Author's Note: another servant blurb posted at the bottom.
***Story Begins Here***
Aria said nothing as she went inside. She made straight for the converted shower room at the far back of the shophouse, not once looking back at Heinz as he closed the door quietly behind him. Although Aria shut the bathroom door very quietly, to Heinz the new distinct clicking sound of the rusty lock might as well have been the clamour of a moody slam.
As their house was originally an abandoned snack bar, when she moved in with Heinz here on the first day they found the bathroom reeking of mold and urine. Together they've since then cleaned and disinfected the filthy floors, moldy walls, and the scum-caked toilet, and furnished the nine square meters with a tub and a showerhead. A look around at the cleaned tiles on the floor and the scrubbing sponge next to the tub somehow worsened her bitter mood, and she bit her lower lip in repressed brooding.
She tore off her ragged denim top and slid off her ripped jeans, underwear and all. Taking out her angst on her flat cups, she crumpled the stringy garment in her hand and tossed it on the floor as she opened the cold tap under the showerhead. She wasn't really sure if it was anger or fear, but she tried to flush it away with near-painful cold shocks and hypothermia. As she forced herself to endure the shivering water and letting it soak her short hair and trickle down her neck, chin, chest, back, and legs, she felt guilty that her character hasn't seen any improvement from before. She was still seeking safety in physical breakdowns to escape from psychological ones, and in realizing so she threw the showerhead down in disgust. But her shivering, spasm-stricken muscles didn't quite move as they should, and after a twitchy step in the slippery bathtub she fell down inside with a crash. As she fell the instinctive urge to cry out became mixed with a sudden urge to sneeze, and she ended up giving herself a painful bite on the cheeks. The pain in her mouth finally compelled her to let out a muffled 'oww' as she coped at the same time with bumped joints, scraped skin, and a shivering body.
"Are you all right?" Heinz called from outside the locked door. Being in the doghouse made him hesitant about opening his mouth, but his concern for Aria proved too strong.
"Why don't you come in and see?" Aria wanted to sound bitter and sarcastic, but the voice didn't come out right. It sounded injured and vulnerable instead.
"I don't have the ability to dematerialize - "
"BULLSHIT!"
Following Aria's angry outburst, Heinz fell silent outside the door. But raging at the boy only made Aria feel worse, for it was particularly hurtful for her to experience yet another reminder that something has broken in her bond with Heinz. As the aftershock of her yelling continued to echo silently in her mind, she felt another chill pass over her. A feeling of heaviness in her chest dampened her fluctuating emotions, and she acknowledged that the boy may be feeling just as down and rotten as she was.
She may have been too moody and over-reactive, but if anyone else really understood how she felt, they wouldn't be calling her on it. The last time she has lived with a roof of her own and a caring someone to care for, felt like a lifetime ago. How could she put it into words? After Ka-San passed away, she spent years coping with the loss by slowly destroying herself. But not even the filthiest struggle to live from day to day could distract even a shrivelled mind from knowing that the graces of 'home' and 'only friend' were forever gone. That was why Heinz has been Hope; he made her a home, and became her only friend. Since Ka-San, Heinz was the only person who could always be trusted, and always be believed.
Except it suddenly became clear tonight that Heinz was not a living person; and in having claimed the reverse, nor was he thus someone who could always be believed. It was clear now that Heinz was a servant just like all the others, and all his talk of being a real person was at best a cover-up for something. What if the promises of home and trust were also lies? What if the nominal goal for them to fight the war was also fabricated? After those missions of gunning people down and recycling corpses, what if the point of it all was simply bogus? Those questions made her upset. She was upset at Heinz for having lied to her, which was now making it difficult for her to trust him, even though she desperately wanted to.
But what was she going to do about all this?
The cold running water pasted her short hair to her scalp, and forced close one of her eyes. As she clutched her shaking body, a new wave of misery washed over her. She thought about the times when Heinz picked her up when she was near death, protected her when she was ignorant and vulnerable, and looked after her when she was completely helpless. It was crushingly painful to her now, to think that none of those things were real; that Heinz had some other objectives...
No.
Aria stopped herself, realizing the fallacy at the bottom of her perceptions. The truth was that the things that Heinz has done for her were actually all real. He really did bandage her trauma when she was near death. He really did fight to protect her even when he had virtually nothing to work with. He really did stay by her side, cleaning her sheets and tending her fevers when she went through personal hell. He really did put himself in the line of fire to save her, putting her safety above that of his own. If she was so insistent about knowing truths, why did she not stop at these? As these things dawned on her, Aria asked herself how she really felt about Heinz. She didn't have to dig very deep to realize what the answer was, and she concluded in turn that if she really valued him so much, she should give him more room for mistakes, and set fewer standards for him. If his past actions have meant so much to her, then who cares if his words didn't always strike true? If his existence has meant so much to her, then who cares if he wasn't really mortal?
She stepped out of the tub and made for the door. Her five minutes of seclusion was over, and she has reoriented herself. If what she really wanted was a healthy bond with him, then to that end she needed to take the first step forward.
With a rusty, grinding click, the bathroom door opened, and Aria found Heinz sitting dejectedly beside the door. Upon hearing the sound of the turning knob, he hesitantly turned his head and looked up, but quickly looked away.
Aria guessed that Heinz must have been hurt by her outburst; she was about to sink into a bout of quiet remorse, when she started to sneeze uncontrollably.
***Scene Break***
"I want to know two things." Sitting in a curl on her mattress, Aria spoke flatly but sincerely as she tightened her sleeping gown to keep warm. "First, I want you to tell me if your intent for the Grail is really what you've told me before. I want to know if you really meant it when you said you wanted a broken world to come together." Aria paused to let the question sink in, but Heinz stayed silent, seeming to expect the second question before answering both, so Aria continued. "Second, I want to know the true nature of servants, and how they are related to their masters."
Sitting on the other mattress across from Aria, Heinz began his revelations with subdued melancholy. Coupled with his accent, it left his explanations sounding like a Teutonic, grim, and heavy oration.
"To begin with, a servant is an instance of the spirit of someone from the past, present, or future. The spirit's original blueprint resides in an abstract entity deep within the Root, known as the Throne of Heroes. A servant is always an immortalization of someone important to mankind's belief, cognition, or survival at some point in their mortal lives. When these spirits manifest in the real world, they essentially exist as powerful human familiars, whose mere unnatural existence in this plane nominally demand more prana than this world can reasonably provide..." Heinz paused suddenly, and spoke to Aria in a less repressed, but equally low-key manner. "I haven't answered your questions yet, but does my story make any sense so far?"
"That you're a ghost from the Root, and you nominally can't exist? I get that, if that's what you mean."
"Essentially." Heinz returned to his heavy, revelatory voice and continued. "One of the few mechanisms that can sustain a servant's existence is the Grail system. The Grail itself provides the bulk of the magical upkeep for at least seven servants in every Grail War. It also provides at least seven masters during each War with the means to bind one of them."
"Bind them HOW?" The mentioning of the master's role heightened Aria's awareness and curiosity.
"With the exception of our own case, this binding exists in the form of three sigils called command seals. At the beginning of each War, magi chosen by the Grail to become masters will either consciously or unconsciously conduct a ritual that calls their servant fourth. This ritual tattoos three sigils on the mage's body, which symbolize the contract between master and servant. Each sigil can be expended to give the servant an absolute command. If all three sigils are expended, it terminates the contract. If the servant remains contract-less for more than a day, he or she will likely disappear and return to the Root." Heinz paused again, anticipating the next clarification that Aria would most obviously demand.
"Why is our case an exception?"
"I am a rogue servant, left over from the Grail War twice prior to this one."
"What?" Aria felt that the fact meant something big just from his tone, and the weight of the statement became heavier and heavier with each passing second as she began to understand and see a chain of implications.
"But if you lost that War, How did you survive until now?" Aria's phrasing of her question hinted at her aversion to what the truth might hold, but Heinz, anxious to atone for his guilt of concealment, could no longer bear to withhold that truth from her.
"We didn't lose. We won."
"THAT MEANS - " Aria's eyes went wide as she covered half of her face with her hand, her signature expression of shock and anger against a repulsive revelation. She caught herself before she could spring up from the mattress and squeeze an explanation out of Heinz with both hands, and instead just grilled Heinz with the gaze of her uncovered eye.
"Tell me the truth..." Aria stopped herself with a bitter grunt. "Oh, wait, I can't. I don't have command seals." She felt a chill creeping up her back; she wished she could vomit the things she has heard out of her guts, and for once she was left desiring a weaker stomach. Her attempt to fix things up with Heinz was failing terribly, and the chasm between them was growing with each sentence. But she willed herself to continue the conversation, clinging to the glimmer of seemingly false hope that she could yet accept him after knowing the full truth that she was now so anxious to uncover. "Can you tell me the truth, Heinz? If you can't, just say no. Don't make anything up."
Aria was almost too wound up to notice the taxed tremor in Heinz's reply, but his tone and words together were enough to make Aria realize that he too was investing his authenticity into their dialogue. Perhaps the servant had some complicated things that were hard for him to speak up about, and he was going through a great deal of hurt, being torn between wanting to tell the truth and wanting to bury something terrible. She tuned in to his reply; she promised herself to try and accept him, and so long as she could she would keep trying.
"...you think that without command seals, I would tell you white lies?" Heinz let out a repressed sigh. "Do you know the meaning of command seals? They can be understood as forced bonds - a thing enforced by the Grail between master and servant to keep the strength of their bonds above a minimum level. Without it, a servant-master pair with low affinity cannot physically function. As a spirit without a clear master isn't even a familiar, and such spirits cannot be upkept by the Grail, the whole system would fail. Command seals are BONDS, placed by the Grail to ensure some semblance of order in its wars. That is why when a servant disobeys a command seal he would feel a greatly amplified version of what it's like to refuse someone he feels extremely attached to - the same kind of pressure, the same kind of pain. How can you be so sure right now, that I don't feel that way already?"
Aria bit her lips as she walked across the room to the opposite mattress, and sat down behind Heinz. "I'm sorry." She whispered. "You must have had your reasons, right?"
"The wish wasn't..." Heinz trailed off and screwed his eyes shut in a tortured frown. "But no, I wouldn't have known any better myself."
"The wish wasn't yours? It was your master's?" Aria seized the chance to vindicate her servant.
"It wasn't exactly hers either."
"But how? Who made the wish then? What burned out the sky?"
It wasn't in Heinz's nature to tell half-truths, nor was he disposed now to flatly refuse Aria's wish to know it all. His Tutonically blunt personality surfaced in his time of stress, and he revealed things to a point where there was no going back.
"It was my master's master who communed with the Grail first, wishing for a 'world without war.' There was a conventional world war at the time, and your father-"
"WHAT?"
Heinz fell silent; quietly accepting his slip and anticipating Aria to seize him by the neck, but Aria threw her head away to the side and let out a scornful sneer.
"I don't give a shit about him." She spat in her alley-speak. "Left my mom to rot when she had me, and I never saw his face. When I asked her once she just cried, so I knew he was a prick." She snapped out from rambling and threw herself a cynical expression, and turned back Heinz. "So what did that fucker do? He stole your Grail or something?"
"I wish I could call him something else." Heinz conceded, consciously prepared now to tell her the back-story that she was so anxious about just minutes ago. "Mirai Tetsuya was a twisted man, but he wasn't all bad. He was very brilliant and saw his goals and plans very clearly, only he wasn't selective at all in his methods."
"No shit, that's what I thought." Feeling almost no attachment to the virtual stranger, Aria had no trouble facing up the fact that her old man's conduct was somehow total crap. "But tell me what happened. If you and your master won the war, how did he get to make wishes?"
"All three of us won the war. He was my master's master, and he made his wish first."
"Why do you keep saying that? What the hell do you mean?"
"Tetsuya summoned my master, and my master summoned me. So my master was Tetsuya's servant." Heinz's explanation may have been a mouthful, but his point went across.
"Servants can summon servants?" Aria thought out loud as she digested the new fact.
"That's only if the first servant's mortal manifestation has enough magical circuits and prana to qualify as a high-level magus. While my master was not summoned as a Caster, she had more than enough magical potential to summon a servant of her own."
"I see. So I guess the old man blew up the world along with every army, and hung you two out to dry."
"My master killed your father, released me from my contract, and disappeared from the scene. Left alone, I wished to the fading Grail to fix all the damage, but it simply gave me the ability to persist indefinitely, and left it to me to see to my own wish."
"Harsh." Aria remarked after a brief silence. "On you, I mean. I guess the old man must have had it coming, whatever it was that he did." She paused again before asking something else. "So I suppose you came to me because you think it's fitting that I clean up after him, right?"
"No. You had nothing to do with happened. Of everyone left alive, I am the guiltiest by far. I'm the one who has to clean up after myself."
"Well, whatever it is." Aria retorted. "Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I'm not doing this to clean after some old bastard whom I've got nothing to do with. I'm wishing for a better world because I want it, and you want it. That's it. You understand?"
"You're a good person, master."
"Our bond isn't forced, right? So cut the master crap."
"Anything else you want to know?"
"Why didn't YOUR master wish for a better world? I guess she didn't care?"
"She was so overwhelmed with grief at everything that she caused and was forced to do, by that time she was no longer right in the head. She was forced by a command seal to wish for prolonged existence, and the Grail granted it by making her into a mortal. The Grail's sick humour didn't end there, but let's save the rest for another time." Heinz closed his eyes, looking visibly tired. As Aria nodded in turn, mostly to herself to grip the facts, peaceful silence finally came over their salvaged abode.
In a remote corner a safe distance away from the house, the concealed eavesdropper turned off his reinforced hearing and left the couple to their privacy. Like a lost phantom he lightened himself and bounded away, gliding above the rooftops as he planned his next move.
***Scene Break***
Brigit sobbed quietly as she finished her story, and Ervin decided that the most sensitive thing to do was to say nothing and lend a quiet shoulder. His kind gesture was well received, and he felt a warm, twitching shiver run through him as her soft hair brushed against his neck. He sat in an awkward position, but he remained perfectly still. He wanted to make Brigit feel that she had something solid to lean against, even though deep down he berated himself for being far more unreliable than his facade let on. But at length she abruptly pulled away, as if suddenly waking up from a dream.
"You shouldn't be here, Ervin. You shouldn't be around me at all."
"I'm in love with you, Brigit. Unless my absence really makes you happier, I'm going to stay here with you."
"You're going to die, just like all the others. Don't you understand? I'm a disgusting and dirty mons-"
The rest of her sentence melted into a muffled "mmm" as she felt Ervin's warm lips suddenly pressed against her mouth. Almost at the instant she made that sound, the door swung open with a loud booting that no doubt left a few splinters, as Saber stormed into the room with the real Nightmare hoisted in his hand.
"FOUL KNAVE! YOU DIE HERE AND NOW!" His voice reverberated through his helmet as he pointed his sword at Ervin. Brigit reacted quickly then; she pinned Ervin down on the bed with nearly crushing strength, shielding his body from the blade as she smothered him with kisses. The gesture was message enough for the servant, who lifted his visor to stare at the couple with his sickly yellow eyes. Neither Brigit nor Ervin was at an angle to see that there was actually no scorn or anger in his eyes. He dropped but a word in his thin, natural voice, sounding slightly unsteady as he left the room.
"Lame."
The door closed with a surprisingly gentle click, which somehow made Ervin feel an unexplainable sense of sympathy for his unstable contemporary. The source of Brigit's angst on the matter was much clearer, as it clearly pointed to her apparent neglect of her own loyal servant over a questionable and defunct rival master. But for the most part, the little event only served as an affirmation of how they felt about one another. After an unspecified period of idle staring and increasingly laboured breaths, they buried themselves in each other's arms behind the closed, boot-injured door.
***Scene Break***
Brigit remained soundly asleep in her small curl as Ervin gently slipped into his clothes. It was still very early in the morning, but it became hard for Ervin to remain sleeping.
He has been in Brigit's safe house since the night before yesterday, when he lost Archer at the London Bridge. Overwhelmed with losing his sister, his home, his newest friend and his chance to confront his own ghosts, he called in sick for work the day after to give himself some time to come to grips with his wounds and losses. It didn't take much reflection for him to realize that, regardless of whether he had a legitimate reason for it, Brigit has become the most important thing in his life. He has made his confession, and at least touched her heart enough for her to confide in him. When he heard her story, he was struck by how her brutal past made the cause of his own angst pale in comparison. At that point, Ervin knew what he had to do.
Now, the morning after she has confided everything with him, after sleeping on all that he has learned, Ervin set his mind to a number of things. If he really wanted to look out for her, he would have to grow up. He would first of all work at his job at the shop to earn an income for Brigit and himself, regardless of how much resources she has stashed up from before. If she was compelled to live a normal life, he would provide one for her. But he would not stop there. Although his days as master were over, Ervin still had plenty of fight in him. He would assist Brigit, and help her obtain the Grail, so that she could set her own life, and possibly other things, to right.
He made his way downstairs, moving quietly through the living room past the coldly nonchalant servant sitting in front of the old-fashioned television. Saber was a bit slow in un-burying his face from his palm as Ervin's footsteps drew near, and he didn't have time to blink away the look in his eyes when Ervin passed before him. In a brief instant, his nominally ghoulish, unnaturally yellow eyes, far from evoking fear and alienation, radiated a sense of profound weariness that he had been perhaps too groggy to hide. Nevertheless it took Saber but a second to rearrange his own face back to his blatantly hostile stare, hot enough to be hateful and cold enough to be murderous. Ervin made a slightly awkward, token attempt to defuse his contemporary with a polite and cautiously cheerful "good morning," before making for the door as fast as etiquette would allow.
It wasn't that Ervin couldn't understand why Saber might hate him. Being Brigit's servant, Saber likely knew of her past well before Ervin did. Considering that nothing good ever came from any man in her recent life, Ervin could see why a protective servant would be distrustful of him. Or perhaps Saber had his own motives for winning the war, and he saw Ervin as a source of distraction for his master. Either way though, Ervin has become rather battered in the recent course of events, and did not have the energy to initiate any icebreaking with Brigit's eccentric servant. So he thought as he opened the front door of the safe house, breathing in an unseasonably frigid gust of morning air as he cleared his head for an ordinary day behind the counter.
"Cambrian." Saber's voice sounded slightly indecisive, but the resulting lack of control over his own voice made it come out a bit on the loud side.
"What's up, mate?" Ervin turned back to face him.
"Leaving?"
"To work."
"A responsible man." Saber voiced an empty-sounding compliment. "But so were the past six, as I'm sure you've come to know."
Your approval be damned, Ervin cursed quietly. If I've even given up on Elise's approval, then it's sure as the Root that I can't be arsed with yours. But dwelling on the fact that the difficult servant was perhaps simply being loyal to his master, Ervin bit his lips for a less confrontational answer.
"I understand. But I AM different from those people, even if it's just by the circumstances alone." Ervin proclaimed with a quiet sincerity. "I want to give her the normal life that she's compelled to search for, so she can settle down. I know that's what I really want to do."
"No other motives?" Saber narrowed his eyes, his slit-thin pupils now looking as though they belonged to some feral creature that was ready to pounce.
"None." Ervin was quiet but firm.
"Lies. You were a master before you even met her. You must have had a wish of your own to motivate your participation in the war."
"I did." Seeing that he would get a chance at an icebreaking dialogue after all, he took a seat at the couch, opposite of Saber, and elaborated. "Truth be told, I sought to fight a curse in my bloodline that somehow compels us to hurt our own kin. I accepted my role as master, hoping that the Grail would remove the curse. I've only found out later that my sister entered the war as well with the exact same motive, except that she took Archer away from me, and would have taken out Brigit as well. I couldn't let her do that, and we had a fateful falling out. So the curse came true for us before our very eyes, and we went separate ways."
"That's unnatural. More feasible would have been to join up with your sister instead." For a brief second, Saber's musing made Ervin wonder whose side his contemporary was on, but the servant anticipated and addressed Ervin's doubts in a most undesirable manner.
"Had you joined your sister instead, killing you would have been a much simpler matter. You see, even though she left me behind in our night patrol, I could sense the danger she was in, and come to her side rather quickly. Two nights ago on the bridge, I arrived on the scene just as your sister departed, and I found you standing frozen, with my Nightmare raised over her head. Had you tried to bring it down, Brigit's animal instincts would have willed me to kill you at once, regardless of her command seal spent earlier. How I wish you tried."
"So you were there the whole time?"
"Almost. But... your story with your sister and the family curse I did not know." Saber did not attempt to hide the fact that he was computing something in his head, since Ervin could not read his exact thoughts. Ervin saw this, but did not feel any more guarded than he already was. He stayed quiet and waited for Saber to mull things over, before sharing his last thoughts.
"What you saw there, Saber, was a turning point for me. Not knowing you were there, I could have brought it down, and eliminate a rival for my sister. At first I was thinking, if my entire life's goal has been to lift my family curse, then I should not let up on perhaps the only chance to eliminate this rival for my sister. Not doing so was equal to betraying myself, my past, and who I was. I'd also betray my loving sister, my bloodline, and even logic itself. I asked myself whether I could bear to betray all those things. But then I knew that I could not betray Brigit, could not betray how I felt, and could not betray what I want to have and be. I saw the madness fading from her eyes. I saw her staring at me, then closing her eyes, leaving the decision completely to me. I saw how human she could be. There was no way I could bring the sword down. I couldn't... I wouldn't. I won't."
"Enough. I believe everything you say, and I should have realized that it was unnecessary to doubt you." Saber gently blinked away the meditative look in his eyes and stretched off his calculating frown, but continued with words that were no less heavy. "Nevertheless, I can't promise not to kill you."
"Is that so." Ervin's tone was not even that of a rhetorical question, but one of acceptance. "But you know what; we can talk this out over a cup of tea sometime, provided I can help keep the shop alive." Ervin politely stood up and walked to the door, keeping eye contact with Saber and maintaining a light smile. "That means I shouldn't be late for work! And do remember, if I die, you won't get your lunchboxes."
"Right." Saber did not bother standing up as he returned the goodbye wave. "That would be deadly."
*******************************************************************Chapter End***********************************************
**********************************************************Servant Stat Unlocked: XIV Lancer***************************************
Class: Lancer (Former Grail War)
Master: Mirai Tetsuya
True Name: Brigit De Danann
Sex: Female
Height/Weight: 160cm, 40kg
Alignment: Chaotic Good
***Parameters:***
Strength: D
Magical Energy: A
Endurance: D
Luck: B
Agility: A
Noble Phantasm: B
***Class Abilities:***
Independent Action: A+: Servant can remain in this world indefinitely even without a Master. However, if forced into prolonged conflict, she will be compelled to replenish her energy somehow…
***Skills:***
Divinity: A-: indicates a prime deity of a major civilization. However since the time she has been first summoned, this has drastically degenerated.
Magic: A: with a full set of magic circuits and an intrinsic understanding of most magecraft as well as true magic, she qualifies as a magus and has the basic functionalities of a Caster servant regardless of her actual class.
Healing Goddess: A+: can gradually heal any target back to full health even from the verge of death. This ability will activate automatically on Lancer herself as soon as she receives a serious wound.
***Noble Phantasms:***
Breo-Saighead, Lance of the Forge: besides being a Goddess of healing for the Tuatha De Danann, Brigit was also a deity associated with blacksmithing and the forge. In battle, she can call fourth the enchanted fires from the forges of her fabled nation, and from it, craft her battle-lance at full durability. She can also convert the weapon back into fire, and cast it at range as offensive magic.
Rank: B
Type: Anti-Unit
Range: 1-2
Target: 1
Breo-Saighead, the Flaming Arrow: Lancer's flaming lance can be converted back into raw fire at will. It can then be cast as fire magic up to the level of high thaumaturgy, or re-forged back into a solid weapon at full durability.
Rank: B
Type: Anti-Unit
Range: 1-200
Target: 50