A Matter of Time
Two figures hiked in the Albanian mountains, heavy duty equipment stored in plump bags carried on one of their backs. He followed the taller, more feminine figure, trailing slightly after her from the heavy weight. Communication was difficult in the blinding white snow and howling, bitter wind.
"How much longer?" Shirou asked, voice raised to be heard through the blizzard.
Bazett didn't answer for so long Shirou thought she hadn't heard, before she announced succinctly, "We will get there when we get there. We will meet with the other group of executors at a cave up ahead."
Shirou nodded, not wholly satisfied but understanding her annoyance. He didn't enjoy being reduced to a small child on a long car ride, but then again, he didn't enjoy being used as a pack mule either, so she'd just have to deal with it.
After another half hour of slogging through deep snow and winding, treacherous trails—on at least one occasion almost falling down the mountain, if not for Bazett's quick reflexes, they finally reached the cavern. Bazett gave him a look when they arrived, as if to scold him for how annoying he'd been on the way up. Shirou simply adjusted the straps of her heavy bags and replied with a mocking half bow.
"Ladies first."
She was not amused, but decided to walk in first anyway. Shirou was right behind her.
Walking into the cavern was like entering a different world. He could literally feel the bounded field separating in from out on his skin as he strolled through it, the contrast between cold and warm so sudden as to be slightly disorienting.
The inside was set up with mage lights along the walls, a fire set up near the middle, around which a ragtag group of men and women, all young and reasonably fit, reclined comfortably.
"The enforcers sure know how to do missions in style, don't they?" Shirou muttered to himself.
He looked up in surprise when someone responded to his rhetorical with an assertive, "We sure do." A young woman had stood from the fire with arms slightly spread in welcome.
She was pretty, slavic in origin with messy dirty brown hair held in a ponytail, but what really caught Shirou's attention was a vertical scar over her eye. She noticed his curious glance.
"Curious about my scar, are you boy?" Not in any way keen to insult those he'd be working with before he even said anything, a fake denial made its way to his lips before dying an ignoble death when she continued, "This is courtesy of a Chimera we were hunting down in the african plains. Persistent bloody creature, but we took it down in the end and I gave it a matching scar to remember me by. Now, come. Sit down."
As Shirou and Bazett got seated, the enforcers exchanged greetings with his temporary "supervisor", as Kirei had termed it. They all seemed to know each other, and get along quite well; however it was just as clear that the group that had been in the cave before were much more tight knit, and Bazett was as much an outsider as he was. A known outsider, but nevertheless separate from this quasi tribe of magic users.
Not surprising. Kirei had told him Bazett was a friend of his—The idea that Kirei had friends was an idea Shirou had had to see to believe—and worked regularly with the mage's association's enforcers as a contracted agent. But the enforcers themselves, of which there were only thirty in the known world, moved and interacted together with a certainty only breeded by implicit trust or familiarity.
They never talked over each other, unless it was in jest, and conversation flowed from subject to subject and person to person with an ease that Shirou found breathtaking to watch. At times, one or the other would touch an arm, or a shoulder, in easy displays of physical intimacy Shirou had thought impossible between magi. They drank, and joked, and ate crappy rations, sometimes entering torrid debates on anything from the sex life of Lorelei Barthomeloi to the pros and cons of spears over halberds, along with a particularly pointless derail into whether it was possible to imagine a color that doesn't exist (Go on, try it. All Shirou succeeded in doing was imagining a disappointingly real shade of turquoise.)
Lost in this, dare he say it, friendly atmosphere, Shirou was completely out of his depth. Snark and conversation he could handle, but this—this pointless, ridiculous… fun human interaction was something he could only witness in mute astonishment. Thankfully, they seemed to notice his discomfort, and allowed him to keep his silence as dinner wore on, before, inevitably, the conversation fell back to tonight's topic of interest: Him.
"So, Bazett, what's with this kid you're lugging around with you? Should I be worried for his innocence?" The scarred one—who he'd learned was named Samantha —asked in mock seriousness. Watching Bazett's cheeks heat up as she sputtered indignant denials was most definitely the highlight of the night.
Finally though, she came down from her embarrassment enough to form a coherent sentence, she explained their predicament. "It was a favor for Kirei. He asked me if I could bring his apprentice"—His what now?— "on a Dead Apostle hunt, so he could get some experience. I agreed, because it's so rare that Kirei ever asks for anything, I couldn't pass up his request the one time he needs me."
Samantha's eyes narrowed. "Kirei… never liked that guy." Laughing, one of her companions—a large, scottish looking man with a beard to match but no accent—slapped her on the back, snickering, "Now, now, don't get prissy just because the guy beat you to a few targets. Being a bad loser's unbecoming of an enforcer."
Samantha threw off his hand, asserting in a way that clearly indicated the opposite, "I'm not a sore loser! Something about that old lecher just gets under my skin."
The rest of the group laughed at her denial, leading Shirou to reevaluate his opinion of the veteran executor. If he could fool all but one of these magi—who despite their attitudes Shirou could tell were perceptive in the extreme, as was necessary for some whose life depended on quick tactical thinking—then perhaps his veneer wasn't quite so fragile as Shirou had thought.
Like recognizes like, after all, and Kirei's emptiness had been immediately obvious to Shirou upon their very first meeting. But perhaps someone more… human in mentality would find the immediate tells less damning.
Samantha's catlike eyes turned to him, and Shirou valiantly resisted the urge to shift awkwardly in place. "And what about you, hon? What makes you think you're ready to take on a Dead Apostle at…" Her eyes looked him up and down, seemingly unimpressed, but he could detect some twinkle behind her eyes, "twelve?"
"Thirteen." Shirou corrected stiffly.
Her mouth twisted wryly, before she said seriously, her body language becoming stern, taking on the burden of leadership, "You are to watch, and nothing more. If you interfere and get in the way, I'll put you down myself for endangering everyone else here."
Her remark hit him like a slap in the face, and he retaliated as if it was one. He mumbled no aria. The spell was embedded in his magic crest, and fell in line with his Origin, making the it more of an instinct than a conscious tool he needed to activate through something as ephemeral as words. The gears in his mind, moving the rhythmic ticking always present in his skull, accelerated.
And he attacked.
Appearing behind her faster than she could react, her eyes vainly followed the afterimage he'd left behind. He watched her reaching for a dagger like she was moving through molasses. But even as her hand reached out, he pressed his viciously curved dagger at the small of her back.
The enforcers around him had reacted, and by the time he'd drawn his dagger he already had five other enforcers surrounding him on all sides. A woman held a straight, silver shining sword pointed directly under his chin. Another had two gauntlets on either side of his head, ready to pop it in a microsecond. The other three had no weapons, just glowing palms and threatening looks, promising worse than death.
But the most threatening, the most inexplicable, was the dagger pointed at his stomach by none other than Samantha, held in a reverse grip behind her back.
The tension in the previously jolly hideout was balanced on a strand of spider silk, a tight string pulled taught and ready snap at any moment, any movement, even breathing too loudly, threatened to snap the string and send this whole meeting to a violent end.
The world was on a hair trigger. The next action would decide whether he'd made the right move, the correct conclusions.
Samantha shifted, and Shirou tensed, only for his shoulders to relax when she put her dagger back in its sheath and laughed, a loud, belly laugh. The enforcers around him stayed in position a second longer, before they too relaxed, and soon they were laughing too, until everyone was howling with out of breath laughter while Shirou and Bazett stood in mute astonishment.
Well, Bazett was astonished. Shirou just felt relieved that his intuition had been correct.
"Point made, boy. Point made." Samantha said, turning around and patting him on the shoulder in acknowledgements.
"The name is Shirou." He corrected. He didn't appreciate being reminded of his relative youth.
"Shirou, then. Let's take our seats again. All this excitement has me thirsty."
They returned to their places, relaxing into their seats like nothing had happened. If anything, they were more familiar with him, more liberal with their physical contact, almost like his little showing had earned their… respect.
"So, 'Shirou', you got a last name?" A subtle way of prodding him for his mysteries. From that name they could judge how many generations of magi had come before him, their subject of research, even some more well known mysteries if they'd encountered that bloodline previously.
Eyes taking in the magi around him, Shirou dropped a bomb in monotone. "It's Emiya."
The bearded non-irish irish looking man did a totally unplanned spit take. Samantha choked on the ration bar she was eating, then looked up with wide eyes to demand, "Emiya? As in, Kiritsugu Emiya? That son of a bitch had a son?" Examining him again, she muttered, "I don't see it."
A slight upturn of his lips. "I'm adopted."
She was quiet for a second, before she gave a little "hm". "So that speed, time dilation? You didn't even use an aria."
Shirou felt his smirk widen. It felt good to finally have his work recognized. Casually, he shrugged. "Sometimes you just don't have time to recite a poem mid-battle."
They chuckled, one man giving an enthusiastic "Amen to that."
Conversation flowed like alcohol deep into the night. Teasing ensued, barbs were exchanged, and Shirou felt at home for the first time since Kiritsugu died.
Tomorrow, the hunt.