11 – Cost-Benefit Analysis

"Would you get rid of your daughter?"

It was a quick, question forced to formality, to distance. Like there was distance between magic and person. She was too young to realize that that wasn't true. There were personas, not separate selves. All of it centered towards the self, in the end.

"I already got rid of her mother," he replied to her, with the same amount of speed. Rin froze. "As they wanted."

"Did you want it?"

Kiritsugu looked at her, with those self-assured, empty eyes. Like they'd spent too long in the dark nd had forgotten his irises on the way out. "No, but we can't always do what we want when under contract."

"And you did."

"And I did," he agreed, sitting back. He reached for a cigarette he didn't have and instead sighed heavily. "Indeed I did."

Rin fiddled with her ribbons, wanting to blurt out something but waiting instead, striving for the patience her father had requested of her so many times. Also, Kiritsugu had a look of deepest contemplation, like he was finding the words to say rather than choosing not to say them.

"I would not have gotten rid of Ilya." He straightened in his chair. "Not if there were two children, not if there were twenty. Not even if it was the only thing to be done. Not anymore."

Rin, for some reason, felt herself start to cry.


Sakura justified her wanderings as memorizing her terrain.

She had not even tried to return to the Matou house. If Grandfather hd wanted her there, he would have said so after all. Perhaps he was dead. She doubted that thought as soon as it entered her mind, intriguing though it may have been. That was about as far as her thoughts and emotions went in regards to reactive. Trying to feel too much would only result in pain of some sort.

Still. It was nice to be in the same house as her sister again and not have to leave for arbitrary reasons.

Or no reason at all.

She stomped her foot on the wood to physically tamp down the black, black thought. The thoughts that she didn't like, those that came from a rough, terrible place deep inside of herself with a mental image of her father. Of her father's solemn but unyielding figure as she was left with all she had ever owned and then thrown into a dungeon and-

She shuddered by reflex, imagining a squirming worm. It wasn't very difficult. She had experience.

As she walked, however, in an attempt to clear her mind, a stone smacked the pond water.

Sakura looked up to see Shiro throw another stone and watch it sink. Rin was beside him. Her eyes were red and rimmed but her face was set, determined to do something.

They looked up and smiled at her as she approached. Sakura couldn't understand why, exactly, but when Ilya barreled over her and dragged the four of them together in the grass and seemed to be shaking, she did not question it. She allowed it, like a dream that would some day end. One that not even grandfather would be able to take from her.

At least she hoped that was the case.