Theodicy (Fate/Zero, SI!Caster)
- Thread starter DiscovAres
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hmm, if i recall, the reason why they didn't just stick to those 3 people is an energy issue, they need 7 servants to punch through to the root, having just 3 people isn't enough, so they invited 4 other people in, and with 7 servants, they made 7 classes, with 7 people and 7 servants however and no formal rules or governing body, it quickly became a mess and massacre, and nothing got done, same for the second war, at the 3rd war did the church join to keep things in check, if i recall. the 4 non-knight classes weren't later additions basically, reason why the matou can just summon berserkers on command is cause old zouken build in his own little short cuts like that when he made the 'software' for lack of a better term. that's fairly minor though, and not really anything waver can contest, so it doesn't really matter too much in the story, but it stuck out to me.
well technically there is still kariya's brother and shinji
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hey, can you get me a source on that guy and where he is during the 4th Holy Grail War? I don't know jack about him. I figured someone like that had to exist, with Shinji and all, but I don't know nothing. And as for the 'last' thing, is Shinji even a proper Matou at all?
(well, he's got the cruelty, at least.)Sidenote, but was noone surprised at the Paracelsus thing? I was trying to make it a bit of a reveal, but maybe it was too obvious.
found this on the wiki about him, also apparently he dies 3 years before the start of fate stay nightHey, can you get me a source on that guy and where he is during the 4th Holy Grail War? I don't know jack about him. I figured someone like that had to exist, with Shinji and all, but I don't know nothing. And as for the 'last' thing, is Shinji even a proper Matou at all?
Sidenote, but was noone surprised at the Paracelsus thing? I was trying to make it a bit of a reveal, but maybe it was too obvious.
in regards to Paracelsus, it took me a few chapters before i recalled where the Hohenheim came from, it sounded familiar, but he's both an old acquaintance of zolken and a pretty cool servant, so he stuck around in my memory enough that i recognized him.
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Byakuya Matou
Byakuya Matou (間桐 鶴野, Matō Byakuya?) is Kariya Matou's older brother and father of Shinji Matou. Byakuya was born into the Matou family during Zouken Matou's long patronage, and while he is listed in the registry as Byakuya and Kariya's father, there are records of him dating back to their...
typemoon.fandom.com
There you go. But TLDR? He is staring at the bottom of the bottle 24/7. Considering his wife served as a breakfast to Father Dearest, and the shit he prolly saw, using booze to mitigate the Sanity Damage from living with Zouken, you can kinda understand him. Not forgive though.
- Location
- Probably at sea
Byakuya does appear, briefly, in the Fate/Zero anime - it's towards the end, while Kiritsugu is cleaning up. IIRC Kiritsugu stabs him through the hand to get information on... something, it's been a while.
But yes, old 'worms-for-circuits' Kariya was considered the talented brother. Byakuya is just kind of useless as a mage, as a father and as a person.
But yes, old 'worms-for-circuits' Kariya was considered the talented brother. Byakuya is just kind of useless as a mage, as a father and as a person.
Well, Iskander probably did see Berserker go against Archer and seen Caster get almost murdered by a single effortless attack.
He is unlikely to think that Archer is going to be an easy fight, in any case. Honestly, "overwhelm Archer's output and don't allow him to use Ea when he finally feels actually threatened" is, pretty much, the canonical way of handling him.
NGL, that is probably the most dignity I saw her being afforded in any Fate work, ever.
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Poor Iskander. Let's hope his IRL tactical and political acumen helps him because he has no idea how much Archer doesn't need his trump card to kill him no matter how many of his own he uses.
Chapter 7: In Which the Answers Raise More Questions
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Chapter 7: In Which the Answers Raise More Questions
She awoke facing an unfamiliar ceiling. Immediately, she got up on her elbows and narrowed her eyes, taking in her surroundings. The room was painted white, with dark wood paneling running along the floor, and there was a beautiful painting of a pack of wolves devouring a horse at the foot of the heavenly soft bed she lied in.
"Welcome back to the land of waking, Master," Caster greeted her, sitting in a wooden folding chair at her bedside, for once not reading from his grimoire but instead a leatherbound tome with a title so faintly embossed in gold she couldn't make it out.
"Where are we?" she asked. She tried to get up, but Caster gently pushed her back onto the mattress.
"Woah there, firecracker! I think you should stay here and rest for a while. We're in Aoi Tohsaka's hideout, if you recall," he said. "You passed out briefly in the park, but I was able to get you into the taxi and over here. Had to tell the driver you'd had too much to drink. Then, despite your best efforts, you fell asleep on the way, I had to carry you inside, and you've been sleeping all day since. It's just after dinner."
"All day?! I've wasted so much time!" she yelled.
He raised an eyebrow. "Hardly. Wait," he looked at her incredulously, "you're not planning on going out again tonight, are you?"
She glared at him. "Of course I am! We can't slow down now; we have the momentum! Berserker was a good start, but if we can catch the other Masters on the back foot-"
"-you'd burn yourself out before facing even one of them," he finished her sentence. "Master, you've been running an even forty-degree fever all day. What you did for Sakura I'm grateful for, but it clearly took a lot out of you. Hell, you almost dropped our connection at one point." He patted her on the shoulder. "No, if you are serious about winning this War, and I know you are, then the best thing for that is sleeping the night. You've been resting terribly for several days now. Better not make a habit of it."
She wanted to dispute it, but as she became more awake, she could feel how sore her limbs were from the internal heat exhaustion she'd received from her magic circuits. It had been a while since she'd strained them that badly: she usually knew her limits better. The fact was, as it stood Caster had the right of it. Besides, it wasn't like the time had to be completely wasted if she just made a few arrangements. Hence, after a moment's thought she reluctantly nodded.
"While you're awake," Caster continued, turning in his seat, "I think you should have something to eat, and then we'll discuss those questions I can see you're burning to ask me." Caster picked up a covered bowl of what smelled like fish soup and a small loaf of white bread wrapped in a napkin, from a little table at the far side from her, which Tiffany ate half of before managing to ask anything.
"Are we safe here?"
He clearly took a moment to think it over properly before nodding, which she appreciated. "Yes, Master. I understand if you are uncomfortable because this is technically the residence of another Master, but that is exactly why we are safe: as long as Aoi does not report us, and she won't, Tokiomi would never guess we'd do something so audacious, and meanwhile, his wards will keep Assassin away from your chambers as readily as my Workshop would. You can rest easy."
She nodded, taking it for granted that Tokiomi would be suspicious even of his own allies, and taking another spoonful of soup before asking something else. "Has anything notable happened while I was out?"
Caster tilted his head. "Not while you were out as such, but the news only broke this morning, while we were in the park. Hyatt Hotel was bombed into the ground; no culprit has been implicated yet, but I know it to be Kiritsugu Emiya, attempting to take the life of Kayneth El-Melloi, Master of Lancer, to no avail. This has left Kayneth greatly rattled, and eager for revenge in his compromised state."
Her teeth clacked against her spoon as she bit down in a grimace. It seemed nothing truly was beneath the Magus Killer. How many innocents had died in that bombing? She swallowed, then asked, "What did you discuss with Rider? What was the price of our transport?"
"I told him that his Reality Marble, his most powerful Noble Phantasm, would be a waste against Archer, as he wields the world-ending sword, Ea."
For the second time in their relationship, Tiffany barely managed to resist spitting out a hot liquid at something her Servant told her in a casual tone. "And you didn't think I should know any of that?!"
"Well, Master," he said, in a put-upon, sarcastic tone, "as I do not possess a Reality Marble of my own, I didn't think to inform you of Ea, and I have yet to tell you anything at all about Rider." At her visible confusion, he went on. "Ea is an Anti-World class weapon. It is my understanding that Archer will only wield it in circumstances where the end of the world is acceptable, which is why he so relished facing Rider and his Reality Marble, wherein he could draw his beloved sword without calling forth an apocalypse. Which is irrelevant to us."
She took a deep breath, gathering herself. "Okay," she reluctantly conceded, "that does make sense, from a purely tactical standpoint. In that case, will you tell me about Rider?"
"Certainly," he said. "Rider is Alexander the Great, known as Iskandar, King of Conquerors. You've seen his chariot, and you know of his Reality Marble. I understand such things are coveted greatly by mages for their power," you have no idea, "but its function is to our benefit. You see, just as Archer can defeat it with an Anti-World class weapon, I can defeat it with my Anti-Army Spellbook, for an army is exactly what it contains: the army of all Iskandar's great companions and fellow warriors, who would be Heroic Spirits themselves, had they not pledged their service to the King of Conquerors."
Taking that in, she nodded. "Something of a mirror to Archer's Gate of Babylon, then," she concluded. When he looked confused, she explained. "You said his Gate was a repository of Noble Phantasms; and now, Rider's Reality Marble turns out to be a repository for Heroic Spirits. I just thought it was interesting."
"Ah, so it is Master. Truthfully, I hadn't thought of it that way." He scratched his ear. "Anyway, that's the long and short of it: if Rider uses his Reality Marble against me, I can beat him, if he doesn't, I probably can't. His stats are all higher than mine, I shouldn't doubt, so it really does all come down to Prelati's Spellbook. I should mention," he said belatedly, "that Rider seeks to reincarnate, as this era is another world for him to conquer, and that his Master, Waver Velvet, naturally seeks the Root, to prove himself to his peers and teachers in the Clocktower."
She hummed in acknowledgement, taking another sip of soup. It was really quite good. "And who did that Waver boy steal the catalyst from?" she asked.
"Lord El-Melloi. That would be quite the motivator, if we ever need to set one against the other, but at present, it just means that Kayneth is prone to underestimating Waver and, consequently, Rider. He won't move against them unless compelled to, since he imagines he can crush them at any time." That made for quite a lot of misfortune headed Lord El-Melloi's way. Perhaps, in such dire circumstances, the normally standoffish nobleman would welcome a helping hand, if she reached out.
"You seem more confident, Caster. I take it the plan went well? We didn't have time to rendezvous, what with Sakura needing to be healed so urgently."
"Ah, the plan exceeded all expectations, Master. Matou had so many more Crest Worms than I'd thought, and now every one of them has become a soldier in our army. We are ready to take on this War for real. So if I seem more confident it is only because, for the first time, I feel we have a real chance of winning." He grinned mirthlessly, which, strangely, Tiffany found comforting.
"Which Servants are you still worried about, then?" she asked.
"Hmm. Lancer is now a non-issue, as remains Assassin. Berserker would've been trivialilized, but that's irrelevant. Rider, I've just explained, which leaves just Archer and Saber, and of them Archer is the greater threat, I feel. If we are to make a move it should be against him."
Tiffany nodded. "I've no objections to that. But how?"
"Ah yes," he exclaimed, "I never got to tell you. At the docks, before we met with Kariya, I was able to turn the attention of the gathered Servants toward Archer by prophesying that he would win the Holy Grail War. Rider, in particular, was swayed, which is why he came to investigate us."
"So that's what he was talking about. But you said that wasn't your plan, so what was it originally?"
Caster hemmed and hawed for a moment. "I was attempting to endear Saber to us by foiling an attack against her for the purpose of eventually allying against Archer. Which succeeded, but I felt the better success was the one I hadn't sought out," he said.
Now finished with her meal, Tiffany put down her spoon, trepidation in her guts at being reminded of what her Servant could do. "Caster… you said you received a vision, earlier." He looked a little shocked. "That is what you told Sakura, is it not? So, what happened in that vision? Did Archer win? Did Berserker die? What happened to you? And why did you receive this vision when you did? Will you tell me that, if not who you are?"
He sighed. "It is as you say, I received a vision upon my arrival in this era, and it is why I have been able to advise you as well as I have, but I cannot say why I received it. Which is the reason I've been so reticent in discussing it, as I knew you'd find my claims dubious without evidence. However, I will tell you that Archer did not win. Because nobody did.
"The one who came closest to glory was Kiritsugu Emiya, the Magus Killer, but as I've told you, he knew of no way the Grail could grant his wish, however noble in spirit it was, and so he turned away from it and commanded that Saber expend the last of her strength to destroy the Grail so that none may claim it.
"Berserker died at Saber's hands moments earlier, revealing that he had been Lancelot du Lac, Knight of the Round Table and a personal friend cum personal enemy, summoned to the Grail War to give his apologies to her, but until that moment prevented in this quest by the madness of his Class Container.
"I was the first Servant to die, led astray and into desperation by my original Master, who had neither strength nor cunning enough to carry us very far. Hence after learning this, I rid myself of him and sought another, who has proved much more able so far," he finished.
Tiffany lay there stunned for a moment. All the while, one question, so exceedingly simple, echoed in her mind. How? How could you know this?
But there was no answer. He'd said as much. She clenched her fist. Did she believe him?
Eventually, she decided to focus on something else. "So, Archer. From the way you speak of him, I take it you don't think we can beat him on our own, correct?"
"Indeed."
"Then, we must seek-"
"There was one thing I forgot to mention when I gave you my assessment, however," he cut her off in a doleful tone. "When I told you of Archer, I mentioned his Independent Action skill, and how it was part and parcel of being an Archer. But I elided one detail at the time; not intentionally, I simply didn't think it over properly. But that skill is… not as omnipotent as I implied. While it is true that he would survive being cut off from Tokiomi, he would still be weakened unless and until he secures a new source of mana, and therefore unable to wield his most powerful Noble Phantasms. I apologize for this embarrassing lapse in my counsel to you."
Chewing that over in the back of her mind, Tiffany pressed on, already adjusting the plan she was about to lay out. "Regardless, if you cannot defeat him alone, we must simply acquire an ally."
"Who did you have in mind, Master?" he asked, looking a little impressed. "Also, are you sure one ally will be sufficient?"
"I'm not so sure of either of those questions, but we've a little time to think it over. We will discuss it tomorrow in greater detail. In the meantime, I'd ask- well, first, do you have the ability to direct your water demons at great range, or possibly receive information from them? For the purposes of carrying out a search, I mean."
He nodded. "I believe there was something like it in the book."
Good. "Then, I'd ask that you seek out a suitably hidden location for your Workshop. Without it lessening the burden of your existence, I am hobbled in my ability to perform magecraft, and though I trust your judgement that we are safe here for now, I'd rather not chance it too long. As for myself, I need to make a phone call. Ah, but before that, I just remembered," she said. "I asked Kotomine about the boy like you requested. He said they'd sent him away to the appropriate parties."
Caster nodded. "That is perhaps the best he could hope for. The boy was intended by my former Master as a sacrifice for the being he was attempting to summon," he explained without her needing to prompt him. "I took exception, turning the boy over to the Church instead once I'd handled my Master, for want of anyone else who could help the boy." She nodded, and Caster excused himself for her privacy.
Once he'd left, she did not immediately go to call her father. Instead, she reflected on her Servant. The strange dreams of what she had to imagine were his past, those scenes of light and blood and battle, had not ceased but they had become… repetitive? As though she was being prevented from seeing something that lay beyond them, some final revelation, and as Caster had still not told her his identity, she needed little imagination to guess why that was. Somehow, perhaps subconsciously, Caster was preventing even their familiar bond from telling her who he was.
What sort of secret could be terrible enough for that to be so important to him? What sort of legend had he forged before he became what he was now?
What had his counter-theodicy consisted of?
"That's all well and good, then. Thank you for your understanding, father."
"Of course, Tiffany. And congratulations; if your information is accurate, you would be the first Master to eliminate a Servant, which does you credit."
"I know you'd expect nothing less."
"Very true. The package will be in Fuyuki as soon as possible: we'll arrange the drop point once you've established yourselves. As for the other thing…"
The door to her bedroom creaked open, and a blue eye peered in through the crack. Tiffany looked squarely at it, held a finger up to her lips, and kept talking. "I understand it's something of a late order, but the opportunity only just came up. I know it'll be a challenge even for you, but I'll need at least one of them for the next operation."
Her father sighed. "I can get in contact with the first candidate easily enough, but the other one… I'm not so sure, Tiffany. It's just, it's such short notice, I don't know if my contacts will be up for it."
"Just do what you can, and I'll do the same. We'll talk tomorrow. Goodbye." She hung up. "Come on in," she told the girl waiting at the door.
A young girl she didn't recognize slipped inside and closed the door behind her. She wore a somewhat oversized, white dress shirt tied with a red bow, and a smart, red skirt with black tights. Her black hair was done up in two large pigtails, and she had a perpetual imperious frown.
"You'll be the 'winner', then. Caster told me about you. What's your name?" Tiffany asked.
The girl tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "I'm Rin Tohsaka. Why are you calling me the 'winner'?"
"Because you are the Tohsaka family's heir. Caster framed it as a competition- well, an implicit one, anyway. Was he inaccurate?"
Rin blinked. "I- Papa just told me I was going to inherit, one day. And he finished giving me the Family Crest before the Holy Grail War started, just in case. But he didn't test me and Sakura, like you're implying." She folded her arms tightly and looked away.
Ah, right. "Did you come here to ask about her?" she guessed.
"Actually, I- well, sort of." For such a prim and proper looking girl, Rin seemed very uncertain. It wasn't hard to guess why. "Is it… normal? What happened to Sakura?" she asked, hesitantly.
That gave Tiffany pause. "Why do you ask?"
"It's just," Rin bit her lip, "Caster keeps saying that Papa is evil for what he did to Sakura, and Sakura agrees, and I agree that what happened was really, really bad, and Mama said that Papa knew that would happen to Sakura before he sent her away and did it anyway, but…"
"And you're asking me if that's normal? Not whether it's good?"
She gritted her teeth, rubbing her forehead with her thumb. "I don't know. Sakura won't tell me everything, but what she told me was awful, and it k-killed Uncle Kariya. So, I'm asking both," she said, straightening up, determination coming back into her voice. "Is it good, and is it normal?
Tiffany accepted that with a nod. "Well, I'd say that, in the abstract, what happened to Sakura is normal. It depends, but most families by necessity only train one heir, which means that any siblings have to find something else to do and lacking the Family Crest means they're going to be at a disadvantage pretty much universally. Sending her to become another family's heir would have been a dream come true for your father, or any mage."
Rin shrunk in on herself. "I knew all of that already, though."
"I figured as much." Luckily, Tiffany wasn't finished. "But in practice, what happened was unusual, because Matou's magecraft should have earned him an execution years ago," she stressed. Something in the back of her mind squirmed, its fat body refusing to settle in her thoughts, drawing up contradictions and suppositions she'd yet to bring before the man who'd summoned them. But none of that had to do with the girl before her, so she kept quiet.
Rin looked up. "I thought the Mage's Association only did that to protect the secret of magecraft from the mundane world?" she said, voicing it like a question.
It was an effort of will to quell the worm for a moment. "The threshold for it is lower in that case, which is why you mostly hear about it when that happens," Tiffany agreed, "but especially heinous crimes cannot go unpunished, even among fellow scholars. I've every confidence this would qualify. Especially," she added, reluctant only because it grated against her sensibilities, "since Matou had few allies and was isolated in this backwater, and so had few who'd speak in his defense. No offense to your beautiful country." At least, she might be able to finagle a termination order retroactively: in fact, she'd been relying on it.
Wait a minute, she suddenly thought. Did anyone else know Kariya even existed?
Rin shot her an unimpressed look.
Tiffany coughed. "Anyway. What Matou did was evil, that much is certain, and what happened to your sister, though in structure seeming normal was in essence quite anomalous. But that's not your main concern. It is really whether what your father did was evil or not."
A silent nod, followed by an intense look.
"I don't know," Tiffany admitted. "I don't know why your father did what he did, Rin. If you came here looking for easy answers, I have none. There rarely are any in our trade. Your father could well have believed he was doing the right thing for his daughter, or he may have fully intended to rid himself of an inconvenience in a manner that benefited him. Or maybe…" she said in a sad tone, "he just didn't think about it that hard." This, Tiffany thought, was probably the most likely option.
"What do you mean?" Rin asked, faintly horrified. "It was Sakura's entire future! How could he not care?!"
She sighed. She ought to have expected such naivety from a child. "You've got it exactly backwards, Rin. He had no reason to care. He had his heir, and a solution for the loser. It wasn't worth his time to consider the true cost of his decision, to really try and empathize with his daughter and imagine what it'd be like for her to go through that. And that, Rin," Tiffany said, a cold and tired smile on her lips, "is normal for mages."
Rin opened and closed her mouth like a gasping fish, her brow slowly furrowing. She clenched her fists, shouted "Sakura is not a loser!" and stormed out, loudly slamming the door behind her.
This. This was why Tiffany had come to the Holy Grail War. The wish was just a means to an end. With it, she could bend the Clocktower, that calcifying ruin of self-interest and avarice, into an institution that could benefit mankind. With the wish, she'd show them all the folly of their ways, the abject idiocy of hiding away honest-to-god magic in dungeons and crumbling tomes. With it, she could prevent little girls from crying when they learnt the truth of what it meant to be a mage.
The next day, after a good night's rest, Caster returned to her room with breakfast; eggs, sausage and bacon on toast, as the maid had apparently taken it into her head that Tiffany was English and wanted to accommodate her visitor from overseas. She'd have preferred the fish soup from yesterday over an inferior foreign rendition of a meal she'd already had too many times and didn't like much in the first place.
"I've spoken to my father," she told him as she ate, "and he arranged to have delivered some things I'll need to continue the War. Weapons and tools I'd left at home, since I was only here on a business trip and social call for my brother. But for that to be viable, I'll need to know where he is to deliver them. Have you found a suitable location for your Workshop?" she said, then cut off another bite of undercooked sausage.
"I have," he said, with a pained look. "It's somewhat out of the way, but the city sewers contain several large chambers, any of which would be ideal for the purpose, as my water demons would be able to move unseen beneath the city, striking through storm drains and the like. We'd be hidden from any but the most determined tracker."
He didn't look very happy to be suggesting it, perhaps trying to spare her oh-so-delicate sensibilities, but if he was bringing it up anyway, it had to be the best option. "It'll do nicely. I'll trust you to pick out the least rank of these chambers, and we can move in later. Before I join you, however, I have a meeting with Lord El-Melloi."
"Really?" Caster asked incredulously. "How so?"
She rolled her eyes, swallowing a bit of egg. "He has remained in contact with the Clocktower during the War, though obviously he's not willing to tell them much for fear of espionage. But my father was able to use his contacts to reach out to him and arrange it overnight. Sadly, he was unable to do the same for Waver, meaning that we won't have a choice on who to work with when we take on Tohsaka. I'm guessing you were hoping to work with Waver, correct?"
"I thought Rider would be more useful than Lancer, as he is by far the stronger Servant, but if this is your decision, Master, I will accept it. And I will opine, further, that you should consider allying with Saber and-"
"The Magus Killer? Out of the question. If you can find some way to convince El-Melloi to work with the boy who stole his catalyst, but as it stands, we have few options. Is that acceptable?"
"It must be, Master," he said reluctantly.
Nodding gratefully, she continued. "Then we'll be leaving later today: I'll secure the package, then go to my meeting, and you'll pick out a chamber and establish your Workshop." She tapped her chin. "Actually, if I arrange a suitably discreet drop-off, a water demon could pick the package up for us, couldn't it?"
Caster voiced his agreement, and they hashed out the details of that together.
"Finally, although I doubt Lord El-Melloi would try anything in broad daylight, I'd feel safer from Assassin in particular if you could arrange for some water demons to shadow me throughout the day, just in case. I'll be meeting Lord El-Melloi just after lunch, so be ready for that."
With a sigh, Caster nodded. "If you feel you are recovered enough to do this, I won't stand in the way of it."
Rather than bid his farewell, he got up and then stood silently for a little while. "Master, I believe I owe you an apology," he finally said. "I was very… tightlipped about Sakura before we saved her, and I know that frustrated you, and nearly turned to disaster." He swallowed. "The reason I did that was that I worried you might somehow take over Zouken's scheme, his attempt to cheat the whole War."
That name, Zouken Matou… she'd always been told that the Holy Grail War had been established in part by Makiri, but lately, Caster had claimed that it was really Matou. A possibility, which she dreaded facing, existed which meant that Makiri and Matou were one and the same, a thought which squirmed unpleasantly in the back of her mind. Because if that was true, and Zouken Matou was as old as or older than Caster had implied, then…
"And for that, I apologize," he said, bowing deeply. "Your conduct in saving her was impeccable and proved my fears unfounded. You deserved better than I gave you. I hope you can forgive my suspicious nature."
She looked at him, something cold in her stomach. Shame curdled with indignation, at the fact that he would equate her with the monster they'd slain together.
How often had she not thought on the cruelty and selfishness of mages? How often had she not been glad to belong to a house that dedicated itself, not to pointless advancement towards a meaningless end for its own sake, but instead worked towards utopia with zeal and valor? To be compared so directly to those whom she loathed… it shamed her to belong to the same institution as they. In the end, shame won out for now. Late as it was, she appreciated his candor. "Apology accepted, Caster. Hopefully, this means we can be more honest with each other from now on."
"I hope so too," Caster said with a smile.
"And with that, I think I should admit something," Tiffany said sheepishly. He looked at her with a quizzical expression. "I've been dreaming of a battlefield, choked in blood, but headed by a young woman wreathed in light. Is that something you're familiar with?"
"It is my past," he admitted easily.
"And yet, I have not been allowed to see how it ends. I see the light disappear; I feel as though I am on the precipice of some grand revelation! And then I wake up."
He sighed. "And you think I am to blame."
"Who else could be?" Seeing his expression, she tried to soothe him. "I am not accusing you of deliberately manipulating these dreams, but I cannot help but imagine that your reticence towards disclosing your identity has something to do with it."
"It likely does," he agreed, "but I… still need more time, Master. Once the truth comes out… I fear it will shatter the peace between us, and I do not wish for that. I fear you would come to hate me. So please," he looked at her with tired eyes, "allow me to prove myself and my good nature to you a little longer. I beg."
"I've been receiving details on your… stats?" she hedged. "And it's mostly matched what you told me, except for two things. First, your 'alignment' is listed as Chaotic Evil, second, you have the skill Mental Pollution."
"So you see now, surely, why I hid it," he spoke through clenched teeth.
"But these things have not made me hate you, Caster," she stressed. "So why do you think your name would?"
"Because if you knew my name, you would know why my legend, this thing I run from at every moment, has the shape it does, and all I have done not to deserve its reputation in your mind would be rent to naught." He sounded like he was going to cry. "I am terrified, Master."
"Okay. I believe you," she said. "I'll… try to leave it. Perhaps it does not matter." He looked at her strangely, which made her scoff. "Honestly, Caster, I am capable of being reasonable. Your alignment I can believe stands only as a record. But the skill… does it have something to do with your perspective on this War? You say you received a vision, and you definitely know more than you should, but it's the only thing in your 'stats' I can find that'd possibly explain how."
He scratched his chin in thought, coming out of his melancholy as he chewed it over. "It is a mystery, Master. I myself do not feel mad, but then, the truly deranged do not, do they?" he said. "It may be you are right. It may be the skill was broken upon my arrival and gave me the revelation instead, as I have never felt it working. Or it may be something we have not considered yet. It is impossible to know, perhaps literally."
And that was all that was left to say for now, except this. "Whatever the case, despite everything, and whoever you may be, I still choose to believe that, together, we can win the Holy Grail War."
"That is all I ask for, Master. For you to believe in me."
As she was dressing herself in her old clothes, helpfully washed and dried during her stay - and she had been very grateful to learn she'd been undressed to her underwear by her hostess, whom she technically had yet to meet, rather than Caster - she heard a knock on the door. "Come in," she said, fastening her last few shirt buttons as the door opened.
It was Sakura, formerly Matou. She'd been taken out of the poison-stained clothing Tiffany had last seen her in and was instead dressed comfortably in an oversized, white, wool sweater and a long, black skirt, with pinstripe stockings only a little higher than socks. Her unkempt hair had also been washed and cut to a uniform length, though sadly the purple discoloration of it and her eyes had persisted, which likely meant it was permanent. It would have looked eccentric but understandable on a rebellious teenager; on such a timid young girl, it was downright eerie.
"S-sorry!" she stammered once she saw Tiffany sitting on the bed, "I can come back later, if you're busy."
Tiffany waved her off; she was basically dressed already, missing only her coat before she got out the door. "It's perfectly alright. How are you, Sakura?" she asked, throwing a softball opener her way. The girl would get to her point in her own time.
"I'm feeling better, miss." It would be hard not to, given everything, Tiffany suspected. "I… sleeping was scary, like mister Caster said, but Mama sang lullabies for me, like she used to when me and Rin were little." She assessed Tiffany's face for a moment before continuing. "It's a little embarrassing, actually. I feel like a baby." She pouted.
"Don't let it get to you," Tiffany said with a good-natured laugh. "It's her way of showing she cares."
"I know. It just… I just feel stu- silly," she hastily corrected.
Conversation lapsed for a moment, while Tiffany pulled her boots on. "Just so I don't forget," she said, "you should be keeping those necklaces on for at least a month."
Sakura ran her fingers over the remaining iron and Pisces talisman.
"They're for your health. I made them. They'll lose their charge after a while, but they'll still be pretty?" Sakura nodded, and Tiffany pursed her lips. "You know," she said after a moment, "your sister came to talk to me as well."
Sakura's eyes lit up at that. "Really?"
"Yeah, she wanted to ask me something about your father, actually."
That brought on a frown. "Do you know him?" she asked incredulously.
Tiffany laughed. "Heavens, no. No, she wanted to ask me something as someone who is a professed outsider to all this… family drama, but still with the perspective of a mage," she said. "But I think you should ask her what we talked about if you want to know. Wouldn't do for me to be telling stories."
"I will. Your accent is lot better than yesterday," Sakura commented. "Mama almost didn't understand you then."
"Yesterday, I was passing out from exhaustion," Tiffany said with an indulgent smile. Ahh, kids. Nothing like them for bluntness. Deciding to stop beating around the bush, Tiffany said, "Was there anything in particular you wanted to ask me, or did you just decide to come by before I left?"
Sakura, taken aback, wrung her hands for a moment before speaking. "Yesterday… or maybe the day before? After I woke up, in the church, and Uncle Kariya told me you were real, I asked you why you'd saved me. And you told me to ask Caster. And I did, and he told me how he knew to save me, and" she said this part with a hint of a smile, "he seems like he'd do it just because it was the right thing to do. Which is nice, but… you never really answered the question.
"So why did you save me?"
There were easy answers to give. An echo of what it seemed she'd pieced together about Caster. An admission of the mercenary facts of removing Berserker from the board, or a hint of the prize they'd seized from the bowels of Matou House. But there was another answer, which she derived from many different factors. The contest that wasn't a contest. The trials meant to make her better. The love she feared she'd become unworthy of. A myriad of words, each like a droplet, distilled into the smallest, truest, most efficacious statement Tiffany could. She was an alchemist, after all.
Did she believe it? She couldn't be certain, but she knew what would help Sakura most to hear. So she just told her:
"You deserved it."
As always, I am cross-posting on AO3.
She awoke facing an unfamiliar ceiling. Immediately, she got up on her elbows and narrowed her eyes, taking in her surroundings. The room was painted white, with dark wood paneling running along the floor, and there was a beautiful painting of a pack of wolves devouring a horse at the foot of the heavenly soft bed she lied in.
"Welcome back to the land of waking, Master," Caster greeted her, sitting in a wooden folding chair at her bedside, for once not reading from his grimoire but instead a leatherbound tome with a title so faintly embossed in gold she couldn't make it out.
"Where are we?" she asked. She tried to get up, but Caster gently pushed her back onto the mattress.
"Woah there, firecracker! I think you should stay here and rest for a while. We're in Aoi Tohsaka's hideout, if you recall," he said. "You passed out briefly in the park, but I was able to get you into the taxi and over here. Had to tell the driver you'd had too much to drink. Then, despite your best efforts, you fell asleep on the way, I had to carry you inside, and you've been sleeping all day since. It's just after dinner."
"All day?! I've wasted so much time!" she yelled.
He raised an eyebrow. "Hardly. Wait," he looked at her incredulously, "you're not planning on going out again tonight, are you?"
She glared at him. "Of course I am! We can't slow down now; we have the momentum! Berserker was a good start, but if we can catch the other Masters on the back foot-"
"-you'd burn yourself out before facing even one of them," he finished her sentence. "Master, you've been running an even forty-degree fever all day. What you did for Sakura I'm grateful for, but it clearly took a lot out of you. Hell, you almost dropped our connection at one point." He patted her on the shoulder. "No, if you are serious about winning this War, and I know you are, then the best thing for that is sleeping the night. You've been resting terribly for several days now. Better not make a habit of it."
She wanted to dispute it, but as she became more awake, she could feel how sore her limbs were from the internal heat exhaustion she'd received from her magic circuits. It had been a while since she'd strained them that badly: she usually knew her limits better. The fact was, as it stood Caster had the right of it. Besides, it wasn't like the time had to be completely wasted if she just made a few arrangements. Hence, after a moment's thought she reluctantly nodded.
"While you're awake," Caster continued, turning in his seat, "I think you should have something to eat, and then we'll discuss those questions I can see you're burning to ask me." Caster picked up a covered bowl of what smelled like fish soup and a small loaf of white bread wrapped in a napkin, from a little table at the far side from her, which Tiffany ate half of before managing to ask anything.
"Are we safe here?"
He clearly took a moment to think it over properly before nodding, which she appreciated. "Yes, Master. I understand if you are uncomfortable because this is technically the residence of another Master, but that is exactly why we are safe: as long as Aoi does not report us, and she won't, Tokiomi would never guess we'd do something so audacious, and meanwhile, his wards will keep Assassin away from your chambers as readily as my Workshop would. You can rest easy."
She nodded, taking it for granted that Tokiomi would be suspicious even of his own allies, and taking another spoonful of soup before asking something else. "Has anything notable happened while I was out?"
Caster tilted his head. "Not while you were out as such, but the news only broke this morning, while we were in the park. Hyatt Hotel was bombed into the ground; no culprit has been implicated yet, but I know it to be Kiritsugu Emiya, attempting to take the life of Kayneth El-Melloi, Master of Lancer, to no avail. This has left Kayneth greatly rattled, and eager for revenge in his compromised state."
Her teeth clacked against her spoon as she bit down in a grimace. It seemed nothing truly was beneath the Magus Killer. How many innocents had died in that bombing? She swallowed, then asked, "What did you discuss with Rider? What was the price of our transport?"
"I told him that his Reality Marble, his most powerful Noble Phantasm, would be a waste against Archer, as he wields the world-ending sword, Ea."
For the second time in their relationship, Tiffany barely managed to resist spitting out a hot liquid at something her Servant told her in a casual tone. "And you didn't think I should know any of that?!"
"Well, Master," he said, in a put-upon, sarcastic tone, "as I do not possess a Reality Marble of my own, I didn't think to inform you of Ea, and I have yet to tell you anything at all about Rider." At her visible confusion, he went on. "Ea is an Anti-World class weapon. It is my understanding that Archer will only wield it in circumstances where the end of the world is acceptable, which is why he so relished facing Rider and his Reality Marble, wherein he could draw his beloved sword without calling forth an apocalypse. Which is irrelevant to us."
She took a deep breath, gathering herself. "Okay," she reluctantly conceded, "that does make sense, from a purely tactical standpoint. In that case, will you tell me about Rider?"
"Certainly," he said. "Rider is Alexander the Great, known as Iskandar, King of Conquerors. You've seen his chariot, and you know of his Reality Marble. I understand such things are coveted greatly by mages for their power," you have no idea, "but its function is to our benefit. You see, just as Archer can defeat it with an Anti-World class weapon, I can defeat it with my Anti-Army Spellbook, for an army is exactly what it contains: the army of all Iskandar's great companions and fellow warriors, who would be Heroic Spirits themselves, had they not pledged their service to the King of Conquerors."
Taking that in, she nodded. "Something of a mirror to Archer's Gate of Babylon, then," she concluded. When he looked confused, she explained. "You said his Gate was a repository of Noble Phantasms; and now, Rider's Reality Marble turns out to be a repository for Heroic Spirits. I just thought it was interesting."
"Ah, so it is Master. Truthfully, I hadn't thought of it that way." He scratched his ear. "Anyway, that's the long and short of it: if Rider uses his Reality Marble against me, I can beat him, if he doesn't, I probably can't. His stats are all higher than mine, I shouldn't doubt, so it really does all come down to Prelati's Spellbook. I should mention," he said belatedly, "that Rider seeks to reincarnate, as this era is another world for him to conquer, and that his Master, Waver Velvet, naturally seeks the Root, to prove himself to his peers and teachers in the Clocktower."
She hummed in acknowledgement, taking another sip of soup. It was really quite good. "And who did that Waver boy steal the catalyst from?" she asked.
"Lord El-Melloi. That would be quite the motivator, if we ever need to set one against the other, but at present, it just means that Kayneth is prone to underestimating Waver and, consequently, Rider. He won't move against them unless compelled to, since he imagines he can crush them at any time." That made for quite a lot of misfortune headed Lord El-Melloi's way. Perhaps, in such dire circumstances, the normally standoffish nobleman would welcome a helping hand, if she reached out.
"You seem more confident, Caster. I take it the plan went well? We didn't have time to rendezvous, what with Sakura needing to be healed so urgently."
"Ah, the plan exceeded all expectations, Master. Matou had so many more Crest Worms than I'd thought, and now every one of them has become a soldier in our army. We are ready to take on this War for real. So if I seem more confident it is only because, for the first time, I feel we have a real chance of winning." He grinned mirthlessly, which, strangely, Tiffany found comforting.
"Which Servants are you still worried about, then?" she asked.
"Hmm. Lancer is now a non-issue, as remains Assassin. Berserker would've been trivialilized, but that's irrelevant. Rider, I've just explained, which leaves just Archer and Saber, and of them Archer is the greater threat, I feel. If we are to make a move it should be against him."
Tiffany nodded. "I've no objections to that. But how?"
"Ah yes," he exclaimed, "I never got to tell you. At the docks, before we met with Kariya, I was able to turn the attention of the gathered Servants toward Archer by prophesying that he would win the Holy Grail War. Rider, in particular, was swayed, which is why he came to investigate us."
"So that's what he was talking about. But you said that wasn't your plan, so what was it originally?"
Caster hemmed and hawed for a moment. "I was attempting to endear Saber to us by foiling an attack against her for the purpose of eventually allying against Archer. Which succeeded, but I felt the better success was the one I hadn't sought out," he said.
Now finished with her meal, Tiffany put down her spoon, trepidation in her guts at being reminded of what her Servant could do. "Caster… you said you received a vision, earlier." He looked a little shocked. "That is what you told Sakura, is it not? So, what happened in that vision? Did Archer win? Did Berserker die? What happened to you? And why did you receive this vision when you did? Will you tell me that, if not who you are?"
He sighed. "It is as you say, I received a vision upon my arrival in this era, and it is why I have been able to advise you as well as I have, but I cannot say why I received it. Which is the reason I've been so reticent in discussing it, as I knew you'd find my claims dubious without evidence. However, I will tell you that Archer did not win. Because nobody did.
"The one who came closest to glory was Kiritsugu Emiya, the Magus Killer, but as I've told you, he knew of no way the Grail could grant his wish, however noble in spirit it was, and so he turned away from it and commanded that Saber expend the last of her strength to destroy the Grail so that none may claim it.
"Berserker died at Saber's hands moments earlier, revealing that he had been Lancelot du Lac, Knight of the Round Table and a personal friend cum personal enemy, summoned to the Grail War to give his apologies to her, but until that moment prevented in this quest by the madness of his Class Container.
"I was the first Servant to die, led astray and into desperation by my original Master, who had neither strength nor cunning enough to carry us very far. Hence after learning this, I rid myself of him and sought another, who has proved much more able so far," he finished.
Tiffany lay there stunned for a moment. All the while, one question, so exceedingly simple, echoed in her mind. How? How could you know this?
But there was no answer. He'd said as much. She clenched her fist. Did she believe him?
Eventually, she decided to focus on something else. "So, Archer. From the way you speak of him, I take it you don't think we can beat him on our own, correct?"
"Indeed."
"Then, we must seek-"
"There was one thing I forgot to mention when I gave you my assessment, however," he cut her off in a doleful tone. "When I told you of Archer, I mentioned his Independent Action skill, and how it was part and parcel of being an Archer. But I elided one detail at the time; not intentionally, I simply didn't think it over properly. But that skill is… not as omnipotent as I implied. While it is true that he would survive being cut off from Tokiomi, he would still be weakened unless and until he secures a new source of mana, and therefore unable to wield his most powerful Noble Phantasms. I apologize for this embarrassing lapse in my counsel to you."
Chewing that over in the back of her mind, Tiffany pressed on, already adjusting the plan she was about to lay out. "Regardless, if you cannot defeat him alone, we must simply acquire an ally."
"Who did you have in mind, Master?" he asked, looking a little impressed. "Also, are you sure one ally will be sufficient?"
"I'm not so sure of either of those questions, but we've a little time to think it over. We will discuss it tomorrow in greater detail. In the meantime, I'd ask- well, first, do you have the ability to direct your water demons at great range, or possibly receive information from them? For the purposes of carrying out a search, I mean."
He nodded. "I believe there was something like it in the book."
Good. "Then, I'd ask that you seek out a suitably hidden location for your Workshop. Without it lessening the burden of your existence, I am hobbled in my ability to perform magecraft, and though I trust your judgement that we are safe here for now, I'd rather not chance it too long. As for myself, I need to make a phone call. Ah, but before that, I just remembered," she said. "I asked Kotomine about the boy like you requested. He said they'd sent him away to the appropriate parties."
Caster nodded. "That is perhaps the best he could hope for. The boy was intended by my former Master as a sacrifice for the being he was attempting to summon," he explained without her needing to prompt him. "I took exception, turning the boy over to the Church instead once I'd handled my Master, for want of anyone else who could help the boy." She nodded, and Caster excused himself for her privacy.
Once he'd left, she did not immediately go to call her father. Instead, she reflected on her Servant. The strange dreams of what she had to imagine were his past, those scenes of light and blood and battle, had not ceased but they had become… repetitive? As though she was being prevented from seeing something that lay beyond them, some final revelation, and as Caster had still not told her his identity, she needed little imagination to guess why that was. Somehow, perhaps subconsciously, Caster was preventing even their familiar bond from telling her who he was.
What sort of secret could be terrible enough for that to be so important to him? What sort of legend had he forged before he became what he was now?
What had his counter-theodicy consisted of?
"That's all well and good, then. Thank you for your understanding, father."
"Of course, Tiffany. And congratulations; if your information is accurate, you would be the first Master to eliminate a Servant, which does you credit."
"I know you'd expect nothing less."
"Very true. The package will be in Fuyuki as soon as possible: we'll arrange the drop point once you've established yourselves. As for the other thing…"
The door to her bedroom creaked open, and a blue eye peered in through the crack. Tiffany looked squarely at it, held a finger up to her lips, and kept talking. "I understand it's something of a late order, but the opportunity only just came up. I know it'll be a challenge even for you, but I'll need at least one of them for the next operation."
Her father sighed. "I can get in contact with the first candidate easily enough, but the other one… I'm not so sure, Tiffany. It's just, it's such short notice, I don't know if my contacts will be up for it."
"Just do what you can, and I'll do the same. We'll talk tomorrow. Goodbye." She hung up. "Come on in," she told the girl waiting at the door.
A young girl she didn't recognize slipped inside and closed the door behind her. She wore a somewhat oversized, white dress shirt tied with a red bow, and a smart, red skirt with black tights. Her black hair was done up in two large pigtails, and she had a perpetual imperious frown.
"You'll be the 'winner', then. Caster told me about you. What's your name?" Tiffany asked.
The girl tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "I'm Rin Tohsaka. Why are you calling me the 'winner'?"
"Because you are the Tohsaka family's heir. Caster framed it as a competition- well, an implicit one, anyway. Was he inaccurate?"
Rin blinked. "I- Papa just told me I was going to inherit, one day. And he finished giving me the Family Crest before the Holy Grail War started, just in case. But he didn't test me and Sakura, like you're implying." She folded her arms tightly and looked away.
Ah, right. "Did you come here to ask about her?" she guessed.
"Actually, I- well, sort of." For such a prim and proper looking girl, Rin seemed very uncertain. It wasn't hard to guess why. "Is it… normal? What happened to Sakura?" she asked, hesitantly.
That gave Tiffany pause. "Why do you ask?"
"It's just," Rin bit her lip, "Caster keeps saying that Papa is evil for what he did to Sakura, and Sakura agrees, and I agree that what happened was really, really bad, and Mama said that Papa knew that would happen to Sakura before he sent her away and did it anyway, but…"
"And you're asking me if that's normal? Not whether it's good?"
She gritted her teeth, rubbing her forehead with her thumb. "I don't know. Sakura won't tell me everything, but what she told me was awful, and it k-killed Uncle Kariya. So, I'm asking both," she said, straightening up, determination coming back into her voice. "Is it good, and is it normal?
Tiffany accepted that with a nod. "Well, I'd say that, in the abstract, what happened to Sakura is normal. It depends, but most families by necessity only train one heir, which means that any siblings have to find something else to do and lacking the Family Crest means they're going to be at a disadvantage pretty much universally. Sending her to become another family's heir would have been a dream come true for your father, or any mage."
Rin shrunk in on herself. "I knew all of that already, though."
"I figured as much." Luckily, Tiffany wasn't finished. "But in practice, what happened was unusual, because Matou's magecraft should have earned him an execution years ago," she stressed. Something in the back of her mind squirmed, its fat body refusing to settle in her thoughts, drawing up contradictions and suppositions she'd yet to bring before the man who'd summoned them. But none of that had to do with the girl before her, so she kept quiet.
Rin looked up. "I thought the Mage's Association only did that to protect the secret of magecraft from the mundane world?" she said, voicing it like a question.
It was an effort of will to quell the worm for a moment. "The threshold for it is lower in that case, which is why you mostly hear about it when that happens," Tiffany agreed, "but especially heinous crimes cannot go unpunished, even among fellow scholars. I've every confidence this would qualify. Especially," she added, reluctant only because it grated against her sensibilities, "since Matou had few allies and was isolated in this backwater, and so had few who'd speak in his defense. No offense to your beautiful country." At least, she might be able to finagle a termination order retroactively: in fact, she'd been relying on it.
Wait a minute, she suddenly thought. Did anyone else know Kariya even existed?
Rin shot her an unimpressed look.
Tiffany coughed. "Anyway. What Matou did was evil, that much is certain, and what happened to your sister, though in structure seeming normal was in essence quite anomalous. But that's not your main concern. It is really whether what your father did was evil or not."
A silent nod, followed by an intense look.
"I don't know," Tiffany admitted. "I don't know why your father did what he did, Rin. If you came here looking for easy answers, I have none. There rarely are any in our trade. Your father could well have believed he was doing the right thing for his daughter, or he may have fully intended to rid himself of an inconvenience in a manner that benefited him. Or maybe…" she said in a sad tone, "he just didn't think about it that hard." This, Tiffany thought, was probably the most likely option.
"What do you mean?" Rin asked, faintly horrified. "It was Sakura's entire future! How could he not care?!"
She sighed. She ought to have expected such naivety from a child. "You've got it exactly backwards, Rin. He had no reason to care. He had his heir, and a solution for the loser. It wasn't worth his time to consider the true cost of his decision, to really try and empathize with his daughter and imagine what it'd be like for her to go through that. And that, Rin," Tiffany said, a cold and tired smile on her lips, "is normal for mages."
Rin opened and closed her mouth like a gasping fish, her brow slowly furrowing. She clenched her fists, shouted "Sakura is not a loser!" and stormed out, loudly slamming the door behind her.
This. This was why Tiffany had come to the Holy Grail War. The wish was just a means to an end. With it, she could bend the Clocktower, that calcifying ruin of self-interest and avarice, into an institution that could benefit mankind. With the wish, she'd show them all the folly of their ways, the abject idiocy of hiding away honest-to-god magic in dungeons and crumbling tomes. With it, she could prevent little girls from crying when they learnt the truth of what it meant to be a mage.
The next day, after a good night's rest, Caster returned to her room with breakfast; eggs, sausage and bacon on toast, as the maid had apparently taken it into her head that Tiffany was English and wanted to accommodate her visitor from overseas. She'd have preferred the fish soup from yesterday over an inferior foreign rendition of a meal she'd already had too many times and didn't like much in the first place.
"I've spoken to my father," she told him as she ate, "and he arranged to have delivered some things I'll need to continue the War. Weapons and tools I'd left at home, since I was only here on a business trip and social call for my brother. But for that to be viable, I'll need to know where he is to deliver them. Have you found a suitable location for your Workshop?" she said, then cut off another bite of undercooked sausage.
"I have," he said, with a pained look. "It's somewhat out of the way, but the city sewers contain several large chambers, any of which would be ideal for the purpose, as my water demons would be able to move unseen beneath the city, striking through storm drains and the like. We'd be hidden from any but the most determined tracker."
He didn't look very happy to be suggesting it, perhaps trying to spare her oh-so-delicate sensibilities, but if he was bringing it up anyway, it had to be the best option. "It'll do nicely. I'll trust you to pick out the least rank of these chambers, and we can move in later. Before I join you, however, I have a meeting with Lord El-Melloi."
"Really?" Caster asked incredulously. "How so?"
She rolled her eyes, swallowing a bit of egg. "He has remained in contact with the Clocktower during the War, though obviously he's not willing to tell them much for fear of espionage. But my father was able to use his contacts to reach out to him and arrange it overnight. Sadly, he was unable to do the same for Waver, meaning that we won't have a choice on who to work with when we take on Tohsaka. I'm guessing you were hoping to work with Waver, correct?"
"I thought Rider would be more useful than Lancer, as he is by far the stronger Servant, but if this is your decision, Master, I will accept it. And I will opine, further, that you should consider allying with Saber and-"
"The Magus Killer? Out of the question. If you can find some way to convince El-Melloi to work with the boy who stole his catalyst, but as it stands, we have few options. Is that acceptable?"
"It must be, Master," he said reluctantly.
Nodding gratefully, she continued. "Then we'll be leaving later today: I'll secure the package, then go to my meeting, and you'll pick out a chamber and establish your Workshop." She tapped her chin. "Actually, if I arrange a suitably discreet drop-off, a water demon could pick the package up for us, couldn't it?"
Caster voiced his agreement, and they hashed out the details of that together.
"Finally, although I doubt Lord El-Melloi would try anything in broad daylight, I'd feel safer from Assassin in particular if you could arrange for some water demons to shadow me throughout the day, just in case. I'll be meeting Lord El-Melloi just after lunch, so be ready for that."
With a sigh, Caster nodded. "If you feel you are recovered enough to do this, I won't stand in the way of it."
Rather than bid his farewell, he got up and then stood silently for a little while. "Master, I believe I owe you an apology," he finally said. "I was very… tightlipped about Sakura before we saved her, and I know that frustrated you, and nearly turned to disaster." He swallowed. "The reason I did that was that I worried you might somehow take over Zouken's scheme, his attempt to cheat the whole War."
That name, Zouken Matou… she'd always been told that the Holy Grail War had been established in part by Makiri, but lately, Caster had claimed that it was really Matou. A possibility, which she dreaded facing, existed which meant that Makiri and Matou were one and the same, a thought which squirmed unpleasantly in the back of her mind. Because if that was true, and Zouken Matou was as old as or older than Caster had implied, then…
"And for that, I apologize," he said, bowing deeply. "Your conduct in saving her was impeccable and proved my fears unfounded. You deserved better than I gave you. I hope you can forgive my suspicious nature."
She looked at him, something cold in her stomach. Shame curdled with indignation, at the fact that he would equate her with the monster they'd slain together.
How often had she not thought on the cruelty and selfishness of mages? How often had she not been glad to belong to a house that dedicated itself, not to pointless advancement towards a meaningless end for its own sake, but instead worked towards utopia with zeal and valor? To be compared so directly to those whom she loathed… it shamed her to belong to the same institution as they. In the end, shame won out for now. Late as it was, she appreciated his candor. "Apology accepted, Caster. Hopefully, this means we can be more honest with each other from now on."
"I hope so too," Caster said with a smile.
"And with that, I think I should admit something," Tiffany said sheepishly. He looked at her with a quizzical expression. "I've been dreaming of a battlefield, choked in blood, but headed by a young woman wreathed in light. Is that something you're familiar with?"
"It is my past," he admitted easily.
"And yet, I have not been allowed to see how it ends. I see the light disappear; I feel as though I am on the precipice of some grand revelation! And then I wake up."
He sighed. "And you think I am to blame."
"Who else could be?" Seeing his expression, she tried to soothe him. "I am not accusing you of deliberately manipulating these dreams, but I cannot help but imagine that your reticence towards disclosing your identity has something to do with it."
"It likely does," he agreed, "but I… still need more time, Master. Once the truth comes out… I fear it will shatter the peace between us, and I do not wish for that. I fear you would come to hate me. So please," he looked at her with tired eyes, "allow me to prove myself and my good nature to you a little longer. I beg."
"I've been receiving details on your… stats?" she hedged. "And it's mostly matched what you told me, except for two things. First, your 'alignment' is listed as Chaotic Evil, second, you have the skill Mental Pollution."
"So you see now, surely, why I hid it," he spoke through clenched teeth.
"But these things have not made me hate you, Caster," she stressed. "So why do you think your name would?"
"Because if you knew my name, you would know why my legend, this thing I run from at every moment, has the shape it does, and all I have done not to deserve its reputation in your mind would be rent to naught." He sounded like he was going to cry. "I am terrified, Master."
"Okay. I believe you," she said. "I'll… try to leave it. Perhaps it does not matter." He looked at her strangely, which made her scoff. "Honestly, Caster, I am capable of being reasonable. Your alignment I can believe stands only as a record. But the skill… does it have something to do with your perspective on this War? You say you received a vision, and you definitely know more than you should, but it's the only thing in your 'stats' I can find that'd possibly explain how."
He scratched his chin in thought, coming out of his melancholy as he chewed it over. "It is a mystery, Master. I myself do not feel mad, but then, the truly deranged do not, do they?" he said. "It may be you are right. It may be the skill was broken upon my arrival and gave me the revelation instead, as I have never felt it working. Or it may be something we have not considered yet. It is impossible to know, perhaps literally."
And that was all that was left to say for now, except this. "Whatever the case, despite everything, and whoever you may be, I still choose to believe that, together, we can win the Holy Grail War."
"That is all I ask for, Master. For you to believe in me."
As she was dressing herself in her old clothes, helpfully washed and dried during her stay - and she had been very grateful to learn she'd been undressed to her underwear by her hostess, whom she technically had yet to meet, rather than Caster - she heard a knock on the door. "Come in," she said, fastening her last few shirt buttons as the door opened.
It was Sakura, formerly Matou. She'd been taken out of the poison-stained clothing Tiffany had last seen her in and was instead dressed comfortably in an oversized, white, wool sweater and a long, black skirt, with pinstripe stockings only a little higher than socks. Her unkempt hair had also been washed and cut to a uniform length, though sadly the purple discoloration of it and her eyes had persisted, which likely meant it was permanent. It would have looked eccentric but understandable on a rebellious teenager; on such a timid young girl, it was downright eerie.
"S-sorry!" she stammered once she saw Tiffany sitting on the bed, "I can come back later, if you're busy."
Tiffany waved her off; she was basically dressed already, missing only her coat before she got out the door. "It's perfectly alright. How are you, Sakura?" she asked, throwing a softball opener her way. The girl would get to her point in her own time.
"I'm feeling better, miss." It would be hard not to, given everything, Tiffany suspected. "I… sleeping was scary, like mister Caster said, but Mama sang lullabies for me, like she used to when me and Rin were little." She assessed Tiffany's face for a moment before continuing. "It's a little embarrassing, actually. I feel like a baby." She pouted.
"Don't let it get to you," Tiffany said with a good-natured laugh. "It's her way of showing she cares."
"I know. It just… I just feel stu- silly," she hastily corrected.
Conversation lapsed for a moment, while Tiffany pulled her boots on. "Just so I don't forget," she said, "you should be keeping those necklaces on for at least a month."
Sakura ran her fingers over the remaining iron and Pisces talisman.
"They're for your health. I made them. They'll lose their charge after a while, but they'll still be pretty?" Sakura nodded, and Tiffany pursed her lips. "You know," she said after a moment, "your sister came to talk to me as well."
Sakura's eyes lit up at that. "Really?"
"Yeah, she wanted to ask me something about your father, actually."
That brought on a frown. "Do you know him?" she asked incredulously.
Tiffany laughed. "Heavens, no. No, she wanted to ask me something as someone who is a professed outsider to all this… family drama, but still with the perspective of a mage," she said. "But I think you should ask her what we talked about if you want to know. Wouldn't do for me to be telling stories."
"I will. Your accent is lot better than yesterday," Sakura commented. "Mama almost didn't understand you then."
"Yesterday, I was passing out from exhaustion," Tiffany said with an indulgent smile. Ahh, kids. Nothing like them for bluntness. Deciding to stop beating around the bush, Tiffany said, "Was there anything in particular you wanted to ask me, or did you just decide to come by before I left?"
Sakura, taken aback, wrung her hands for a moment before speaking. "Yesterday… or maybe the day before? After I woke up, in the church, and Uncle Kariya told me you were real, I asked you why you'd saved me. And you told me to ask Caster. And I did, and he told me how he knew to save me, and" she said this part with a hint of a smile, "he seems like he'd do it just because it was the right thing to do. Which is nice, but… you never really answered the question.
"So why did you save me?"
There were easy answers to give. An echo of what it seemed she'd pieced together about Caster. An admission of the mercenary facts of removing Berserker from the board, or a hint of the prize they'd seized from the bowels of Matou House. But there was another answer, which she derived from many different factors. The contest that wasn't a contest. The trials meant to make her better. The love she feared she'd become unworthy of. A myriad of words, each like a droplet, distilled into the smallest, truest, most efficacious statement Tiffany could. She was an alchemist, after all.
Did she believe it? She couldn't be certain, but she knew what would help Sakura most to hear. So she just told her:
"You deserved it."
As always, I am cross-posting on AO3.
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Thank you to everyone who helped me figure out Byakuya Matou: he has now been accounted for in a future chapter. Fret not.
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Yeah, sometimes rather than try and sort out the maelstrom of one's thoughts, better to give something you at least partially believe that will harm none and provide comfort to the one in need.
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Um. Disagree, if for no other reason than Rider also gets to show up inside his Reality Marble. His firepower can only increase inside it. (Also, i'd expect Ionioi Hetairoi, given that each is a Servant, to be able to deal with Caster's demons with little trouble - unless he can summon infinite numbers while inside a desert, they'll have the edge in any battle of attrition.)
I'm... fairly sure Kayneth realised what had happened when the Heroic Spirit associated with the catalyst he ordered rocked up in his usual subtle manner, with Waver very openly in tow?
Hundred Persona's Presence Concealment A also extends to people remembering the events of the plot, I see!
For me, I've always thought it was a mixture of one and three. I do believe Tokiomi genuinely thought he was doing right by Sakura - but, from the perspective of a magus, which is the only one he considered. I'm fairly sure Tokiomi would genuinely rather be dead than without magic, and having someone with high magical potential be untrained is actively unsafe for them - there are any number of creatures or magi that would jump at the chance to devour/make use of someone like Sakura. Provided you completely ignore any other perspective, I can kind of see Tokiomi's logic.
I mean, this all falls apart when you stop for a nanosecond and realise 'hey wait Sakura's not a magus yet and hates all of this, why didn't you ask her opinion', but, hey.
It's also worth noting that even the Tohsaka magic involves massive suffering (Rin notes that her Crest feels like red-hot wires under her skin). Not strictly comparable to what the Matous did to Sakura, but Rin is also not having a wonderful time learning magecraft.
Or, one rubbish magus using a method we literally see in the show?
I notice SI!Caster has a 'pained look' when he says this, presumably because he knows fine well that these chambers aren't going to be very hidden at all. My guess is he's going to try to deflect Team Rider from looking somehow - possibly using Tiffany's meeting with Kayneth to set Lancer after them and keep them too busy to spare the time.
The Tohsaka wards? The Tohsaka wards that Hundred Personas effortlessly bypasses as their first act in the War? If the whole thing hadn't been a setup by Kirei and Tokiomi, Tokiomi would have 100% died on night one.
Overall... I'll admit it's frustrating to see SI!Caster making assumptions he can't reasonably make, and work from wrong or incomplete information. He completely dismisses Assassin (a 'non-issue'), probably because Hundred Personas doesn't do all that much in Fate/Zero, but realistically they should be the nightmare scenario for anyone that doesn't have a reliable method of detecting them. I do note that Tiffany at least requests demons to accompany her, not that they'll do much good against a determined Servant Assassin with Hassan's level of Presence Concealment.
But, hey. I wouldn't have your priorities were I in the SI's situation, but that's the S part of SI - we do get a strong sense of character, flaws and all, and I'm interested to see just how all this will end up blindsiding him in the end.
Thank you for the chapter, happy holidays!
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Can't he, though? Every soldier killed would be another demon, and there's absolutely no way all of them have an attack capable of handling a water demon. He's overconfident, I'll grant.
The point isn't that Kayneth doesn't know who stole his catalyst, the point is that he does, and would want revenge. Tiffany was stalking Kariya, she didn't see Rider and Waver arriving.
Do you have to point it out like this every time? I'm getting really tired of reiterating the point; SI!Caster last watched Fate/Zero five years ago, it's a wonder he remembers fucking anything.
I know. I know Waver does that, SI!Caster knows. Maybe I'll come up with a better justification. I just wanted it to be that SI!Caster ended up hiding the same place as Canon!Caster. For irony.
Literally no. It's a different building. Caster is, in case it was unclear, trying to make Tiffany stay in bed instead of killing herself by running out to do more Grail War shit. I grant that Assassin doesn't give a shit about these wards either, though.
It's also broad daylight. Is another thing. The fact that it's going to be in broad daylight. And Tokiomi, the mastermind of the alliance, wouldn't break the masquerade so openly. If it was Emiya, it'd be a different matter, because Tiffany would have fucking quit the Holy Grail War if the Magus Killer had Assassin. That would be a nightmare. As you've observed in your own fic.
Overall, I'm getting a little tired of having to defend every little mistake and lore inaccuracy SI!Caster commits. If you're here for a flawless SI using the power of 'checking the wiki' to turn every encounter into a cakewalk, then I'm afraid that's not what I'm willing to provide. I'm trying my best to write compelling characters, and a half-decent plot. The idea is that having an SI would make characterizing the main character way easier for me in my debut story on this site. Furthermore, the idea was that by limiting the knowledge of the SI, I'd create a fun sense of dramatic irony for people who remember the story better than he does.
If I'm going to edit anything, it'll have to be later. Right now, I'm too tired.
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Hey, I'm sorry. I certainly didn't mean to come across as nitpicky. I was just picking stuff out of the text as it jumped out at me and commenting on it - occasionally with bad jokes that I didn't realise would be taken poorly. Like I said, I get that it's an SI, and I'm looking forward to how the dramatic irony is resolved. If you don't want me to comment in that way anymore, I won't.
Please do not edit anything about your story, especially not on my account.
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I get it. I'm sorry if I seem whiny, too, it's just been pretty disheartening. I don't, in principle, mind having someone who's pointing out the moments of less-than-perfect planning, but the way you've framed, it, it felt like you were saying I, the author, missed it. And if I did miss something, I'd also want it pointed out! But most of what you've said has been something I did knowingly. I guess that's the hazard of predicating dramatic irony on the mistakes of an SI; it makes it feel more personal when your readers point out his mistakes, and that's not your fault. It's something I'm going to have learn to deal with.
Assassin got got immediately. That means that SI!Caster has a pretty low opinion of them, in terms of threat. But I've got plans. I've only got seven Servants to play with, I'm not going to waste one.
Flairina
Least Omnipotent Goddess
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Speaking as someone who had an idea for a SI story and started writing it two years ago, only for the events of the initial chapters to end up being heavily influenced by my rather vague memories of the property in question, and I found myself too worried about this exact sort of response to ever feel confident in posting it anywhere... well, I sympathize. ^^; For what it's worth, I think you're doing just fine. Whether any of Caster!you's mistakes come back to bite him or not, it still reads well, and with your position/the character you're portraying to Tiffany, it's better to be confidently mostly right than to seem too unsure of anything to be useful.
(Side note, using the crest worms as stored material for the spellbook was clever. Two birds, one stone, and it hadn't even occurred to me.)
yeah, Caster is definitely underestimating Assassin, reason Assassin got got so early was entirely because Tokiomi and Kirei weren't using them for more than a glorified surveillance system, and then as a way to see Riders noble phantasm in case it might counter Gilgamesh, masters clairvoyance showed that Rider had an EX rank np or something like that, compared to Gilgamesh's that was 'merely' around A+++, it made Tokiomi really nervous, even if he really shouldn't be. had they actually used Assassin optimally they'd be a fucking menace, a seemingly unkillable assassin able to target every master at the same time, making traps, poisoning food, if the servant is away from their master for even an instant then their master is as good as gone, to say nothing of servants getting into fights and being too busy to defend their master from a sudden assassination. if say, during the saber and lancer fight where kiritsugu and kayneth both were present, assassin would've killed both of them, if used that way.
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It might be bad fanon from a decade ago, but weren't Caster capable of summoning effectively infinite amount of those demons? Using corpses of dead demons, at that. Unless Rider goes hard from the very start, Caster might, in fact, be capable of grinding him down. Theoretically. If the stars align.
Iskander still got the chariot that'll splat Caster unless he shields himself inside of a really beeg demon.
"brief rewatch of relevant sections from 6th episode"
...In fact, it seems Saber, of all people, was somewhat troubled by water demon spam... Which doesn't really make terribly much sense in retrospective, but eh. Urobuchi suffering fetish writing makes silly stuff happen, sometimes.
...Although she haven't actually revealed too much about herself, too, so its not just Caster, in the end.
Iskander still got the chariot that'll splat Caster unless he shields himself inside of a really beeg demon.
"brief rewatch of relevant sections from 6th episode"
...In fact, it seems Saber, of all people, was somewhat troubled by water demon spam... Which doesn't really make terribly much sense in retrospective, but eh. Urobuchi suffering fetish writing makes silly stuff happen, sometimes.
This seems to be shaping into something pretty sad. Tiffany actually seems to a be pretty okay, not exceptional but still above average cooperative master from what we had seen of her so far, but Caster seems to be self-sabotaging their cooperation somewhat due to mistrust.
...Although she haven't actually revealed too much about herself, too, so its not just Caster, in the end.
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Chapter 8: In Which There Are Things We Have to Let Go
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Chapter 8: In Which There Are Things We Have to Let Go
Aoi bid me leave once I'd laid my Master on the bed in the guest bedroom, as she was about to procure my Master's clothes for the purpose of having them washed. With that as pretext, I began to explore the house a little, looking for something to occupy my time with. At least my usual nighttime activity had been exhausted: I'd extracted every secret I was likely to divine over the course of the War from Prelati's Spellbook, effectively putting me on an even playing field with Bluebeard, who'd have known it by heart the moment he was summoned. It had been grim reading, but at least it was over now. I'd only told Aoi otherwise so as to not be a bother.
Therefore, I ended up gravitating towards a reading nook on the second floor, to cleanse my palate after several days spent perusing a cursed grimoire, only a skill named for madness I didn't possess preventing my brain leaking out of my ears. I ran my fingers over the leather spines of the old books on high shelves; seemed Tokiomi didn't skimp on anything, not even the fiction section of his second mansion. I pulled down a book more or less at random, as I knew I wouldn't be able to finish it before my Master and I would have to move on, but I still wanted something to do.
It couldn't all be tearful conversations, trying to help mend the fractures of the Tohsaka family. We'd already racked up a body count; Kariya lay still under a blanket in the living room. Aoi had told me that she had the means to dispose of a body within the mansion, as with Kariya being inundated with magical waste products, his body could not exactly be turned over to the authorities, never mind the suspicion that'd fall on this place if we did.
The book I got my hands on was apparently a romance. It contained many twists and turns and odd characters, but the central narrative concerned the love story of an ancient vampire and the man raised from birth to kill her. Humoring it, I settled into a high-backed armchair for a spot of reading. After a while, Aoi came by, and I left briefly to help put Kariya's body into the incinerator in the basement, which was some of the most visceral shit I'd ever had to do. I thought for a moment, staring down at his pale body, trying to think of something to say. But I couldn't. I didn't really know him at all. Aoi whispered something in his ear, and that was that.
Then I went back upstairs and returned to my book, deciding not to give the maid a scare by haunting the living room. I thought Aoi might appreciate a moment alone to gather herself as well. Sometime into my reading, someone sat down in the armchair across from mine, and I lowered my book to find Rin Tohsaka, out of her pajamas and dressed more… recognizably. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" I asked.
She huffed.
Raising an eyebrow, I almost managed to return to my book, deciding to leave her in peace to sulk, but then she spoke up.
"Why don't Sakura's magic circuits work anymore?" she asked.
I picked up a bookmark from the table and put down the novel, folding my hands in my lap. "It was a consequence of undoing what Matou had done to her. I had hoped the Crest Worms," she shuddered at that name, "hadn't been so invasive, and that her natural circuits would be relatively unharmed, but she wasn't so lucky, apparently. Possibly a deliberate act of spite from Matou."
"Why didn't you fix it?" she asked, urgently.
"How?" I simply said. "I have not the means to do such a thing. Believe me, I would if I could. It's a shame," I said sincerely.
"You're a Caster! Aren't you supposed to be some kind of super-mage?"
"I am," supposed to be, "but what I am not, is a healer. She has my condolences, not that she needs them. No, what she needs is your support, you and your mother's. This will be a difficult period of adjustment for her." I didn't have a frame of reference for what it'd be like to lose my magic superpowers, but I'd been point-blank on other life-altering events before, so that's what I tried to draw on. "You haven't just left her alone, have you?"
Rin shook her head, indignant at the mere suggestion. "She's eating with Mama."
Ah. "And you're not with them, because you're still mad at Mama," I nodded. "It all makes sense."
"Shut up."
I picked my book back up, but she preempted me again.
"Sakura was just as strong as I was, you know."
"Oh?" I said, pretending to understand what she was getting at.
"Yeah. She had just as many magic circuits, and I've got a ton, so they're probably not all gone."
"You think so?" Actually, maybe I did know where this was going.
"And, you know, I'm an Average One," she couldn't help puffing out her chest a little, "but Sakura had a Hollow element, which is like, super rare too. So…"
I knew it. "So...?" I asked leadingly.
Her confidence evaporated, and she looked strangely timid, more like the child she really was than the young woman I kept seeing when I looked at her, the image of her future self. "You're doing something," she accused me.
"What do you mean?"
"Y-- you're the one who said Papa was evil! You're making me think weird stuff!" she said while pointing at me.
"I'm not. But I think I can guess." I leaned forward, placing my elbows on my thighs and intertwining my hands in front of my nose. "You're thinking 'She can still be powerful! And if she's still powerful, Papa won't have a reason to send her away again'. Am I right?"
Her lip quivered. "N-no."
"You're a smart girl, Rin, I know you are. And I imagine you must know your father well, perhaps better than anyone else in the world. But that is your undoing," I told her. "You're too smart for your own good. You're going to keep interrogating everything I say, everything your mother, and your father, and Sakura tell you, and you're going to put it all together, and the result you're going to come to will be true, whether you like it or not. And that wouldn't be a problem," I said, "except the truth is that your father doesn't love Sakura, and you do."
"He does!" she insisted. "He- he does! He wants to help her! He just did it wrong!"
"So you think it was right to send Sakura away? That it might have been for the best, somehow?" I asked. It was delicate work, this, but I had an idea of what to do. Rin's problem was this: she loved her father but also hated 'the person who had hurt Sakura'. With that in mind, I was certain that if I could drive a wedge between Rin and her father, she would come out of this War a better person. Or at least I'd repair her relationship with her mother, what I'd damaged. I felt I owed it to them to try.
"No!" she yelled. "It was a mistake, a big one, but it was just a mistake."
"Ah," I said, acting like I'd just realized something, "so you must think your father is stupid, then."
"No! I- you're doing it again!" she yelled. "Stop making me think weird stuff! Papa didn't mean to hurt Sakura, it- it-,"
"If it wasn't right, and it wasn't a mistake because he isn't stupid, what is it, Rin?" I asked gently. "If your father could do what he did to Sakura, what does that mean?"
She sniffled. "…it means he doesn't- love her enough. It means he did something wrong." She was trembling a little, at least partly in anger if I had to hazard a guess. "But- but sometimes people do the wrong thing! And then, they make up for it, and we forgive them. That's… that's normal!" she insisted.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again, turning it into a weighty look in her direction. "Leaving aside whether or not your mother, or Sakura, even can forgive your father, that isn't why you came here. You were trying to convince me, in order to convince yourself, that Sakura isn't weak. Which means you know that, if she were, he'd take her away again."
"No," she said resolutely. "He won't. You're right, I don't think he's stupid, and that's why he won't make the same mistake twice."
"If you say that's true, then I've no doubt of that," I allowed, and she smirked in victory. "In fact, I know exactly how to prevent him from doing it." I looked her square in the eye. "Just tell him not to."
"Y-Yeah! That's right," she said brightly, but I could still see those well-oiled gears turning too quickly, and her face fell again. "No- damn it, stop doing that! You keep making me think that he's-" she hit the arm of the chair with the side of her hand. "Damnit. Damnit."
"If he'd listen to that, it'd be because he doesn't care what happens to her, anymore. Because she's not useful or valuable anymore. And he'd only listen to you, only let you keep her as a pet, as long as that's true. If he found some fresh torture that he thought would increase her utility, he'd do it, and he wouldn't feel a single twinge of conscience." I tilted my head and sighed in sympathy. It wasn't easy, reckoning with the fact that, sometimes, the people you love hurt each other, and you have to choose which of them you keep on loving. I knew that from experience. "I hardly need to spell it out. After all, you know him best."
"SHUT UP!" Rin bolted out from her chair and stormed out of the room.
"And all I have to do, to make you realize, is tell the truth," I murmured to myself, feeling like a heel, and picking the book back up.
"I heard you and Rin had a fight?" Aoi said at dinner. It was just the two of us: Rin had come by and grabbed bowls of soup for both her and Sakura, shooting her mother and I a dark glare each before absconding, an entire loaf of bread under her arm.
"I apologize. I know it's bad form to argue with children, but in my defense, she did seek me out looking to have an argument," I said, swallowing a spoonful of fish soup.
Aoi gave a slightly pained smile but nodded in understanding. "I know Rin can be… headstrong. Sakura's state has her on edge, I think as well- obviously. I… really can't thank you enough for saving her," she told me with a brief but radiant smile. "But, if I may… could I ask you what you were arguing about?"
I sighed and put down my spoon. It seemed I'd be at this for a bit. "We were discussing her father. She was trying to… reconcile the image she has of him with the misdeed she knows he has committed by convincing me that he wasn't a bad person. I was not very cooperative."
"Ah," Aoi said, "that would do it." When I looked at her quizzically, she explained. "Rin and Tokiomi are very close. I suppose that's inevitable, with how much time they spend together on magecraft. Especially recently, since…" her face fell, "since Sakura was sent away."
"You say it so passively," I said with a deep frown, aching in my heart. The lingering soup had turned slimy in my mouth. "Like it was… some sort of natural phenomenon, not a decision someone made."
"I can see why you didn't get along with Rin, if that's how you phrased it." She had raised an eyebrow at me, tilting her head, her spoon lingering over the bowl.
"Forgive me if I'm too blunt, Mrs. Aoi," I said, "but I truly do not understand it. How can you love someone, when that someone hurts a person that you both clearly care deeply about?"
"I- it was my own fault for," she paused, swallowed spit, blinked several times as if confused. "I should have- no, I shouldn't have tried to talk him out of- that's not right either." She frowned, eyes widening a little. "I- there had to have been something I could have done, right?"
"Mrs. Aoi, please don't tell me that this is your fault because you told him the unvarnished truth about that place, and he decided that made it the perfect opportunity. He can make his own decisions. The way you talk about him, he always does."
"No- that can't- you don't understand. You don't know my husband like I do. He was trying to… make her…" Aoi held her hand in front of her mouth, as if trying to prevent the words from spilling out. "What am I saying?" she whispered. "I don't believe that." She shook her head. "Forgive me. My thoughts go in strange directions. You're… right," she said, sounding surprised. A flash of anger crossed her face, but quickly vanished. "You're right," she said, more resolutely. One hand pressed against her brow. "Why was I so quick to make excuses for him?" she asked, only half present.
"If you have to ask, I think you already know," I told her.
She nodded slowly, not seeming to really listen. "He… it wasn't Matou. Not really," she murmured. "Matou was the instrument. But Tokiomi was the one who hurt Sakura. And I let him do it," she finished, covering her mouth again.
"No, please, I told you, stop that," I begged her. "You didn't let him do anything. The worst thing you did was fail to strangle him in his sleep, and even that I'm nearly positive wouldn't have worked."
"Strangle? I-I can't just kill… oh God." She looked at me in horror, her meal forgotten. Her spoon clattered mutely onto the napkin as she lay her head in her hands. "Oh God. That really is the only way. That's the only thing that could have stopped him." A single tear trickled down her face. "That's what you were trying to tell Rin."
I nodded, closing my eyes with a despondent sigh. "Tokiomi is evil, but he is an incredibly banal sort of villain, who simply acts as though everything he does is perfectly natural, and so the world does not take notice of his cruelty but finds ways to blame it on things other than him. He is selfish, sociopathic, and materialistic in the extreme: lo, he is a magus," I finished. It hurt to see Aoi in so much pain, but I was the only one who could lead her through this to come out on the other side with a fuller understanding.
"I should have realized it. You're right, I should have done something years ago," she muttered.
"You couldn't, Mrs. Aoi. That's… why he married a non-mage, I think."
She began to slowly nod. "I- the Zenjou family, my family, we used to be mages, once. But we declined, for whatever reason, possibly just the times… but even as we did, I was told, we continued to produce children with other lines who were just as powerful as we'd been. Eventually, that was all we had left." She spoke in a reverie. "We were no longer mages, but our children would be, powerful ones. And that made us valuable. So our parents, the ones who hadn't married out of the family, started to sell us off.
"If you wanted a powerful heir, you bought a Zenjou. It wasn't put like that, of course. It was all very proper. But powerful men wanted powerful heirs, and so they took us as their wives." She absently stirred her spoon through the thick soup. "I thought he was different. I first met him when I was thirteen- I say met, it was only very briefly. He was there to negotiate being allowed to marry my sister, but… these Tohsaka's," she laughed a little, "they have all these fancy houses and brilliant gemstones and expensive suits, but somehow, they never seem to have money on hand, so it fell through." She looked at me, and I saw an emptiness in her eyes I recognized on a much younger face. "But then he came back."
"How old were you?" I asked. She looked… young, still.
"I was seventeen when we got married." She read the unvoiced questions on my face. "He was twenty-five. We had Rin on our wedding night."
"Aoi, I'm so sorry." It slipped from my mouth before I realized. I felt like throwing up, the scent of fish and salt at once turned sickening.
"He was so charming." Her head tilted, like she was realizing something for the first time. "And I thought, 'what a nice surprise. He isn't anything like I feared.' That became my mantra, even as he grew more distant over the years. 'It could be worse. It could be so much worse.' Like the frog in the pot, never realizing I was boiling. He took my daughter and I let him. I forgave him. Our little girl. He used to coo over her in the crib, making faces and sounds to hear her giggle. He smiled like she was the treasure of his very life. I remember it. Why didn't he?" She was crying now. "How…? you've been here for one day, and already you've uprooted my entire life? How?"
I shook my head. "That's not it at all, Mrs. Aoi. You knew this stuff already, but I think… you accepted it, because it was inevitable. All I did was prove it needn't be and your mind began to rebel against it." I thought something over, debated whether it was too much, but decided to go ahead. "When we rescued Sakura, at first, she didn't believe it was real. Because she had been trained to accept that things were never going to get better, she couldn't trust it when they seemed to. She'd been beaten into numbness, into accepting that simply not being hurt was a reward reserved for those who obey." I reached a hand across the table. "You have lived in that same fear, Mrs. Aoi. You have walked, mortal, in the halls of gods."
She took my hand. "Caster, what am I meant to do now, knowing this?" Her eyes were shining. "I can't just… forget, again. But I'm still just mortal, as you said."
"You get to do whatever you want, Mrs. Aoi. I'll guarantee it myself." Never had I loathed Tokiomi, and the whole culture of mages, more than I did in this moment. It is one thing to read something and think 'aha, the logic that has swallowed and ruined countless lives, which even now threatens to bring about the apocalypse, brought to a mirror shine with magic and exaggeration.' It was another to hear Aoi Tohsaka sit there before me, flesh and blood, not an image on my computer, and tell me that she feels she has no options at all because to her, her husband may as well be God, and God did not care.
"Whatever I want?" She laughed. "What even is that? Where do I begin?" She was smiling, strangely hurt, strangely alive. "Can't you just tell me- no, you wouldn't accept that," she said, shaking her head. "What do I want?"
"Did you even want children?" I tried asking.
This, she thought over for some time, clenching my hand very tightly at points, sometimes letting out a deep sob, like hitting a pothole. "I think… I would have liked it to be my decision. Does that make sense?" she asked, sounding terrified.
"Of course," I assured her, as gently as possible.
She still started crying. I could feel tears run down my own cheeks as well. "It just feels so selfish. Like I'm saying I don't love them, but I do! I love my girls with all my heart." She sighed, slumped over the table with her head in one hand, the other limp in my grip. "I feel like a nonsense person. Like I can't make sense of myself, my thoughts, my feelings. Shouldn't this be simpler, now?"
"You can find happiness in an unhappy situation and wish to take that happiness with you where you go, and still long desperately to leave, and that doesn't mean you're evil, Mrs. Aoi. It means you still have hope." I rubbed my thumb over her knuckles.
"That sounds nice," she said, chuckling wetly. "You make me sound so strong, stronger than I really am."
"If you want to run away with them, I'll make it happen," I told her honestly. Heh. She said I'd uprooted her life in a day, but in that same day, I'd gone from resenting her for abandoning her daughter to pledging my loyalty to her. She really was something remarkable. That Tokiomi couldn't see that was… unimaginable. "He won't ever find you, wherever he searches, whatever favors he calls in."
"Is that what you think is best?" she asked, laying her arm on the table and her head atop, tapping the long nail of her free hand's pointer finger against the lacquered wood anxiously.
"Mrs. Aoi," I said, staring into her eyes until she looked up at me. "I only care what you want to do. I can't move the heavens, or command the elements, or raise the dead. But I can grant you a choice. For once, someone is asking you to choose for yourself."
A thrill went through her, passing into me, and I half expected to find I'd accidentally made some kind of magically binding oath, but no. It was just… real.
She rose, straightening her back again. Her free hand fidgeted with her hair, her chin, her lashes, for a moment, as she worked through her thoughts. "He's not going to make me run," she said, hollow eyes lit from behind, like shadows dancing with the flames. Her arm laid still on the table. "This is my home. My family. My house. He doesn't get to make me run from that."
"Then he won't," I agreed.
She was breathing heavily but seemed as still and sure as stone. "You- I know there's only one way he'd listen to that. That there's only one way to make him leave my family alone forever. I- you're right, there is no reasoning with him. There never has been."
Nod. "Rin won't like it."
"But she'll understand. One day." The fire in her eyes grew higher and higher, like an ancient bonfire in a forest clearing, stretching up into the dark of night, a challenge to the stars, a sun at midnight girth by writhing shadows. "Caster. Please, if you could, kill my husband."
I planted the idea in my Master's head, once I'd brought her dinner, at a rather larger portion size than I'd had with Aoi. Of course, I'd couched it tactically, once again, but that hardly mattered. If all went well, I'd be able to keep my promise to Aoi.
Before I did that, though, I should really get on keeping my promise to Tiffany. Searching for a place for my Workshop was trivial; Prelati's Spellbook contained more incantations than just the ones for summoning water demons, albeit they were largely concerned with getting the most out of the ones you had. I could, intrinsically, direct the water demons in basic ways, such as I'd done when setting up the perimeter around the warehouse we'd stayed in, or making them hide uselessly in the harbor waters, or I could set them as sentries at a specific location. But in order to find a place, I'd need an actual spell.
"Ystell'bsna d'sgn'haiphlegeth" I intoned, the book's pages flapping and its eyes glowing on the back, and inside my mind, images skittered hither and yon like startled water skippers. All spells in the grimoire were, according to the translations in the margins, very simple requests or commands, either for the water demons themselves or the patron which empowered the book who was, indeed, Cthulhu. Riveting stuff. This spell asked that the water demons share information with me as it happened and allowed me to effectively tune in to their 'vision' one at a time.
Like this, I was able to use them to scout out locations such as had been requested. It wasn't perfect; the images were coming from creatures with very different senses to my own, and I suspected that only Mental Pollution was preventing me from going absolutely fucking ballistic at this invasion of my thoughts, and even then, it was nauseating. The signal would also frequently die, or at least jump to another demon without my direction, which was majorly disorienting, but for tonight, I'd suck it up.
However, much to my distress, as I combed Fuyuki for a suitable location, I was being inexorably drawn to one conclusion: It actually would be a good idea to hide in the sewers. Like Bluebeard and his Master had done, once upon a never.
I searched desperately for another choice, but everything was either too public, less accessible, less versatile or too out of the way. With the speed my water demons could traverse the sewer drains, nowhere else offered equivalent tactical utility. I didn't need leylines or what have you, I just needed an undisturbed location to set up shop, and wouldn't you know it, literally no one wanted to go in the sewers.
Or perhaps, in reality, the issue was with the instruments of my searching: ravenous, mad, and barely under my control, there were many places I could not send my water demons to look; nowhere private, nowhere open, nowhere people might come. We'd taken the gamble on an abandoned warehouse remaining abandoned because we would only be staying there for a few days: for somewhere to keep a base during the rest of the War, that wouldn't do.
Waver might have found the hideaway in the sewers on his own, but he'd done so, as far as I recalled, by tracking the coming and going of water demons, something that would happen far less in this version of events, because I wasn't planning to have my water demons venture out en masse every night to kidnap local children. Also, he shouldn't be searching at all. The magic might have been simple, but he'd still been the only person to think of it, which was… reasonably reassuring.
This was the conclusion I presented my Master with once morning came. Much to my disappointment, she accepted.
After that, I ate breakfast. Rin and Sakura joined Aoi and I, for the first time since I'd been here. For once, we didn't talk about anything heavy; Rin was bound and determined to discuss her friends from school, and Aoi wasn't getting in the way of that, instead trying to gauge when Sakura would be comfortable returning. There was still tension in the air between them, but the mere fact that Rin was here gave me hope. Sakura was quiet, but I'd expected that, and she ate reasonably well and answered when asked, which was as good as could be expected this early. Afterwards, Rin pulled Sakura along again, out into the foyer where they pulled on their coats to go to the city.
That left Aoi and I alone until my Master decided to get out of here. We spent it quietly in the reading area I'd found on my first day: my book was apparently a tragic romance, as the vampire began reconnecting with her humanity, only to be horrified at how much of it she'd already lost. When I had to put the book down, she was preparing to leave the world of humans behind forever.
Then, it was time to go. I had no idea if I'd see these three again; after all, I still planned to leave this world for my own as soon as possible. And that hurt: the unknowing of it all. I'd worry for Sakura until my dying days, most likely, how and if she recovered from trauma so profound it boggled the imagination, and I'd wonder what'd become of Rin, whether they'd be able to mend their relationship, how they'd do in the next Holy Grail War, how different Rin would be with a mother, rather than as an orphan. And as for that mother…
Aoi had surprised me. I'd expected a woman trod so far beneath her husband's heel that it'd take determined forensic analysis to find out where she ended and the boot-leather began, but instead, I'd found a deeply troubled young woman, determined to see the best in the people she loved, regardless of whether they deserved it. And through our brief time together, I'd already seen her come so far out from under him, which I couldn't credit to some awesome power of charisma, but instead to her truly, earnestly conscientious soul, which had already seen but not dared to face the very truth I'd brought before her.
We'd gathered in the foyer, waiting on my Master; that is, Rin and Aoi were there to bid us adieu; Sakura only came running in just then. I smiled at her, and she returned it hesitantly. I hadn't been able to talk to her as much as I might have liked, since Rin had monopolized much of her time, so I could only hope that I'd been able to help her beyond the obvious. And, I chastised myself, I shouldn't make the mistake of thinking I was the only one capable of leading her out of the darkness. She'd have a family, a mother and sister she'd surely have longed for at Matou House, not just this past year or so, but the next decade of torture I'd saved her from.
In my experience, that was worth everything.
My Master came in shortly after Sakura had stood at attention left of her mother, Rin to the right. She was shucking on her large overcoat and walking with newfound determination and vigor. I greeted her with a professional nod, and she did the same to me before turning to Aoi.
"Apologies for my rudeness, Mrs. Tohsaka," Tiffany said, "as I have yet to even greet my hostess and am now about to depart." She held out a hand.
Aoi shook it with a smile. "Think nothing of it, Ms. Hohenheim. I saw the state you were in when you arrived; given that, some rudeness can be excused." Then, she curtsied. "Fair travels, and good luck in the War."
"Even though we compete against your husband?" Tiffany asked, raising an eyebrow.
I didn't miss Aoi's brief glance at Rin. "Even then." I guess she was going to break it to Rin after the fact.
"Then you have my thanks," Tiffany said with a bow. Following that, she leaned down to shake Rin's hand as well. A strange look passed between them; Tiffany's eyes were full of nostalgia and sorrow, while Rin's were filled with doubt and, faintly, unaccountably, horror. I had no idea what'd transpired between them to make up such a look.
Next, she went over to Sakura, and this was much more as I'd expected: Sakura seemed a little embarrassed, I'd guess because she'd been with Tiffany only moments before, having a private goodbye, but she still thanked Tiffany for her service and her kind words, shook her hand, and that was that.
Once Tiffany had stepped aside, I pushed off the wall I'd been leaning against and approached Aoi. When I reached out my hand to shake, she instead surprised me by pulling me into a brief embrace, whispering "thank you," in my ear. A shiver ran down my spine, but I pulled myself together, and initiated a much more prosaic handshake. "Goodbye, Mrs. Aoi," I said.
"Please- even if it doesn't matter and we never see each other again, I'd appreciate it if you'd just call me Aoi." Er, 'Aoi-chan', in case that was unclear, as opposed to the formal 'Aoi-san' I'd been using so far, and the even more formal 'Tohsaka-san' Tiffany used. Japanese! Translation convention!
"Aoi," I agreed. "It's been a pleasure, and it saddens me to see it end so soon. I wish I didn't have to go, but duty calls," I said, and found I meant it.
"Don't be a stranger!"
Mimicking my Master's path, I then turned to Rin. At first, she averted her gaze from me, but with a gentle push from Aoi she sighed and looked up. Her face was less resolute in its displeasure than yesterday, and she reluctantly said, "Thank you for taking care of my little sister." Then, hesitating only for a moment, she added, "I missed her, and you brought her back. You're very stubborn," she said quietly, "and I don't think I like you very much. But… maybe you aren't stupid. Sorry." She turned her head again, a faint hint of pink on her cheeks.
I grinned. "I'll take it: I know how difficult it is to extract an apology from the great Rin Tohsaka." Then I added: "I've no doubt you'll succeed in whatever you do; therefore, I shall not insult you by wishing you luck. Instead: Ganbatte! As you say in Japan." I thrust my fist to the sky.
"Dork."
Still smiling, I went over to Sakura. She looked thoughtful, and so I asked what was on her mind.
"You're not coming back, are you?" she finally said.
I shook my head. "Not to my knowledge, no. I'm sorry."
She fidgeted with her newly cut hair. "It's just… you already know what happened to me, don't you?" She looked at me with those empty, violet eyes.
"I do." It didn't take much to guess what she meant.
"I- I tried to tell Rin, but I… couldn't tell her everything. I was too scared." She sighed. "I wish I didn't have to explain it. That they'd just… know, already. Like you. That would be easier."
"I'm sorry I have to go, too, Sakura. You're right, it is scary. It's… what happened to you was awful, but I still think that one day, you'll find the strength to talk about it. I know you can. They both love you, Sakura. You just have to let them help." I went to pat her on the head.
Before I could do that or react, she reached out and hugged me, her short arms barely able to go around my torso. With a smile, I returned the embrace before stepping away. She was smiling too, but she didn't say anything. She knew she didn't have to, because she knew that I already knew how grateful she was.
"A good day to all of you," I bid them, shooting off a loose salute, and walked out the door behind my Master, the three of them waving at us. Then the door closed behind me, and we were off, me in my spirit form, my Master with her trademark imperious stride.
'So the plan is for us to kill Tokiomi?' I asked my Master.
'If necessary,' she demurred. 'Best case, we pressure him into killing Archer for us, if not, we'll remove his Command Seals and have him imprisoned where the Church can't help him get them back. But if all else fails, yes, we will,' she concluded.
'But to even have the chance, we'll need an opening, won't we?' I asked rhetorically.
'So we will. Now, will you tell me about Lord El-Melloi's Servant?' Tiffany asked. She was currently having lunch on the streets above, while I was establishing my new Workshop in a vaulted chamber in the sewers below. Rank water dripped periodically from above. 'Or will I have to wait, again?'
'There's no need for that sort of quid pro quo anymore, Master, now that I have demonstrated the efficacy of my counsel. Kayneth El-Melloi's Servant-'
'His name is Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald, actually' my Master corrected.
'Really? You know of him?' I asked, surprised.
'Not personally, but I'm familiar with him. He is a Lord, the head of the Department of Minerology, which my family deals with frequently. It's why my father had contacts in his orbit. I also attended some of his lectures. He's… decent, if conceited.'
'I see,' I told her in earnest surprise. 'Then I hardly need to expound on his disposition. In any case, his Servant is Lancer, although he'd been aiming for Rider, as I've said.'
'I think you did mention he was Lancer's Master,' Tiffany interjected once again. 'As I recall that would make Lord El-Melloi the one who was splitting the contract, and the one to issue the challenge at the docks.'
I nodded, then remembered to send a 'That's right, Master. Anyway, Lancer is Diarmuid ua Duibhne, a warrior of some renown. He has two legendary spears, of which I remember the name of one, but the functions of both.'
'Remember?'
Ah, shoot. 'From the vision. I only received it the once, Master. Sometimes details escape me. It is why I struggled so much with the specific timing of Lancer's challenge and forced you to stay and keep watch with me.' Hopefully, that'd be save enough.
'Hm. I see. Continue?'
'The first spear, his red one, is most relevant to you as it destroys any magecraft it comes into contact with. It cannot slay my water demons, but we probably shouldn't let him get too close with it. The second is Gae Buidhe, a shorter, golden spear. It does not have the first spear's ability to pierce our defenses, but the wounds it leaves cannot be healed.' I continued, 'Kayneth's gambit with Lancer's challenge was to draw out Saber and use the first spear to trick her into dismissing her heavy, and magically conjured, armor, thereby letting Gae Buidhe wound her. By intervening, I foiled this scheme.'
'But Saber is our enemy.' Tiffany was incredulous. 'Why not simply let her be wounded?'
Because I like her better than Lancer and want her to survive the War.
I'd been doing some math, you see. Thinking back on it, by the time the Grail had manifested, there were at least three Servants alive: Berserker, Saber, and Archer. That meant there were two Servants that I could spare, even if I, a Servant-for-hire, wanted to be the winner of the Holy Grail War, as I didn't need the full set of six (seven) to reach Heaven's Feel: I just needed enough for the Lesser Grail to send me home.
And yes, I was aware the Grail was corrupted in the last War. But… It was my only hope. I had to chance it. Besides, so long as I didn't piss it off by rejecting it, I'd prevent the Great Fuyuki Fire basically by happenstance.
So I'd been doing the math, and if I had the opportunity to choose, I'd spare Rider and Saber. But I'd read something to the effect of Archer being so OP that he'd count for two Servants if he were killed, which left the exciting possibility of sparing yet another Servant, probably Lancer himself, let him and Sola-Ui get their fairytale ending or what have you. Even if that turned out not to be true, I had few qualms about killing Archer to get home. Or at least fewer, which would have to do. And if I had to go further, kill more Servants, Saber would still be last on my list of 'targets'. This was the other reason I'd been pushing my Master towards Archer. The first, of course, was Tokiomi.
But I didn't say that. I'd gotten the impression that Tiffany believed I had to be the last Servant standing for her to claim Heaven's Feel, so I knew she wouldn't understand. 'Well, I had no idea at the time we might be working with him in the future: really, I'd thought that Saber was our only chance of beating Archer.'
'But how were you planning to beat Saber, then?' she asked.
'With Rider. Think of it like… the elements, Master. Each element is conquered by another, and in turn has the power to conquer one itself. I can't beat Saber or Archer, Rider can't beat Archer or me, but I can beat Rider. It's not strictly a question of power, it's a system of advantages and disadvantages.'
'I see, how very devious; a cycle of betrayals, each time being the pivot that lets the second strongest beat the strongest Servant, then turning around and helping the third, the fourth, until you can beat the one remaining. While I don't like it, I do understand having to fight from a position of weakness. Carry on.'
I did as ordered, not commenting on the 'devious' thing since it wasn't actually what my plan was or had ever been. 'That's about it, Master. He's a masterful spearman with some tricks up his sleeve: oh, and a birthmark on his cheek that charms women. You should be strong enough to ward it off, though, and he finds it somewhat embarrassing, so he likely won't be using it offensively. The only reason I bring it up is that Kayneth's wife, Sola-Ui-'
'His fiancée,' she corrected again. 'And her full name is Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri. I've heard about her, and her family. Is she the one he's splitting the contract with? How does that work?' Tiffany asked.
'Precisely what I was getting to, Master,' I replied, tamping down my slight annoyance at being interrupted again. 'Anyway, Kayneth's fiancée despises him and has never been in love before, so she's deliberately not fighting off Lancer's charm in order to get high on that false infatuation. They're splitting the contract very simply. I don't know the mechanics of it, but essentially Sola-Ui supplies the mana and Kayneth has the Command Seals and a trunk full of Mystic Codes, which makes him more powerful than would be expected of a Master.'
'As I'd expect from Lord El-Melloi, yes.' Her next statement was displeased. 'Is that all you know about Lancer? What are his skills? Does the Lancer Class not have a skill like Riding or Independent Action for the Rider and Archer Classes?'
Well, Master, I thought Lancer was kind of boring, so I didn't look up any information about him before I was pulled into your magical nightmare world. But I didn't say that. 'The Lancer Class does not, not truly; all the Knight Classes share the Class Skill Magic Resistance, but Archer's is folded into his Divinity, so I forgot to mention it. Lancer could therefore have some degree of Magic Resistance that I'm unaware of, but Lancers are generally underwhelming,' I admitted.
'I'll make sure to tell Lord El-Melloi you said that,' Tiffany joked, her tension easing a little. 'Would surely make me the belle of the ball. Anyway, the meeting will be in a few minutes. Keep an eye out. Lord El-Melloi is too honorable to try anything, but I wouldn't put it past Assassin or the Magus Killer.'
I assured her I would, as the Workshop snapped into being and I breathed a sigh of relief, then immediately regretted it. But there was nothing to do but get back to work. With the bounty we'd secured at Matou House, I could afford to get a little… creative. I called up a cadre of water demons, and they slithered before me, all slavering jaws and limbs fit only to rip and tear. Awful things.
At my command, they began to dig themselves, all five, into one uneven pit, where they lay atop one another in a heap. Like this, it was nearly impossible to see where one ended and another began. Which was exactly the point.
Reading from Prelati's Spellbook, I began the first verse of a ritual that would continue for the rest of today. The book began to glow, like the anglerfish's lure, and the pages quivered in anticipation.
"D'cthulhunyyth uh'e sgn'wahl! Ah ch' d'ftaghu'nglui ngah sha'bthnk!"
And a hideous creature, more terrible than the five water demons combined though that was what it was, began to take form.
Translation: 1: "Let the barriers between our minds disappear, and share your senses."
2: "You servants of Cthulhu, crowd up and share one space! Then, move beyond your boundaries and be one!"
As per usual, this story is being cross-posted on AO3.
I'll say, for this one, I'm worried I didn't hit the right tone in the argument with Rin. Could anyone comment on that? Also, as far as I'm aware Aoi doesn't have a canonical age, but if you've got dissenting evidence, I'd love to see it. It wasn't on the wiki.
Aoi bid me leave once I'd laid my Master on the bed in the guest bedroom, as she was about to procure my Master's clothes for the purpose of having them washed. With that as pretext, I began to explore the house a little, looking for something to occupy my time with. At least my usual nighttime activity had been exhausted: I'd extracted every secret I was likely to divine over the course of the War from Prelati's Spellbook, effectively putting me on an even playing field with Bluebeard, who'd have known it by heart the moment he was summoned. It had been grim reading, but at least it was over now. I'd only told Aoi otherwise so as to not be a bother.
Therefore, I ended up gravitating towards a reading nook on the second floor, to cleanse my palate after several days spent perusing a cursed grimoire, only a skill named for madness I didn't possess preventing my brain leaking out of my ears. I ran my fingers over the leather spines of the old books on high shelves; seemed Tokiomi didn't skimp on anything, not even the fiction section of his second mansion. I pulled down a book more or less at random, as I knew I wouldn't be able to finish it before my Master and I would have to move on, but I still wanted something to do.
It couldn't all be tearful conversations, trying to help mend the fractures of the Tohsaka family. We'd already racked up a body count; Kariya lay still under a blanket in the living room. Aoi had told me that she had the means to dispose of a body within the mansion, as with Kariya being inundated with magical waste products, his body could not exactly be turned over to the authorities, never mind the suspicion that'd fall on this place if we did.
The book I got my hands on was apparently a romance. It contained many twists and turns and odd characters, but the central narrative concerned the love story of an ancient vampire and the man raised from birth to kill her. Humoring it, I settled into a high-backed armchair for a spot of reading. After a while, Aoi came by, and I left briefly to help put Kariya's body into the incinerator in the basement, which was some of the most visceral shit I'd ever had to do. I thought for a moment, staring down at his pale body, trying to think of something to say. But I couldn't. I didn't really know him at all. Aoi whispered something in his ear, and that was that.
Then I went back upstairs and returned to my book, deciding not to give the maid a scare by haunting the living room. I thought Aoi might appreciate a moment alone to gather herself as well. Sometime into my reading, someone sat down in the armchair across from mine, and I lowered my book to find Rin Tohsaka, out of her pajamas and dressed more… recognizably. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" I asked.
She huffed.
Raising an eyebrow, I almost managed to return to my book, deciding to leave her in peace to sulk, but then she spoke up.
"Why don't Sakura's magic circuits work anymore?" she asked.
I picked up a bookmark from the table and put down the novel, folding my hands in my lap. "It was a consequence of undoing what Matou had done to her. I had hoped the Crest Worms," she shuddered at that name, "hadn't been so invasive, and that her natural circuits would be relatively unharmed, but she wasn't so lucky, apparently. Possibly a deliberate act of spite from Matou."
"Why didn't you fix it?" she asked, urgently.
"How?" I simply said. "I have not the means to do such a thing. Believe me, I would if I could. It's a shame," I said sincerely.
"You're a Caster! Aren't you supposed to be some kind of super-mage?"
"I am," supposed to be, "but what I am not, is a healer. She has my condolences, not that she needs them. No, what she needs is your support, you and your mother's. This will be a difficult period of adjustment for her." I didn't have a frame of reference for what it'd be like to lose my magic superpowers, but I'd been point-blank on other life-altering events before, so that's what I tried to draw on. "You haven't just left her alone, have you?"
Rin shook her head, indignant at the mere suggestion. "She's eating with Mama."
Ah. "And you're not with them, because you're still mad at Mama," I nodded. "It all makes sense."
"Shut up."
I picked my book back up, but she preempted me again.
"Sakura was just as strong as I was, you know."
"Oh?" I said, pretending to understand what she was getting at.
"Yeah. She had just as many magic circuits, and I've got a ton, so they're probably not all gone."
"You think so?" Actually, maybe I did know where this was going.
"And, you know, I'm an Average One," she couldn't help puffing out her chest a little, "but Sakura had a Hollow element, which is like, super rare too. So…"
I knew it. "So...?" I asked leadingly.
Her confidence evaporated, and she looked strangely timid, more like the child she really was than the young woman I kept seeing when I looked at her, the image of her future self. "You're doing something," she accused me.
"What do you mean?"
"Y-- you're the one who said Papa was evil! You're making me think weird stuff!" she said while pointing at me.
"I'm not. But I think I can guess." I leaned forward, placing my elbows on my thighs and intertwining my hands in front of my nose. "You're thinking 'She can still be powerful! And if she's still powerful, Papa won't have a reason to send her away again'. Am I right?"
Her lip quivered. "N-no."
"You're a smart girl, Rin, I know you are. And I imagine you must know your father well, perhaps better than anyone else in the world. But that is your undoing," I told her. "You're too smart for your own good. You're going to keep interrogating everything I say, everything your mother, and your father, and Sakura tell you, and you're going to put it all together, and the result you're going to come to will be true, whether you like it or not. And that wouldn't be a problem," I said, "except the truth is that your father doesn't love Sakura, and you do."
"He does!" she insisted. "He- he does! He wants to help her! He just did it wrong!"
"So you think it was right to send Sakura away? That it might have been for the best, somehow?" I asked. It was delicate work, this, but I had an idea of what to do. Rin's problem was this: she loved her father but also hated 'the person who had hurt Sakura'. With that in mind, I was certain that if I could drive a wedge between Rin and her father, she would come out of this War a better person. Or at least I'd repair her relationship with her mother, what I'd damaged. I felt I owed it to them to try.
"No!" she yelled. "It was a mistake, a big one, but it was just a mistake."
"Ah," I said, acting like I'd just realized something, "so you must think your father is stupid, then."
"No! I- you're doing it again!" she yelled. "Stop making me think weird stuff! Papa didn't mean to hurt Sakura, it- it-,"
"If it wasn't right, and it wasn't a mistake because he isn't stupid, what is it, Rin?" I asked gently. "If your father could do what he did to Sakura, what does that mean?"
She sniffled. "…it means he doesn't- love her enough. It means he did something wrong." She was trembling a little, at least partly in anger if I had to hazard a guess. "But- but sometimes people do the wrong thing! And then, they make up for it, and we forgive them. That's… that's normal!" she insisted.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again, turning it into a weighty look in her direction. "Leaving aside whether or not your mother, or Sakura, even can forgive your father, that isn't why you came here. You were trying to convince me, in order to convince yourself, that Sakura isn't weak. Which means you know that, if she were, he'd take her away again."
"No," she said resolutely. "He won't. You're right, I don't think he's stupid, and that's why he won't make the same mistake twice."
"If you say that's true, then I've no doubt of that," I allowed, and she smirked in victory. "In fact, I know exactly how to prevent him from doing it." I looked her square in the eye. "Just tell him not to."
"Y-Yeah! That's right," she said brightly, but I could still see those well-oiled gears turning too quickly, and her face fell again. "No- damn it, stop doing that! You keep making me think that he's-" she hit the arm of the chair with the side of her hand. "Damnit. Damnit."
"If he'd listen to that, it'd be because he doesn't care what happens to her, anymore. Because she's not useful or valuable anymore. And he'd only listen to you, only let you keep her as a pet, as long as that's true. If he found some fresh torture that he thought would increase her utility, he'd do it, and he wouldn't feel a single twinge of conscience." I tilted my head and sighed in sympathy. It wasn't easy, reckoning with the fact that, sometimes, the people you love hurt each other, and you have to choose which of them you keep on loving. I knew that from experience. "I hardly need to spell it out. After all, you know him best."
"SHUT UP!" Rin bolted out from her chair and stormed out of the room.
"And all I have to do, to make you realize, is tell the truth," I murmured to myself, feeling like a heel, and picking the book back up.
"I heard you and Rin had a fight?" Aoi said at dinner. It was just the two of us: Rin had come by and grabbed bowls of soup for both her and Sakura, shooting her mother and I a dark glare each before absconding, an entire loaf of bread under her arm.
"I apologize. I know it's bad form to argue with children, but in my defense, she did seek me out looking to have an argument," I said, swallowing a spoonful of fish soup.
Aoi gave a slightly pained smile but nodded in understanding. "I know Rin can be… headstrong. Sakura's state has her on edge, I think as well- obviously. I… really can't thank you enough for saving her," she told me with a brief but radiant smile. "But, if I may… could I ask you what you were arguing about?"
I sighed and put down my spoon. It seemed I'd be at this for a bit. "We were discussing her father. She was trying to… reconcile the image she has of him with the misdeed she knows he has committed by convincing me that he wasn't a bad person. I was not very cooperative."
"Ah," Aoi said, "that would do it." When I looked at her quizzically, she explained. "Rin and Tokiomi are very close. I suppose that's inevitable, with how much time they spend together on magecraft. Especially recently, since…" her face fell, "since Sakura was sent away."
"You say it so passively," I said with a deep frown, aching in my heart. The lingering soup had turned slimy in my mouth. "Like it was… some sort of natural phenomenon, not a decision someone made."
"I can see why you didn't get along with Rin, if that's how you phrased it." She had raised an eyebrow at me, tilting her head, her spoon lingering over the bowl.
"Forgive me if I'm too blunt, Mrs. Aoi," I said, "but I truly do not understand it. How can you love someone, when that someone hurts a person that you both clearly care deeply about?"
"I- it was my own fault for," she paused, swallowed spit, blinked several times as if confused. "I should have- no, I shouldn't have tried to talk him out of- that's not right either." She frowned, eyes widening a little. "I- there had to have been something I could have done, right?"
"Mrs. Aoi, please don't tell me that this is your fault because you told him the unvarnished truth about that place, and he decided that made it the perfect opportunity. He can make his own decisions. The way you talk about him, he always does."
"No- that can't- you don't understand. You don't know my husband like I do. He was trying to… make her…" Aoi held her hand in front of her mouth, as if trying to prevent the words from spilling out. "What am I saying?" she whispered. "I don't believe that." She shook her head. "Forgive me. My thoughts go in strange directions. You're… right," she said, sounding surprised. A flash of anger crossed her face, but quickly vanished. "You're right," she said, more resolutely. One hand pressed against her brow. "Why was I so quick to make excuses for him?" she asked, only half present.
"If you have to ask, I think you already know," I told her.
She nodded slowly, not seeming to really listen. "He… it wasn't Matou. Not really," she murmured. "Matou was the instrument. But Tokiomi was the one who hurt Sakura. And I let him do it," she finished, covering her mouth again.
"No, please, I told you, stop that," I begged her. "You didn't let him do anything. The worst thing you did was fail to strangle him in his sleep, and even that I'm nearly positive wouldn't have worked."
"Strangle? I-I can't just kill… oh God." She looked at me in horror, her meal forgotten. Her spoon clattered mutely onto the napkin as she lay her head in her hands. "Oh God. That really is the only way. That's the only thing that could have stopped him." A single tear trickled down her face. "That's what you were trying to tell Rin."
I nodded, closing my eyes with a despondent sigh. "Tokiomi is evil, but he is an incredibly banal sort of villain, who simply acts as though everything he does is perfectly natural, and so the world does not take notice of his cruelty but finds ways to blame it on things other than him. He is selfish, sociopathic, and materialistic in the extreme: lo, he is a magus," I finished. It hurt to see Aoi in so much pain, but I was the only one who could lead her through this to come out on the other side with a fuller understanding.
"I should have realized it. You're right, I should have done something years ago," she muttered.
"You couldn't, Mrs. Aoi. That's… why he married a non-mage, I think."
She began to slowly nod. "I- the Zenjou family, my family, we used to be mages, once. But we declined, for whatever reason, possibly just the times… but even as we did, I was told, we continued to produce children with other lines who were just as powerful as we'd been. Eventually, that was all we had left." She spoke in a reverie. "We were no longer mages, but our children would be, powerful ones. And that made us valuable. So our parents, the ones who hadn't married out of the family, started to sell us off.
"If you wanted a powerful heir, you bought a Zenjou. It wasn't put like that, of course. It was all very proper. But powerful men wanted powerful heirs, and so they took us as their wives." She absently stirred her spoon through the thick soup. "I thought he was different. I first met him when I was thirteen- I say met, it was only very briefly. He was there to negotiate being allowed to marry my sister, but… these Tohsaka's," she laughed a little, "they have all these fancy houses and brilliant gemstones and expensive suits, but somehow, they never seem to have money on hand, so it fell through." She looked at me, and I saw an emptiness in her eyes I recognized on a much younger face. "But then he came back."
"How old were you?" I asked. She looked… young, still.
"I was seventeen when we got married." She read the unvoiced questions on my face. "He was twenty-five. We had Rin on our wedding night."
"Aoi, I'm so sorry." It slipped from my mouth before I realized. I felt like throwing up, the scent of fish and salt at once turned sickening.
"He was so charming." Her head tilted, like she was realizing something for the first time. "And I thought, 'what a nice surprise. He isn't anything like I feared.' That became my mantra, even as he grew more distant over the years. 'It could be worse. It could be so much worse.' Like the frog in the pot, never realizing I was boiling. He took my daughter and I let him. I forgave him. Our little girl. He used to coo over her in the crib, making faces and sounds to hear her giggle. He smiled like she was the treasure of his very life. I remember it. Why didn't he?" She was crying now. "How…? you've been here for one day, and already you've uprooted my entire life? How?"
I shook my head. "That's not it at all, Mrs. Aoi. You knew this stuff already, but I think… you accepted it, because it was inevitable. All I did was prove it needn't be and your mind began to rebel against it." I thought something over, debated whether it was too much, but decided to go ahead. "When we rescued Sakura, at first, she didn't believe it was real. Because she had been trained to accept that things were never going to get better, she couldn't trust it when they seemed to. She'd been beaten into numbness, into accepting that simply not being hurt was a reward reserved for those who obey." I reached a hand across the table. "You have lived in that same fear, Mrs. Aoi. You have walked, mortal, in the halls of gods."
She took my hand. "Caster, what am I meant to do now, knowing this?" Her eyes were shining. "I can't just… forget, again. But I'm still just mortal, as you said."
"You get to do whatever you want, Mrs. Aoi. I'll guarantee it myself." Never had I loathed Tokiomi, and the whole culture of mages, more than I did in this moment. It is one thing to read something and think 'aha, the logic that has swallowed and ruined countless lives, which even now threatens to bring about the apocalypse, brought to a mirror shine with magic and exaggeration.' It was another to hear Aoi Tohsaka sit there before me, flesh and blood, not an image on my computer, and tell me that she feels she has no options at all because to her, her husband may as well be God, and God did not care.
"Whatever I want?" She laughed. "What even is that? Where do I begin?" She was smiling, strangely hurt, strangely alive. "Can't you just tell me- no, you wouldn't accept that," she said, shaking her head. "What do I want?"
"Did you even want children?" I tried asking.
This, she thought over for some time, clenching my hand very tightly at points, sometimes letting out a deep sob, like hitting a pothole. "I think… I would have liked it to be my decision. Does that make sense?" she asked, sounding terrified.
"Of course," I assured her, as gently as possible.
She still started crying. I could feel tears run down my own cheeks as well. "It just feels so selfish. Like I'm saying I don't love them, but I do! I love my girls with all my heart." She sighed, slumped over the table with her head in one hand, the other limp in my grip. "I feel like a nonsense person. Like I can't make sense of myself, my thoughts, my feelings. Shouldn't this be simpler, now?"
"You can find happiness in an unhappy situation and wish to take that happiness with you where you go, and still long desperately to leave, and that doesn't mean you're evil, Mrs. Aoi. It means you still have hope." I rubbed my thumb over her knuckles.
"That sounds nice," she said, chuckling wetly. "You make me sound so strong, stronger than I really am."
"If you want to run away with them, I'll make it happen," I told her honestly. Heh. She said I'd uprooted her life in a day, but in that same day, I'd gone from resenting her for abandoning her daughter to pledging my loyalty to her. She really was something remarkable. That Tokiomi couldn't see that was… unimaginable. "He won't ever find you, wherever he searches, whatever favors he calls in."
"Is that what you think is best?" she asked, laying her arm on the table and her head atop, tapping the long nail of her free hand's pointer finger against the lacquered wood anxiously.
"Mrs. Aoi," I said, staring into her eyes until she looked up at me. "I only care what you want to do. I can't move the heavens, or command the elements, or raise the dead. But I can grant you a choice. For once, someone is asking you to choose for yourself."
A thrill went through her, passing into me, and I half expected to find I'd accidentally made some kind of magically binding oath, but no. It was just… real.
She rose, straightening her back again. Her free hand fidgeted with her hair, her chin, her lashes, for a moment, as she worked through her thoughts. "He's not going to make me run," she said, hollow eyes lit from behind, like shadows dancing with the flames. Her arm laid still on the table. "This is my home. My family. My house. He doesn't get to make me run from that."
"Then he won't," I agreed.
She was breathing heavily but seemed as still and sure as stone. "You- I know there's only one way he'd listen to that. That there's only one way to make him leave my family alone forever. I- you're right, there is no reasoning with him. There never has been."
Nod. "Rin won't like it."
"But she'll understand. One day." The fire in her eyes grew higher and higher, like an ancient bonfire in a forest clearing, stretching up into the dark of night, a challenge to the stars, a sun at midnight girth by writhing shadows. "Caster. Please, if you could, kill my husband."
I planted the idea in my Master's head, once I'd brought her dinner, at a rather larger portion size than I'd had with Aoi. Of course, I'd couched it tactically, once again, but that hardly mattered. If all went well, I'd be able to keep my promise to Aoi.
Before I did that, though, I should really get on keeping my promise to Tiffany. Searching for a place for my Workshop was trivial; Prelati's Spellbook contained more incantations than just the ones for summoning water demons, albeit they were largely concerned with getting the most out of the ones you had. I could, intrinsically, direct the water demons in basic ways, such as I'd done when setting up the perimeter around the warehouse we'd stayed in, or making them hide uselessly in the harbor waters, or I could set them as sentries at a specific location. But in order to find a place, I'd need an actual spell.
"Ystell'bsna d'sgn'haiphlegeth" I intoned, the book's pages flapping and its eyes glowing on the back, and inside my mind, images skittered hither and yon like startled water skippers. All spells in the grimoire were, according to the translations in the margins, very simple requests or commands, either for the water demons themselves or the patron which empowered the book who was, indeed, Cthulhu. Riveting stuff. This spell asked that the water demons share information with me as it happened and allowed me to effectively tune in to their 'vision' one at a time.
Like this, I was able to use them to scout out locations such as had been requested. It wasn't perfect; the images were coming from creatures with very different senses to my own, and I suspected that only Mental Pollution was preventing me from going absolutely fucking ballistic at this invasion of my thoughts, and even then, it was nauseating. The signal would also frequently die, or at least jump to another demon without my direction, which was majorly disorienting, but for tonight, I'd suck it up.
However, much to my distress, as I combed Fuyuki for a suitable location, I was being inexorably drawn to one conclusion: It actually would be a good idea to hide in the sewers. Like Bluebeard and his Master had done, once upon a never.
I searched desperately for another choice, but everything was either too public, less accessible, less versatile or too out of the way. With the speed my water demons could traverse the sewer drains, nowhere else offered equivalent tactical utility. I didn't need leylines or what have you, I just needed an undisturbed location to set up shop, and wouldn't you know it, literally no one wanted to go in the sewers.
Or perhaps, in reality, the issue was with the instruments of my searching: ravenous, mad, and barely under my control, there were many places I could not send my water demons to look; nowhere private, nowhere open, nowhere people might come. We'd taken the gamble on an abandoned warehouse remaining abandoned because we would only be staying there for a few days: for somewhere to keep a base during the rest of the War, that wouldn't do.
Waver might have found the hideaway in the sewers on his own, but he'd done so, as far as I recalled, by tracking the coming and going of water demons, something that would happen far less in this version of events, because I wasn't planning to have my water demons venture out en masse every night to kidnap local children. Also, he shouldn't be searching at all. The magic might have been simple, but he'd still been the only person to think of it, which was… reasonably reassuring.
This was the conclusion I presented my Master with once morning came. Much to my disappointment, she accepted.
After that, I ate breakfast. Rin and Sakura joined Aoi and I, for the first time since I'd been here. For once, we didn't talk about anything heavy; Rin was bound and determined to discuss her friends from school, and Aoi wasn't getting in the way of that, instead trying to gauge when Sakura would be comfortable returning. There was still tension in the air between them, but the mere fact that Rin was here gave me hope. Sakura was quiet, but I'd expected that, and she ate reasonably well and answered when asked, which was as good as could be expected this early. Afterwards, Rin pulled Sakura along again, out into the foyer where they pulled on their coats to go to the city.
That left Aoi and I alone until my Master decided to get out of here. We spent it quietly in the reading area I'd found on my first day: my book was apparently a tragic romance, as the vampire began reconnecting with her humanity, only to be horrified at how much of it she'd already lost. When I had to put the book down, she was preparing to leave the world of humans behind forever.
Then, it was time to go. I had no idea if I'd see these three again; after all, I still planned to leave this world for my own as soon as possible. And that hurt: the unknowing of it all. I'd worry for Sakura until my dying days, most likely, how and if she recovered from trauma so profound it boggled the imagination, and I'd wonder what'd become of Rin, whether they'd be able to mend their relationship, how they'd do in the next Holy Grail War, how different Rin would be with a mother, rather than as an orphan. And as for that mother…
Aoi had surprised me. I'd expected a woman trod so far beneath her husband's heel that it'd take determined forensic analysis to find out where she ended and the boot-leather began, but instead, I'd found a deeply troubled young woman, determined to see the best in the people she loved, regardless of whether they deserved it. And through our brief time together, I'd already seen her come so far out from under him, which I couldn't credit to some awesome power of charisma, but instead to her truly, earnestly conscientious soul, which had already seen but not dared to face the very truth I'd brought before her.
We'd gathered in the foyer, waiting on my Master; that is, Rin and Aoi were there to bid us adieu; Sakura only came running in just then. I smiled at her, and she returned it hesitantly. I hadn't been able to talk to her as much as I might have liked, since Rin had monopolized much of her time, so I could only hope that I'd been able to help her beyond the obvious. And, I chastised myself, I shouldn't make the mistake of thinking I was the only one capable of leading her out of the darkness. She'd have a family, a mother and sister she'd surely have longed for at Matou House, not just this past year or so, but the next decade of torture I'd saved her from.
In my experience, that was worth everything.
My Master came in shortly after Sakura had stood at attention left of her mother, Rin to the right. She was shucking on her large overcoat and walking with newfound determination and vigor. I greeted her with a professional nod, and she did the same to me before turning to Aoi.
"Apologies for my rudeness, Mrs. Tohsaka," Tiffany said, "as I have yet to even greet my hostess and am now about to depart." She held out a hand.
Aoi shook it with a smile. "Think nothing of it, Ms. Hohenheim. I saw the state you were in when you arrived; given that, some rudeness can be excused." Then, she curtsied. "Fair travels, and good luck in the War."
"Even though we compete against your husband?" Tiffany asked, raising an eyebrow.
I didn't miss Aoi's brief glance at Rin. "Even then." I guess she was going to break it to Rin after the fact.
"Then you have my thanks," Tiffany said with a bow. Following that, she leaned down to shake Rin's hand as well. A strange look passed between them; Tiffany's eyes were full of nostalgia and sorrow, while Rin's were filled with doubt and, faintly, unaccountably, horror. I had no idea what'd transpired between them to make up such a look.
Next, she went over to Sakura, and this was much more as I'd expected: Sakura seemed a little embarrassed, I'd guess because she'd been with Tiffany only moments before, having a private goodbye, but she still thanked Tiffany for her service and her kind words, shook her hand, and that was that.
Once Tiffany had stepped aside, I pushed off the wall I'd been leaning against and approached Aoi. When I reached out my hand to shake, she instead surprised me by pulling me into a brief embrace, whispering "thank you," in my ear. A shiver ran down my spine, but I pulled myself together, and initiated a much more prosaic handshake. "Goodbye, Mrs. Aoi," I said.
"Please- even if it doesn't matter and we never see each other again, I'd appreciate it if you'd just call me Aoi." Er, 'Aoi-chan', in case that was unclear, as opposed to the formal 'Aoi-san' I'd been using so far, and the even more formal 'Tohsaka-san' Tiffany used. Japanese! Translation convention!
"Aoi," I agreed. "It's been a pleasure, and it saddens me to see it end so soon. I wish I didn't have to go, but duty calls," I said, and found I meant it.
"Don't be a stranger!"
Mimicking my Master's path, I then turned to Rin. At first, she averted her gaze from me, but with a gentle push from Aoi she sighed and looked up. Her face was less resolute in its displeasure than yesterday, and she reluctantly said, "Thank you for taking care of my little sister." Then, hesitating only for a moment, she added, "I missed her, and you brought her back. You're very stubborn," she said quietly, "and I don't think I like you very much. But… maybe you aren't stupid. Sorry." She turned her head again, a faint hint of pink on her cheeks.
I grinned. "I'll take it: I know how difficult it is to extract an apology from the great Rin Tohsaka." Then I added: "I've no doubt you'll succeed in whatever you do; therefore, I shall not insult you by wishing you luck. Instead: Ganbatte! As you say in Japan." I thrust my fist to the sky.
"Dork."
Still smiling, I went over to Sakura. She looked thoughtful, and so I asked what was on her mind.
"You're not coming back, are you?" she finally said.
I shook my head. "Not to my knowledge, no. I'm sorry."
She fidgeted with her newly cut hair. "It's just… you already know what happened to me, don't you?" She looked at me with those empty, violet eyes.
"I do." It didn't take much to guess what she meant.
"I- I tried to tell Rin, but I… couldn't tell her everything. I was too scared." She sighed. "I wish I didn't have to explain it. That they'd just… know, already. Like you. That would be easier."
"I'm sorry I have to go, too, Sakura. You're right, it is scary. It's… what happened to you was awful, but I still think that one day, you'll find the strength to talk about it. I know you can. They both love you, Sakura. You just have to let them help." I went to pat her on the head.
Before I could do that or react, she reached out and hugged me, her short arms barely able to go around my torso. With a smile, I returned the embrace before stepping away. She was smiling too, but she didn't say anything. She knew she didn't have to, because she knew that I already knew how grateful she was.
"A good day to all of you," I bid them, shooting off a loose salute, and walked out the door behind my Master, the three of them waving at us. Then the door closed behind me, and we were off, me in my spirit form, my Master with her trademark imperious stride.
'So the plan is for us to kill Tokiomi?' I asked my Master.
'If necessary,' she demurred. 'Best case, we pressure him into killing Archer for us, if not, we'll remove his Command Seals and have him imprisoned where the Church can't help him get them back. But if all else fails, yes, we will,' she concluded.
'But to even have the chance, we'll need an opening, won't we?' I asked rhetorically.
'So we will. Now, will you tell me about Lord El-Melloi's Servant?' Tiffany asked. She was currently having lunch on the streets above, while I was establishing my new Workshop in a vaulted chamber in the sewers below. Rank water dripped periodically from above. 'Or will I have to wait, again?'
'There's no need for that sort of quid pro quo anymore, Master, now that I have demonstrated the efficacy of my counsel. Kayneth El-Melloi's Servant-'
'His name is Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald, actually' my Master corrected.
'Really? You know of him?' I asked, surprised.
'Not personally, but I'm familiar with him. He is a Lord, the head of the Department of Minerology, which my family deals with frequently. It's why my father had contacts in his orbit. I also attended some of his lectures. He's… decent, if conceited.'
'I see,' I told her in earnest surprise. 'Then I hardly need to expound on his disposition. In any case, his Servant is Lancer, although he'd been aiming for Rider, as I've said.'
'I think you did mention he was Lancer's Master,' Tiffany interjected once again. 'As I recall that would make Lord El-Melloi the one who was splitting the contract, and the one to issue the challenge at the docks.'
I nodded, then remembered to send a 'That's right, Master. Anyway, Lancer is Diarmuid ua Duibhne, a warrior of some renown. He has two legendary spears, of which I remember the name of one, but the functions of both.'
'Remember?'
Ah, shoot. 'From the vision. I only received it the once, Master. Sometimes details escape me. It is why I struggled so much with the specific timing of Lancer's challenge and forced you to stay and keep watch with me.' Hopefully, that'd be save enough.
'Hm. I see. Continue?'
'The first spear, his red one, is most relevant to you as it destroys any magecraft it comes into contact with. It cannot slay my water demons, but we probably shouldn't let him get too close with it. The second is Gae Buidhe, a shorter, golden spear. It does not have the first spear's ability to pierce our defenses, but the wounds it leaves cannot be healed.' I continued, 'Kayneth's gambit with Lancer's challenge was to draw out Saber and use the first spear to trick her into dismissing her heavy, and magically conjured, armor, thereby letting Gae Buidhe wound her. By intervening, I foiled this scheme.'
'But Saber is our enemy.' Tiffany was incredulous. 'Why not simply let her be wounded?'
Because I like her better than Lancer and want her to survive the War.
I'd been doing some math, you see. Thinking back on it, by the time the Grail had manifested, there were at least three Servants alive: Berserker, Saber, and Archer. That meant there were two Servants that I could spare, even if I, a Servant-for-hire, wanted to be the winner of the Holy Grail War, as I didn't need the full set of six (seven) to reach Heaven's Feel: I just needed enough for the Lesser Grail to send me home.
And yes, I was aware the Grail was corrupted in the last War. But… It was my only hope. I had to chance it. Besides, so long as I didn't piss it off by rejecting it, I'd prevent the Great Fuyuki Fire basically by happenstance.
So I'd been doing the math, and if I had the opportunity to choose, I'd spare Rider and Saber. But I'd read something to the effect of Archer being so OP that he'd count for two Servants if he were killed, which left the exciting possibility of sparing yet another Servant, probably Lancer himself, let him and Sola-Ui get their fairytale ending or what have you. Even if that turned out not to be true, I had few qualms about killing Archer to get home. Or at least fewer, which would have to do. And if I had to go further, kill more Servants, Saber would still be last on my list of 'targets'. This was the other reason I'd been pushing my Master towards Archer. The first, of course, was Tokiomi.
But I didn't say that. I'd gotten the impression that Tiffany believed I had to be the last Servant standing for her to claim Heaven's Feel, so I knew she wouldn't understand. 'Well, I had no idea at the time we might be working with him in the future: really, I'd thought that Saber was our only chance of beating Archer.'
'But how were you planning to beat Saber, then?' she asked.
'With Rider. Think of it like… the elements, Master. Each element is conquered by another, and in turn has the power to conquer one itself. I can't beat Saber or Archer, Rider can't beat Archer or me, but I can beat Rider. It's not strictly a question of power, it's a system of advantages and disadvantages.'
'I see, how very devious; a cycle of betrayals, each time being the pivot that lets the second strongest beat the strongest Servant, then turning around and helping the third, the fourth, until you can beat the one remaining. While I don't like it, I do understand having to fight from a position of weakness. Carry on.'
I did as ordered, not commenting on the 'devious' thing since it wasn't actually what my plan was or had ever been. 'That's about it, Master. He's a masterful spearman with some tricks up his sleeve: oh, and a birthmark on his cheek that charms women. You should be strong enough to ward it off, though, and he finds it somewhat embarrassing, so he likely won't be using it offensively. The only reason I bring it up is that Kayneth's wife, Sola-Ui-'
'His fiancée,' she corrected again. 'And her full name is Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri. I've heard about her, and her family. Is she the one he's splitting the contract with? How does that work?' Tiffany asked.
'Precisely what I was getting to, Master,' I replied, tamping down my slight annoyance at being interrupted again. 'Anyway, Kayneth's fiancée despises him and has never been in love before, so she's deliberately not fighting off Lancer's charm in order to get high on that false infatuation. They're splitting the contract very simply. I don't know the mechanics of it, but essentially Sola-Ui supplies the mana and Kayneth has the Command Seals and a trunk full of Mystic Codes, which makes him more powerful than would be expected of a Master.'
'As I'd expect from Lord El-Melloi, yes.' Her next statement was displeased. 'Is that all you know about Lancer? What are his skills? Does the Lancer Class not have a skill like Riding or Independent Action for the Rider and Archer Classes?'
Well, Master, I thought Lancer was kind of boring, so I didn't look up any information about him before I was pulled into your magical nightmare world. But I didn't say that. 'The Lancer Class does not, not truly; all the Knight Classes share the Class Skill Magic Resistance, but Archer's is folded into his Divinity, so I forgot to mention it. Lancer could therefore have some degree of Magic Resistance that I'm unaware of, but Lancers are generally underwhelming,' I admitted.
'I'll make sure to tell Lord El-Melloi you said that,' Tiffany joked, her tension easing a little. 'Would surely make me the belle of the ball. Anyway, the meeting will be in a few minutes. Keep an eye out. Lord El-Melloi is too honorable to try anything, but I wouldn't put it past Assassin or the Magus Killer.'
I assured her I would, as the Workshop snapped into being and I breathed a sigh of relief, then immediately regretted it. But there was nothing to do but get back to work. With the bounty we'd secured at Matou House, I could afford to get a little… creative. I called up a cadre of water demons, and they slithered before me, all slavering jaws and limbs fit only to rip and tear. Awful things.
At my command, they began to dig themselves, all five, into one uneven pit, where they lay atop one another in a heap. Like this, it was nearly impossible to see where one ended and another began. Which was exactly the point.
Reading from Prelati's Spellbook, I began the first verse of a ritual that would continue for the rest of today. The book began to glow, like the anglerfish's lure, and the pages quivered in anticipation.
"D'cthulhunyyth uh'e sgn'wahl! Ah ch' d'ftaghu'nglui ngah sha'bthnk!"
And a hideous creature, more terrible than the five water demons combined though that was what it was, began to take form.
Translation: 1: "Let the barriers between our minds disappear, and share your senses."
2: "You servants of Cthulhu, crowd up and share one space! Then, move beyond your boundaries and be one!"
As per usual, this story is being cross-posted on AO3.
I'll say, for this one, I'm worried I didn't hit the right tone in the argument with Rin. Could anyone comment on that? Also, as far as I'm aware Aoi doesn't have a canonical age, but if you've got dissenting evidence, I'd love to see it. It wasn't on the wiki.
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I'd say you did an awesome job! I really enjoyed the way this flowed, and hope all the best for Aoi, but we will see. Anyhow, wonder how Kayneth's Fried Circuits is doing, but we will see.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hasn't happened yet, and might not ever, depending on how the meeting goes. He only gets fried in the assault on Einzbern Castle, and that's a few days out, OTL.
Meh, as long as El-Melloi II makes it out, I am more than happy. Waver might not be the strongest mage, but damn if he isn't one of the most effective ones out there.
Kinda wish to see Kayneth being taken out the left field from a clever application of Magecraft.
- Location
- Brazil
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- He
Ohh is he making a shoggoth ? Those things are super useful