Your Own Little World

A vacation, they called it. Go to Hawaii and track down your branch office personnel, who seem to have disappeared. Compared to your usual missions, this one had a difficulty level of Lost Kitten. Put up a few fliers, adjourn to the beach, and wait for the phone to ring.

Except it's not one or two people, it's a whole office. Strange, but you've become an expert on strange.

Now you're stuck in a hotel room with Joan of Arc's evil twin, putting together a graphic novel for a convention this weekend. As a bonus, you got a forest demon, already mischievious but stuck at the prank-calling age, and a castle ghost who's gotten in touch with her inner nerd. Robin Hood has done a great job as your project manager. He makes sure you have everything you need when you need it, and you admire someone who can do a hard job and make it look easy.

The original Joan shows up, all blondeness and light, which is evil Joan's cue to melt down. Shade will be thrown.

"Senpai," says a small voice at your elbow. Mash Kyrielight, part warrior, part waifu, has followed you through every adventure. "Why don't we get something to eat?"

You know the Joans will need an hour before they can calm down. "Sure. Anyone want supper?"

The other occupants of the room freeze, look at each other, and look at you. "We're good," says Joan (the saintly one). "You kids go on."

Robin shrugs and gets a beer from the fridge.

You and Mash take the service elevator. She stares at the floor indicator, her eyes large behind her glasses. "Are you all right?" you say. "I saw Hood talking to you. It seemed like he upset you."

"It's nothing. I was lettering. He interrupted me."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'You look like you're in your own little world.' I lost my concentration."

"I'm sure he was just trying to start a conversation. He gets bored when he's not running errands." The elevator stops. A hotel employee gets on with a cart.

"It's the implication." She pauses to make room for the cart. "He thinks I shut people out."

"That's not true, Mash."

"The Singularity is a 'little world,' too, but you don't hear anyone complaining about getting shut out of it."

The doors open again. You step out into the rear hallway and into the kitchen. You hope you can take a seat in the restaurant and have a leisurely meal. You barely get from one room to another without running into a Servant, which means listening to some imagined grievance against another Servant. And that leads to a grudge match, and lucky you, you get to referee.

A woman, half cat, half chef, stops you. "Sorry, restaurant is closed. Private party."

"Private?" you say. "Whose is it?"

"That's private too. But here, take this basket of your favorite foods. Which I happen to have. Sitting in my kitchen. On that counter over there."

"Thank you, Tomamo," you say. Mash takes the basket.

"Also, this king-size beach towel, if you should happen to eat your dinner on the beach. Which is right across the street."

"Thank you, Tomamo," you say. Mash takes the towel.

"Why don't you let me keep your phones? It's so easy to lose them. Out on the beach. In the dark."

You throw a glance at Mash. She stares fixedly ahead.

"Thank you, Tomamo," you say. "That's very thoughtful. We wouldn't want to lose our phones."

You and Mash turn over your phones and head back out the kitchen door.

She says, "What will happen if there's trouble? They won't be able to call us."

"We're on vacation." You push through the service doors.

"What is 'vacation,' Senpai?"

"A vacation-" you begin to explain. She has probably never had a true vacation. "A vacation is when you do what you want to do and not what someone else tells you to do."

"But I can do what I want to do at Chaldea. I can read or swim or eat chocolate. Nobody tells me to do that."

"That's true. But at Chaldea someone can call you at any moment and send you on a mission. When you're on vacation, you choose where you go, and nobody can call you. You are-" you search for the best word "-free."

"That sounds nice."

You have to bite down on your first response. Mash is the magical equivalent of a test-tube baby. She looks human, but she lacks some things you take for granted.

You never had any remarkable skills, not the kind they need in an office. At Chaldea, though, you found you had one valuable skill-you can fit people together. You know how to motivate a team so that they're fighting with an enemy and not with each other. Next to Mash, though, you're a genius at everyday life. She's spent her entire fourteen years in a research facility on a mountaintop.

You cross the street to the beach. Mash grabs your arm. "Someone's coming," she whispers.

You duck into a grove of palm trees. In a moment you hear the passage of several large figures and some furtive... clucking? "Giant chickens? Again?"

You know they will cause trouble for someone. You take a step.

Mash grabs your arm again. "Your twin is on call. In case there's trouble."

Your job involves taking care of this kind of problem. You move forward hand on your arm stops you. As always, you can't believe such a small body has such great strength.

"We're on vacation," you remind yourself. You relax and wait for the chicken horde to pass.

You and Mash find a spot under some trees and spread out the blanket. Mash prepares a plate and offers it to you.

"Mash." How do you explain? "I can get my own food. You're my Servant, but you're not my slave. Out there, in the... other world, when people work together, they treat each other as equals."

"But I'm not an equal. So many Servants are better warriors than I am, better mages, better healers."

"You are a warrior. Your 'weapon' is a shield. You make it possible for all the others to concentrate on their missions instead of dodging lightning bolts. Without you, we'd get overwhelmed before we made it halfway through a battle. For my money, you're the most important member of our team."

She starts to deny it, so you switch gears. Before, you'd held down a series of jobs, none for very long. You volunteered for a medical test, having little else to contribute to society. A week later they called back and hustled you off to a lab in the mountains, all top secret and hygenic and official looking. It turned out you did have magical powers. Who knew? Mainly they involve not dying when they Rayshift you, whatever that is. So, not very cool. "Remember when we first met? I thought you were like all the other worker bees, complete with lab coat, glasses, clipboard, no sense of humor. Then everything blew up, and we had to go to Fuyuki. When I saw you in that armor, with that monster shield, fire all around us, you looked like an angel come to guide me through Hell.

"You'll always be my first Servant. Nothing will ever change that."

You think very carefully about your next words.

Mash, did you have a talk with Tamamo? No, too obvious.

This is quite a coincidence, isn't it? Us, alone together? No, too flip.

You're a tactical genius, but leave the strategy to me. No, too condescending.

You reject all these gambits because you know that your relationship will change tonight. What you say next will define that relationship for months to come. You cannot get this wrong. When you run out of other options, you know that truth is your best strategy.

"I want to discuss what we mean to each other." She's always taking your hand. Now you take hers. "In a normal world, I don't suppose we'd have gotten this close. We'd never have met, most likely. But this isn't a normal world. History is messed up. We're leading a small army of legendary figures. Some of them frighten me. But we have to keep moving forward, or the human race will be incinerated.

"I guess Chaldea is like its own little world, too. We're the only people left who can fix time.

"Look at us. Once we got to Hawaii, a lunatic moon goddess pushed two islands together and trapped us in a time loop. We can't leave until we produce the best-selling book at ServantFest, and our strongest competition is soft-core porn from a mythical Irish goddess who's deathly afraid of a block of cheese to the head. On top of that, some mecha drops out of the sky every day to announce that she's going to annihilate the convention-and she has the firepower to do it. How weird is this?"

Mash says, "I give it a seven."

Her joke catches you off guard. You begin to laugh. You manage to say, "Or as we call it at Chaldea, Monday." She laughs. You have to laugh because thinking too much will drive you insane.

You've talked to da Vinci, the Renaissance Woman, about Mash. "Chronologically, she's six years old. We don't know what she's capable of because there's no one else like her. She's merged with a Servant, but we don't know who. It's only natural that you and she would become close, but you have to proceed very carefully. I shouldn't have to tell you that strong emotions can cloud your judgment."

da Vinci and the others study her, but you watch her. You've begun to suspect that she too has a special skill. She can divine what you want before you tell her. All of us cooperate to some extent, but she takes it to another level. Nobody notices because they expect that response. The closer she matches the expectation, the less they notice.

You've found that she anticipates your commands in combat. Some times you don't even have to tell her. And she's always right.

You've talked to Doctor Roman about Mash. Of course his first thought was about sex. "You should go for it," he said. "Not my type, but the mousy ones can surprise you."

"I'm not sure if she's mature enough," you said.

"Just look at those bazookas. She's mature, all right."

The laughter fades away in fits and starts.

She falls silent. The time has come.

"Let's go for a swim," you say. You and she put away your dishes. You and she get to your feet. You and she walk down to the water.

The Pacific Ocean welcomes you like an old companion. Out there no one will be able to see you or hear you. You wade out to a place where the water reaches your chest and her shoulders.

You reach out. She moves into your arms the way you've always imagined it.

"Mash."

"Yes, Senpai."

You ache to kiss her. For a moment you breathe in the same air she breathes out, you are that close. You put your hand on the back of her head to pull her to you. In that moment you can let your species burn if it means that you can share your life with this marvelous woman.

She remains still. Doesn't she want the same thing? She hold you tightly, but she's not making the next move.

Her breath thunders in your ears. Your hands slide across her shoulders, her back, her arms. She ought to respond.

Unless-

Unless she doesn't know how.

She's never experienced love. She has no parents. She never learned the language of touch.

Doctor Roman was wrong. She knows many things, but she knows very little about the messy, infuriating, glorious workings of the typical human.

You put your hands on her hips and retreat an inch or so. "That was close," you sigh.

"Senpai?"

"Mash, I-" I love you, you want to say. But you can't.

You can't because she doesn't understand love, not really. She's part science experiment, part weapon, part miracle. Can she be a woman too?

You can't because, when you analyze her, you see what it would do to her. Somewhere deep inside her a Hero has bonded with her-and with you. You don't know who, but you now understand the clarity of purpose, the uncompromising principles, the steadfast loyalty that compels you to love her, to admire her, to protect her.

You feel very small all of a sudden. How could you put your own happiness ahead of the fate of humanity? How selfish.

"We're really alone," you say. "I think it's the first time." You put your hand to her cheek. You feel like you're holding her heart. "I want to tell you how I feel. I want to be with you all the time. I want to forget about everything we're doing."

You hope that she will anticipate you. "But... you can't."

"I have to keep all the Servants from fighting with each other. Some of them feel like I belong to them, and they want to fight over me. If I choose you, they'll fight with you, or they may even leave. We can't let that happen."

She says nothing. You can't see her face or gauge her reaction.

You hear a snuffle, so quiet you almost miss it. You run your finger up her cheek. "Are you crying? It is because you're happy? or sad?"

"Both."

"We'll be together. One day. Just... not right now." Where would you go? An impossible scenario occurs to you: find a Grail and create a singularity, a paradise where you and she can live happily every after. Your own little world.

"Hold me," she says. You fold your arms around her.

You say, "You set up all of this. You told everyone else to stay in the room. You told Tamamo to make our dinner and take our phones. You kept me from chasing after those chickens. You let me talk and talk."

"Yes, Senpai. Are you angry?"

"No, of course not. Those were things I needed to say."

"And things I needed to hear... May I still call you Senpai?"

"...You should. Someone might get suspicious if you didn't." You haven't really thought about it since the first time she called you that. Senpai means master or teacher, which makes her kohai, servant or student. The others call you Master, with the implication that you have nothing to teach them. Oddly enough, they don't spend time teaching you, either-so full of themselves they don't consider others. But that's what makes them heroes.

"This is my own little world," she says. "You and me."

You will hold her for as long as she likes. And maybe a little longer.

The End