Miracle of Zero: Kingdom of the Forsaken

by James D. Fawkes

"A girl cries out for Salvation - and receives a Miracle." Like all things, it begins with a wish. One wish, for a powerful, strong familiar. One wish, to be a hero that saves everyone. One wish, to finally live free. One wish, to meet again after so long apart. One wish, to be forgiven for the sin of betrayal. One wish, with the power to change the world.

14. An Ancient Hymn Sung by the Water

Miracle of Zero: Kingdom of the Forsaken
By: James D. Fawkes

Chapter XIV: An Ancient Hymn Sung by the Water
— o.0.O.O.0.o —

The rest of Shirou's night was dreamless — no Saber coming to him in the darkness, no nightmares of Louise throwing herself at him — and when he woke up, it was almost possible to believe that the events of the night previous really hadn't been anything more than a fevered nightmare.

When he pulled himself out of bed, however, Louise was still asleep, and her face was still flushed. Beneath the blankets, her legs were kicking back and forth, and she was nibbling anxiously on her bottom lip, and looking at her, it seemed so very obvious what kind of dream she was having.

"Shirou…" she murmured fondly in her sleep

And that confirmed it.

Shirou sighed.

Damn it. What sort of luck did he have to find himself in this sort of situation? Of all the terrible problems and difficulties he might have imagined, this was one of the ones he hadn't prepared himself for.

Shirou sighed again and ran a hand through his mottled hair.

"Would it really be so bad?"

Shirou closed his eyes briefly, then looked over at the sword propped against the wall.

"So, you really were paying attention, after all. You've been strangely silent, recently."

"And yer dodgin' the question," Derf retorted. "Partner, I remember what ya said before. About already havin' someone in yer heart. That's fine, and that Germanian lass ain't really yer type, anyway. But would it really be so bad, fallin' in love with the girly, here, and livin' happily ever after?"

Shirou almost laughed, and for a crazy moment, he wondered if this was how Archer had felt, back then. Was this strange, almost bitter feeling in his chest the same sort of feeling the hero Emiya had felt when confronted with his own idealistic optimism? He thought that it must be.

That optimism had been beaten out of him, bit by bit, over the years. He still clung to his ideals, he still couldn't think of them as wrong, even if they were borrowed or hypocritical, but he had to acknowledge that he couldn't save everyone. There were limits to what he could accomplish.

Living happily ever after? With Louise?

"No such thing exists for me, Derf," Shirou said with a grim humor. "Happily ever after…if I search for it, then I might find it after I die."

Two miracles…would she still be waiting for him, after all this time? He believed it. If he stopped believing in it, then there would be nothing left but the life of a machine, and down that route lay a fate he wanted no part in.

"My future isn't here with Louise. I won't die here, hoping that she might greet me in the afterlife. I won't die beside her with a smile. I won't hold her in my arms as she dies and promise that I'll see her again, someday. I'll die…" broken, bleeding, betrayed — no, that wasn't his future. He refused to become Archer. "…on a hill of swords, with a smile, knowing that my life will save the lives of countless others."

"You don't know that!" Derf barked, sounding truly angry. "Partner — Shirou Emiya, you can have a happily ever after, if ya take it! Listen! Love Potions don' manufacture feelin's of affection! That's beyond the magic of this country! They only enhance what's already there! Those feelin's that girl has fer ya, they ain't as strong as the potion makes them be, but they could be, they will be, one day!"

Derf's quillions quivered, and the entire blade shivered and hummed with his anger. Shirou might have found it quite the novel thing to be watching, if his stomach wasn't knotting itself together from frustration and half a dozen other feelings of helplessness and anger.

"Derf —"

"No! You listen!" Derf roared, as much as a sword could roar. "It ain't a pleasant thing ta talk about, but this's the facts! Master and familiar, they're drawn together! But it's different for the Void! I can't even begin ta tell ya how many times I've seen Gandalfr and his master fall in love, only ta waste so much time tryin' ta pretend it ain't happenin' or deny exactly how much they love each other! There's only so much time ya get, Partner, and if ya waste it on stubbornness —"

"Stubbornness?" Shirou echoed faintly, head filling with something hot and unpleasant. "You think…simple stubbornness?"

He wanted to break something. He wanted to snap and just let out all the hotness that was filling up his chest and head. But he didn't. In the first place, Emiya Shirou was someone who created.

"Trace, on."

He couldn't recreate her sheath. That image was beyond him, now, had been since the Grail had been dismantled. He couldn't even properly recreate her sword, not even if he relied on him. There were some things even Shirou was incapable of reproducing.

But he could get close. Closer than anyone else alive had ever gotten.

After a moment, he held in his hand a beautiful golden sword. Derf seemed to have been stunned to silence.

"You've seen my Noble Phantasm," Shirou said without preamble. "But even my Gavilain seems paltry compared to this. Do you see it, Derf? This radiance? This is the greatest sword ever created, the pinnacle of holy swords that has no equal. My Gavilain comes closer than most, and among all the swords ever made, only my Gavilain, Sir Gawain's Galatine, and Sir Lancelot's Arondight are considered worthy of being spoken in the same breath. But Excalibur will always be in a class of its own."

He looked down at the blade, at the intricate fairy letters engraved down the middle, at the golden guard and blue enameling interspersed throughout. Even with his best effort, it still seemed like nothing more than papier-mâché pasted over a hollow shell.

"This is only a fragment," Shirou continued. "A fraction. A fraction of a fraction. It can't even compare with the original. But even the sublime radiance of the original…" He closed his eyes and pictured her face again, as best as he could. The image was nebulous and difficult to hold onto, because her features were indistinct and fuzzy, but it was enough to fill him up with warmth. "Even the sublime radiance of the original pales in comparison to her, its owner."

Derf remained silent. Shirou let the projection fade and watched as it vanished into motes of golden light, fluttering like little fairies before disappearing. His hand dropped back down to his side.

"You asked me, once," he began at length, "to tell you about King Arthur. The full story is for another time. But, what I'll tell you now is that I met her when I was seventeen in an event called the Holy Grail War. It was a battle royale between seven magi called Masters and seven Heroic Spirits summoned and temporarily incarnated as beings called Servants — yes, that's where the term Louise uses comes from."

He closed his eyes. Memories of those battles, of the titanic heroes whom he had witnessed with his own eyes, flashed through his head. It almost felt like it was only yesterday that it had all ended.

"…She was beautiful, standing over me like a goddess of victory. The Servant Saber, she introduced herself — I was so captivated that I couldn't even speak."

The details had become hazy, but he could still remember that image of her, haloed in the moonlight, with her golden hair, emerald eyes, and porcelain skin. How amazing it had been, seeing her like that for the first time. How miraculous, seeing her like that for the second.

"Rin Tousaka, who, with her Servant Archer, teamed up with us, told me so many times that I shouldn't get attached or treat Saber like a person. Servants were temporary, transient existences; they appeared and vanished like lightning, powerful and brilliant and gone by the time you realized what you were seeing. But I didn't listen. Maybe it was because we were so similar, and maybe it was because we fulfilled something the other was missing, but we fell in love. In that two week span, I made a connection I've never had before or since."

Shirou opened his eyes, and the image vanished. The wood and plaster walls of Louise's room seemed so paltry by comparison.

"I'm not an ordinary person." He could admit as much. Even if he didn't think it was wrong, he could recognize that he wasn't normal. "Rin called me 'distorted,' once. My life is meaningless if I can't save people — friends, family, complete strangers, it doesn't matter. If I can save even a single person by sacrificing myself, I would do so and die with a smile. So when I tell you, Derflinger, that Saber occupies the place in my soul where my own selfishness and self-interest should exist, the throne upon which should be seated my desire to survive at all costs, that should tell you exactly why I can never love Louise or Kirche as intensely and completely as they deserve."

There was no response. Shirou turned away and decided that he'd spent enough time talking, so it was time to find Montmorency and get her to fix what she'd done to Louise. That meant finding Guiche, first.

"I'm going to find out how to reverse this love potion," Shirou explained as he headed towards the door. "Derf, I'm trusting you to look out for Louise while I'm gone."

When he reached the door, he undid the lock, and then his fingers curled around the brass knob and twisted. The door came open with a click and a quiet creak. As he was about to step out, however, Derf's voice asked a soft question from across the room.

"Is it really possible to love someone that much?"

Shirou felt his lips pull into a bittersweet smile.

"Yes."

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

It was still early in the morning. Most of the students and teachers were still in bed, asleep and dreaming, and it was only the dedicated, early risers who, now that classes had been cancelled for the foreseeable future, bothered to wake up any sooner than they had to. At this hour, the kitchen staff would only just have finished cooking breakfast, and the perfectly prepared tables would have been filled with food only moments ago.

That was where Guiche could be found. Whereas the Guiche from before that ill-fated mission to Albion might have still been tucked comfortably under his sheets, the Guiche who had begged Shirou for lessons in swordplay was, as he had been every morning for the last week, seated at the Second Years' table and enjoying a light, energizing meal to start off the day.

It put a lot of points in Shirou's respect column, to see such dedication. It was almost hard to imagine that the Guiche who had first challenged him to a duel and the Guiche who got up early to practice his swordsmanship were actually the same person.

Fortunately, as Shirou walked into the Alviss Dining Hall, Guiche was one of the very few students who were up and eating breakfast — though, unfortunately, Montmorency was nowhere to be seen — so there wasn't any congestion, and the few conversations were muted and quiet, on account of how tired their participants were. It meant that Shirou didn't attract much notice as he zeroed in on Guiche's spot and made a beeline for him.

To his credit, Guiche usually noticed Shirou's presence before Shirou even said anything, but that particular morning, Guiche must have still been drained from his elevation to Line class a few days previous (however that all worked — Shirou still didn't understand), because he didn't react at all until he was tapped on the shoulder.

"Hm?" Guiche turned his head, blinking, with his fork poised halfway to his mouth. "Oh. Sir Shirou. I was just eating breakfast; I'll be along shortly."

Shirou shook his head. "It's not that, Guiche. I…need a favor."

"A favor? Of course, Sir Shirou. Anything you need."

"I need you to help me find Montmorency."

Guiche's brow furrowed. "Montmorency?" he asked, confused. "But…I don't understand. Why would you need to see Montmorency, Sir Shirou?"

Shirou glanced around, but no one was paying them any mind. Most of the students were still engrossed in their own conversations, and up on the teachers' level, Headmaster Osmond was listening to an excited-looking Colbert, who was gesturing animatedly with his spoon.

Nonetheless, if there was one thing Shirou had learned at the Clock Tower, it was that you didn't air dirty laundry out in the open, not if you wanted it to stay a secret. Anything spoken of outside the privacy of your own room was fair game for blackmail or fuel for underhanded political maneuvers.

"…Not here," Shirou said at length. "This isn't something we should be talking about in the Dining Hall, where anyone can hear."

If anything, that seemed to make Guiche only more confused. "Sir Shirou —"

"Look, Guiche, I'll explain everything once we get there, but this is something that needs to be handled quickly and discreetly."

It would be better if no one saw Louise the way she was now, the girl who had thrown herself at Shirou in the middle of the night. That sort of thing would follow her around for the rest of her career here at the Academy, and she already had a horrible enough reputation. Adding this bit of drama to it wouldn't help at all.

Guiche's brow furrowed and he frowned, and then he gave a longing look at his plate and sighed. "I don't actually understand," Guiche said, "but I trust you, Sir Shirou. Please, follow me."

He set his fork down and stood up from his chair, then pushed it in and started towards the exit. Shirou followed him, somewhat sorry to have interrupted his breakfast, because it did look quite good and he had been pushing Guiche quite hard the past week, but more anxious to get the love potion situation resolved as quickly as possible.

Guiche led him out of the Alviss Dining Hall and back across the grounds to the Second Years' tower. Of course, Shirou thought, he had already figured that Montmorency was somewhere in that tower, but he had no idea which room it was or which floor she was on; that was why he'd gone to find Guiche in the first place.

Immediately after entering, Guiche turned and started up the stairs — so she wasn't on the bottom floor, then.

"How do these dorms work, now that I think about it?" Shirou asked, wondering why he'd never asked before.

"Ordinarily, students are grouped according to social standing and family ties," Guiche explained. "That's why Louise and I are on the same floor — despite the fact that her parents are the Duke and Duchess de la Vallière and my father is only a Count, my father's position as General puts us on roughly the same standing. Of course, I cannot fathom why Louise and Kirche would be roomed adjacent to each other — perhaps to help soothe the rivalry between their families? The Vallière and the Zerbst have been at each other's throats for…perhaps sixty years, now, at least."

"Maybe," Shirou agreed mildly.

"At any rate, Montmorency should normally be housed a floor below theirs, because her family might have dealings with the Water Spirit of Ragdorian Lake, but she is only a Countess."

Water Spirit? Shirou felt his brow furrow. This was new. They hadn't heard of Heroic Spirits, they didn't have a concept of what Divine Spirits were, and they were virtually nothing like the magi of his own world, but these people knew of and had dealings with an Elemental, of all things?

How backwards was this place?

"However, shortly before the beginning of this year, she applied for a room on the top floor so that she could brew her trademark perfumes without disturbing the other students." From his position, Shirou could faintly make out the proud smile that curled on Guiche's lips. "Truly, she is a very talented potioneer, my Montmorency."

"How talented, exactly?" Shirou asked shrewdly.

"A prodigy!" Guiche crowed. "Why, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if she were offered a research position at the Oriz Academy after graduation! Even the teachers have professed that there is nothing more she could possibly learn from them in the art of potion-making!"

So, he hadn't been wrong, then, to think that Louise's condition was caused by some potion of Montmorency's she'd ingested yesterday. What he still couldn't quite figure out was the why, though. Why would Montmorency try to dose Guiche with a love potion when, from what Shirou had seen, Guiche had dedicated himself entirely to her? Not once since that duel had he heard any rumors about Guiche's philandering.

Before Shirou even realized, they reached the top floor, and Guiche had led him to a wooden door, upon which was a plaque that said, "Montmorency Margarita La Fère de Montmorency." What a mouthful.

"Ah," Guiche said with a smile. "Here we are."

He knocked three times just below the plaque.

"Go away!" Montmorency's voice called through the door. "I'm busy!"

"Montmorency, it's Guiche," Guiche replied. "I need to speak with you! It's urgent!"

"Go away, Guiche!" was the response. "Come back later!"

Guiche looked over to Shirou for guidance, but Shirou only frowned and shook his head. They needed to take care of this now.

"I'm afraid it can't wait, Montmorency!" Guiche said, turning back to the door. "I need to speak with you immediately!"

There was a moment, a pause where Montmorency didn't reply at all, and Guiche knocked another time. "Montmor —"

Then, the click of the lock being undone, and the door swung open to reveal a very frazzled, very tired looking Montmorency. Her hair was a mess of frizzy curls that went every which way, as though she had been pulling at her hair over the course of several hours, and there were dark circles under her eyes from her obvious lack of sleep. She didn't have on even the slightest bit of makeup, which made her skin seem paler and the freckles across her nose stand out like lanterns in the dark.

It made her glare all the more venomous.

"I said, Guiche —"

But then, she caught sight of Shirou, and her expression fell into one of dismay.

"Oh," she said. "You know, then, don't you?"

Guiche blinked and looked back and forth between them. "Know?"

Shirou only gave her a grim nod. "I do."

"Know what? Sir Shirou? Montmorency?"

Montmorency dragged a hand over her face and sighed, then glanced quickly around the corridor, grabbed both Shirou and Guiche's wrists with one hand each, and pulled them into her room. Shirou let himself be dragged, and didn't protest, even when she shut the door and locked it behind them.

Guiche, on the other hand, was very much bewildered. "What —"

"It was supposed to be Guiche," Montmorency started off immediately. She stalked past them and over to a cauldron she had set up on what looked like a long desk. "He was the one who was supposed to drink that glass of water, not Vallière! But you had to pull him away at the last second and insist he clean his sword! I tried to stop her, I would have poured her a fresh glass if only she'd asked, but before I could do anything…!"

She grabbed at her hair and tilted her head back. "Aaaagh!"

She looked like she wanted to break something, and judging by the books strewn about all over the room — which, if it hadn't been in such disarray, might have looked something like a chemist's lab — she nearly had, several times.

"Do you have any idea," she went on, "how expensive those ingredients were? How many perfumes I had to sell for how many months just to save up all of the money I needed? A commoner could've lived off of that kind of money for five or six years! All of it, wasted, because Vallière had to be the one to drink that stupid glass of water! Was it so much to ask that it all went the way I wanted it to? Was it?"

"…Montmorency?" Guiche tried tentatively.

"And you!" she thundered, turning to Guiche. "You! It wouldn't have even been necessary in the first place if you'd just stopped running around with that…that…that Germanian tramp all the time and stayed here long enough to notice me! Is it so much to ask to have a little attention, Guiche? Is it so much to ask that my betrothed — and more than just that, my boyfriend — stay around the school long enough to…to take me on a date, once in a while, or hold my hand at meals? Just…a smile, every morning, on the way to classes, or a secret touch as we passed each other in the halls. Was it so much to ask?"

"Montmorency…"

"That's why you made the love potion," Shirou interjected, before she could start ranting again.

"Yes!" she admitted loudly. "Yes, I made the love potion, and I poured it in Guiche's drink! I did it! I did it because I just wanted, for once, for Guiche to look at me, to see me, to desire me, instead of someone else! I wanted to be the only one he looked at! I never meant…!"

She broke off, plopped down into a chair, and dropped her face into her hands. Shirou faintly heard her sniffle, and she let loose a shuddering sigh that might have concealed a sob.

"I never meant for Vallière to get caught up in all of this," she said quietly. "And since then, I've spent every minute trying to make an antidote before things got too far out of hand, but…"

"But?" Shirou prompted, trying to sound a little dangerous. It didn't take much effort.

Montmorency looked up from her hands and grimaced at him. Now that he gave her a closer look, there were dried tear tracks that went down her sallow cheeks, and from her bloodshot eyes to her pale skin, every inch of her face was etched with exhaustion.

"I don't have the ingredients I need," she admitted. "Most of them were easy to come by, and I've been trying all night to find a substitute, but no matter what I tried…"

She swept her gaze around the disheveled room, and Shirou understood what she said without saying. All of this was the proof of her failure.

"So what do you need, then?" he asked. "And how much does it cost?"

He wanted to be angry at her. He thought that maybe he should be, because she'd endangered Louise and he had seen other mages in the Clock Tower manipulate people in ways just as badly as she had tried to manipulate Guiche. Messing with people's minds was terrible, and he abhorred the idea of just what someone could force another to do with that sort of magic.

But he wasn't, not really. Looking at Montmorency, all he could see was a little girl who was insecure about her own attractiveness (at least, when compared to someone like Kirche) and had made a mistake, trying to get her boyfriend's attention, and now she was trying to fix it. Looking at it like that, it was not so different from how Sakura had been, once upon a time.

In that case, Shirou didn't think Louise would mind if he spent her allowance on whatever ingredient was needed for the antidote. He didn't think she'd be too angry, after the initial outrage wore off, about this whole mess, either.

But Montmorency only grimaced and shook her head.

"Can't get another one," she admitted. "It's a specialty item, rare and hard to find. If I wanted to get another one, I'd have to talk directly…to…the…"

She trailed off, sighed, and then ran her hand over her face.

"…I'm so stupid. I'm a Montmorency. If I needed to talk to the Water Spirit to get a Tear, then I could have just gone myself."

Shirou nodded. "How long will it take to get there?"

"Three or four days on horseback, depending upon the weather," she answered automatically. "I could — wait. Why are you asking?"

Shirou didn't answer directly. "Three or four days is too long," he said. "Right. Get dressed, pack whatever supplies you need, be ready to leave in about twenty minutes."

"Wait. What?"

"Sir Shirou," Guiche, who had been silent for the past several minutes, spoke up, "are we going to…?"

"You're going to stay here, help Montmorency get ready to leave, and talk out whatever started this," Shirou replied a little gruffly. "I'm going to talk to Kirche."

He really wasn't looking forward to it.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

If it had been absolutely necessary, piling Louise, Guiche, and Montmorency into Vimana wouldn't have been a very big issue, and it would get them where they needed to go almost instantly. For that matter, it wasn't that the idea hadn't crossed his mind nor that it wasn't a very tempting prospect. If the situation was direr, then it would have been his first choice, other consequences be damned.

However, Louise's life was not in danger. She was not suffering from a life-threatening wound, and it would not result in irreparable damage to take things a little bit slower than his instincts were telling him to. It would be perfectly fine if it took another hour or two to get to where they needed to go.

Furthermore, Noble Phantasms were trump cards. As he had chastised Henrietta, using them casually was a bad idea on multiple levels, and though Shirou was more liberal with the Noble Phantasms in his arsenal (the ones he Traced, at any rate) than most Heroic Spirits would be, he still didn't throw them around willy nilly. To use Vimana so openly was to risk the information of his secret weapon getting back to the enemy, and although there was some psychological warfare that could be waged through such casual use of a powerful Noble Phantasm, the risks and disadvantages were not outweighed by the possible advantages.

On the other hand, time was not on Shirou's side. He could keep Louise asleep for a day at most, if necessary, while the antidote to the love potion she'd accidentally taken was prepared, but beyond the dangers of keeping her under for a week while they traveled conventionally, any longer than a day would require things like a feeding tube and an IV drip to support her basic life functions. No matter how he looked at that, it simply wasn't feasible, and the idea struck him as wrong on so many levels that it didn't bear considering.

He could run, of course, and make it there in maybe an hour or so, but there were several problems with that: firstly, he had no idea where he was going, and more importantly, he couldn't carry more than one person at a time, so if he took Louise, he couldn't take Montmorency, who he needed to show him where to go and brew the antidote. Making more than one trip was possible, but also wasted more time and energy than he would have liked.

Then, with all of the facts considered, with conventional travel by horse unfeasible, running too time consuming, and Vimana an option of last resort, there was only one other method of getting where they needed within a reasonable timeframe: by Tabitha's dragon, Sylphid.

And who was Tabitha's best friend, who would not only know where Tabitha spent her spare time but also how to convince her to help?

Kirche.

A part of Shirou dreaded the conversation, but the rest of him understood the necessity of it and had accepted that it was simply the best option. There was no way of getting around that simple fact.

The things he sacrificed for his little master…

Fortunately, Shirou did know where Kirche's room was, so after leaving Guiche and Montmorency, he made his way back down the stairs to the floor that housed Louise and, thinking back to that first morning after his summoning, found the right door. Then, he lifted his hand up and knocked.

"Coming, coming!" Kirche's voice called. There was a moment of pause, then the sound of footsteps, and a few seconds later, the door swung open, and there was Kirche. The moment she saw him, she lit up with a grin.

"Darling!" she cried ecstatically. "Have you finally come to…"

But she trailed off — it must have been the severe expression on his face, Shirou decided — and frowned.

"What's wrong?" Kirche asked.

Shirou opened his mouth, ready to explain, then snapped it shut again when he remembered where they were. After all, not an hour ago, he'd waited to explain the situation to Guiche until they were away from ears which might pry; he shouldn't discuss something like this with Kirche out in the hallway.

It occurred to him, then, that the best way to start his explanation to Kirche and segue into asking for her help would be to show her.

"Come with me."

He turned back around without saying anything else, but something must have convinced Kirche to follow him, because as Shirou took the handful of steps back to Louise's door, he could feel Kirche's eyes on his back and her presence behind him. He led her back to Louise's room, opened the door, then stepped inside and aside and stood out of the way.

It took a moment, and another curious, confused look at his face, but Kirche did enter the room, and there, immediately, he saw her eyes alight onto Louise, who was still asleep and dreaming fevered dreams — about what, exactly, Shirou didn't want to imagine, although he had a disturbed inkling that they were decidedly not innocent. It was already awkward enough; he didn't need his brain conjuring images of where the last night might have gone if he hadn't realized that it wasn't Saber he'd been about to make love to.

Kirche was at Louise's side so swiftly that she almost seemed to have teleported, leaning over the bedspread and pressing her hand to Louise's forehead and cheeks the way a mother might her sick child.

"How long has she been like this?" Kirche asked, as serious as she'd been that night at the fireside.

"Since last night," Shirou answered.

"I'm no Water Mage, but she's burning up — a fever?"

"No. Potion."

"Potion?" Kirche parroted incredulously. "What kind —"

At that moment, Louise let out a long, drawn out moan and shifted in her bed. "Shirou," she whined, "please…"

Kirche's head spun around so swiftly that Shirou wouldn't have been surprised if she'd given herself whiplash.

"Love potion?"

Shirou nodded.

"A love potion."

"Why would you —" she caught herself and shook her head. "No, you wouldn't, probably wouldn't even know where to get one if you wanted to. Louise — wouldn't feed it to herself. Plus, she's too much of a goody two shoes to buy something as restricted as a love potion." Kirche huffed a short laugh. "So, it was an accident. The potion was meant for someone else."

Shirou nodded again and started to explain. "We —"

"But love potions are expensive," Kirche went on, ignoring him. "Difficult to brew, even for master potioneers, and heavily restricted. Small time nobles would be bankrupted trying to pay for one; no one here has a large enough allowance from mummy and daddy to go buying one fully made, but the ingredients are common enough, if somewhat rare, that anyone with enough spending money could buy them if they wanted to."

She hummed. "But again, difficult to brew. Even most of the teachers here aren't good enough to manage it. The only one who would have the skill to…brew…"

She blinked and focused back on him.

"Montmorency."

He nodded a third time.

"That little twit." Kirche huffed another short, mirthless laugh. "Which means this was meant for Guiche, right? Vallière just got in the way."

Looking at her, Shirou thought, and even watching the way she acted, you wouldn't think it, but Kirche was actually fairly smart.

"She poured him a glass of water after our lesson, yesterday," Shirou confirmed. "He would've drunk it, if I hadn't insisted he sharpen his sword, first. Louise sat down and asked for it before he finished."

"And the potion was in the glass of water," Kirche concluded. She sighed and glanced back at Louise. "Like I said, I'm no Water Mage. You'd need a Square class to handle something this potent. I'm not sure how you expect me to help, but I'll do what I can —"

"Sylphid," Shirou interrupted.

Kirche blinked. "What?"

"Montmorency can brew the antidote," he explained, "but the ingredient she needs has to come from the Ragdorian Lake, which is about three days' ride from here by horse. I can't keep Louise asleep for that long, and every moment she's awake, there's the risk that she might say or do something that she can't take back — especially here, in the school, where it could have irreversible consequences."

It didn't need to be restated that this entire situation could affect the rest of her school career if it got out, and the rumors alone could send her back down the spiral that she'd been in when he was first summoned. The scandal of a love potion being involved would inevitably lead to speculation about whether the Master-Familiar relationship was more than that, and then that would lead to Montmorency as the only one who could make them, and somehow, that would end up with the idea of him, Louise, Montmorency, and Guiche involved in a love square or some kind of Roman orgy…

There were so many layers that he probably didn't even see — Rin had always been better at navigating the political side of the Clock Tower than Shirou was.

"At this point, the only people who know about the Vimana Siesta gave me are those of us who went to Tarbes, the Princess, that Cardinal, and Wales," he went on.

"And — what did you call them — Noble Phantasms are trump cards. The fewer people know what they're capable of, the better," she caught on. "Right. And you need Sylphid, because she can fly you there in an hour or two, fly you back after the potion's finished, and no one will be any the wiser."

Shirou nodded. "Exactly."

"All right, then," Kirche agreed. "I'll go let Tabitha know — I'm sure she'll be willing to help."

"Thank you," Shirou said gratefully. "I'll meet you at the…Vestri Court in about ten minutes. The shade should provide some privacy."

"Okay."

Kirche stood and left, pausing only long enough at the door to glance at Louise's flushed, sweaty face and grimace.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

It took a few minutes and some fumbling, but Shirou did eventually get Louise dressed — including her underwear, which he somehow managed to slip on her without seeing anything compromising — before he picked her up, bridal style, and carried her out of the students' tower, picking up a quiet Guiche and Montmorency along the way. Thankfully, either his luck was holding or whatever passed for a god in this world was smiling upon him, because everyone else stayed in their own rooms and he made it down the stairs without being noticed or seen.

Unfortunately, the trip to the Vestri Court, where the shade might give them some privacy and make it easier to take off without being watched by prying eyes, required crossing most of the rest of the courtyard with an unconscious teenage girl held in his arms. On the other hand, despite how nice of a day it was, the courtyard was almost eerily empty: there was no one, not students or teachers, out and about on the lawn, so Shirou made it to the Vestri Court in the shadows of the central tower unnoticed and unmolested.

There, Kirche and Tabitha were waiting, with Sylphid sat behind them and cocking…her — yes, Kirche had called that dragon a "she" — head to the side curiously. Behind him, he heard Guiche and Montmorency break out into a furious whispered conversation, but he didn't pay any mind to it, so he had no idea what they were arguing about. Likely, Montmorency was having a bit of a fit about relying on Kirche, who she seemed to blame (rightly or wrongly) for Guiche's wandering and penchant for sudden, unexplained adventures.

Kirche, for her part, seemed to be doing her best to hold in…disgust, he supposed, although he wasn't sure exactly why. When her eyes slid past him and onto Montmorency, her upper lip curled, just for a second, into a sneer, but it was gone almost as quickly. By the time Shirou reached talking distance, her face had smoothed back over into a slight grimace, an expression of seriousness that, for one of the first times in Shirou's knowing her, was befitting of the situation.

"I told Osmond where we were going," Kirche informed him without preamble.

"You what?" Montmorency hissed, hackles rising.

"Relax, Frog Girl," Kirche replied, rather unkindly. "I told him that Louise had come down with a very serious illness, and the only potioneer skilled enough to cure her was you, and we didn't have time to waste by taking horses."

Her face split into a cold grin — it was not a nice smile. She had covered for Montmorency, weaving a plausible story that would quell any rumors if they should be missed, and she was quite aware, as Montmorency must have been as well, that she had just done Montmorency a huge favor. For the second time in less than an hour, Shirou found himself seeing a side of Kirche that he really hadn't, before.

Guiche came to his girlfriend's defense immediately. "Kirche —"

"I hate love potions," Kirche cut across him. She was looking very pointedly at Montmorency. "I'm Kirche the Ardent, and maybe you've forgotten what that means: I am the fire of gently smoldering passion. Love potions pervert passion. They take our feelings, our passions, and they twist them, turning them against themselves or forcing them to be something they're not. Love and hatred, lust and anger — a person's passions should be his own, not taken from a bottle. What's the point, otherwise? If it's not real, it has no worth."

Every word was solemn and serious. There was no flirtatious quality or exaggerated heat to her tone; she spoke as though each was a universal law, unambiguous and unalterable.

"What would you know?" Montmorency snapped. Of course she wouldn't take it lying down. "Someone like you, who has the attention of every male who's entered puberty, could never understand —"

"You're the one who doesn't understand. A man whose heart is already taken wouldn't give me more than a second glance. That's how it is. If you need a love potion to keep your man's attention, if you need to ensnare his heart by manipulating his passion, then you don't really deserve it in the first place."

"You —"

"In this sort of situation, I normally wouldn't have anything to do with you. In fact, I'd probably report you to Osmond, or maybe even the police." Kirche shrugged with casual indifference, as if to say that it couldn't be helped. "But, Darling asked me to help out, and you're the best potioneer in Tristain. You're the only one who can brew the antidote and fix Louise. Those're the only reasons I agreed not to see that you got exactly what you deserved."

Shirou glanced back at Guiche, who had deflated like a balloon, and Montmorency, who looked somewhere between angry and guilty, and though there was a vindictive feeling that seemed to come to him from somewhere else, he smothered it and tried to cut off any other argument before it could get started.

"We're wasting time," Shirou cut in. "The longer we spend talking about all of this, the more likely it becomes that we'll be noticed and have to answer some very uncomfortable questions. Let's go."

Kirche glanced at him, then shrugged. "You're right, of course, Darling," she said. "I just wanted to make it clear: I agreed to this for Louise's sake, not Montmorency's."

Having spoken her piece, she stepped aside, and behind her, Tabitha gave Sylphid a couple of firm pats. Sylphid, who was either very smart or very well trained (or perhaps gained her understanding through the familiar bond), crooned and dropped her body to the ground, offering up her bare back.

Shirou stepped forward, taking care not to jostle Louise too much as he shifted her in his arms, and as he passed by Tabitha, he murmured, "Thank you."

Tabitha gave him a little smile, so faint that he wasn't even sure it was there.

"Anytime," she rasped in her quiet voice, "for a friend."

One by one, their group ambled up onto Sylphid's back. Tabitha took to the front, draping her legs over either side of Sylphid's neck, then Shirou and Montmorency, who was hunched in on herself and clutching a bag of what must have been ingredients, and bringing up the rear were Kirche and Guiche, who was carrying what looked like a small cauldron. Of course; how else was Montmorency going to brew the antidote, if not with a cauldron?

Then, Sylphid spread her great, big wings, threw her body into what could only be described as a jump (which, through some miracle, didn't toss any of them off her back), flapped once, twice, three times to keep herself in the air, and like that, they were off.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

It took a little over three hours before the lake they were looking for came into view. It was three hours of mostly silence, where it seemed no one wanted to talk or otherwise start a conversation, and it meant that Shirou had three hours to consider all of the things that were happening and could go wrong.

It was a dark spiral, a downwards spin of asking himself what would happen if the antidote didn't work or made things worse, how he would deal with Louise if it took weeks or months to wear off, and even more frightening, whether or not there'd be any difference by the time it did. What if, after spending weeks or months convinced she was in love with him, that became her default state? If the potion was in her system long enough, enhancing whatever platonic affection had been built up since the summoning into full-on love, would the potion wearing off even mean anything, or would she stay that way?

It was a troubling thought. Last night, Louise had almost said something she couldn't take back, something which he was sure would have driven a wedge between them and forever changed the way he looked at her. Kirche's words were empty, hollow — when she professed to love him, it was easy to brush off. To hear the same thing from Louise's mouth, however…

No, it shouldn't need to be said. It wouldn't be possible to simply ignore it.

Fortunately, at that moment, Montmorency tore him away from his morbid thoughts by pointing at a lake that had just come into view and shouting, "That's it, right there! The Ragdorian Lake!"

Ahead of Shirou, Tabitha leaned forward over Sylphid's neck as though to whisper in her dragon's ear and patted her neck twice. Sylphid let out a keening acknowledgement, then banked hard and swerved into a shallow dive. Once again, Shirou thought that there must have been some sort of magic at work, because none of the g-forces or inertia that should have thrown them all off, or at least yanked uncomfortably on their stomachs, were present at all.

They landed with surprising grace, and the thunderous thud of several hundred pounds of sinuous dragon hitting the ground that Shirou expected never came; there was only a slight jerk on their shoulders as the laws of physics reasserted themselves and the soft whump of Sylphid's wings sweeping the grass outwards. In front of them, the dark blue lake was cast in gold by the rays of the sun, like a shimmering pane of glass.

Tabitha gave Sylphid a few affectionate pats on the neck, then flung herself off and onto the ground with a practiced, simple elegance. The others clambered down with significant less ease shortly thereafter, and once they had gotten off, Shirou carefully climbed down himself, making sure not to jostle Louise too much — he wasn't sure if the hypnosis would break that easily, but he wasn't going to chance it.

For a moment, everyone stilled and looked out across the surface of the waters, at the glittering waves that undulated gently and lapped at the shore. Even Shirou, who wasn't exactly the artsy sort who appreciated Van Gogh or Da Vinci and could comment intellectually on their techniques or whatever, had to admit that it was, indeed, a sight to behold.

He just wasn't really in the mood to appreciate it.

"So this is the Ragdorian Lake," Guiche muttered, more to himself than anyone else. "It really is…quite beautiful."

It seemed enough to anchor Kirche, who had also been staring out at the lake, because she turned to Montmorency, cocked her hip to one side, and stood there expectantly. "So?" she said. "What's this ingredient we need, and how do we get it?"

Montmorency startled. "Oh! Oh, right, yes, the ingredient…" She swiftly but carefully set everything she'd been carrying, all of the other ingredients she'd brought with her, down on the ground and dug into a pouch slung across her waist like a gunslinger's holster. "Hold on, I need to…"

With a final, brief exclamation of triumph, she pulled from the pouch a bright yellow frog pockmarked with black spots and gently lowered him to the grass. That was right, Shirou remembered. Hadn't Louise told him several weeks ago that Montmorency's familiar was a frog?

"Now, Robin, I need to contact an old friend of yours," she explained to her frog, crouched over it. She rummaged about in her pocket and pulled out a thin needle, extra sharp. "We're in a bit of a rush, so there's no time to observe the usual rituals. Just let me handle the negotiating, okay?"

The frog gave a surprisingly human nod of its head, and Montmorency used the needle to stab her index finger with a casualness and precision that spoke of familiarity. Then, she held her wounded finger over her familiar, Robin, and waited. The needle was so fine and the puncture so small that it took several long seconds before enough blood had pooled to form into a single, perfect drop of ruby red that landed on Robin's back and retained an unnaturally circular shape, undisturbed.

"Go, Robin," Montmorency said. "The Water Spirit knows who I am, so it should recognize you. Quickly, now, seek her out and let her know that I'm calling on her in the name of our alliance."

If it could have saluted, Shirou imagined that the little frog would have, but it turned with haste at its master's command and bounded off and into the lake, disappearing beneath the water with a soft, wet plop. Montmorency straightened and stood up, her eyes glued to the spot where her familiar had vanished. After a quick, muttered incantation, the prick on her finger sealed itself up as though it had never existed.

"The whims of spirits are hard to understand, but it should honor the oath it swore with my ancestors," she explained somewhat distantly. "Because Robin is my familiar, it should treat her as though I came to it myself."

"That's all well and good," Kirche said, "but what do we need the Water Spirit for? I thought we came here for an ingredient."

"We need a Tear of the Water Spirit," Montmorency answered impatiently. "That's the vital ingredient. I've tried substitutes, but none of them is good enough."

"So…what? We've got to tell it a sad story? Hit it a bunch of times? We just need to make this spirit cry?"

"Of course an ignorant fire mage would think something so silly," Montmorency sniffed, turning a disdainful look at Kirche. "Water mages call it a Tear, but even if it could cry, there's no way a simple mage has the power to make the Water Spirit do so. It's said to be over six-thousand years old, and it's been here since before the time of the Founder. But if you want to try it, Zerbst, I won't stop you. I just won't stop the Water Spirit from turning you into a fine red mist, either."

Kirche's hackles raised like an angry cat. "Hey —"

"Stop it, both of you," Shirou cut them off sternly. Good grief, it was like Luvia and Rin all over again. "You can settle your problems with each other later," preferably, when he wasn't around to get flashbacks of his teenage years, "we're not here for that. This is for Louise, remember?"

Kirche still looked like she wanted to say something, and her mouth was already opening to speak, but she glanced down at Louise, and the click of her teeth was almost audible as she bit her tongue — perhaps even literally — and turned her glare towards some shrubbery off to the side.

"Now, then." Shirou turned to Montmorency. "What, exactly, is this Tear of the Water Spirit we need?"

"It's…" Montmorency began, but she trailed off as her eyes turned back to the lake. "Oh," she said softly. "It's here."

The surface of the lake began to ripple, as though someone had dropped a large rock into it, and the waters near the shore began to churn and froth. Then —

Plop. Out came Montmorency's familiar. She blinked at them, cocked her sleek head to the side a little, and gave a loud croak.

"What?" Kirche muttered. "That's it? Where's the Water Spirit?"

"Shh!" Montmorency hushed her. Robin the frog bounded up and back into her master's hands, where Montmorency gave her an affectionate pat. "Thank you for bringing the Water Spirit, Robin."

"But it's not here!"

"Of course it is!" Montmorency hissed. She pointed out to the lake. "Look!"

Shirou followed the direction of her finger and saw only a patch of ordinary looking water that was shining with — wait, that wasn't sunlight.

"What the…?"

The surface of the lake boiled. It bubbled and frothed and churned, roiling like a pot about to overflow, and nearly ninety feet away from the shore, at the spot Montmorency had gestured to, the waters began to spin and rise like a waterspout, even as the sky remained clear. It was like watching a waterfall form in reverse.

Then, it began to take shape, wiggling about like a blob monster from one of those old horror movies. Something like limbs started to form, but had no distinct structure — no fingers or toes, no familiar musculature, no eyes or nose or mouth, just a vague glob with four long tendrils and a somewhat circular droplet at the top.

Shirou's grip on Louise tightened slightly. For the first time since hearing about this Water Spirit, he found himself nervous. At first, he hadn't given it much consideration, because the lack of other gods in Halkeginia's religion had made him categorize it as something akin to a fairy or an Elemental. He'd dealt with something like that before, knew he could handle it, because as powerful as they were, Dead Apostle Ancestors were also on that level, and he was strong enough to fight them.

But fairies wore humanity's imagination as a skin. They looked mostly human, elvish things with bodies that performed similarly to the real thing, similarly enough that they could breed with people, at least. Even at their most monstrous looking, they should still appear human enough that they possessed such things as organs and blood and flesh. Even though you needed special armanents to kill them, they still, at least, looked like they possessed normal biology.

And what was forming now had no such thing. No blood, no flesh, no organs, just a shell made of water constructed by a Water Spirit.

Then, what was even more inhuman than an Elemental? What was even more distant from normal biology than even magical creatures? What counted as natural phenomena personified, with bodies constructed of water, ice, wind, fire, or the earth itself?

Shirou took a step back and swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat. He wracked his brain for a defense, for some kind of weapon that would be strong enough to stop the Water Spirit if it decided to rampage, but even though several Noble Phantasms came to mind, he doubted any of them would be powerful enough. He had several Noble Phantasms that had slain things like Medusa, several which had claimed the lives of demigods and terrible monsters, but nothing on the same level as the Chains of Heaven possessed by Gilgamesh.

The answer? Gods. Divine Spirits. Kami, as they were called in Japan. The almighty transcendent beings who had the power to raise and raze entire civilizations.

If it came down to it, he doubted he could protect Louise from that.

The only thing stopping him from fleeing as swiftly as possible in the opposite direction was, strangely enough, Montmorency, who seemed unbothered and altogether as though this was not anything out of the ordinary. Did he trust her? On the whole, no, because it was her fault this situation had come about in the first place. However, did he trust her remorse and her desire to make up for her mistake? Did he trust that she was honest in her contrition, that she truly regretted what she had unintentionally done to Louise? Yes, he did. Therefore, he also trusted that she would not knowingly endanger the person she was trying to cure.

The niggling thought remained, though: did the mages of Halkeginia even understand what a Divine Spirit was?

The blob of water shifted, swirled, and began to take a more definite shape. The long tendrils streamlined into arms and legs, feminine and slender, and the ends split into palms and feet and fingers and toes. The middle compressed down into a torso with a narrow waist and hips, not quite womanly but too small to be male. What had to be the chest blossomed with a modest bust, and the globule of the head contorted into a face as yet more tendrils grew out in a crude approximation of hair.

It was a naked Montmorency. Fifteen feet tall, lacking in any of the details which would have revealed more than a swimsuit did, and shimmering like a jewel as sunlight refracted through her body, it was a perfect replica of the blonde girl standing right next to him.

That was when the power hit, a wave of pressure that washed over Shirou like the ocean's tide, and though it contained none of the malicious intent that he had felt slung about during the Grail War, the bloodlust and thirst for battle that the Heroic Spirits had radiated in combat, it pressed him down still. Shirou took an unsteady step back, and a bead of sweat curled down his cheek. Even flamboyant, unshakeable Kirche looked unnerved.

And yet, Montmorency stepped forward, unheeding of the pressure and seemingly unbothered by it, as if she didn't even realize it was there. She spread her arms out as though to welcome the Water Spirit and opened her mouth.

"I am Montmorency Margarita La Fère de Montmorency," she said confidently. There wasn't the slightest quaver to her voice. "A user of water, a member of the lineage of the old oath. It was my blood and my familiar which were used to contact you and remind you of our pact. If you remember, answer in the way and with words that we understand."

There was a moment of quiet, a silent moment where the Water Spirit's face cycled through nearly every emotion in the spectrum, as though it were trying them each out after a long time of going without. Then, settling on the same impassive expression it had worn upon first forming, it spoke.

"Human." The word echoed and reverberated with something otherworldly, like it was speaking through a filter or down a long tunnel. "I remember. I remember the liquid that flows through your body. The moon has changed fifty-two times since last we met."

Something like relief eased the tension in Montmorency's shoulders.

"I'm glad. Then, Water Spirit, I call upon you to remember our pact, for there is a favor which I need performed. I need a portion of your body."

The Water Spirit smiled, and for a moment, Shirou thought that the situation had been resolved. Then, it opened its mouth again and said, "I refuse."

This was obviously not the answer Montmorency was expecting, because her confidence and the surety in her posture evaporated like water in the desert. "O-oh," she said faintly, as though she were unsure of what to do next. "W-well. I-I guess, um… If there's nothing we c-can do…"

"What?" Kirche demanded. "That's it? All of this, and you're gonna give up just because it said no?"

Montmorency flushed. "W-well, it's not like I can force it or —"

"Sure you can," Kirche disagreed easily. "In fact — Hey, Water Spirit! Listen, we really need you to —"

Montmorency lunged at Kirche, slapping her hand over the other girl's mouth.

"What, are you crazy?!" she hissed. "If you offend the Water Spirit, there's no way we'd get the tear! Or be allowed to deal with it every again! You could ruin any chance at future negotiations if you insult it!"

"Get off of me!" Kirche grunted, tearing herself free of Montmorency's hand. "If you're not willing to be a little aggressive, then stand back and let someone else —"

"Being aggressive could get you killed, you backwards, ignorant barbarian —"

"I don't see you coming up with any better ideas for how to get that Tear, Frog Girl, so just —"

"Stop it, both of you," Shirou ordered a second time. Both girls froze and looked back at him, one of Kirche's thumbs hooked in Montmorency's mouth and Montmorency's hands just a few inches from wrapping around Kirche's throat. After a moment, they glanced at each other and sprang apart, shooting dirty looks back and forth.

"She started it," Montmorency mumbled. She was wiping at her mouth with the back of one hand.

"What are you, five?" Kirche hissed back.

Shirou ignored it and turned to her. "Kirche," he said, "I need you to hold Louise."

"What?" Kirche blinked. "Um, sure, Darling, but why —"

"Force won't work," Shirou explained. Carefully, gently, he lowered Louise, still miraculously asleep, into Kirche's arms. "Montmorency's attempt at negotiation failed."

"I'd like to see you do better…"

He made sure that Kirche had a good grip on Louise and wouldn't drop her before he let go, and though she threatened to buckle for a moment once she had to support all of Louise's weight, she adjusted well enough that he was satisfied. Then, he turned around and faced back to the Water Spirit.

"So, I'm going to give it a try."

There didn't seem to be any other option. For Louise, he told himself.

"What?" Montmorency squeaked. "Wh-what do you think you — I already told you, force won't work! It doesn't matter how strong you think you are, this is the Water Spirit!"

"I know," Shirou agreed grimly.

That seemed to throw her for a loop, because it took her a moment to respond.

"Th-then…what are you going to do?"

"Something probably equally as ill-advised." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Guiche."

Guiche, who had remained almost strangely silent the entire time, snapped to attention. "Y-yes!"

"If this goes wrong, I'm counting on you to get the others out of here as quickly as possible."

Guiche gaped. "S-Sir Shirou…"

"No arguments." He swept the rest of the group with a look. "That goes for everyone. At the first sign of trouble, get away as fast as you can and don't look back."

None of them looked like they wanted to, but after even Kirche and Tabitha gave grim nods of acknowledgement, Montmorency swallowed whatever argument she'd been about to give him and agreed — reluctantly, but still.

"Alright." Shirou took a breath and faced the Water Spirit again, which was watching them with an expression of curiosity. Given the strangeness of it, however, it was equally possible that it was just bored. "There's just one other thing, then. What you're about to see…don't tell anyone."

He didn't give them a chance to respond. He stepped forward immediately and kept going until he was at the waterline, so close that another step forward would put him in the lake itself. The Water Spirit still regarded him silently, expectantly, like it was waiting for him to do something interesting. Reactionary, rather than proactive.

Of course. It was a Water Spirit, after all.

Then, Shirou closed his eyes, let out a breath, and reached into himself.

"It hasn't been that long, but it seems as if I need you, again, you freeloader."

Light roused. The giant of light shivered and awoke in the back of Shirou's head. All of the empty spaces were filled.

"You should know what I need. I'm willing to give it to you for that sake, if nothing else."

Acceptance. Permission. Everything from this step forward was formality.

"Then, swap me."

The light pushed. Shirou pulled. In an instant, the sides of the board were switched.

"Indeed." Apeiron breathed. "For negotiation with a spirit, another spirit should naturally be used. Isn't that right?"

The King of Light walked forward and out onto the water as though it were dry land. The surface of the lake rippled beneath his feet, and each ripple carried with it a wave of golden radiance.

Brassy yellow eyes looked up at the Water Spirit. "In that case, will you treat with me, Water Spirit?"

The surface of the Water Spirit's body shivered, and its expression became blank again, like erasing all the lines on a sheet of paper.

"You are," it said slowly, "not human."

The surface of the lake quivered, as well, and for an instant, what was reflected on it was not Emiya Shirou, but a faceless man with glowing gold skin, a crown of sunfire above his head, and fractal wings made of streaks of silver. It was gone a fraction of a second later, like a trick of the light or a mirage in the desert.

"No," Apeiron agreed, "and yet, yes. Both and neither simultaneously. I do not quite understand it myself, but surely that woman must have known what she was doing."

It should go without saying: though their powers were different, Apeiron's knowledge was ultimately limited to Emiya Shirou's experience. Whatever else was separate about them, the one thing they must absolutely share was knowledge.

In that case, if Emiya Shirou did not understand the process that had created Apeiron, then Apeiron himself would not understand, either.

The only thing which was obvious was the person to blame for their situation: the Lady of the Lake. Their gratitude and curses were laid at her feet in equal measure, for if Kiritsugu was the father from whom they had inherited their ideals, then she was the mother who had given them the strength to pursue them.

"However," Apeiron said, smirking, "you are not exactly what everyone has been claiming, either, are you? Tell me, have you misled them deliberately, or are the people of this world simply so ignorant that they have not realized that they have been negotiating all these years with a fallen lake god?"

The blob of water sharing Montmorency's face tilted its approximation of a head to one side. "I have not fallen," it said simply. It might not even have understood the concept of a lie. "I am exactly the same as I have ever been, and I will continue to remain as such until this world withers. The only thing which has waned is my influence, for the kin who once inhabited this world alongside me have vanished and cannot hear my voice."

"I see." Apeiron closed his eyes for a brief moment. "Then…Pseudo Deified Natural Phenomenon? A god which is not quite a god…" He laughed. "Such a strange world! More than a simple Nature Spirit, but less than a Divine Spirit — where on the spectrum do you lie?"

The Water Spirit did not answer, and for a moment, Apeiron said nothing more, either. The sudden silence was so complete that each splash of the waves upon the shore was like rolling thunder.

"Regardless, whether you are a god or not, you still have something I need." He held out a hand. "A portion of your body is required to cure my master of a poison which has no other antidote. I cannot leave here without it."

"Your existence does not change my answer." The Water Spirit's voice was bland, and its face was blank, and it spoke like it was making a statement of fact, an inviolable truth of the universe, uncolored by emotion or opinion. "I refuse."

For the first time, Apeiron frowned. "And your refusal changes nothing. On this issue, there can be no negotiation, because there may be some things which cannot be traded away, but I will exhaust any and all other methods available to retrieve that vital ingredient. Your agreement is secondary to my goal."

The Water Spirit tilted its head again. "Negotiation?" it asked, testing the word on its facsimile of a tongue. "Trade. An exchange of goods, deeds, favors, or promises between two or more entities. An agreement or oath to exchange services. Yes, I find that agreeable."

Apeiron frowned. "What?"

"Here shall be our oath," the Water Spirit declared as though he hadn't spoken. "What it is you ask for shall be paid unto you, and in exchange, I will entrust you with a task: the retrieval of my stolen treasure."

"Stolen treasure?"

"Thirty cycles before the moon's crossing, this treasure was stolen by a human calling himself Cromwell and taken beyond my reach. My Ring of Andvari, embodying the Strength of Water — if you will give me your oath to retrieve it and return it here, then I shall gift you a portion of my body, as you request."

"Oath…?" Apeiron's brow furrowed. "A Geas…?"

The concept was familiar and widely known, especially in the Clock Tower. A Geas was a curse similar to the Command Spells used to compel Servants, only a Geas could be broken — the undoing of Cuchulainn was his being forced to break several Geasa in rapid succession, weakening him drastically. It was a thorny magecraft not often used in standard situations, a magical contract which bound the target and forced him to sacrifice part of his free will, even if it could only "bind" rather than "command."

It should go without saying, most of the deals and alliances between the most influential members of the Clock Tower were sealed with a Geas, provided one did not have enough leverage to otherwise compel the other's honesty.

And in exchange for the needed ingredient, the Tear of the Water Spirit, Apeiron — or perhaps more accurately, Emiya Shirou — would have to submit himself to such a thing and recover a stolen artifact.

The answer to that should be obvious.

"I accept."

The Water Spirit nodded. "Then prepare your vessel, and I will give you what you came for."

Apeiron turned halfway back to the shore, where the others were watching silently, and raised his voice. "You, girl!" Montmorency startled. "Yes, you. An empty vial — quick!"

She jumped, then turned to all of the ingredients and such she had brought with her and hurriedly searched through them. After a few seconds, her hand came away grasping a clear, glass vial — empty and unused, just as he'd demanded. Then, she cocked her arm back, narrowed her eyes, and threw it.

Apeiron caught it with contemptuous ease and turned back to the Water Spirit. He held out the vial — it was similar to a test tube, all narrow lines and curves — and waited.

The Water Spirit did not hesitate or flinch or in any way show a sign of uncertainty. It simply raised one of its hands, stuck a single finger into the vial all the way to the bottom knuckle, and when it pulled its hand back, the finger detached and sloshed down to the bottom, looking for all the world like ordinary water.

"Our accord is struck," it said.

Then, without ceremony or circumstance, its body fell apart and splashed back down into the surface of the lake, taking the overwhelming pressure of its presence with it. It had returned back to its home at the bottom.

Apeiron did not give its spot another glance. He turned around and walked back to the shore, careful not to spill the vial containing the ingredient that had taken so much effort to acquire.

"Here, girl," he thrust it back into Montmorency's hands. She jerked as though she'd been slapped and blinked up at him, bewildered. "After all this trouble, it had better work."

That seemed to be the cue for Guiche and Kirche, who both came to him with questions on their faces.

"Sir Shirou —"

"Darling —"

"Don't," Apeiron cut them off. "What you saw was something which you should not have seen. I will remind you that you promised to keep it a secret — remember that. Trust of this magnitude is not something which has been shown to many before you."

"But," Kirche began.

"Ya best do as he says, girl," Derflinger spoke solemnly. "This world yer tryin' ta enter — it's far beyond yer understanding. It's better for ya ta remain ignorant."

Kirche frowned, and her defiance was written all over her face, but she didn't press the issue. Guiche, who was watching them, remained silent, as well.

But that was undoubtedly not the end of it.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

Quietly, without pomp or circumstance, Shirou took back control of his body as Montmorency set up her workstation and started brewing. The others pitched in where and when they were needed — even Kirche, who lit the fire Montmorency brewed the antidote atop, did still light the fire, as much as she still seemed to dislike Montmorency and what she'd done.

Louise, meanwhile, had been laid out on the ground, with her cloak used as a blanket and Guiche's cloak as a pillow. When Shirou checked on her, she was still feverishly warm and muttering his name in her sleep, and the way and reason behind why she wriggled her thighs remained something that didn't bear thinking about. On the overall, however, her condition hadn't gotten any worse. It hadn't gotten better, either, but a small victory was a victory nonetheless.

"It's almost over," he promised her quietly.

"Hey, Partner." Derf chose that moment to whisper in his ear. "We need to talk."

Shirou grimaced and looked down at Louise, then over at the others, who were huddled around Montmorency as she brewed. Deciding that there really wasn't any reason to put it off — especially if it was about what he thought it was — he stood up and put some distance between them and himself.

Fifty feet was what he eventually settled on, with the rest of the group still in sight, but far enough away that they wouldn't hear what he said. He sat down on the grassy shore, then pulled Derf out and planted him blade-first into the ground.

"Alright, Derf," he said. "What is it you wanted to talk about?"

As if he didn't already know.

"Yer playin' a dangerous game, Partner," Derf told him gravely. "That thing just now — what was it?"

Exactly as he'd thought. There really wasn't any way of getting out of it, was there?

Shirou shrugged. "I don't know."

"Bullsh —"

"No, I really don't," Shirou cut across him. "I have guesses — that's it. Even Rin, the smartest magus I've ever known, couldn't give me anything more than that. The Spiritual Evocation Department might have had some idea, but there were too many risks involved in trying to ask them."

Like dissection. If they had had even the slightest inkling about what he had sitting in the back of his head, they would have done their absolute best to have him on a slab in their labs as quickly as possible.

"Okay, then. Yer best guess."

For a moment, Shirou didn't answer. He took in a deep breath through his nose, then let it out like a sigh. He considered lying for all of a second, but if a situation came up again, one where Apeiron actually had to show off his abilities, there was a good chance he could be caught out, and that would ruin any trust.

When it really came down to it, it was riskier to lie.

"A weak spirit," he said eventually. "A low class Elemental. He — no, that's the wrong way of thinking. It started off as something more like a machine, back when it first appeared."

"Machine?"

"A mechanism, a weapon with only one purpose and no room for anything else, not even an identity."

"And what was that?"

Shirou's lips curled into a smirk. "Protect mankind's future."

"What?" Derf asked, bewildered.

"The method or the means didn't matter. Who or what was sacrificed didn't matter. All that mattered was removing any threat to humanity with the least amount of lives lost, balancing the scales by sacrificing the lighter side." Shirou chuckled ruefully. "He was what I could have become, if I'd thrown everything else away."

"But that's not…"

"No," Shirou agreed. "What you saw today and those days in the shed, fixing Vimana, that was Apeiron. Like a child, he watched and observed and took into himself the things he saw through my eyes. By watching me and my interactions with other people, he learned what it was like to be human."

Or at least, that was his understanding of it. As he'd said, getting an in-depth analysis had been impossible, not without an absurdly high number of risks, and what he did know about Guardian Spirits (the most apt comparison for what Apeiron was) came mostly from notes Rin's family had taken over the years about the nature of Servants.

How it really worked, though? How the Lady of the Lake had pulled it off? How it was Shirou's human soul hadn't been consumed in the process? Those were all questions that he had no answers for. Maybe it was more like what Merlin had done to Saber — and who even really understood that, either?

Factor of the Fairy — it was almost funny, if he thought about it like that.

"Does that answer your question?"

"…is he a threat?"

"No," Shirou replied. "This is my body. He's just a guest. The only way for him to take control is for me to let him. Does that satisfy you?"

For a long moment, Derf remained silent. Shirou took that as acceptance — grudging, perhaps, but in the absence of further protest, he'd take it. He grasped Derf by the hilt and pulled him up out of the ground, then reached up and started to slide him into his sheath.

"Partner." Shirou stopped. "I won't pretend ta understand everythin' that's goin' on, here, or what it all means. Ya got some sorta spirit sharing yer headspace? Hell, I seen a lotta things, and that's definitely one o' the stranger ones, but it ain't in my nature ta worry about stuff like that. So I'll support ya. 'S long as this don't threaten the girly, I won't interfere over it."

"I see. Thank you, Derflinger."

Shirou slid Derf the rest of the way into his sheath, then walked back over and sat down next to Louise, again. The others had not noticed his trip, and in the few minutes he'd spent talking to Derf, nothing had changed. Louise was still just as feverish, and Montmorency showed no signs of slowing.

Shirou settled in and tried to think of something to pass the time that didn't involve worrying. After a moment, he pulled Saber's stuffed lion from his vault, and set about fixing the frays and rips it had gathered since last he'd repaired it.

It took the better part of another hour and a half, most of which Shirou spent waiting impotently for Montmorency to finish. Patience had been something he'd learned to cultivate in combat, but if he was entirely honest with himself, he was still as impatient and impulsive as he'd been in his youth, he was just better at handling it.

Finally, however, finally, just as Shirou was contemplating whether or not he should purposefully rip one of the lion's seams so that he would have something to fix, there was a cry of exultation from Montmorency.

"Is it done?" Guiche asked eagerly.

"Yes, yes," Montmorency snapped impatiently, "just allow me a moment…"

She turned away from the cauldron and started rummaging through the supplies she had brought with her. As Shirou watched, absentmindedly returning the stuffed lion to its place, she pulled up an empty flask and dipped it into the potion until it was filled. Then, she turned, slowly, and at a pace that was frankly agonizing to watch, she made her way towards him and Louise, careful not to spill a drop.

Behind her, Kirche and the others were getting to their feet, and Kirche was wobbling, grimacing, and shaking out her legs in such a way that she could only have been trying to get her blood flowing again. Shirou didn't envy her the pins and needles feeling she had to have had.

Once she'd reached him, Montmorency cautiously lowered herself back to the ground and held out the flask for him to take. That was when the smell hit him, a foul odor that made his nose wrinkle on reflex alone, but he swallowed his disgust and gingerly accepted it from her.

"This is it?" he asked.

"This should be enough, but she'll have to drink all of it," Montmorency answered. "If it isn't, there's still some over there, and if that doesn't do it, then nothing will."

Shirou grimaced, but acknowledged that she would know better than him — he didn't know thing one about potions. So, with a hesitant hope curling in his chest, he bit down on the fingertips of his other glove and pulled it off with his mouth.

The hypnosis he'd put Louise under could be disrupted by someone who knew the proper method, it was just that Shirou didn't know it. He'd only ever needed the hypnosis; every time he'd ever used it (successfully, that is), it'd been fine to let his target sleep it off. That was just the way it was: Shirou had only ever learned what he needed to and what Rin had insisted he couldn't do without.

There were, however, universal methods that should work on something as simple as this. After all, people's bodies rejected foreign Prana the same way antibodies fought disease.

Shirou flipped on his Magic Circuits, then pressed a bare finger to Louise's cheek and pushed the smallest amount of Prana he thought would do the trick into her body.

Like she'd been shocked, Louise let out a gasp and shot up, eyes wide, holding herself in a half-sitting position for just a second, then she slumped back down — right into Shirou's awaiting arm. She moaned and twisted, eyelids fluttering, and blinked blearily up into his face.

"Shirou?" Louise asked hopefully.

"Louise." Shirou leaned her a little forward and held the flask up to her face. He wasn't surprised when she recoiled, nose wrinkling. "Stop, Louise, no. I need you to drink this."

"Ugh — No!"

"Louise —"

"No! That's foul! I won't!"

"Louise, you're sick, you need —"

"I not sick!" she insisted. "I'm perfectly fine! The only thing I need is you, Shirou."

She looked up at him with teary eyes. "Shirou, I just need you to —"

No, no, that was getting dangerous, again. Shirou grimaced and cut her off. "Louise, please. Just drink it. Trust me."

She was quiet for a moment. Shirou was suddenly very much aware of the others' eyes on the two of them, watching with the same sort of anticipation he might have expected from a group of housewives sitting down to watch their favorite soaps. He tried to ignore them, because this, this was a battle, and he could not afford to lose it.

Finally, Louise looked up at him with a fragile expression, the infamous "puppy dog eyes" set to full bore, and asked, "If I drink it, will you kiss me?"

What? Shirou's brain recoiled at the thought of it. Of course he wouldn't. That was why they were here in the first place.

Even so, he found his mouth saying, "Yes, Louise. If you drink this, I'll kiss you."

Louise kept her eyes staring up at him for a moment longer, looking for any sign of insincerity, but she was decades too young to see through his poker face. Just when it was starting to get uncomfortable, she looked away, gingerly took the flask from him, and using her other hand to hold her nose closed, she downed the entire thing in one go.

For several long seconds, nothing seemed to happen, and Shirou worried that it hadn't worked, that she might try to force him to make good on his promise before he could convince her to drink another flask. Then, however, she hiccupped, blinked owlishly at empty space for a second or two, and slowly, with a look of dawning horror spreading across her face, she blushed a bright, cherry red.

"Louise?"

Her head whipped around to look at him, and she went, if possible, even redder. He imagined she was probably remembering what she had done last night, trying to seduce him, and then he had to force those images out of his head.

Dangerous, those were too dangerous.

"Oh, Founder," she whispered, and then she jolted to her feet and ran off into the nearest copse of trees at the fastest run he'd yet seen from her.

For another long moment, no one said anything, and there was an awkward sort of silence. Then, Kirche stood back up and said, "I'm going to go find her."

She left in the same direction and vanished into the trees.

Shirou sighed and allowed himself to relax. It was over, now, and everything could go back to normal — as normal as it ever got in this place, at least.

He looked back out over the lake, where the Water Spirit had appeared, where the afternoon sun was blazing down and casting the surface in a beautiful golden glow. There was nothing to say it was anything other than an ordinary day, not even the slightest ripple to betray what had happened just a scant few hours before. The lake, too, had returned to its everyday life.

Thank goodness.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

Once Louise and Kirche came back, they all discussed getting back to the Academy, and after a bit of discussion, they made the unanimous decision to stay out at the lake until after dusk. They would eat dinner out by the lakeside, enjoy a moment's rest for the rest of the afternoon, then go back to school.

At first, the others had wanted to head right back, but it was Kirche, surprisingly, who suggested staying out, before Shirou had ever had the chance to say anything. The argument she made was the one he had intended to make — that it might be a bit of a scandal if anyone saw them all coming back at the same time, so they should wait until everyone had eaten and gone back to their rooms before returning under the cover of darkness as though they had never left.

After agreeing on that plan, they all split up for a few hours. Guiche and Montmorency were down by the lakeside, making up (or making out — with a girl like Montmorency, either one was possible), and Kirche and Tabitha had taken a walk, with the explanation that Tabitha's mother lived in a cabin not too far away on the other side of the lake, leaving Shirou and Louise to set up the camp where they would eat dinner.

For a while, they worked in silence with a surprising degree of cooperative coordination, and Louise helped with a skill he now realized must have come from observing him in her dreams. Then, once they'd set up a firepit and caught dinner (fish, which Shirou, being Japanese, was intimately familiar with cooking), the sun had started to dip low in the sky, and there was nothing for them to do but sit and wait for the others to come back.

Long moments passed without a word. There was something that probably needed to be said, but Shirou didn't want to push the issue, not when she had just gotten over the love potion such a short time ago. Too, as he had learned from Rin, sometimes it was just better to let the other person start things; whenever he'd had those quiet moments with her, those times when she had shared with him some of the most intimate details of her thoughts and feelings, all he'd had to do was sit by her and wait.

Louise, as she seemed to with so many other traits, shared that with Rin.

"I'm sorry for not telling you," she said quietly.

"The dream cycle?"

Louise nodded. "At first, I thought they were just dreams. By the time I realized exactly what I was seeing…" She trailed off. "I guess…I didn't want it to stop. I was learning so much about you, about the things you've seen and done, good and bad… It was like one of my adventure novels coming to life, like a…a movie, right? It was like having a movie to watch every night, and I felt guilty for not telling you, but I thought, if I did, you might have a way to stop it, and I…"

She trailed off again, but he had a good idea of what she was trying to say. So much of getting to know Saber had been done in dreams, in seeing her triumphs and failures and learning how she'd lived her life. Maybe, if he'd had more time, they could have taken it slower, one little piece at a time, the way normal couples did, but the Grail War only lasted about two weeks. With so much of it spent fighting…

Except, he'd had plenty of time here, hadn't he? Shirou had been here for a month or two, now, and Louise had said that a familiar was expected to stay with his mage until one of them died. There was no reason why he couldn't have shared more of himself with her, with this girl he was going to be spending years guiding towards her future, only he hadn't. He'd shared only when he had to, using bits and pieces of his history only as teaching points and jealously guarding everything else.

He hadn't even realized he'd been doing it.

"I guess it's time to tell you," Shirou said at last. "No, now that you've seen so much through the dream cycle…I guess you've already seen the Grail War?"

"…Yes," Louise admitted. "Both times. It was…" She closed her eyes, as though to view the memories again. "…terrifying, and amazing, and beautiful, and heartbreaking, all at once."

"Then you've already seen how we fell in love. But you didn't see the memories I saw, did you? Of Saber's life?"

"No." Louise shook her head. "No, I didn't see those."

"I see. I'm glad." She shot him a confused glance. "To hear the story is one thing, but to have seen those memories…they weren't all happy or good. Some of the things I saw…I'd be happy if no one else did."

Those final moments of weakness, where Saber had shed tears and despaired… The confrontation with Lancelot in the Fourth Grail War… no, Shirou didn't want anyone else to see those terrible moments. He had already intruded upon such private events unintentionally; no one else had that right, either.

"What is the story, then? The legend of King Arthur."

Shirou laughed a little. "The legend got a lot of things wrong," he said. "But let's see…Well, they called King Arthur the 'King of Knights.' It wasn't because she was a king and a knight, but because she was so magnificent and so chivalrous a king that all knights could not help but swear fealty to her. In the Dark Ages of Britain at the dawn of the Age of Man, she was the bulwark against which invaders and would-be conquerors crashed and fell. She was born the daughter of the previous king, Uther Pendragon, and hidden away, because the people would not accept a girl as king.

"But the sex of Uther's heir had never mattered. It was the design of Merlin the Magician that she would be king, as the personification of the red dragon, no matter what, so she was raised to be a knight, and while she slept, Merlin taught her the path of kingship in her dreams. After Uther died, with no heir named, a test of kingship was set up — a sword, thrust into a stone, which was enchanted so that it could only be freed by the rightful king of Britain. When she pulled it from the stone, her body was blessed with agelessness, and the people of Britain hailed her as a holy child who would be always youthful, a boy who would never grow old and frail. Thus was born King Arthur, Britain's greatest king."

"But why her?" Louise asked. "Why did she have to be the one to become king?"

"Why not her?" Shirou asked back. "She was born and raised to be the king of Britain. Every moment of her life was spent in preparation, and every day from the moment she could walk, she dreamt of being king and saving her country. Selfish desires for personal peace and an easy life never entered the equation — all she ever wanted was to become king and save her people."

Louise gave him a look, as though some piece of a puzzle had just clicked into place, but when she didn't say anything else, Shirou kept going.

"She ruled for more than ten years and engaged in twelve great battles. During that time, the holy Sword of Selection, Caliburn, broke, and through Merlin's intervention, King Arthur received the greatest of holy swords, Excalibur, along with the sheath that healed all wounds and kept her eternally young, from the Lady of the Lake. Great knights, such as the chivalrous Sir Gawain and the famous Sir Lancelot, gathered around her and swore themselves in service to her. Their Round table is still spoken of around the world by people of all cultures."

"Round Table?"

"The Knights of the Round Table," Shirou explained. "In Camelot, King Arthur's kingdom, there was a circular table, one with neither a head nor a foot, around which her knights were seated. The voice of each knight was considered to have equal weight, and the idea of equality it represented meant that no one knight was considered of higher standing than the others, regardless of birth and social status. It was part of what made her such a successful king."

He paused for a moment to take a short breath. If he tried, he could still see that table and the knights gathered around it, bowing their heads in reverence to their king. The righteous Sir Gawain, fair haired and handsome; the solemn Sir Lancelot, with his long black hair and calm blue eyes; Sir Bedivere, effeminate but strong; the crass and boorish but loyal Sir Kay; Sir Tristan, Sir Yvain, and all the rest, putting their trust and faith in a child king with strong ideals and an unwavering determination.

"But King Arthur's rule was not perfect. During times of hardship, when there weren't enough resources to supply her army, she would cannibalize one village to ensure the health of Britain as a whole. As long as she was winning, as long as the enemies were driven away, the people didn't care. In fact, they praised her for it. But, inevitably, the whispers came. 'The king does not understand human feelings,' 'the king does not understand his people.' Spurred on by her traitorous sister, the people and even her own knights were turned against her, and a rebellion led by Sir Mordred culminated in the destruction of the kingdom she'd built and the death of nearly all her knights."

He closed his eyes and remembered the image of that final battle, of the final blows she and Mordred had dealt each other. He remembered the distraught face that had, at the last, begged only for acknowledgement. He remembered her solemn response, that Mordred had never had what it took to be king.

"On her deathbed, she asked the World for the chance to find the Holy Grail and wish for a better king to have taken up the Sword of Selection. Even in her last moments, she wanted only to save Britain. After that, she was summoned into the Holy Grail War, first into the Fourth Grail War, and then into the Fifth, where she was my Servant."

"And you fell in love."

Shirou grinned wryly. "We did," he agreed. "Despite what Rin kept telling me, I went and I fell in love with her, and somehow, I got her to fall in love with me, too. It was doomed from the start, but no matter what, no matter how much it hurts to think about how long it's been since I saw her, I can't regret it at all. When she left, she took everything of me with her. But in return, she left everything of herself with me."

"So…" Louise began. "What happened to her? After the Grail War?"

Shirou took in a deep breath and closed his eyes. He'd never seen the scene himself, but he could imagine how it must have gone, those last moments. He could imagine the expression of heartbreak on Bedivere's fair face as he was commanded to return Excalibur to the lake. He could almost see the peaceful expression on Saber's as she closed her eyes for the last time, having accepted that her path hadn't been wrong, even if there was trouble and hardship.

"Destroying the Grail broke her contract," he told her. "That moment…she turned to me and confessed her love as the sun rose behind her, and then, she vanished and returned to her deathbed. According to history, King Arthur died that day, attended to by her sole surviving knight, Sir Bedivere. But some people believe that she was carried away to Avalon, the Paradise of the Fairies, to heal her wounds and sleep until the day came that Britain needed her again. The 'Once and Future King,' as the story goes."

"And that's where you'll meet her again," Louise concluded quietly. "Avalon, the Ever-Distant Utopia, where Arturia Pendragon has gone to rest. Right?"

Shirou sighed. "One must wait endlessly and the other must search tirelessly…So you've even seen that much."

"…Can't help it," she said after a moment. "You've said it to yourself so many times, it's like you think the more times you say it, the faster it'll come true."

He chuckled wryly. "Maybe you're right," he admitted. "It's been almost fifty years, now. A lifetime. I don't even really remember what she looked like, anymore. What she sounded like. The warmth of her skin. Her smell. Her smile. Every day, I wake up with an emptiness inside of me that can't be filled."

And still, Shirou smiled. "That's why I'll keep going. I'll keep searching for it, that elusive utopia. It won't be easy. The road is a long one. But, if she's there, waiting for me, at the end of it, then I'll gladly walk it a thousand times."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hide a smile. "You're so corny," she said.

Together, they shared a quiet laugh, then lapsed into a moment of silence.

"It's almost difficult to imagine," she said at length, "loving someone that much. But then, you've never exactly been normal, have you?"

"If you've seen Rin, you'll know that you're not the first person to say that."

"No, I guess not." Another moment of silence passed. Then… "I don't want you to die, yet. I still need you. You're still my Servant. So, I may not have any Command Spells, but this is my one and only absolute order that you can't disobey: no dying on me, okay? Saber will just have to wait a little longer."

Everything in him said that Shirou couldn't make a promise like that. His life didn't have meaning unless he was saving someone, so if that required sacrificing his life, then he would gladly do so. With a smile, even.

But…

"As you say, Master."

He made it anyway, because Louise needed him most, right now.

Then, without turning around, he called out, "Are you guys just going to sit there watching, or are you going to come and help with dinner?"

The high pitched squeak Montmorency let out made it all worth it.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

CONTINUE?

[YES/NO]

Tousaka-sensei's Lecture Corner #10

"Welcome back to Tousaka-sensei's Lecture Corner!" Ilya cheered. "And also, welcome back, Tousaka-sensei!"

The crowd cheered as well, and the camera panned over to Rin, who smiled politely and pleasantly. "It's good to be back."

To the crowd, Ilya whispered, "She's finally stopped sulking about how she was killed off, so we can finally get back on track."

"What'd you say?!"

"I said that you've finally stopped sulking!"

"I wasn't sulking! I was just sick! Sick, I tell you!"

"That must've been some sickness!" Ilya retorted. "You were gone for a year! Don't try and pull that stuff about story time, either! We've already broken the fourth wall, so you can't pretend!"

"I — what — you!" Rin growled, rolling up her left sleeve with a glare. The blue lines of her magic crest began to glow. "I was sick, and anyone who says otherwise is a dirty, rotten liar! Understand? Or do I need to drive my point home?"

"Eep!" Ilya squeaked. "Eh-he-he-he…N-no, Tousaka-sensei, that's quite alright, I understand."

"Then say it."

"You were sick," Ilya repeated.

"And?"

"A-and anyone who says otherwise is a dirty, rotten liar!"

Suddenly, Rin smiled. "Good girl."

"Crazy Tsundere," someone coughed.

Rin spun around, glaring. "Oi, is that the same idiot who was offering to be target practice a while back? Because I'm perfectly willing to take up your offer!"

Silence. No one said anything.

"Good." She smiled again. "Then that means we can get on with today's lesson. It's something we really should have talked about before."

She turned around and pointed to the board: Nobles.

"Now, I'm sure you've probably figured a few things out just from reading, but we're here to clarify how a lot of it actually works. Halkeginian Nobles aren't the same as real world nobility, not precisely, and those are confusing enough already."

"Plebian," Ilya sniffed aristocratically. "Maybe a backwards Japanese like you doesn't get it, but a German princess like me —"

Rin turned towards Ilya with a pleasant smile and began reaching for her arm again. "I'm sorry, I must not have been paying you any attention. Were you saying something?"

For a long, tense moment, there was silence. Then…

"I-I'll be good," Ilya promised quietly.

"Alright. Back to what I was saying." Rin turned back to the audience. "So, at the basic level, anyone in Halkeginia who has magic is a Noble. That's all that's required. However, there's a difference between a Noble and the Nobility. Nobles can be anyone, as long as they have magic. The Nobility, however, are landed gentry. They're the ones with long lines dating back centuries or millennia, the kind with a strong magical bloodline that can be traced to some famous mage or other in history. In that respect, they're sort of like the Clock Tower."

"Or the Einzbern," Ilya muttered.

"Or the Einzbern," Rin agreed. "People like the Duke and Duchess de la Vallière, the Gramonts, the Montmorencies, and various Counts, Viscounts, Earls, Barons, Marquis, and so on, those are all part of the Nobility, the Peerage of Tristain, if you will. Actually, the ratio for Nobles to Nobility highly favors the Nobles in Tristain, because Tristain is an almost abysmally small country. For simplicity, because I can see this getting confusing, let's call them the Lesser and Greater Nobles. Lesser Nobles don't really have a name or lineage to call their own, so they're mostly penniless and have to do the harder jobs, like being healers or using their magic to help farmers. Greater Nobles have land and lineage and get those big, white collar jobs that influence the path of nations."

"But what happens to people like Louise?" Ilya said. "I mean, third daughters and fourth sons of those Greater Nobles? Inheritance laws usually favor eldest child, don't they? For that matter, what about families that only have daughters?"

"I was just about to get to that," Rin said. "Right. This is actually where Halkeginian Nobles and real world nobility intersect. See, most nobles only had one child, like modern day mages do, or two at most — that 'heir and a spare' mentality. For families with two or more children, however, then it became a problem. How do you take care of your children who won't inherit? Simple. Marriage."

"Marriage?" Ilya asked.

"Marriage," Rin nodded. "The younger son of one noble family marries the only daughter of another noble family — that's actually what's intended to happen between Guiche and Montmorency. Since it's mostly a patriarchal society, Guiche will become the head of the Montmorency family through Montmorency herself — geez, her parents should've been more creative. I said 'Montmorency' more times than I needed to that last sentence.

"Anyway, that's what'll happen with Éléonore, Louise's eldest sister, too, provided she can get someone to marry her."

"Unlikely," Ilya cackled. "She's a worse Tsundere than…"

"Than who?" Rin asked dangerously.

"Nevermind."

"Right. As I was saying, the reverse also happens. In a family with only daughters, like the de la Vallière, the two younger daughters will marry the eldest sons of other noble families, generally of equal or near equal status in the hierarchy — dukes marrying duchesses, that sort of thing. This way, everyone gets to maintain their cushy lifestyle, for the most part. Marrying for love is possible, but rarer than you might think."

"That's what affairs are for," Ilya interjected.

"Exactly."

"So, how does everyone stand, then? I mean, Louise is the daughter of a Duke, but what about everyone else?"

"That's the difficult thing. The Familiar of Zero canon isn't really clear on who is what in the peerage, although most of the Nobles who are named and have screentime are, actually, in the peerage, so mostly it's up to the author guy to determine. Right now, I think it was that Gramont and Montmorency are both Counts, so Guiche and Monmon are marrying laterally instead of vertically — in regards to the hierarchy, that is. Not everyone can be dukes and duchesses, after all."

"Wait. That's it? What about everyone else?"

"Who else? Zerbst is Germanian, so they're not relevant to the Tristainian peerage. Likewise for Tabitha, who's actually a Gallian princess. Osmond? No one knows, because he's just the headmaster of the Academy and doesn't have any mentioned family. Colbert? Again, no one knows. Geez, Yamaguchi wasn't very thorough in a lot of places, was he?"

"So is the author guy gonna figure all of this out?"

"Are you kidding? The peerage is landed gentry. Tristain is tiny. Trying to figure out how to split up the land of Tristain among potentially dozens of minor and major Nobles is a logistical nightmare, made worse by either Yamaguchi's inconsistent distances or mistakes in the fan translations. It's not going to happen."

"Darn. I'm sure there were some people who were really curious about that."

"Yeah? Well, too bad for them. I get a headache just trying to figure it out. It's better to leave it alone."

"And on that note, it's time to wrap up!" Ilya said brightly. She waved at the camera. "See you next time, when we'll be discussing…I don't know!"

"Maybe love potions?"

"Maybe."

Tousaka-sensei's Lecture Corner #10: End

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

To be continued

Do you like what you're reading? Do you want to show your appreciation, let me know exactly how much you enjoy my stories? Then please, consider supporting me on ( . com [slash] James_D_Fawkes), or even purchasing my first original story on Gumroad (gumroad . com [slash] l [slash] kQLbK OR gumroad . com [slash] l [slash] tzLma). With just 100 Patrons pledging $5 a month, it would be possible to make writing my fulltime job.

Anyway, I meant to have this out ages ago…and then Worm happened. Ugh. I feel terrible about that. Also, time seemed to fly — before I even knew it, it'd been two months, then three…

I guess there is a point where you have to admit that the box is actually a box and own up to writer's block. It's never a fun thing to do.

I'm glad this didn't stretch out for too many chapters. Frankly, this was one of those sections I didn't really want to do, but which the characters insisted had to happen.

Anywho, I'm mostly satisfied with how this turned out. No real action, but we got some world-building and some character development, which are two of my favorite things. Yay! Right?

As a last thing, I'm starting on a new project: A Simple Guide to Fiction Writing, which will hammer out some of the common mistakes and misconceptions I see in fanfiction as well as provide some advice about writing stories. It's currently up on my forum and also on Sufficient Velocity.

As a last, last thing, I'm going to try to cut down on ANs, so after this chapter, the only things you'll see at the bottom are the thing right down there and anything that's too important to leave out (like when I had to stress exactly how not like the Holy Grail War the classes for Drake and Perseus are).

As always, read, review, enjoy.