Rin is in retreat. That feels like the only thing necessary to know about their position, even if Waver knows that there is so much more to tactical maneuvers than direction. It is also important that her entire cohort of mages is in flight, toward the river and the secure bottleneck that the bridge affords them - the place where their inferior numbers might gain some advantage. But a small, spinning part of his mind cannot not recover from the gravity of Tohsaka Rin, who has never walked quickly if she could avoid it, running. So he runs as well - or the Volumen Hydragyrum does, if the rolling rush of solid mercury beneath him can even be called a run, toward the river and away from the scrabbling conclusion of his own front. Waver maps the route in his mind, recalls thoroughfares throughout Fuyuki and just as quickly discards them. The streets have become an unpredictable shambles in the last twenty-four hours, passable but dangerous. It's safer to run to the mouth of the river, and from there-
The bit of plastic snugged against his ear crackles to life, flooding him with alien sound - hard breathing, barked snatches of spell activations, the scuffle Rin's fingers always make against the buttons for a moment before she speaks. There's something tightened-down and strained in her tone when she does - something Waver does not like at all. "Where are you? "
"Coming up the river, I'll be at the mouth in - nh, thirty seconds." The background noise is too clear from Rin's end (tangled syllables of Greek and German, a few seconds of eerie falsetto droning) before she gives an unladylike noise of impatience.
"Do that. We'll be at the far end of the bridge, you-"
"No." It is a word that comes a few moments before he has even become fully conscious of the idea. Of the fact that he meant coming up the river, that the Einzbern forces would for a few moments be massed over the water. "-no, just- don't be on the bridge at all."
There's quiet that is not quiet, for only a few seconds, broken by the static-electricity crackling of spellcraft and a single ugly thump. Rin hisses at him to do whatever he's going to do, but do it now , and the sound ends entirely. The wind sings past him , and then with a hard lurch they are slithering down the bank, toward the ice-dotted black of the water. But for this battle, there is no walking upon it as Saber did twenty years ago, nor can he fly over it on ox-drawn chariot as he once did at the side of Alexander.
No, for Waver to traverse the great river that splits Fuyuki in two, he must board a boat, and there is no craft he trusts more than Volumen Hydragyrum. Upon hitting the water, the mercury knows to transform, and with astounding speed it has melted across the surface of the water like a silver oil-slick and curved into a new form, no longer a mount but the shallow hull of a boat. Waver steps onto it with sure footing, knowing the Mystic Code will respond and distribute his weight accordingly. With a gentle nudge of his foot, he urges it forward, smiling grimly as Volumen Hydragyrum obeys. It shifts in a sudden roiling of water, pulling away and left from the bank, bow cresting as it picks up speed.
As they cut through the water, Rin's words echo in Waver's head. ' The mouths of rivers are natural points of attraction for ley lines ,' she had said on the same bridge he speeds towards now, her head full of worry about the cost of battle and the potential destruction that they might rain down upon the city. ' It creates a specific atmosphere. A crucible, the Einzberns called it. A place that cannot help but breed change .'
Change - that was about to come in spades, and in all his endless imaginings Waver had never imagined he would feel so still in the midst of it. The cold wind and spray sting his eyes blindingly, but the bridge glows like a vision, and an anticipatory breath hitches in his throat. He spreads his arms into the wind, stretches them out behind himself and hisses a single command to the river's water: " ἐπανσιδεί". The word comes from the ancient Doric dialect of Greek; it is not Alexander's Macedonian, but it is Greek all the same, and in that moment there are no syllables better-fitted to the weight of air flattening his clothes against his body. The command sparks from Waver, will to circuits to tongue, and hooks and snarls itself into the world. And the water swells up behind him, leaving the laws of nature in fealty to him . His circuits are incandescent with the sudden expenditure of energy, and Waver knows that he has perhaps ten minutes to spend on this spell. The awareness is only exhilarating.
As if responding to that thought, the mercury beneath him doubles its pace, gliding through the waters of the Miongawa river with practiced ease. Waver ticks the minutes off in his head as he goes, paying no heed to the familiar landmarks that rest on the river's banks. He knows them all already, and they will be gone in moments, become one more memory of the time before this war. Behind him, the water's rush becomes a great roar, and in that roar there is white noise that gives Waver an eerie sense of calm. The Volumen Hydragyrum's wake boils higher, into a rising swell that temporarily dries the riverbed behind it, until what started as a small bubble has rushed into the yawning arc of a tidal wave, awesome and deadly to behold. Waver's craft sweeps upward along the arch of the wave, bringing the movement on the bridge into focus, small figures growing larger by the second. He focuses only on them, the bodies caged-in by girders, the prickling brightness of power blooming into pain like a frozen limb warming. There is water rushing up through the tense curl of his fingers, his sleeves are soaked to the elbow, and all of it is something happening to a stranger continents away. Waver himself is the centre, between the terrible weight of the water and the cutting sharpness of the air, between the dark of the sky and the warm glow of the bridge, between remembering every immortal footstep across that pavement and hovering above it with ton upon ton of icy water. It should be a sin, what he is about to do, but sins are the province of men - and in this moment, he is a magus.
The wave swallows the bridge in its roaring curl, and Waver can see them now, eyes cast upward, too many of the Einzbern's number to count. He can hear nothing over the roaring of the water, not even the energy that scatters up toward him from the ranks, darkness and crackling electricity and finally something that the curving prow of his Code does not block, an invisible percussion that would blow him into the very weapon he has reared up, if not for the fact that he is sunk to the ankles in tense-coiled mercury singing with his own energy. Waver's answer is a second command to the water, bellowed hoarsely over the great cacophony, arms shoving forward in a sharp snap that knifes through him like hot glass.
" AMYE !" Instantly, the wave's momentum lurches into a fierce plummet, toward and onto and through the bridge, sending carefully laid steel and concrete crashing into the river with a deafening roar. Waver flies with it, choking out a second command through the wet of the air itself, this time not to the water but the mystic code beneath him. " Defend!"
The rushing of the world snaps through a haze of silver and then into black chaos; gravity shatters into a thousand points. There's new pain and a sound that does not even register as his own voice, the rushing of water from too many directions, and when the water settles into a single shallow layer Waver rolls with it, hands pushing him up against the curved inside of a cold and perfect sphere. He feels too light for a moment, disoriented and panting hard, strained breaths in the echoing blindness of his protection. Then they jostle down against what he realizes is the riverbed, and he crawls to his feet and is still for a moment, beneath the river flooding the city in its desperate attempt to return to its banks. The world outside the Code is a haze of energies, twisting sickly in on him the moment he tries to sense his own forces, too well-matched to the thickness of blood running down the back of his throat. "North-" he orders instead, low and stern, swallowing a gag as he pushes the construct into motion once more. "North."
Volumen Hydragyrum rolls and drifts along the bottom of the river, moving only when it is certain Waver has sure footing - how long, he cannot say, only that the air grows hot and stale within the thin shell. Outside the water still rages, sweeping debris and bodies along with it. Every so often Waver hears something slam against his defense, and he feels himself wince in response, as his own body lights itself from the inside with each guttering reinforcement of the prana sustaining them beneath so many pounds of pressure. Things thud , both with sickening softness and startling volume, sometimes so hard that for a moment he worries that volumen hydragyrum might finally shatter and leave him desperately gasping for air at the bottom of the river. The mercury responds in kind (he imagines it is a response, is sure of it, that there is kindness in that force) by ignoring Waver's fears and forcing him to keep walking forward, up the sloping river banks and forward more, until Waver dazedly recognizes the freedom of rolling across solid ground. The protection drops and the air hits his throat unforgivingly, sending him coughing as he squints in the light of the waxing moon They are far further inland than he expected, though in exactly what neighborhood he cannot say - in fact, the longer he tries to discern it, the more a skittish heat rises terribly inside him. There are houses that sit off of their foundations now, others that rest as piles of rubble or list tiredly, as if falling to one knee. He forces his feet forward again, between downed trees and over toppled street lamps, past the yawning darkness of shattered windows streaked with the mud glossing everything on the street. They move in the periphery of his vision, but he forces his eyes ahead, and fumbles at the cocked shape of his earpiece before he finds and presses down on the button of his two-way radio. It is probably broken, but there is always the chance, and he speaks into it as steadily as he can manage. "Rin?"
The voice that responds is not Rin's. Even in its own strain, it is posh, and butter-smooth, and incredibly annoyed. The first two to be expected of the head of the Archibald family, and the third as bitterly at-home as only a woman like her can be. "Velvet."
"Ismene," Waver says, half to confirm the voice and half in honest bewilderment. "What are you- why are you on the radio and not Ri-"
"No." Her rebuke is a sharp snap, cold and crisp precision between breathless sounds of exertion. "No, Velvet. Questions are a privilege of leaders and tacticians, and neither of those throw themselves into a river and leave me wondering how I'm meant to end this war without a Lord or a Mystic Code."
"Yet by virtue of speaking to me, you know one has survived and can inquire about the other."
"After that? I'll be amazed if it's fit to be used as a mount. You've already pushed past your limits." There's a hissing rustle of hair brushing the earpiece, and a muted curse after; the feed pops like a firecracker before quieting again. "Get inland. If they find you before you're behind our lines you're done."
"Where has our base of operations moved to?" Waver asks, taking a few unsteady steps forward to test just how much energy he has left before he absolutely has to rest. "I'm a quarter of a kilometer from the water and a half a kilometer from where the bridge was, in one of the residential districts."
"And even less than a quarter from a very lucky Einzbern," she says, and that explosive pop jumps across their frequency a half-second after it echoes through the streets to the west. "-unlucky, maybe," she murmurs, in a way that might be honest reconsideration rather than black satisfaction.
The familiar sound sends Waver into as much of a run as he can manage, Volumen Hydragum keeping pace behind him. That there are no further spells crackling in his earpiece is a blessing unto itself, although he does not expect it to last very long - especially after he rounds a corner to see the young woman herself, all gently sloping lines in her dark blue war-garb, one foot upon a prone figure's back and body torquing into a point of force at the nape of its neck. Her eyes are up and on him, cat-pale and narrowed with the focus of the new spell at her fingertips, before she releases an exasperated sigh that roars in Waver's earpiece. He turns it off and advances, choosing not to focus on the knife that rips free with a sick crunch of steel against bone and cartilage.
"Do you realize what you've done, Velvet." It is not a question. It is a warning of the displeasure to follow, a warm-up to fill the time as she wipes the blade clean on the filthy sash of her garment.
There is no answer to Ismene's question that will act as a shield from her wrath, and so Waver gives none, only a tired gesture to show that as always, he is listening to the single person that his power and authority as a Lord derives from - a fact hammered home by the Archibald house following him into this war.
"You have declared war on anything that stands between you and this crusade." She is succinct, and level, but there is a resonating intensity behind the words all the same. "You have declared that you will make war on the city itself if need be."
Again, Waver does not respond. He does not correct her, because he knows, in that terrible numb way that unforgivable truths come home to rest, that she cannot be corrected. If there is no dismantling the Grail while leaving one stone of Fuyuki atop another, that will be the price for it. It is the sort of thing, he thinks, that deserves outrage.
So it is the most weightless feeling of all, when Ismene instead smiles, the heat of assured victory in her china-blue eyes. "I think you are exactly what I need."
Waver cannot guess what trump card they have just been handed that makes Ismene smile so, but he knows this: that when that card is played, grail destroyed and war ended, he will be written as the herald of it all.
A magus, he is certain, would consider it a gift.
Notes*This fic was originally posted on AO3 29 July 2012 and is mirrored here: /works/472343
*This fic was co-written with Soodonim, please see her AO3 profile here: /users/Soodonim/pseuds/Soodonim
*This fic is a part of the series If Not Alexander, then Diogenes, and is available on AO3 here: /series/23756
*Canon gives us the following information that served as the basis of this fic: there is a war between the Mage Association + Waver and Rin over bringing back the Greater Grail that is said to be just as bad as the Grail Wars themselves, Waver inherits Kayneth's mystic code and adds AI to it, and the head of the Archibald family at the time Waver gains the title of Lord El-Melloi II is a young girl (happens in the late 90s.)
*Title comes from Plutarch's Lives, chapter 1.2: "For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities." Greek Translations (with thanks to Lindensphinx for help with conjugating)
*ἐπανσιδεί - epansidei - "swell up"
*ἀμύε - amue- "sink" or "fall down"