A Matter of Time
"We say we waste time, but that is impossible. We waste ourselves."—Alice Block
"Determine to never be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of want of time who never loses any. It is amazing how much may be done if we are always doing."—Thomas Jefferson
A boy of twelve woke from his slumber at precisely five AM, Japan Standard Time. No alarm clock pierced the day with its shrill scream. No parent ruthlessly pulled off his bedcovers to prevent his lateness. No roosters croaked, and the sun didn't pierce his window to land on his closed eyes. His eyes simply shot open, at exactly five AM, Japan Standard Time.
Grumbling as he got out of bed, Shirou stretched lazily while he turned on the hot water in the shower at 5:00:30 AM. After a judicious application of soap but not shampoo—Once every other day, and not one drop more—he exited the shower precisely five minutes after he'd entered it.
Drying himself off took another minute, and the combined morning routine of brushing his teeth, applying his clothes and running his hand through his hair once to make sure it was just messy enough took three.
At 5:09:39 AM, Japan Standard Time, Shirou Emiya entered his workshop for a grueling morning of practice.
He started with eight minutes of meditation, which consisted of sitting, legs crossed, hands laying relaxedly on his knees, his breaths deep and steady. He found that starting a session with exactly eight minutes of meditation would maximise his magecraft training, priming his mind for the self-hypnosis that would follow and his body for the stress circuits put on it. Less than eight minutes resulted in slightly less effective results, while over eight did nothing to increase his effectiveness.
Eight was the golden mean.
As the eight minutes ended, Shirou began the process of activating his circuits. Kiritsugu, when he'd first taught Shirou to properly activate them, had told him that he need an image, something jarring or emotionally powerful that could fire his circuits to life.
It had taken time and much trial and error to find the perfect image, but now it came as easily to him as breathing. In his mind, he loaded a pistol. He cocked back the hammer, his finger on the trigger, and as the bullet left the pistol, his eyes shot open with the aria, "Countdown, on."
His circuits, 27 of which he was born with 13 of which he'd inherited from Kiritsugu, whirred to life, prana flowing through them and bringing up Shirou's body heat. Getting up from his seat on the floor, Shirou went through some stretches, before closing his eyes and muttering, "Time Alter—Double Accel."
An innate bounded field encased Shirou's body, isolating the flow of time within from without, doubling the rate at which it flowed, effectively speeding up every biological process. Thought, movement, reflexes, everything was heightened.
In a sedate stroll faster than a jog, Shirou made his way over to his training area, filled with some weights and standing punching bags. Lying on the floor near his beat-up punching bag, an old boxing bell rested, light gleaming of its silvery surface, the arm that rung it attached to a timer that Shirou set to 20 minutes. He didn't need it to keep track of time, it was more of a formality, something to set the mood when he began his training. Settling backwards in a diagonal, bouncing stance, Shirou brought his two hands up in a classic boxing pose.
Then he unleashed his punches. They darted forward, lightning quick jabs faster than the eyes could see, invisible but for the large impacts visible from the bag before him. Taking a bouncing step backwards, Shirou brought up his leg almost faster than his punches had been, a roundhouse kick almost throwing the punching bag to the other side of the room, if not for the fact that Shirou, having grown wary of recovering it every time he threw some weight into his hits, had chained it to the ground. This process continued, lightning fast jabs randomly interspersed with frightening kicks and vicious knees and elbows, before the bell rung through the air and Shirou took a deep breath, wiping some stray sweat from his brow.
He'd first gotten into boxing a little under two years ago, not long after Kiritsugu had died. Some punks had heard that he lived alone in a huge house near Ryuudo Temple, and had ambushed right outside the bounded field that deterred intruders with ill-intent towards its resident—The non-magus kind, anyway.
He'd been caught completely unprepared. Dazed with a quick punch to the jaw, they'd gottewn him on the ground and kept him there, vicious kicks to the stomach and face leaving him with a plump lip, broken nose and two broken ribs. His circuits were still recovering from the surgery and thus unusable, and without his magecraft he was left completely at their mercy.
They eventually tired of beating the shit out of him, and Shirou desperately crawled into his residence, taking off the next week of school to recover.
But the humiliation of getting ambushed and abused by such worthless wretches burned a hole through him from his sick bed. Much of his time was spent fantasizing creative ways to use magecraft to ruin their lives. How would they feel, Shirou wondered, if they suddenly all woke up in the bodies of old men, paralyzed from the waist down? Maybe then they'd contemplate what worthless excuses for human beings they were—for however much longer they lived, at any rate.
But as he came up with more and more cruel ways to ruin them, he felt that they were somehow… insufficient. They wouldn't—couldn't—know who had done that to them. It would be a rupture of the rules of secrecy all magi obeyed and could possibly get him in a lot of trouble. He could always kidnap them, but Shirou had no desire to babysit them, and wasn't sure how long he'd be able to resist killing them.
For Kiritsugu, at least, he would try to keep schoolyard casualties to a minimum.
And so, a different solution occurred to him, one that left him much more satisfied. He would still destroy them, would still do to them what they'd done to him times a thousand, but his solution would have to be a little more… hands-on. And that was the beginning of Shirou's training in the viciously effective science of Kick-Boxing.
As Shirou drank idly from a spare bottle of water, he remembered with relish the beating he had delivered to them only a month, one that had almost gotten him expelled from school if not for a little old school hypnosis of the principle, the bullies and their parents.
After that he'd continued, enjoying the sport and appreciating it as a viable method of defence, especially when his natural capabilities were augmented by magecraft. But, as in most things he set his mind to, he quickly surpassed the other kids at the gym he trained at. His instructor had continued to pit him against older and stronger opponents, until he was fighting evenly with adults twice his size, impossibly matching them when all indications, of body weight and muscle and force, demanded that his loss be inevitable. But there was always a way.
That he was smaller just meant he was more nimble, his less heavy muscles let him be faster, to weave between strikes, his smaller height gave him access to other... more vulnerable organs. And once they learned the importance of wearing a cup and came prepared, there always the stomach, and Shirou quickly became the gyms best jump-kicker, slamming his opponents to the ground with a well placed kick to the temple or jaws.
The key was, as with most things, practice. Without magecraft to occupy his time, Shirou had dedicated everything he had towards Kick Boxing, training incessantly, obsessed to the point of neurosis. That was Shirou's talent. Not natural born inclination, not genetic predisposition towards a skill. Instead, he simply had a talent for choosing a single thing, and concentrating on it to the exclusion of all else—sleep, human contact, entertainment.
It was all a matter of time. Shirou was a very rigid person, when one got down to his core. Despite Time's nature as a fluid, changing thing, Shirou instinctively planned his days down to the last second, aided by his supernatural internal sense of time, always actively doing something that would aid his end goal. He obsessively reserved every minute for his chosen goal, leaving small, hyper-efficient intervals for things like eating or, god forbid, socializing.
And that which made him a great fighter, is what also allowed him to become a great magus. Or at least, someone with the potential to become a great magus. Closing his eyes, Shirou put all his attention into completing his latest discovery, the missing piece of the puzzle Kiritsugu had never dedicated enough energy to solve.
He was still in Double Accel. If he was Kiritsugu, he would simply mutter "release accel", stopping the bounded field completely and suffering while his body incurred damage as the world fixed the flow of time he'd altered.
Shirou found the idea of suffering every time he performed magecraft repugnant ever since that one fumble with creating magic circuits wrong and almost killing himself, and had since decided on a motto: If it hurts, you're doing it wrong.
Accordingly, he'd developed his own method of releasing Double Accel. "Release Accel—Countdown 2-1." He muttered to himself. Carefully, elegantly, Shirou slowed time within his bounded field. 2.0 . 1.9 . 1.7. 1.4. 1.1. 1.
And when time flowed through his bounded field at the rate of 1—what he called the default flow of time within the world—he released the magecraft. Holding his breath, he waited for ravaging pain.
Nothing.
Smiling, Shirou positively glowed with satisfaction. He'd done it! He'd fixed the otherwise magnificent technique his father had created. Through careful analysis, and a refined use of his magecraft, he'd surpassed his father!
An outside observer might comment that Kiritsugu had never really tried to advance his magecraft beyond being useful in battle, and that with effort and time he'd probably have achieved that same conclusion.
There was no outside observer here today. Let the boy have his fun.
While he still can.