"Here you go, darling."

Shirou took the offered hot mug of tea with a grateful smile and set it on the porch floor next to him, careful not to disturb the two fox kits sleeping in between his legs as he did so. Steam wafted up from the cup, enticing him with its suggestions of heat and happiness, but he knew how these liquids lie. They would seduce you into attempting to partake in your beverage, and then they would burn your tongue in a sadistic outburst, laughing as you frantically tried to soothe the scar.

"I'm onto you..." he muttered, staring at the supposedly-innocent mug.

"Eh?"

Caster was giving him a bemused look as she sat down next to him.

"Nothing, don't worry about it," he assured her, shaking his head gently. She shrugged and moved as close to him as possible without disturbing the cubs, and leaned her head on his shoulder.

"Are you cold?" she asked, her tail coming around to press against his back.

"Not very," he replied, but at the same time allowed her tail to wrap around his upper chest.

"Please don't hesitate to use my tail as a comforter," she smiled easily, "and you're welcome to fluff it as much as you like."

Shirou meant to refuse, but his hands in turn refused to obey him, and soon he was running them through the soft fur. It was an action without thought. In fact, it removed all higher thought capacity from his head. For a few minutes, he genuinely blanked out, nothing but the soft snores of the fox kits providing sensory company.

Finally, a light gust of cold wind brought him out of the haze, and he drew her tail closer to him without thinking about it.

"My my," his Servant teased, "so aggressive."

"Cold," he corrected bluntly. He continued to hold onto the appendage with one arm while using the other to pick up the tea mug and bring it to his lips. He was disappointed to find that it had cooled down beyond even lukewarm, grumbling quietly as he took one small cold sip.

"This is why you don't wait so long," Caster said as she took the cup from him. She exhaled onto the mug, and he could see it begin to steam again. His jaw almost dropped as she held it back out.

"Why don't you just do that all the time?" he asked as he took it in his hands and sipped carefully. It was the perfect temperature. If he could do magecraft like that...

"Because overheating will kill the taste," she said. "I find that the tea leaves come through best if you heat it and then let it cool down naturally."

"Damn it," he muttered, his eyes moving back to the light snowfall beyond the porch.

"Why, were you thinking of cooking with that?" Laughter bubbled under her words with only the faintest restraint holding it back.

"...maybe." He looked to the side, abashed. That was what caused her to laugh, though she covered her mouth so that it wouldn't wake the kits. He huffed as she tried to keep her quiet, continuing to fluff her tail with one hand and lightly petting one of the pups, scratching at their head.

He sniffed, and a snowflake brushed his nose, making his nose itch and causing him to chamber a sneeze.

Crap.

It came very close to release, and he held his nose against his elbow to muffle it down as much as possible. Unfortunately, it disappeared without much fanfare, and the tension was left unresolved. He sighed and sniffed again.

"If you're getting sick, I know of some nice herbal remedies..."

He shook his head.

"I never get sick," he said. "Not like most people, at least."

"You're very lucky, then." She leaned a little more into him. "When I was alive, people getting sick was either the work of the kami, or just a simple death sentence. Herbal remedies were about all we had..."

She sighed.

"And prayers too, I suppose. Though what good's a prayer if—"

The way she stopped the sentence so abruptly made him look at her, but she wasn't even turned for him to see her eyes.

"If what?" He prompted.

"Nothing," she said quietly. "Don't worry about it."

Emotional Intelligence, though a difficult but interesting read, gave him absolutely no help on how to actually understand others better, least of all the complex mindset of his Servant. He understood that, despite how intimate Caster was being in trying to integrate so deeply into his life, she had a lot of things to hide. She did not like to talk about her history. She liked to brush off or deflect those questions with a smile, perhaps a little flirting. He wasn't really good at reading people, but even he got the message.

Don't cross this line.

Perhaps he could add a 'yet' there. But he didn't want to push her beyond what she was comfortable with. He just allowed himself to enjoy her affections. Normally, that would make him very uncomfortable, because someone like him didn't deserve to be attended to like she did. But it seemed to him like she needed this... like if she threw herself as hard as she could into attending him, she could feel okay.

This... felt like the path to saving her.

"Okay," he replied, and left it at that.

Once more they were left to watch the snowfall in silence, apart from the small sips he took from his tea. It was refreshing, rejuvenating his weary bones. It felt like some kind of... passive Reinforcement. No, wait, that was just his imagination. It really was just some nice tea.

Draining the mug, he placed it aside and rested his hand on his knee. He felt her hand slide onto his, and she interlaced her fingers between his own. He decided not to make a note of it, letting her take what she needed from him. He certainly didn't mind the softness of her hand, or the warmth of her skin. Her tail lightly rested across his shoulders like a scarf, and he found it far too easy to let his head fall to one side and rest. But he chose to stay awake.

"What do you wish for?" he asked.

"On the Grail, you mean?" She turned and tilted her head, a bit of weariness showing on her face.

"No," he said, "In general. You were... you were a person once, right?"

"Why, Master," mock offense filled her voice, "are you saying that your wife currently isn't a person?"

"No, no, that's not what I meant!" He scrambled to pull his hand away to surrender physically as well as verbally, but she latched onto it further and pulled him towards her, laughing. The fox kits on his lap snorted and huffed awake, complaining at the excitement. With one hand she pet each of them in turn, cooing softly.

"I know," she said after having comforted the last one. "You really just make it too easy to tease you, darling~."

He felt his ears steaming and his cheeks flush with embarrassment.

"I'm just trying to ask an honest question here..." he mumbled.

"Mmm." She looked out to the horizon, the dimming light of the sunset painting the sky with thick strands of purple and orange, and then released what felt like decades of weariness out with a sigh. "What do you think it is?"

Shirou's first impulse was to say that she clearly needed a partner in life she could latch onto, but that thought did not stay with him for long. It was too obvious, and if he spit that out... it would feel insulting to her somehow.

He followed her gaze out to the sunset.

"Do you want to be real again?"

Her smile aged in a flash, and her hand let go of his. He felt a little colder without it.

"You're smarter than you look," she said offhandedly.

"I'm going to choose not to be offended by that," he replied in good humor, but wasn't responded to in kind. A silence hung in the air, and suddenly Shirou wished he had some windchimes or another provider of ambient sound to help fill the space.

"Incarnation," she murmured, the words flowing through her lips like a small breeze. "It's not complicated, so I hope that makes it easier to come true. A Heroic Spirit is... something like being halfway between dream and reality, you know?"

She started to turn toward him, but stopped mid movement, keeping her hands in her lap.

"That first moment you have after waking up from a pleasant dream, still thinking it's true," she continued, "like the world is covered in a veil of fantasy. Nothing that I do is real or permanent. I get to live again for a few weeks at best, and then nothing more. I..."

Her voice trailed off. He gave her time to recover her thoughts. The fox kits awoke once more, quietly getting up and nudging at her thighs. She absently pet them.

"I have always felt more spiritual than heroic," she said after a time that they spent staring at the snowfall. "I did some things I'm ashamed of, some things that left me... well, I find myself wanting to try again. I want another chance, and this time I want to not screw it all up."

"An all-encompassing guilt," he muttered as waves of memory washed over him, "something you can't ever let go of."

She huffed and leaned on his shoulder again, letting her head rest on his collarbone. He hoped it was comfortable for her.

"You're not using magecraft to read my thoughts, are you?" she said with the lightest traces of jest in her voice.

"Even if I could," he replied, instinctually wrapping an arm around her shoulders, "I wouldn't."

"Mm."

He let the easy silence fall down onto them. He didn't want to push her beyond where she was emotionally comfortable.

"There was someone else before you," she said. "A woman, no, really a girl. She was around your age. She didn't talk much, but somehow I could always read her thoughts just from her facial expressions. She..." A shuddering breath. "She accepted me. It's hard to explain. I didn't have to... try around her. It all came so naturally, supporting her and fighting for her and... l-loving her."

She unwrapped herself from him and placed her hands on her knees.

"She's gone now," she whispered. "In the end I couldn't do anything, and now she's gone. Like another dream, like every other hope and wish I ever had, she's gone. I don't even know if those memories were real. Do you know what that's like, Shirou?"

When her gaze met his, he thought he could see the wounds on her heart through her eyes.

"I can't even trust myself," she continued. "I can't even be certain if this Grail War is real, or if it's just another simulation, or if it's the dream of a sleeping god, or... just words on a page for someone to read."

Her small chuckle had no humor in it.

"Wouldn't that be funny?" She leaned her forehead on her hands, her voice becoming more and more choked. This was becoming painful to watch. "Wouldn't it be hilarious to just be characters in a story that a few people read? Not even a famous book that people pass around and discuss for decades, but a tiny transient literary moment that comes to the surface of the sea just long enough for a trivial amount of people to read before sinking again? Ha... ha..."

Her forced attempts at laughing were quickly turning into sobs.

"I just want to be real..." she whispered brokenly. "I just want to mean something again..."

He couldn't take it anymore. He wrapped his arms around her as tightly as he could without becoming painful and held her.

"You mean something to me," he said as he ran his hands through her hair. "You mean a lot to me. I don't know or care about whether we're real. That doesn't matter to me. As long as I can save just one more person, whether they're real or not, then I'm... fulfilling myself."

He could feel the heat of her body, the brushing of her skin against his. She turned around in his grasp, her eyes filled with tears, and cried as she pressed her face into his shoulder. He continued running his hands through her hair, and couldn't help but notice that despite how emotional she had become, the strands had not become tangled or anything else but perfection.

Unreal.

A minute passed, then two, and then Shirou had been holding a crying woman until the sun went down. She was whispering things into her sob that he couldn't hear, though the occasional "I'm sorry" would float up to him, and he would always rub her back and tell her "It's okay." That was all he could do.

I feel so useless.

She calmed down gradually. He wasn't sure whether she wanted to escape his hold or stay inside, but she hadn't made any indication of wanting to leave. Her arms had, at some point, moved from gripping onto his shirt to wrapping around his chest. She hadn't stopped, and so he assumed she wanted to stay there.

"You're an idiot," she said quietly.

"What did I do this time?" he replied in the same tone.

"This is the part where you lean back, and then our eyes lock, and then we kiss."

He definitely felt his cheeks flare up.

"Uh, well, I didn't really think about that?"

"It's never about romance with you, is it?" She let out the first natural laugh he had heard from her in a while and leaned back, wiping at her eyes. He let her go and she easily slipped off of him and got up, wiping at her kimono. "You did this because you wanted to help me, didn't you?"

"Of course," he replied instantly, a little puzzled. "Why else would I have?"

Her smile lit up her entire face, and it relieved Shirou to see it come back.

"Like I said," she started to walk back inside, "it's never about romance with you. I'll start working on dinner."

As the door closed behind her, a furry projectile hit Shirou straight in the nose.

"Ow! Why?!"

The offending fox kit just huffed at him, and a certain kind of frustration was communicated in that single sound.

I knew this chapter would work as a catalyst for her. I just knew it. Well, all the quartz I dumped in probably helped too. Anyway, I've described the other Tamamo chapters as being cathartic for me personally, but I think this one was a catharsis for her. I think she needed it. She's not all fluff and games, you know.

Thanks again to the Loresingers: Aberron, TungstenCat, Exstarsis, Katkiller-V, and KentaKazami. I've recommended all of their works in the past, and I will continue to do so. Aberron published a little while ago some kind of Pseudo-Servant War AU called Pseudo Servant Madness. I think the title says it all. Go check it out.

Your ending theme for this chapter is Despair by Yasuharu Takanashi.

Thanks for reading.