Disclaimer: I do not own the Fate franchise it belongs to Kinoko Nasu and Type-Moon.
Everything and Nothing
Chapter 6
Sakura pulled the covers up around Rin's shoulders, neatly tucking the young woman into the spare bed in her apartment's guest room. Rin mumbled unintelligibly in her sleep, briefly fidgeting before quieting down. Sakura quietly regarded her for a moment, her eyes flickering as a glass filled with poison came to mind.
"…nothing…" she thought in silence. "…and everything…"
Then briefly closing her eyes, Sakura turned and left the guest room, quietly closing the door behind her. Making her way back to the living room, she raised an eyebrow at the sight of Little Rin on the couch, hugging her legs to herself. Even without their familiar's link, Sakura knew her sister well enough that something was bugging her, and badly at that.
"What's wrong?" Sakura asked.
"…sorry." Little Rin mumbled.
"Huh?" Sakura said in surprise.
"I'm sorry." Little Rin said louder.
"What for?" Sakura asked, looking and sounding confused.
"For being such a bad big sister!" Little Rin finally exploded. "Even back then…I didn't know…didn't notice…you were feeling so left out. I was just too…too full of myself! Too selfish…too happy being the only one Tokiomi taught magic to, too happy being the only one he ever praised, too happy being the one Aoi kept spoiling…spoiling…yes, I'm such a spoiled brat."
"That's not true…" Sakura began, stepping closer only to stop dead as Little Rin burst out.
"Yes, it's true!" she shouted, irises shifting to red and causing temperatures around them to drop. Even the air seemed to pulse around her, billowing outward with enough force to shake the furniture, and even causing silent alarms to go off in Sakura's mind from both her bounded fields and her own personal defenses.
If it wasn't Little Rin behind them, they'd already have triggered, panes of sundered reality harder than diamond shielding her from harm, and folded space like unreal blades able to shear through battleship armor striking with unerring aim.
"It's true…and you know it." Little Rin said in a calmer and softer voice, seeming to shrink on herself. "Just look at her…my other self…the kind of person I'd have grown up into. If…if you hadn't killed me back then…you'd be food…a nest, even, for worms…nothing more than a slave to someone as disgusting as that Shinji Matou…and I'd have done nothing about it. Just pretended everything was alright…and in the end, I'd even try to kill you…"
Little Rin closed her eyes and bowed her head. "You were right to kill me." She finally said. "Everything's better this way."
Sakura stared at her sister for a long moment, and then without hesitation, walked up to her, then sitting down next to her, pulled Little Rin into a tight hug. Little Rin hugged her back, soundlessly leaning against her sister as Sakura rubbed her on the back.
"…all you said is true." Sakura admitted. "But what's also true was that at the end…no matter how twisted master…no…not master…Tokiomi or that wretch Kirei made you…you still couldn't bring yourself to kill me. And most importantly…even if you didn't try and find out the truth before…once you found out…you could only feel sorry for not finding out sooner…for not being able to help when it could have mattered the most…but…"
Sakura paused, and hugged her sister tighter. "…there's nothing wrong with simply being sorry." She said. "It's certainly more than monsters are able to do."
"I wish we had different parents." Little Rin murmured.
"If only we could choose." Sakura agreed also in a whisper. "If we did, we wouldn't choose those two, would we?"
"No…we wouldn't." Little Rin agreed, closing her eyes and letting Sakura lull her to sleep.
Rin's eyes scrunched up as she felt something tickle at her nose, and then slowly but surely, consciousness reasserted itself as she rose from sleep back to the waking world. She rolled from her side onto her back, looking up dazed at an unfamiliar ceiling. For a while, she just laid there, wondering where she was and what was happening, until the smell of cooking bacon finally caused her stomach to grumble in hunger.
Oh…that's right…with everything that had happened last night…I went to sleep without eating dinner…
Rin sighed as she forced herself to sit on the bed's age, arms crossed and rubbing at her eyes with her fingers. As she did so, she remembered the events of last night, from the abduction attempt at her rented townhouse, to coming to Sakura's apartment, then finding out the truth of her counterpart's supposed murder.
And then her own confession, of how hollow her pride and dignity actually was, how all her achievements and status had been paid for with a decade's worth of rape and torture for her sister.
If it hadn't been for Shirou…Illya…even Rider…
…she wouldn't be here right now.
Rin also remembered her counterpart's silence, as well the Sakura of this timeline…
…silence…but not rejection…
…sympathy…comfort…
Rin's stomach growled again, and with another sigh, she got to her feet, and stretched her limbs. Normally, this would be the time when she'd change into something more appropriate before going out on a morning run, but after last night…
…she'd have to reassess her routine.
Gunshots from the living room had her blinking…and then dashing out of the guest room, burst into the living room, where she stopped to a halt, as more gunshots came from the TV. There was her counterpart, sitting on the ground in front of the TV, playing hard with her tongue sticking from her mouth. Gunshots rang out from the speakers, along with inhuman screams, as what looked like a man shot a shotgun at what looked like a group of monks.
Well, they were dressed like monks. Most looked like zombies of some kind, and one of them…instead of a head, it had a giant centipede sticking out of its neck.
That…brought back more than a bit of bad memories from the past.
Then Little Rin noticed her, and then pausing the game, smiled up at her. "Good morning!" she greeted Rin.
"Ah…good morning." Rin returned the greeting before giving a cough and then a smile. "So…what's that game you're playing?"
"Resident Evil," Little Rin replied, before blinking and then pausing in thought. Then she held up her hand, thumb folded to show only four fingers. "Resident Evil 4!"
"Ah…so what's the story?" Rin asked.
"You play as Special Agent Leon Kennedy from the USA." Little Rin cheerfully explained. "You go to Europe where you rescue the President's daughter from a cult, Los Illuminados. Peasants infected with a parasite called Las Plagas make up the cult…"
"Definitely too much like the Matou…" Rin glumly thought.
"…mercenaries working for Wesker who want to get a sample of the parasite." Little Rin continued to explain. "You also later meet Leon's ex-girlfriend, Ada Wong, who works for a secret society of some kind, and who also wants a Las Plagas sample."
"Ah…I take it you've played this game before?" Rin asked.
Little Rin nodded before grinning. "It's my favorite!" she said.
"I see."
Sakura poked her head out of the dining room. "Oh good, you're awake." She said, walking into full view, wiping her hands with a towel. "I was just about to wake you. What do you want for breakfast? Coffee? Tea? Orange juice? Or just water?"
"Tea is fine." Rin said, before blinking and focusing on Sakura. In hindsight, this was the first time she'd seen her sister not in business clothes. A long-sleeved blouse of white over dark leggings and a skirt, along with a matching ribbon at her collar.
A bit…monochromatic, but strangely enough, it suited her.
"What's for breakfast, anyway?" she asked no one in particular.
Little Rin shrugged. "Bacon, eggs, toast, fruit, and cereals for me." She said.
Rin raised an eyebrow at that. For Little Rin to be able to actually eat, her…manifestation, was incredibly-advanced. Not to mention expensive in terms of prana, though that was the least surprising fact of this situation.
Sakura's potential was equal to her own, after all. And Rin knew quite well just how much of a powerhouse she was, easily equal to Luvia and several other scions of equally-distinguished lineages despite Tohsaka's relative youth. Outside of the eldest Clock Tower lords, only Illya had ever managed to surpass her output.
Well, my Sakura could, but that's only because of Matou's unnatural modifications.
This Sakura was never subjected to any of that, so her output should be equal to mine.
No…greater…she has my circuits in her crest, after all.
…
…
…
…
…
I guess…I don't really mind that. If it helps keep her safe…gives her more of a chance to shine as bright as she can…to fly as high as she wants…I'm happy to help…
Rin blinked and then looked down as her counterpart tugged at her trousers. Little Rin looked up, and smiled. "Shall we have breakfast?" she asked.
Rin smiled back. "Yes," she said with a nod. "Let's."
"So what's the plan for today?" Rin asked over the breakfast table.
"We need to report what happened last night." Sakura said. "Cleanup and coverup should already be done, the Clock Tower has dedicated teams for that, that kind of trouble happens all the time, after all."
Rin nodded in agreement. She'd never been a target before, but her Luvia had been at least once, and in a grocery store, no less. By the time the battle ended, and the assassins reduced to smears on the ground, the grocery store looked like something out of a WWII movie.
Luvia stalked out of the field tent with a face like a thundercloud, clothes and hair soaked through with milk. Apparently, she'd been thrown into a stack of milk bottles, and while reinforcement meant mere broken glass was nothing to her, that didn't mean spilled milk would just wash over her.
Rin winced at the sight, knowing Luvia's temper would be frayed to the breaking point. Something two whispering idiots didn't seem to realize, ending with one idiot knocked to the ground with a broken nose after Luvia had head-butted him while passing by.
Yeah…no matter how pressing, their business could wait until Luvia had calmed down first.
"Not that the Clock Tower would actually do anything about it, of course." Rin predicted.
"The Clock Tower prefers to not get involved in disputes and feuds between magi families." Sakura said with a nod. "Unless all parties concerned agree for the Clock Tower to mediate, of course, and which is a rare enough thing, when all is said and done."
"That," Rin said with a nod of her own. "Or a Clock Tower lord decides to personally intervene."
"Yes."
"I'm guessing nothing will come of any of our reports," Rin said. "If what you implied last night about how this has been going on for a while now means anything."
"Icecolle and Forvedge settled with the Glascheits years ago." Sakura said.
Rin raised an eyebrow at that. "And…" she delicately began while taking a fresh serving of bacon. "They didn't offer to do likewise with Tohsaka?"
Sakura didn't answer at once, instead busying herself with toast and a fried egg. After a few moments, though, she gave an answer.
"Forvedge was willing to settle," Sakura admitted, before narrowing her eyes. "But Icecolle took the chance to try and have me killed. Rin burned most of them alive, and the ones that managed to get past her I tore to pieces."
"Mercy!"
Sakura ignored the Forvedge's plea for mercy, and gestured sharply. The concentric mandalas simultaneously counter-rotated while stabbing forward, folded space drilling through and tearing the Forvedge's torso apart.
A flash of light behind her drew Sakura's attention, and she turned to spot Little Rin standing on a smoking patch of ground, an Icecolle cowering not far from her.
"I-impossible…" the man gasped. "…this is impossible…t-t-those were my…"
Little Rin didn't bother with words, instead snapping her fingers. A blast of fire roasted the Icecolle, followed by another as Little Rin snapped her fingers a second time, then a third time, and so on and so forth, each snap accompanied by an agonized scream and a blast of fire. By this point, the Icecolle was just a blackened figure wreathed in flames, human fat and oil burning as meat sizzled and bone cracked.
And there was that smell too…like roasted pork…
Little Rin snapped her fingers a tenth time, and the fire blast was three times as big as before, and much hotter too. By the time it dissipated, the air around her was shimmering like from an inferno, and of the Icecolle, only a sticky patch of black littered with glowing embers and bubbling oil was left.
"You alright?" Sakura asked. "He tried to curse you, didn't he?"
Little Rin snorted. "We already figured out how to not get affected by things like those." She said. "Besides, compared to Zouken, these guys' curses are like a joke."
"Hmm…so you ate their curses then?"
Little Rin turned and grinned. "Yup!" she said. "And it was so easy too, thanks to you letting me borrow Imaginary Numbers!"
Sakura smiled back, and ruffled her sister's hair. "Well," she said. "It's only fair, when you let me borrow the Five Elements."
Little Rin grinned wider, and then vanished into astral form as Sakura turned to leave. As they left the ruined function room, Sakura made a point of not just walking over the late Forvedge magus' corpse, but outright stepping on his head and crushing it beneath her feet.
They break the sacred and ancient truce of parley, and they dare to plea for mercy?
What a joke.
"So what happened after that?" Rin asked.
Sakura shrugged. "They tried to reopen negotiations a couple of times." She said. "I ignored them. Afterwards, they stopped playing around, and just sent assassins."
"What exactly happened that started this feud?" Rin asked in disbelief.
Little Rin beat Sakura to the punch. "Sakura's ex-boyfriend's family didn't approve of her." She said. "So they set him up with someone else."
"What?"
Sakura sighed. "Yes, I know." She said. "It sounds like something out of a cheap TV drama, but that's pretty much it."
"Wait, I don't…"
Sakura sighed again. "I'll tell you more after breakfast." She said, and after a moment's thought, Rin nodded in agreement.
"His name was Caules Forvedge." Sakura said, handing Rin a picture the former had taken out of storage. The picture was of Sakura and a brown-haired young man with a pair of glasses. He was handsome in his own way, with a genuine smile. The picture looked like it'd been taken on the banks of the Thames on an evening in winter, probably before or after the two of them had gone out for the night.
They looked happy together.
And that probably was the problem. Sakura…she just had bad luck when it came to relationships, almost as though the world had a pathological need to make her miserable.
"He was nice, kind, very smart too." Sakura said, walking past to look out the windows next to Rin. There was coffee for them both on the table in front of Rin, while further away, Little Rin had gone back to playing her video game. "You could even say he was considerate too, for a magus. None of us ever expected things to go as they did ten…nine years ago."
"Us?" Rin echoed.
"We were friends." Sakura said softly, almost as though she was talking to herself. "The brightest students in the entirety of Modern Magecraft Theories. Myself, Caules, Flat, Yvette, and Svin Glascheit. Luvia sometimes hung out with us, and while she didn't trust me back then any more than she trusts me now, back then, there was a hope, maybe even a chance, that things could have gone better."
Rin didn't say anything at once. In truth, she knew all those names Sakura had mentioned, their counterparts in her timeline. And she'd seen them all in this timeline at least once, not necessarily up close, but she'd seen them all…
…but one. Svin Glascheit…
…and the way his name was mentioned by Yvette along with Caules…
"What happened?" Rin asked.
"It was three years after I joined the Clock Tower." Sakura replied. "We were twenty by then. It was no secret that Caules and I were seeing each other, and by then word had also gotten back to his family."
Sakura paused and gave a short laugh. "You can imagine their reaction." She said. "They were a bloodline that went back to the High Middle Ages, a scion of the now-extinct but once great Tree of a Thousand Realms: Yggdmillennia."
"Sakura…"
"In contrast," Sakura continued, as though she didn't hear. "I was the heiress of a family barely two, maybe three hundred years-old, mere landlords from the magical backwater of Japan. So what if the first magus of our family was a student of the great Wizard Marshal Kaleidoscope? So what if we helped found Heaven's Feel? So what if we were descended from Edelfelt thanks to our grandmother being a scion of that house? No, they didn't approve. They demanded Caules end our relationship, and even threatened to disown him."
"He gave in." Rin said, only for Sakura to shake her head.
"No…not at the time…" she said. "He called his relatives' bluff. Forvedge was a family in decline, you see. Like all the Yggdmillennia scions, the fall of the main line centuries ago had crippled the entire lineage, dooming them to a slow decline and downfall. They couldn't afford to disown him, and he even tried to point out my exceeding potential to try and strengthen his position."
"Then what happened?" Rin asked.
"Caules' father refused to bend." Sakura replied. "Like Caules said, they couldn't afford to disown him. But even my potential wasn't enough. I just wasn't good enough for them."
"But…you're a blue…and a Fes…only you weren't…not at the time, were you?"
"No." Sakura said with a shake of her head. "I was only a Cause at the time, and not even a candidate for a color."
"…and?" Rin prompted.
"Caules' father and other relatives arranged a marriage between him and a daughter of another Yggdmillennia scion." Sakura said. "Cecilia Icecolle, that's her name. And to ensure his compliance, they bound him with a geis, one that would keep him from using his magic if he disobeyed."
"That's…that's just…" Rin stammered out while shaking her head.
"As a magus, that was a line that Caules couldn't cross." Sakura softly said. "And in the end, he gave in to his family's demands."
"But that wasn't the end, was it?" Rin said, feeling a mounting sense of dread.
"No, of course not." Sakura said with a snort. "He tried to find a middle ground, and offered to keep me on as a mistress. His family was fine with that apparently, even seeing it as something I should be honored to be. His wife, though…admittedly, I respected Cecilia back then. She refused to let her husband have a mistress, and I personally refused to lower myself to such a shameful position. No…I may be a murderer, but even murderers have standards."
"…and?" Rin prompted again.
"The wedding came and went." Sakura said with a small smile. "I wasn't invited, of course. But apparently, Caules said something. To his wife…about how he'd do his duty, but nothing more."
"Oh no…"
"Oh yes," Sakura said with a disparaging laugh. "Basically, she'd have him, and she'd bear his heirs, but she'll never have his heart. Add to that Caules' earlier wish to keep me as a mistress, well…"
Sakura laughed again and shook her head before running a hand over her face. "I guess…I contributed too." She said. "Do you know how I gained a promotion from Cause to Count? Or how I became a candidate for a Color Designation? It's simple, really. I figured out a way to break geis. It's not simple, and the cost is…prohibitive. It requires a sacrifice, a portion of your magic circuits, a limb's worth, even, depending on your circuits' quality. But such is the price of freedom."
"What happened?" Rin asked, setting aside the sheer brilliance of what Sakura had developed.
Sakura looked at her before replying. "Soon after he returned to the Clock Tower," he said. "I offered it to him. All our friends were there. Even Luvia. Caules refused. Like I said, as a magus, his magic, and his ability to use it, were a line he could not cross."
"…I don't know, Sakura." Rin sadly said. "As a magus myself, I understand his position. It might have been better to just walk away."
Sakura laughed sadly and nodded. "I agree." She said, before looking out the window again. "And I made that decision myself. It should have ended there, and I focused on my studies, burying any heartbreak on my part in my research, in my pride at having become a Count, and ambitions to go and climb even higher. But…for my friends, it wasn't enough."
"Svin's much too loyal." Rin said sadly. "Too…devoted, to his pack. A side-effect of his family's magic."
"You know him in your timeline, then."
"Yes. Not as a friend, but…friendly acquaintances, at least."
Sakura hummed. "He confronted Caules." She finally said. "Several times, in fact. The last few times got heated. So much so that Grey put familiars to keep an eye on them both. And in their last confrontation…things got too heated."
Sakura paused and closed her eyes, before opening them, hard and unforgiving. "What happened then," she said with a dark undertone to her voice. "What Caules did to Svin…his own best friend…a man who was only standing up for what he thought was right…it simply cannot be forgiven."
A/N
Well, that was a thing.