The Story Spinner - Moonlight Beneath the Aegis—Chapter 26: Spare Keys

Okay, so! The rewrites aren't fully ready, but! I know enough to tell you a few things that decided the look of this chapter. First of, the first arc has ended with Sakura's rescue, and that's not changing, just the context leading up to the rescue does. However! Neither Gilgamesh nor Illya will have shown up in Arc One at all. The first time we will have heard of Illya is the end of the previous chapter, which ends with Illya's letter to Shirou (included in this chapter). Gilgamesh is being moved to the very end of Arc 2/start of Arc 3.

TLDR: Pretend you've never seen Illya or Gilgamesh in this story thus far.

Onwards!

***

Good evening, big brother!

You don't know why I'm calling you that, do you? Nobody ever tells you anything, I've noticed, and I've had a whole week to notice from the trees outside your temple, so I'll be nice and tell you myself. Kiritsugu Emiya is my Papa. Calling you big brother is a little silly, really, since you're only the one he picked up afterward, but I like how it sounds, so I'm going to.

Papa went to Japan for the Grail the winter I was eight. He knelt down in the snow in front of the castle and promised me two weeks exactly, and I crossed off every day on the calendar in my room with a red pencil, and then I started over and crossed them off again, and that was ten years ago, big brother, and he never came back. Mama went with him. She never came back either, but Mama didn't promise, so she's allowed.

Ask your Saber if you don't believe me. He was Papa's Saber first, isn't that funny? He stood on our castle wall every single day that winter, and now he lives in your temple and he still hasn't told you about me, has he? Hmm, hmm. I knew he wouldn't.

You had Mama's scabbard inside you this whole time, too, and then you let a nasty little worm pull it out of your chest on the stairs, which was very careless of you, big brother. I was so cross I threw my cup at the wall. Tonight I watched you go into the Matou house and come out carrying a girl. Sella says I'm not supposed to tell you I watch you, but Sella isn't the one writing this letter.

Come see me tomorrow. Come alone. No Servants, and absolutely no Tohsaka girl, she'd touch everything, I just know she would. I'll know if you bring anybody, and Berserker will be so disappointed.

You won't trust me, I know, so Sella wrote a Geass and I signed it in my very own blood, which Sella says was a bit much, but I wanted you to see I meant it. It's folded up inside. From the moment your foot leaves the road and goes into my forest until the moment it touches the road again, nobody who belongs to the house of Einzbern will hurt you or let you get hurt. Berserker has to behave too, and so do I. Isn't that nice?

We're only going to talk, big brother. You're going to tell me all about Papa, every little thing, and I'm going to listen very carefully.

See you tomorrow!

Illyasviel von Einzbern

***

Alright, the whole letter had been one huge motorcycle ride up and down a hill, but the part Shirou just couldn't get, he really couldn't, was that Dad had told Illyasviel he'd be gone for two weeks. In the five years Shirou had lived with the man, he'd never once heard him commit to a date for anything. Dad couldn't tell Taiga when he'd be home for dinner, much less keep a promise he'd made about a Grail War.

Two weeks would've been about right, too, if the war hadn’t ended with the whole east side of Fuyuki on fire. Instead, somewhere inside all that smoke, Dad had dug Shirou out from under a collapsed roof and then spent days sitting next to his hospital bed, peeling apples so badly half of every apple went out with the peel. So, if you really thought about it, Shirou was what happened to Iliya’s two weeks.

That wasn't really fair, though—

Okay, maybe it was a little fair, but Dad couldn't have known there'd be some kid lying in the rubble waiting for him, and you couldn't blame a guy for picking up a dying kid, could you? Shirou, though he might be a bit biased on the matter, sure couldn't.

Besides, every winter, Dad had got on a plane to somewhere he'd never named and came back in January grey in the face. Taiga was convinced he had a girlfriend. She announced it over curry one year with her mouth full, and Dad laughed so hard he had to lie down in the next room, which, looking back, probably should've worried somebody.

The letter said he’d never come back, though. Illiyasviel had pressed that line into the paper hard enough to nearly pierce through it, so either Dad hadn’t been trying to rescue his long-lost daughter—which was about as likely as Medea swearing loyalty to Aphrodite—or somebody over there had been lying to Illyasviel for ten years.

Ask your Saber.

The… guy who'd talked to Shirou about kings and the people a king didn’t get to choose between had actually been there, with Illyasviel, that whole winter, and hadn't said one word about it. Granted, she could be lying, but…

No, she wasn’t.

Shirou couldn’t even stay properly mad at Saber. Every time he tried to picture Saber up on that wall, Archer’s memories went and filled in the wind in her hair—his hair!—and showed him the way her braid had come loose. Since when did Saber even wear a braid?

Saber’s footsteps stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Master.”

"Don't."

“I recognized that raven. I can only assume I owe you an account of—”

“Your previous service?” Shirou thumped the knife against the cutting board as he cut the poor onion. “Is that what you’re going to say?”

“Master—”

“How long have we been here together?”

“I did not know she had lived or what had become of her.” Saber took a step in. “I had no way of knowing her grandfather would send her to this war.”

Thump.

“He was my dad!”

“Forgive me, Master, but it seemed no kindness to you to hand you a sister you could never meet.” By the sound of it, she wasn’t wearing her armor. “What kind of king would I be to torture you so?”

Shirou sighed and turned around.

Saber wore the white button-up Rin had bought her at the Miyama mall, the one which had the plastic tag still sticking out the back of the collar, and stared at the floor. The bare bulb over the sink caught her face, where long lashes blinked. The cheek under them curved into a jaw that narrowed into a point that just made Shirou wonder…

How on earth had no one noticed before?

Then again, Shirou did have an unfair advantage. He’d seen this face before on a hill he’d never been to, where the sun had come up behind her, and her braid had finally come loose.

His right hand was already up and reaching for the tag before he caught it and jammed it in his pocket. He was supposed to be mad. He'd been mad for four straight hours at that stove, he'd earned it, and now it kept sliding off Saber and going looking for somewhere else to land. The only other place there was, however, was Dad, who'd been dead for five years.

Shirou turned back to his onions. “What was she like?”

“Master…?”

“Illyasviel. What was she like?”

“Ah… I only saw her four times, but she was loud. She ran wherever she went, and her mother could not keep a hat on her.”

Shirou cut the onion.

“Once, in the forest behind the castle, she and her father made a contest of finding buds on the bare trees. He cheated, and she caught him at it and made him carry her home on his back for a forfeit. I believe the last bud she found was a walnut's, though, I confess, I do not know German trees, so I may have that wrong."

Of all the things Saber could’ve said, walnut was the one Shirou really didn’t need, because there was a jam jar on Dad’s windowsill with a dead walnut twig standing in it. Shirou had been dusting around that jar every Sunday since the funeral. He’d kept the water topped up without once asking why a guy who threw out every takeout menu the second it came through the mail slot would hang on to a dead stick.

Shirou sniffed and rubbed his eye.

“…Master?”

“The rice is dusty.”

“Shall I leave you?”

“Do whatever you want.”

***

By six, the whole temple was awake.

Rin came in with one twin-tail done and the other one hanging loose and read the letter over a mug of instant coffee she called an insult to the Tohsaka name. She’d done the same thing every single morning and she’d drunk the coffee to the last drop every single morning. Medea had the Geass out of the envelope before anybody saw her touch it. Archer read about two lines over Rin's shoulder and walked straight out the side door toward the gate without a word.

Huh… Archer had actually missed the chance to jab at Shirou. What was the world coming down to?

"—touch everything, she says, I do not touch everything, that's such an Einzbern thing to do, insulting people inside the actual invitation. My great-grandfather kept a whole drawer of their letters, and every single one has a line in it about somebody's shoes or somebody's accent or—"

Medea stared at the Geass. "It is real…"

"Obviously it's real. They're Einzbern. The one thing they're good at besides making dolls is signing stuff in blood and then actually sticking to it, my great-grandfather used to say you could set your watch by—"

"Read the end of the sentence."

"Which sentence?"

"Until the moment it touches the road again." Medea slid the paper across the table with two fingers. "Nothing obliges her to let him reach the road."

"Huh." Rin pulled the paper the rest of the way over. "That's ugly. Technically she could just... keep him? Indefinitely?"

Shirou munched on some rice. "I'll just leave before it gets dark."

“Silence, Shirou.”

“Caster—”

“To that child, your father abandoned her.” Medea looked up at him for the first time all morning. "She has had ten years of resentment to which to hold on, and you would walk into her house and sit at her table?”

"He went back for her. Every winter he went somewhere and came home half dead, he—"

“Shirou—”

“I knew—”

“You knew a sick man who sat on a porch.”

Shirou opened his mouth and nothing came out. A whole week of fighting with Medea about everything from memory spells on Taiga to the right way to rinse rice, and sure, he'd lost most of those, but he'd always had something to throw back at her. Not this time. She wasn't wrong, was she? Dad had sat on that porch, and he'd been sick the whole time. Shirou didn’t actually know anything else about him.

“Caster—”

“You swore to me—”

"I swore I'd try to stay alive."

“That child hates you!”

“She put it in writing, Caster. In her own blood.”

“Blood is cheap, Shirou.” Medea stood. “You should know as much from my history.”

Yeah… Shirou knew the story of the little brother on the boat and what she did with the pieces, and he really wished he didn’t. Still, Illyasviel wasn’t Medea, and, for reasons he just couldn’t explain, she didn’t strike him as somebody who broke promises. He would’ve said so if Medea had stuck around long enough to hear it, but she was already out through the back hall, and the door was still rattling in its track behind her.

Saber stood at the end of the table. “I will come as far as the forest’s edge.”

“She said alone.”

“Her Geass says she will not harm you within her bounds.” Saber put two fingers on the table next to the letter. "It says nothing of the road.”

“I’m not talking about this.”

“Emiya, you cannot be this stupid.”

Shirou glanced at Rin. “Wow… that’s… harsh, even for you.”

“Harsh? I’m being generous.” Rin jabbed her pen at the Geass. “She’s got a Berserker!”

“She’s not going to jump me at a bus stop.”

“Why not? It’s what I’d do.”

“You’d ambush somebody at a bus stop?”

“I’d ambush somebody at a funeral if it won me the war, Emiya, that’s what this whole thing is!”

“She’s Dad’s kid!”

“She’s an Einzbern!”

“She’ll definitely be monitoring the road.” Shirou rubbed his face with both hands. “She’ll see Saber standing out by the road and call the whole thing off.”

“Then let her call it off! What do you lose, a slice of cake?”

“I lose the one chance she’s giving me.” Shirou pressed the heel of his hand into his eyes. “Besides, I can always Command Seal Saber to me if I get in trouble.”

“Fine.” Rin huffed and crossed her arms. “Get yourself killed, see what I care.”

***

“Medea, I’m heading out.” Shirou put his palm flat on the door of Medea’s workshop. “Please talk to me…”

…

Great, so he was having this conversation with a door. Wasn’t that about the speed of his whole morning?

“She’s not you, okay?” Shirou leaned his forehead against the frame. “She’s a kid who spent ten years waiting for someone who never came back. I… I need to at least—”

The wards came apart all at once instead of peeling, which they’d never done before, and Shirou nearly fell through the doorway on his face as it slammed open. Medea was sitting on the floor with her back against the altar and a stone mortar in her lap, grinding something black into something blacker.

“She is exactly me.”

Shirou got his bearing. “What do you mean?”

“She has spent years waiting for a man to come home.”

“So?”

“I waited to, in Corinth, with Jason’s children asleep in the next room.” Medea slammed the pestle into the bowl. “That the man in question is her father matters little.”

“Medea—”

“When he finally came home, it was to tell me of the girl he had chosen in my place.”

“I’m going to do the exact opposite.”

“I sent her a wedding dress.” The pestle stopped. “Do you know that part, Shirou?”

Yeah. The dress, what it did to the woman the second she put it on, and what it did to her father when he tried to pull it off her. Shirou wasn’t going to think about the rest of that story and what happened to the kids in the next room. Dad had picked Shirou. That made him the girl in the dress, didn’t it?

“Did anybody come talk to you first?” Shirou sat down on the floor across from her, close enough that their knees almost touched. “Before the dress, I mean. Did anybody just... come and talk to you?”

“Who would come to talk to the witch?”

“That’s what I’m doing today.”

Medea looked at him long enough for the bush warbler outside to get through its whole song twice.

Shirou had been hearing that bird every morning since they moved up the mountain—it always sang with the same rising whistle and a little wobble at the end—and he’d never figured out whether it was pretty or just loud. Right now, though, he’d take any noise that wasn’t his own heartbeat. Taiga always said the hardest part of a match was standing still before the judge said ‘go’.

“Hear me.” Medea set the mortar down on the floor between them. “Eat nothing at her table and drink nothing she pours.”

“You think she’s going to poison me? The Geass says—”

“Poison would be honest.” She gently clasped his chin. “I would not have you suffer the fate of Persephone.”

“Uh, I don’t think a castle in Japan has the same rules as—”

“Shirou.”

“Medea, if she hands me a cup of tea, I can’t just—”

“Shirou!”

“Fine!” He huffed. “I’ll try, okay?”

“You and your ‘trying’…” She shook her head and picked the pestle back up. “Go, then, before I change my mind and put you behind twelve bounded fields.”

***

Okay, the castle was way too big for the one smoking chimney to heat, which still wasn’t as bad of a problem as the fact that Shirou still had no idea what to say. He'd once talked a very confused police officer out of arresting him for being up on a stranger's roof fixing their TV antenna, but he could not, for the life of him, come up with one decent way to say hello to his own sister.

What actually got under his skin, though, was the third step on the way up. There was a flagstone on it cracked corner to corner, and Shirou had stepped right over the crack without looking down. He’d never set foot in this forest in his life, but Archer, apparently, had.

The door had opened on a woman in a white maid's uniform with a dust cloth folded over one wrist. "You will wipe your feet."

"Sorry—"

"On the mat. Both feet. The other one as well, please."

Shirou had figured a Berserker would be big. Taiga’s grandfather had a guy named Ōta who had to turn sideways to get through the dojo door, and Shirou had been picturing somebody about Ōta-sized. The… thing sitting cross-legged in the snow out in that courtyard would’ve had to turn sideways to get through the castle door.

“Don’t worry about him.” The maid turned to let him pass. "It is in the paper. Come along."

Shirou followed her in.

She took him to a low table by the one fire and set a cup of tea in front of him. “My lady will be down presently.”

The tea smelled incredible, which was a dirty trick, and Shirou had it halfway to his mouth before Medea's drink nothing she pours came back to him. In seventeen years, he had never once turned down something somebody poured for him. Taiga’s coffee was more sugar than water, and he still drank it. Still, as painful as it was, he set the cup back down on the saucer. He still kept his hand on it, though. Surely, that didn’t count for Underworld rules…

“You really came all by yourself…” A girl with white hair, who came up to his chest, maybe, walked through the door. “Good.”

***

Of all the indignities Zouken had put up with in five hundred years, being hungry at four in the afternoon in his own kitchen was turning out to be one of the more irritating.

The scabbard under his breastbone had been fixing anything and everything about  him, including a number of things he'd let go soft on purpose and had grown rather fond of soft, such as his stomach. Not having to worry whether one had had food had been one of his greatest methods of making life easier. Yet, the thing had growled at him in the middle of his crossword puzzle.

He had consumed an entire bag of Shinji's rice crackers, the cheap ones with the seaweed glued on, and then all of the various snacks Sakura had left in the cupboard. At the time, he had thought it a harmless, if financially wasteful—he would never have indulged the vessel like that in his younger years, he truly had gone soft—way to make her accept her inevitable fate.

Now, he thanked every divine spirit he could think of that he had done so.

The grandson had fled out the side door in his house sandals and lacked the spine to come back. The vessel had gone up the mountain on the Emiya boy’s back, and the witch had handed her prana enough to keep Rider, so that every piece Zouken had spent eleven years arranging in this house had walked out of it in a single night. What remained to him was a single Servant. Well… a gardener kept a branch for what it would bear.

“Assassin.”

The creature took its time. It came in through the loose corner of the plastic sheeting with snow on its shoulders and stood dripping on tiles Zouken had paid a Kobe man to lay in nineteen sixty-one. Every Hassan in the old accounts had shared a fondness for entrances.

“I told thee the account was closed, old worm. I have spent the day in a cedar above the river watching a heron fish the shallows, and the heron hath not once called for me, and I find I prefer his company.”

Zouken wiped cracker salt off his fingers onto his trousers and held up his right hand. “By my Command Seal.”

“Hast thou gone mad, worm?”

“You are to go up the mountain—”

“Thou wouldst rid thyself—”

“—and allow the Servant Caster—”

“—of thy final piece on the board?”

“—to take your Contract from me.”