My father was haunted. I'd heard the phrase, but I hadn't known what that meant until I met him.

If the things haunting him had been ghosts, maybe that would have been easier to bear than the specters in his sad, crinkled eyes, or the spirits weighing down his shoulders. He wasn't a sad man. He smiled often, and we passed a lot of afternoons just goofing off together in the dojo. But every so often, his smile would falter, and he'd look away. His slump would become a hunch. His hands would slacken, or they'd clench into fists. It usually happened at night, when the shadows were longest. It always passed quickly, he was never cruel to me, and I never mentioned it to him, but I always noticed.

He was a man who had a lot to offer the world, I think. He just needed more time. He could have made the world a better place.

No, that's not fair. Even if it was just in the life of one lonely boy, he did make the world a better place. He taught me to smile, even through the pain.

A hero of justice. A superhero. He'd told me that it was a childish notion, and that he was too much an adult to make himself into one. I never understood that. He was a superhero. He was a man who had plunged into fire and death and pulled a little boy from the rubble. If that wasn't a superhero… then what was?

I looked up to him. I look up to him. If I can be half the man he was, no matter how hard I have to work, then no cost will be too high. I will make people smile the way he made me smile.

I remember the end. I didn't know it was the end until it was over, but I think that's just the way life is. It's easy to recognize the good things once they're gone. He spent a whole afternoon cleaning the house, the day before. He'd never done that before. We didn't live in filth, but my father had never been one to tidy up more than absolutely necessary. There's an image I have burned into my head, of coming into the kitchen and seeing him holding a knife. Not by the handle, like he'd been cutting food. He had the blade balanced on the palm, and he was staring at it. I asked him if he was okay, and he jumped like he hadn't noticed I was there. He noticed everything. He looked over at me, and he smiled, and I thought that his eyes were wet, which didn't make sense because my father had never cried before. Not since the day he saved me. I don't remember most of what he said. It didn't make much sense. His metaphors were confusing. But then he looked back down at the knife, and his smile faded a little. "Shirou," he said softly.

I went up to him and took the knife out of his hands. He let it happen. "You should be careful," I told him. "Knives are dangerous. You shouldn't play with them." He'd taught me that, but sometimes he really was like a big kid.

He smiled again, that sad smile. "Thanks. Guess I just got distracted." His eyes were distant. "It reminded me of a dream I had, a long time ago. That's all." He ruffled my hair and walked on by, while I slid the knife back into the block. I should have been concerned, but I wasn't. That was just my dad.

He stopped at the hallway, though. Without turning back, he spoke softly. "Knives are funny things, Shirou. You can make such beautiful things with them." I smiled. I wasn't very good at it, but he often praised my cooking, saying I was better than he would ever be, and that someday I might be a real pro. He was so good at so many things, but he was a disaster in the kitchen. "But they're dangerous, too." He looked down at his hand, fingers splayed, and I couldn't see his eyes. "If you're careless, you can get hurt. The people around you can get hurt." My smile became a frown, and he sagged a little, silhouetted against the doorway. "Sometimes… Sometimes one looks like the other. Remember that, Shirou. Always be sure you can tell the difference."

I still don't know what he meant by that.

Shirou came back to consciousness slowly, the soft ticking of his clock guiding him back to reality like a metronome. It was still dark, but it was a familiar darkness. His bedroom. A peaceful place, nestled in his sheets. A headache pounded at his temples, but pain was an old friend, and it didn't bother him the way it used to.

"That was some dream," he muttered to himself, throwing an arm over his eyes. Dream logic always felt so real in the moment, and so silly in the light of wakefulness. You'd believe anything when you were asleep.

He considered whether or not to go back to sleep. The clock read 4:36, so he had almost an hour until he needed to be up. He was still tired, after all, and his head was throbbing. What decided things, though, was when he noticed how dry his throat was. How parched. "Need some water," he grumbled. Then he'd see how he felt. There were always chores that needed doing, and Shirou was not the kind of person to sit around wasting time.

He pushed himself to his feet, and it was strangely difficult. His whole body felt like rubber, the way it would after a pretty strenuous workout, and his strength seemed to be gone. He flexed his fists experimentally. He could close them, but squeezing them proved difficult. A byproduct of the headache, maybe, and that very well could have been the onset of dehydration. He'd feel better with some water in him. Once he'd successfully shuffled to the door, he pushed it open, then shuffled a little more to the kitchen.

He'd left the lights on all through the house, it seemed. That's not like me, he thought dully, staring deeply into a bright lamp like he was some kind of moth. His routine was consistent, if nothing else. The kitchen faucet was even dripping. The cabinet door swung open with a quiet creak, and he fumbled out a glass. With his body so weak, it was hard to get ahold of, but after a minute he managed to get it filled with water. He drank it down in one long pull, then refilled it and stood there by the sink, sipping it. After finishing and refilling the glass a third time, he turned to go back to his room, and froze.

There was a girl sitting against the far wall. She was wearing his school's uniform, her legs were stretched out in front of her and crossed, and she wore a look of supreme skepticism on her face. Her arms were folded across her chest, on which there also seemed to be a significant smudge of dirt. A fresh scab hung on the edge of her forehead. She looked familiar, but every single facet of the image was so wrong that he simply couldn't wrap his mind around it long enough to identify her.

Neither of them moved until she broke the silence. "Is your situational awareness that bad all the time? Because I could have killed you a dozen times a dozen different ways just now, and I don't think you'd have even noticed anything was wrong until you woke up in hell."

Things finally clicked, and he recognized her as... Rin Tohsaka? In his house. In the middle of the night. Kind of beat up. He followed the train of logic to see where it led, and either something horrible and unspeakable had happened last night of which he had no memory… or the dream hadn't been a dream.

Adrenaline hit like a sledgehammer, and before he could think things through, he'd yelled and thrown the only thing close to hand - the full glass of water.

It shattered on the wall about a foot and a half from her head, and without otherwise moving, her look of skepticism became one of sheer disbelief. "Are you a six year old girl?" Her head crept up, and she pinched the bridge of her nose. "And you're a Master. Good god. This is the kind of competition I'm dealing with?"

Shirou said the very first thing that came to mind. "What are you doing in my house?" he asked stupidly.

Like a booming cannon going off about a foot and a half from his ear, the hellish voice from the shed thundered. "The girl is an enemy master. Defend thy sanctuary."

Shirou shrieked again, but at least this time he had nothing left to throw.

Rin's head was fully in her hands now. "I can't believe this."

A second disembodied voice spoke. "I can."

This was it. This was the last goddamn straw. Shirou considered himself a fairly resilient person. He endured pain well, and he knew how to roll with punches both literal and metaphorical. But this? This? He was putting his foot down. He stomped once, like a petulant child, and the combination of his ankle suddenly screaming that it might be broken and the overwhelming weakness in his body nearly knocked him to the ground yet again. "Tohsaka!"

Tohsaka blinked up at him, clearly unimpressed. "Yes?"

"Explain all this."

A slow, catlike smile spread across Tohsaka's face. "All this? Oh, Emiya, you poor thing. You must have hit your head pretty hard on the way down, because obviously you couldn't possibly be this dense normally. You see, this thing we're standing in right now is a house, and this…" she patted the ground beside her, "is called a floor. My name is Rin T-"

Shirou made a noise that was somewhere between the sound of being punched and the sound of being strangled, and Tohsaka sobered.

"You really don't know?" Her voice was pensive. "You have no idea what you're caught up in?" Something that looked almost like pity passed like a shadow over her face.

The second disembodied voice spoke up. It seemed to be coming from about a foot above Shirou's head, along the wall by Tohsaka. "I'm getting the feeling that this one doesn't know a lot of things. I say we have an easy kill right here, and then we're down to five enemies. It's a no-brainer."

"Kill?" Shirou protested, at the same moment that Tohsaka muttered, "Not now, Archer." Her fist was pressed pensively to her mouth. "I can't kill someone who doesn't even know why they're dying."

"An honorable sentiment." This voice, the monster's voice, came from behind Shirou. He jerked backward, but nothing but his kitchen lay behind him. "For respect of my Contractor's will, I have temporarily allowed thee respite, but if thou doth persist in a hostile course of action, I will not show thee mercy again."

"I've known some honorable people in my life," the second voice - Archer - said. "You know what happened to them? They died, and they died badly. Because honor is just a pretty little lie people tell themselves when they don't have the stomach for what they need to do."

"Shut up, Archer." She waved vaguely at the empty air. "Okay, okay. Emiya. Shirou." Using his given name seemed to cause her actual physical pain. "Let's… start basic. Tell me you know about magic."

Shirou's brow furrowed. "Magic? I know a little. My father taught me what he could." He had also been told to keep his knowledge a secret, but these circumstances seemed to call for desperate measures.

Tohsaka nodded, relaxing a little. "Good. That'll make things easier. Magical theory? Application? What schools of magic are you proficient in?"

Shirou shrugged, feeling a little uncomfortable. Like he'd stumbled into a very important exam that he hadn't known to prepare for. "I dunno. Application, I guess. My father taught me about strengthening, mostly. I don't really know much of the theory behind it."

The girl looked like she'd just bitten into a lemon, peel, pith, and all. "Strengthening? Seriously? You don't know how to handle the five main elements? How to make a pass?"

Shirou suppressed the urge to tug at his shirt collar. "I don't know what that means." The glare he received could have soured milk and peeled paint from a wall. He shrank away a little, feeling very small.

"But you have a workshop, at least." She sounded like a woman grasping desperately for straws.

"I have a workbench and some tools in the shed?" he answered, rubbing the back of his neck.

Tohsaka groaned. Archer spoke up again, and Shirou began to get the feeling that whoever this invisible man was, he did not like him very much. "This is painful. I can't watch this." His voice started to fade, as if he were walking away. "I'm going to go keep watch on the roof. Call me back if you need me."

"Archer!" Her voice seemed genuinely nervous, but the man didn't reply. She looked in the direction the voice had gone for a moment, then shook her head and turned back to Shirou. "Well, I guess you're not going to kill me anyway." She gestured at him. "Anyway, you don't know anything, your teacher sucked, and you're going to die. That's lesson one."

Shirou's blood became ice again. "Die?"

"Yeah, dumbass, die. That's what happens in war."

"War?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Don't do that."

"What?"

"The broken record thing. I can't stand it. Anyway, yeah. You've… somehow stumbled ass-backwards into a little something called the Holy Grail War. I don't know how that happened, because summoning is a pain in the ass, and very precise, and requires a lot of power." Hm. That was definitely anger in her voice. "So don't ask me what you did, because I've got nothing." She glanced up. "That big scary dude with the sword? That's a Servant. It's like a familiar. Please tell me you know about familiars."

Being able to answer was really a breath of fresh air. "It's a construct, right? Something a mage creates to serve."

She nodded. "Yeah, that's… basically right. A Servant is a really powerful familiar. So powerful that we mages normally wouldn't be able to create one, let alone control it, which is why they only appear under very specific conditions. You see…" Rin proceeded to talk for something like twenty minutes, detailing first Servants, then the Holy Grail (which allowed them to be summoned, and which would grant wishes). She moved on to the Holy Grail War (a seven sided battle to the death, carried out in proxy by servants), and all the ways in which he'd probably die horribly (she lingered on that one for a while). She pointed out the design now inscribed into his hand (a command spell, she called it), as well as its use (to issue three irrevocable orders, one of which he had used to save her life). She kind of seemed like she was enjoying lecturing him, actually, once she settled into it.

Midway through detailing the seven classes (Saber, Lancer, Archer, Assassin, Caster, Rider, Berserker, which he hoped he could keep straight and understood that he'd quickly forget), she paused, frowning. "Anyway, your servant says he's an Assassin. That doesn't make sense, though, because a class is a framework, and your guy doesn't fit the template at all."

"What do you mean?" Shirou's head was kind of spinning. She was throwing a lot at him, and he was still exhausted. He hadn't exactly gotten a full night's five hours of sleep, after all.

"Assassins assassinate. They don't work through brute strength." She pressed her fist to her lips again. "Bring him out?"

"What?"

"Just tell him he can show himself. You don't actually need to do anything."

"This girl is the enemy. Remember this." A warning. He'd almost forgotten he was still present.

"But she's helping," Shirou protested. Rin hadn't exactly killed him when she'd very much had the chance and had even put him in bed. She seemed like a good person.

"Thine ignorance is troubling, but she is not needed to remedy it," Assassin said in a warning tone. It didn't fill him with comfort to hear.

Rin shrugged, then raised a solemn hand. "Upon my honor as Magus and head of the Tohsaka family, I, Rin, swear that I won't try to hurt him until after I've returned home."

"See?" Shirou said.

"Art thou a woman of thy word, Rin Tohsaka?" Before she could answer, Assassin continued. Two points of blue light like eyes appeared, seven or eight feet in the air. "Do not deceive thyself that thou art proficient enough at the art of lying to hide thyself from me."

Rin closed her mouth, then regarded the Assassin with the most serious look Shirou had seen from her all morning. "I will do whatever it takes to win The Holy Grail War, but I will not break the word I've freely given." Assassin was silent. Tension built in the room; Shirou could feel it, and he could even see it in the set of Tohsaka's jaw. "So where do we stand? You going to kill me?"

The lights faded away, taking their cold glow with them. "Interesting."

Rin shook her head. "What's interesting?"

"I have seen thy soul, and I believe thee."

"Just like that?" She didn't quite seem disappointed, but it was close. Shirou didn't really understand, either.

"Indeed. If the day has come one such as thee can lie to me, then I no longer deserve my titles."

Rin blinked as though she'd been slapped. "Wha-"

Shirou laughed, and all at once the tension drained out of the room. At Rin's glare, he laughed harder; it felt good after all the heaviness of the last conversation.

"Anyway," she said, looking away, an angry blush on her cheeks. "What I said still stands. I need to see him."

Shirou thought about it for a second, then figured, what the hell. What was the worst that could happen? "Okay, uh. Big scary guy. Sorry, Assassin. Stop being invisible?"

"At thy command." Without preamble, without the kind of show he'd been treated to in the shed, Assassin appeared in Shirou's kitchen. He was tall enough that his horned skull and the spikes bristling off of his back brushed the ceiling, and wide enough that he seemed to be taking care not to break anything on the counters. The flaming eyes were fixed at the same point they had been moments before. For the briefest of moments, Shirou wanted to laugh at the sheer incongruity of the image, but then the pain hit. Just like it had been outside once the fog had cleared, his nerves set alight, transmitting raw agony from every one of his cells.

"Emiya!" He was vaguely aware that Rin was kneeling over him, and wondered whether time was actually passing or not. Wait, when did he get down onto the floor? "Go back!" His vision wavered, darkness encroaching on the edges, and now her head was turned, and she was yelling over her shoulder. "Go back to how you were! It's killing him!"

More words. Shouting. A strangled sound that he realized was coming from him. A noise that might have been a bass grumble, and the pain passed all at once. Shirou gasped in a breath, realizing that he hadn't been breathing. His body shook a little, but he could see clearly again. "Ow." He blinked up at the ceiling.

Tohsaka touched a finger to his neck, checking his pulse, then leaned in close to see his pupils. "You're alive, right?" She was clearly trying to sound dismissive, but there was an edge of something like worry in her tone that she hadn't completely managed to erase. "What was that? Pain?"

Shirou nodded, distantly noting that he was too dazed to be flustered by how close her face had gotten to his. "Pain. I'm okay, though." He tried to sit up, and she grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him back down.

"You're weak as a kitten right now. Don't be stupid." There was a wrinkle of confusion in her brow. "Pain… That could be a few things, but the way it only hurts when he manifests…" She tilted her head. "It could be that your magic circuits just aren't strong enough to provide the power he needs. Instead of pulling power through you as a conduit, he's just… taking your power. Ripping the energy straight out of your circuits."

"The supply is insufficient," the voice said in agreement. It kind of hurt Shirou's teeth.

"You said that earlier," he mumbled.

Tohsaka lifted one of his arms, turning it one way and another as if searching for something. He didn't have the energy to stop her. "Where's your crest? That might help me confirm some things."

"My what?"

She let his arm fall to the ground with a thud. He barely felt it. "You really are something, Emiya. Your father was a magus, and he didn't see fit to pass down his crest?"

Shirou shrugged. "I guess?"

She sighed. "This is getting us nowhere, then. I have an idea how we can figure this out, but… damn it, I really didn't want to have to go see him this early."

"Wait, when you say 'we'-"

"Shut up, Emiya. Yeah, looks like we've got no choice. We're going to go see someone as soon as you can walk, and he's a real bastard. Can probably explain things a little better than me, though, and he might have some idea what your…" She wiggled her fingers vaguely at him. "...Deal is."

Shirou struggled to a sitting position, and this time, she didn't try to stop him. "Okay? What do you think, Assassin?" Asking the Servant's opinion was more reflex than anything, but according to Tohsaka, they were partners. He might as well have a say.

"Ignorance can lead only to disaster. Thou art my contractor, and our destinies are intertwined. If this person can provide answers, then the sojourn may be worth our time." It was the longest speech the monster had given, and Shirou found that he was almost getting used to that weird reverberation that rattled his teeth and shook his bones. "If she proves false, however, my blade stands ready. Though it may bring thee pain, she will not take thy life."

Tohsaka was grimacing as if she had a headache, but Shirou nodded. "Okay. Just don't do anything unless you have no other choice, okay?" Giving commands to something so powerful was surreal, but this was important to him. It was weird how quickly you grew accustomed to the unnatural. "Tohsaka is helping us out, so we should be nice to her back."

"Understood," Assassin affirmed, but it sounded like Shirou was being humored more than deferred to.

"Great, cool, you guys are one big happy family," Tohsaka said impatiently. "Now try to stand up. We've got a shitty priest to visit."

A/N: Welcome back! After posting the beginning last week, I've gotten more readership than I ever expected, and I'm so happy most of you seem to like what I'm doing! I know I said I'd be posting every other week, but both this chapter and the next will be posted weekly - so stay tuned for another chapter in seven days!

Your comments and messages mean a lot to me; thank you so much to all the people who reached out. We're just getting started.