My Glory

Fujimaru Ritsuka has never had very many friends. Many acquaintances and a few intimates, but relatively few people whose society she would choose to seek out for the simple joy of their presence, rather than for the sake of a common interest. If she ever felt the lack, it never bothered her.

And then, by a series of highly improbable events, she became the Master of Chaldea, and began to make friends.

Mash, of course, is her dearest, closest friend. And that is as far as she cares for the discussion of that relationship to go, even in an objectively-narrated account. But she has other friends among the servants she has called to her side or been given by forces she wot not of. Not all of them, of course. Some are too awesome for such closeness, some too cold, and some too insane. But there are quite of a few among these people out of legends whom she believes she would have cherished if, in some bizarre world, they had been ordinary people who were part of the life of an ordinary Ritsuka.

Emiya, for example. Secretive and overprotective though he can sometimes be, he is almost exactly the sort of person she would have wanted as an older brother, had she ever had that mixed blessing and burden. From their time together chasing down the counterfeits, she knows that he has a fairly personal familiarity with the sort of complicated set of relationships that she finds herself in, and that if he finds her attempts to deal with them in a mature and reasonable manner to be funny ... well, she can't deny that things often seem that way.

Being a friend to an Emperor of Rome would have been completely unimaginable in her earlier life - mostly because she had only the vaguest notion where Rome was, and almost none at all of its history. And yet, struggling alongside the conceited and courageous fifth emperor, a legend because of misdeeds, Ritsuka has come to feel respect and affection for this person who kept on going through terror and confusion. For what can be more heroic than trying to be a hero when eternity has already condemned you as the villain of the piece?

She isn't really sure when Tamamo-no-Mae had become so dear to her heart, but she suspects it might have happened the first time she called on both her and Nero in battle. Normally, summoned servants never pay much attention to those whom they fought beside, and yet she knows that she'd seen the two of them exchange a glance, let out identical sighs of dismay, and then fight against her enemies with balletic grace. There is a bond between these two, and from what she'd been able to puzzle out, they'd somehow served, and loved, the same master once before. There is something inspiring about that, that something of another summoning had somehow survived in their memories. Even beyond that, the two of them seem to balance each other out, softening their respective edges.

There are others whom she counted as true friends - an alternate version of the greatest king of Britain and an alternate version of the Maid of Orleans - but these are the ones who were nearby when the news of Seraphix came in, and the ones who go with her to the command center, and the ones who go with her on her most unusual Rayshift yet.

Various things happen.

And then, once more, she is in the command center, being regarded oddly by da Vinci, being told a decidedly counterfactual scenario by da Vinci, and then gently shooed out of the room by da Vinci. No sooner is she out of there than she finds herself silently staring into the face of a certain indvidual who'd just made portentious remarks about how fate might see to it that they met again in the sea of electrons.

"Wassup, senpai?" BB asks cheerfully.

Ritsuka continues to stare.

"You were thinking it was all a dream, weren't you? Go on, admit it, that's what you were thinking," the Moon Cancer says encouragingly.

"No," Ritsuka says at last, speaking very carefully. "I wasn't actually thinking that. I had other things on my mind."

"Oho? Like what, might I ask?"

"Well, BB, I was thinking that without your help, this whole situation would have turned out much worse than it did, and so I'm profoundly grateful to you, and realize that I owe you a great deal."

BB looks startled. "Well! That's an encouraging start to our -"

"So I'm going to ask you, BB," she asks, physical reinforcement sigils that she wasn't really very good at suddenly gleaming on her flesh, eyes glowing with the fires of Orc, "where are my friends, you pustulent sack of spite?"

The other female figure makes a sound best represented by the letters 'g', 'l', and 'k', in more or less that order but with a certain amount of repetition. "They're fine! They're here! The whole thing got dealt with in a time warp, so they never went there in the first place! It's fine! It's all fine!"

Ritsuka lets out a long breath. "Oh, good," she says as the sigils vanished. "Because I was a little bit concerned that you might be holding them hostage or something. Isn't it nice when we don't play silly games like that?"

"That hasn't been my experience at all," BB replies, very bravely.

Fortunately, Ritsuka isn't really listening. "Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go find Mash, hug her a lot, and then fall down crying about the sheer unimaginable horror I just witnessed. Nice talking with you."

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
- William Butler Yeats