Lancelot du Lac knew three things about himself.
One, he had a daughter. Her name was Mash Kyrielight. She was a senior in high school, she was in the fencing club.
Two, he had a son. His name was Galahad du Lac. He was in college; he wrote home sometimes. He was also in a fencing scholarship.
Three, he was French. He spoke the language, and he sometimes lapsed back into it whenever he was stressed.
The rest of his life was a blur.
He knew he was in Fuyuki City, for some reason, and his son was in the Clocktower in England to study magecraft, which was a thing apparently—he didn't quite know when he had figured it out, and his son was also in Imperial University, as a sort of day job cover, he guessed. His daughter attended Fuyuki High School, and she lived with him, and she tended to go to study magecraft with other people when he was not around.
He could not remember anything else.
Life was like a dream for him, and he stumbled sometimes, swimming through the open ocean as if it were through air. His life was flowing water, born out of the lake, and when he emerged from the lake, his naked body was against the air and he was born again.
At this point, he had come to accept it.
Lancelot du Lac was alive, but only in the barest sense.
Lancelot du Lac was dreaming.
He kissed his daughter goodbye in the morning, a brush of lips on her cheek, and she smiled at him like he had given her the entire world. She smiled at him brilliantly, and his heart wrenched because he did not remember her, he did not remember how he had her or how she had come to live in his life.
But he loved her. As much as he had loved anyone else in the world.
He went to the grocery store, as he did every day. He purchased food for the night, placing the dishes into his basket. He blinked his way through cooking. His hair had reached his chest, long and limp and his daughter came home to help him with cooking.
He helped her with dinner. He wondered why he spoke Japanese when he never studied it in his life. He could not remember the last time he called his mother.
He put his daughter to bed, even though she was eighteen, and she could honestly do it herself. He kissed her cheek.
She grasped his hand.
"Dad, you know I love you."
He smiled and grasped her hand back.
"I love you too, Mash."
Lancelot went to the clocktower, once.
Waver Velvet El-Melloi the Second stared at him the entire time.
Galahad sat at his side, bangs covering his eye while Waver spoke to him, his voice deep and the document shaking in his hand. Lancelot stared at him unblinking, unmoving, feeling as if he were listening through stuffed cotton rather than through reality.
Lord El-Melloi told him that his son displayed amazing aptitude for defensive magic, rather than offensive magic, and that he would do well to expand his horizons. Lancelot could hear him from the other end of a tunnel, but he hardly tried.
He licked his lips. His hands were balled into fists, nails biting flesh. Even looking at the other sent his world rocking.
He could hear the screams of madness deep in his mind. Desperate crying for someone to end his suffering here. Desperate crying for madness to be stopped.
He got up, halfway through the speech. He rested his hand against the wall and tried to make the vertigo go away.
"Sir Lancelot—"
"Stop." He croaked. "Don't say that name."
Waver Velvet looked back down at the desk.
Galahad stroked the edges of his jacket the whole time.
Sir Lancelot thumbed over the edges of his paper, staring at the document on his desk.
He was not quite sure where he got his money from, not really. He knew he had a job of some type, and he knew that he could buy his groceries and he could buy his clothes, but he was never sure where the money came from. Just that it always came.
He signed at the bottom of the document, his eyes only falling over the paper, sliding over the edge. It was official looking, with a strange symbol from a company at the bottom. He put it back into the mail, and Mash took it to the mailbox to send it away.
A girl came to pick Mash up. A redhead, with bright, hazel eyes and a ponytail on the side of her head. She smiled at Lancelot when she took his daughter to school, wearing the same uniform as his daughter. He could not quite recall the name of the school, but Mash always seemed happy to go.
Lancelot went to pick up groceries for the day, all the days going into the next.
Lancelot walked down the sweets aisle, intending to pick something up for his daughter that day, when he reached for a bag of sugar and almost bumped into another.
He blinked, once, twice.
The woman stared back at him. Blonde, blue-eyed. Hair tied into a braided bun.
Silence stretched between them.
"Sir?" She asked. She shook, small in her frame, grasping the cupcake she had taken like it was her very life. "Sir Lancelot?"
He nodded.
She grasped onto him, wailing.
Lancelot was dipped into cold water again, as he woke up again without memory. The cycle repeated.