Vortex of Fate
The living room of the Emiya household had the distinctly oppressive air of an interrogation room that day.
Not that Mashirou was being interrogated. In fact, Tohsaka had only spoken once when asking for some tea after he had asked to speak to her. He let himself into the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea before setting it on the table along with teacups in front of each of them: herself, Sakura, himself and the white-haired woman who she for some inexplicable reason hated with a passion.
He was sitting straight across from her, his face was expressionless and the only thing that differentiated him from a statue was the fact that he occasionally brought the steaming cup of tea to his lips to take a silent sip.
Among the things she had found out that night were: Tohsaka Rin was a magus and Sakura probably was one too, she was a "Master" of something called The Holy Grail War, she was supposed to do a summoning ritual to summon this thing called a "Servant" which was probably something like a familiar so that an albino girl who she met just yesterday doesn't kill her for god-knows-what reason. Oh, and her heart was destroyed and she was hanging between life and death until Tohsaka fixed it with magecraft.
In short, tonight was the night Emiya Mashirou's life went to hell in a pretty picnic basket covered by a dainty pink cloth to muffle her poor brain's cries of anguish from the effort of trying to process it all.
Also, Tohsaka was creeping her out with his stare that went through her. "T-Tohsaka, say something!" She finally said aloud in an agitated voice.
In response, Tohsaka buried his face in his right hand.
…Was it really that exasperating, the fact that she was totally unable to tell what was going on behind that mask called Tohsaka Rin's face?
A soft, almost inaudible sound resembling snickering fluttered in from towards Tohsaka's general direction. Mashirou saw a brief flash of aqua from between his fingers.
Tonight she also found out that Tohsaka Rin was a fucking Troll.
Her irritation was probably showing on her face, as Tohsaka straightened up instantly and coughed, his face perfectly stoic as though saying, "Nope, wasn't snickering at your discomfort at all."
…And he's downright mediocre at hiding it.
"So, I guess we have a lot of ground to cover." Tohsaka said matter-of-factly. "I'm guessing you don't know anything about magic, right?"
"Actually," She started as he took another sip from his cup, "My dad was a Mage and he taught me a bit, so…"
Tohsaka's eyes widened and he gulped down too much of the tea, causing him to cough and splutter. Sakura worriedly thumped his back, and the White-haired woman just smirked victoriously before smacking him so hard on the back that he nearly fell face-first onto the table.
"I've been in the school for one yea-" She started in a mock-cocky voice, only to be cut off by a livid Tohsaka snap, "Not. One. Word." As he wiped his mouth with the back of his mouth.
"But honestly, I'm not that good of a mage. I barely have any magic." She continued, rather perturbed by the intense glare Tohsaka was giving the still smirking woman. "Heck, I have a hard time handling the Bounded Field over the house… So I keep it deactivated. "
"Are you nuts!?" Tohsaka asked a little too aggressively making Mashirou frown and lean away a bit, "What kind of magus keeps the bounded field of his workshop down on purpose?"
"Um… If what I said before wasn't an indication, I'm not really a proper magus." Mashirou said plainly and took a sip of her tea. "I can only manage reinforcement magecraft…"
"You-you really are nuts!" Tohsaka snapped, earning a raised eyebrow from Mashirou.
"What are you angry at me for?" She whined. Tohsaka's eyes widened for a bit and he straightened up looking apologetic.
"I'm sorry. I guess I'm just on edge." He took a deep breath and conjured a stern look on his face reminiscent of a concerned adult about to scold a child for attempting to play with scissors, "But really, I'm right to be angry at you. You just gave away the secrets of your magecraft."
"Why does it even matter?" Mashirou asked back, and she couldn't help but notice the two other women hovering at the sides. The woman she couldn't help but dislike was still holding a victorious smirk which Tohsaka seemed to be ignoring intently.
"It matters because now I can guess what you might attempt at a given situation." Rin explained calmly, "Since you are a Master, we might as well face each other sometime in future."
"About that, I still have no clue about what this "Master" business is." Mashirou said.
Tohsaka sighed, "Well… First tell me how you two got into this situation."
Emiya and Sakura looked at each other and Sakura started.
"Well… Um, Nii-san and I got into a bit of an argument before practice started the day before yesterday." Sakura said, averting her eyes from Tohsaka and looking into her cup of tea which had gotten cold as though she had found something interesting in there.
"I'll assume that means you tried to make Shinji behave and he flew off the handle and hit you." Tohsaka said calmly, sipping his tea with a scowl on his face.
"N-no, it—" Sakura started, but was cut off by Tohsaka.
He looked at Mashirou and said rather coldly, "Emiya-san, you continue. I'm having trouble hearing Sakura. She speaks a bit too softly, you see." He added the last part in a particularly indifferent tone, which made Mashirou expect that the statement was a veiled insult directed towards both herself and Sakura.
But she brushed off the thought, looking at a Sakura who struggled to deny Tohsaka's theory.
"You're right, that's more or less what happened." Mashirou said plainly, casting an apologetic glance towards Sakura. Sakura quieted instantly, looking back at her cup of green tea dejectedly.
"Please continue." Tohsaka said, ignoring Sakura.
"Um… Well, Shinji was angry the whole day after that." Mashirou explained, "I felt kind of sorry for Sakura, so I invited her over and had Fuji-nee—Fujimura-sensei, I mean, lie to her family that she was invited to stay with her."
"Well, that explains why you two were together." Tohsaka said, emptying the teapot into Saber's cup, who thanked him softly. Mashirou noticed that even though the woman gave the impression that she was uninterested in the whole affair, she was actually listening intently to every word.
"But how did you two end up in school that late in the evening?" He continued.
"Mitsuzuri kinda asked me to help fix some of the equipment in the archery range," Emiya said rather sheepishly, rubbing the back of her head, "But I also had my part-time job in Copenhagen—"
"…You work part-time in Denmark?" Tohsaka asked incredulously.
"Pfft… It's the name of a bar in Shinto, idiot." Saber said before Mashirou, snickering.
Tohsaka raised an eyebrow at Saber, "And how, exactly, do you know that?"
"Our brief scouting of Shinto." Saber said smoothly, but Mashirou felt there was a touch of dishonesty in her voice.
However, her suspiciousness was overridden by a faint feeling of amusement and a stronger feeling of exasperation at the embarrassed Tohsaka. Wasn't he supposed to be the smart one?
"Anyway," She said with a smile, "I had some work, so I decided to go to Copenhagen before tackling the equipment. I told Sakura to stay here, but she wanted to help me, so I let her come with me."
"Oh…" Tohsaka sighed, "Fate is such a b—bother." Mashirou had the faintest feeling that that last word wasn't as innocent as he'd like them to think.
"Well, now that that's cleared up, what do you intend to do about this?" Saber spoke for the first time in a while, looking at Rin with a scrutinizing look.
He frowned, bringing the cup he was still holding to his lips before realizing that it was empty. He put it down on the table and said with a resigned sigh, "I guess we'll have to take her to the Overseer. The fake priest will explain everything to her. This'll be a lot less trouble since she's yet to summon her Servant."
"Fine… I was expecting you to knock her out and take her command seals." Saber said.
Mashirou looked at Tohsaka furtively when he seemed to consider it for a moment, "Um… Tohsaka?"
"Don't worry, I don't intend to do anything like that." Tohsaka said, resting his elbows on the table and cradling his head between his hands to give her a mischievous smirk.
Mashirou pouted a bit and decided to clear away the table. Sakura quickly jumped to her feet to help, but she just thanked her and told her to leave it to her.
"Hang on…" Mashirou heard Tohsaka say slowly, "You two jumped out of a window! What was that all about, you could've gotten seriously hurt!"
"Well…" Mashirou said rather sheepishly, joining them back at the table. She started to reminiscence what happened earlier that evening.
Mashirou and Sakura panted as they fled to the second floor, hoping that they could find a place to hide.
Mashirou herself was keeping her pace well, but Sakura was getting tired fast. Mashirou had lots of stamina due to her training, but Sakura didn't have much stamina.
Mashirou could feel her slowing down from the extra tug she felt on the arm she was holding. But they didn't have the time to stop and rest for a second.
A prickling sensation on the back of her neck signaled the approach of a hostile foe. She weighed their chances and decided to run into a classroom, slamming the sliding doors behind them.
Just as they reached the other side of the classroom, the doors flew off their place violently and Sakura shrieked.
Mashirou could only register the crazed scarlet eyes of the monster in the shape of a man when her body went into overdrive and her mind became clear.
Burning. The world was burning around her. Ichor as black as death and charred flesh just as black.
Screams. Pain. Fear. Destruction.
A woman shrieked as her lower body was being slowly roasted beneath the burning debris.
Her hand was reaching out towards Mashirou.
Mashirou's charred hands weren't trying to pull her out.
Her hands weren't trying to remove the debris.
They were on her ears trying to block the screams out.
No, her hands were on a chair, the pain was her Magic Circuit coming into existence as a searing hot rod which was her spinal cord.
The screaming was of Sakura's as the reinforced chair shattered while trying to parry a scarlet spear like the tongues of flame rising from the corpse of a man being reduced to ash in front of her eyes.
Or was it just another pillar which once held a building up, which looked like it was squirming because of the tears which filled her burning eyes?
She hoped it were the latter as she closed her eyes to block out the visions as well.
No, she closed her burning eyes to block the smoke. The smoke smelled of burning flesh. It tasted of burnt teriyaki. But human flesh made terrible teriyaki.
Or was it the flying splinters she was trying to keep from her eyes as she dived away from the beast in blue as it tore apart the other desks blocking its way to them? She had the half-burned woman under one arm. The woman's mouth was agape and eyes sightless, but her screams still resounded.
A large rag, probably left by some student inside the mouth of a corpse crushed under the ruins of a house to silence its screams and let them escape with their conscience free of its wails for help flew onto her and Sakura's corpses to save them from the fire. Her body was still burning and prana was able to flow into the rag through her singed hands to fortify that as well.
Just as a boy about her age grabbed hold of her ankle to drag her into those scarlet flames as well, she swung the rag in front of her and it spread out and shielded like a veil.
The reinforced rag was able to deflect the spear wielded by the flames, and then she wrapped it around the flame's head to smother it. But the curiously blue flame snarled like a beast as it tried to throw off the rag from its head, the arms wielding the tongue of scarlet flame flailing around and barely missing her head which was bleeding copiously. But no one would notice that her hair was soaked in blood, it was already red so there wasn't any point in trying to brush it off with her already bloody hands.
Sakura's corpse was shrieking nonstop and another blob of scarlet flame and black ichor came to meet the blue flame maybe they didn't get along and there was the sound of collapsing buildings again.
They needed to get out of there, maybe she could jump into the flames. She had abandoned them all, so the flames could only hurt her. She still had the corpse of the woman under her arm so there was no time to think because she was still screaming and she had abandoned them all and needed to atone so she'll jump into the abyss of fire so she would burn and Sakura's body could be safe.
She jumped out of the window, reinforcing her body so that the fall wouldn't seriously injure her. A voice beneath them yelled something in a foreign tongue she didn't recognize and suddenly their fall was slowed so that they gently landed on the ground.
For a moment she thought that it was Kiritsugu who was approaching, but she knew better.
In the faint light of dusk, she identified the figure as a pale Tohsaka Rin.
"Emiya-san?" Tohsaka said, a frown etched on his face.
"Sorry," Mashirou said, putting on her best smile she hoped looked reassuring, "I was just out of it for a moment."
"Okay then." Tohsaka looked a bit suspicious.
"As I was saying, if you want to keep your status of Master, you'll need to be prepared to kill." Tohsaka said matter-of-factly. Mashirou almost did a double-take at that, wondering if she was hallucinating.
"K-kill!?" A horrified Mashirou asked. She quickly glanced at the back of her hand where the dark bruises that were the Command Spells then back to Tohsaka who was looking at her command spells as well.
"Not necessarily." Tohsaka said, oddly pleased at her reaction, "It's just a precaution to keep the defeated Masters from forming contracts with stray Servants. Eliminating the Servant is usually enough to make the Master a non-issue." He explained.
"But… What about people caught in the crossfire?" She asked again, "If there were more people like that spearman and his Master, a lot of people could get hurt or killed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time!"
"Honestly? Most Masters wouldn't give a damn about people caught in the crossfire." Rin said, rather ironically calm. "The Church and the Association will make sure the collateral damage is swept cleanly under the rug. Not that they'll thank the Master responsible, they would prefer to keep themselves a secret."
"What do you mean by "collateral damage"?" Mashirou exclaimed loudly, "It-it's messed up to call people that."
"…Senpai," Sakura said softly, drawing the three pairs of eyes towards her for the first time in a while, "I know that it's cruel to treat people like disposable objects, but… Most Mages don't think like you. They're more concerned with results."
"Sakura's right, Emiya-san." Tohsaka said, a hint of sadness in his voice.
"But-but! Tohsaka, you don't think like that, do you?" She asked him with the kind of intensity she rarely showed.
"Maybe…" Tohsaka said evasively, a mysterious twinkle Mashirou couldn't quite recognize playing at the corner of his eye. He placed his elbows on the table between them and linked his fingertips, giving an intent look at her from above them.
"I refuse to believe it." Mashirou said, "I know you're not like that."
"And how exactly can you be so sure about that?" Rin said icily, and Mashirou was taken aback for a moment.
She took a big breath and looked Tohsaka in the eyes, trying not to shiver from his look, "I know because you didn't leave me to die back then. You even used your trump card to save me."
Tohsaka looked a bit flustered, "W-well," he looked flustered a bit before he recovered replied, "we mages are also believers in Equivalent Exchange. You saved me and I saved you back. So we're even. You don't need to bother with that gratitude crap." He said harshly.
"Sure…" The white haired woman named Saber drawled, earning a glare from Tohsaka and a soft giggle from Sakura.
There was a brief silence where Tohsaka seemed to seize Mashirou up and then gave a theatrical sigh.
"Oh well, I guess we have some time to kill before I take you to Kirei." He said in a chipper voice. Mashirou was seriously creeped out by the bright smile Tohsaka had hitched on which came off as unnerving rather than friendly. "Please direct me to your Workshop."
"Workshop?" Mashirou asked, rather confused.
"…You know, your "Atelier"?" Tohsaka added with a touch of incredulity.
Mashirou tilted her head, the first thing coming to her mind was how perfectly Tohsaka had pronounced the French word. The second thing was the sheer stupidity of him trying to get his point across to a Japanese person by randomly throwing synonyms from different languages in.
"Oh…" She said quickly, before Tohsaka had a veritable fit from all that incredulity, "Follow me."
"Sakura, you stay here if you like. Saber, go to the roof and keep watch."
"Aye, aye." The stoic swordswoman said rather sarcastically and faded away.
Sakura just sat silently, indicating that she wanted to stay in the living room. Tohsaka frowned for a brief moment while giving Sakura an odd look before nodding and looking at Mashirou to lead the way.
She led him to the courtyard, occasionally looking back to see him looking around and taking in the scenery. They were in front of the shed behind the house within a few minutes, and before they entered Mashirou couldn't help but ask, "Um… Tohsaka, before we go in, I want to ask you something."
"Go on." He said, turning to look at her curiously.
"You- um, you're calling Sakura by her first name…" Emiya stated, feeling something like boiling water bubbling at the pit of her stomach.
Tohsaka seemed to process the statement in slow motion as his face steadily showed shock and his mouth gaped in a half-gasp.
"We-well, our families are both Magus families and had an alliance for a few generations." Tohsaka said hastily, "We've known each other since we were kids… So we tend to be a lot more informal in private."
"Oh…" Mashirou said and felt rather ashamed at herself for jumping to conclusions, "Let's go inside!" She added before scurrying inside the shed which she used as a personal workshop and garage.
"Wait, what were you about to ask?" Tohsaka said suspiciously as he followed her inside the dark room.
"Uh, um… Nothing! Just killing time! Heheheh…" She said, raising her arms in front of her defensively and backing away from an increasingly livid Tohsaka.
"Emiya-san…" Tohsaka started in a dangerous voice as he took a menacing step towards Mashirou, "I was completely honest with you today. Would you please do the same courtesy for me?"
There it was; the Tohsaka Rin patented smile of doom. He would've made Marquis de Sade proud with that completely friendly smile which was playing on his face even though he was exuding a venomous aura of malice.
"We-well… I was wondering whether you and Sakura were an ite—"
"ARE YOU A FUCKING PSYCHO, EMIYA!?" He roared with a look of absolute disgust, and Mashirou toppled backwards onto her backside in her hurry to back away from him.
She broke her fall with her hands; a sharp object she couldn't identify in the darkness cut into her palm and it started bleeding onto the floor.
Before she knew it, she was engulfed into a pure white light. Her body felt on fire as something inside her clicked and heat radiated out of her body. A stream of energy flowed into her from the air and from the tips of her body it flowed into the area in front of him.
Another flash of light, and a soft silver radiance like moonlight replaced the blinding white light. A flurry of movement which was too fast to make out yet inhumanly beautiful in the way that it made blue and silver mingle filled her sight, and a muffled yell brought her from her reverie.
Her sight finally adjusted, and she saw the gallant figure of a blonde young man clad in silver armor over blue clothes present himself in front of her. He was holding something invisible in one hand which only announced its presence through the faint rippling of the scenery around it, the other hand was extended towards her.
A soft smile played on his face and those astonishingly blue eyes sparkled even in the dim lighting of the room. He spoke in a boyish yet refined voice, "I am the Servant Lancer. I ask you, are you my Master?"
A/N:
Sorry, couldn't resist. :P
Although one should note that Lancer is more of a Male Saber than Proto!Saber as Lancer.
Guess the pairings!