Anniversary update. This chapter was actually going to be a fair bit longer but Sherlock pointed out that it would be way too much going on all at once so we're breaking it up. We'll be posting this one now and the "second half" once I've finished writing it (in a few days, hopefully). Illust. on QQ and SB as always.

Thanks, Sherlock.

X

With the attentiveness of a hawk, Matsu watched Emiya and Tohsaka as they moved away from the table and entered the garden. In the darkness of her room, her wide, unflinching eyes caught the light of the bright monitor displaying the video feed from the dozens of cameras that she had planted throughout the house.

Now that they were in supposedly in private, this might've been the best shot that she would ever get at figuring out what was up with the two of them. Tohsaka was nice and all but she definitely rubbed Matsu the wrong way and Emiya probably didn't have an innocent bone in his body.

No matter which way you sliced it, assuming that their current stay at the Izumo inn was as benign as they made it appear was foolish. Minato-chan wanted things to go well… he was so sure that things would go well, that Emiya was a good person, but…

"Come on…" she whispered under her breath. "Come on. Show me what you're really all about."

And then they disappeared.

No, that wasn't quite right.

They were still there. Her feed just couldn't see them. They were messing with her cameras somehow; it was like they suddenly ceased to exist.

Ah. That wasn't right either.

It was because the cameras were still there that she knew that they were still in that space; she just couldn't get those cameras to transcieve information to her computer properly. As a Brain Type Sekirei, it was a feeling that she knew to believe. It was a connection that existed between her and the electronic devices that couldn't really be put into words.

There was nothing more that she could do with her current abilities, however. If she couldn't get a connection through the computer—

Norito.

Yes. That would work just fine.

Matsu pushed herself away from the screen and crawled toward her room's door.

X

As impassively as he could, Shirou stared at Tohsaka with crossed arms. He didn't want to speak with her. Definitely not now and definitely not about this. Still, he couldn't allow her to get a read on him. Tohsaka's motives were a mystery; as long as they remained that way, he couldn't let her get into his head.

That was exactly what she was trying to do at the moment.

She was smiling right now, her legs dangling over the edge of the engawa, relaxed, as though she didn't have a care in the world. He knew not to trust her body language, however. Whether she was acting as cheerful as an innocent babe or as stoic as the most apathetic of magi, it didn't matter in the end.

None of it was real. Not with her. Not anymore.

He took a moment to weigh his options.

As it stood, he was at a disadvantage. He couldn't beat Tohsaka in a straight fight without any preparation. With that said, it stood to reason that she didn't want him dead or else he would have been by now. Or at least, she didn't want him dead right now.

Was it worth humouring her? Giving her exactly what she wanted would almost assuredly be counter-productive as long as she worked for the Clock Tower. Then again, did he have any other choice to begin with?

Of course not. He could think about this all he wanted; there was nothing that he could do here.

"Let's 'reminisce', then, Tohsaka. Have it your way. What is it that you want to talk about?"

Why am I here? Why are you?

She stayed silent for a moment. At first, he thought that she would wait for him to lose his nerve and speak up again.

"Do you know why you're alive right now, Emiya-kun?"

His arms dropped down to his sides.

"What do you mean?" he could only ask.

"You know what I mean. Why I didn't kill you 'back then'."

Back then.

She meant—

"I don't," he answered simply.

He didn't think about it all that much. He never cared. He still didn't, honestly. Her reasons were her own; he could only go on living doing what he thought was right. He assumed that she would do the same.

Perhaps "what was right" was a phrase to be interpreted by the individual. Such was the case with most people, but nonetheless, never was it a point of contention between the two of them. Their relationship ended the night of the Holy Grail War.

He thought so, at least.

Her emerald eyes, utterly empty despite their vibrance, stared into his.

X

X

The rain came crashing down on Fuyuki City.

Tohsaka Rin was on her last legs. She was arched forward; it was all she could do to stop herself from toppling over.

Her hearing was compromised by the deafening sound of her heart thumping in her chest. Every breath she took felt like a hot iron rod being shoved through her lungs.

She was out of magical energy and her jewels were spent. Her Archer class servant was being held up elsewhere and now that she needed him, she didn't even have enough strength to call him to her side.

This enemy that stood before her was an imposing one. Not so much in stature, but in the spine-chilling inhumanity of their appearance.

What was once distinctive red hair had been shocked white by the continuous abuse of his magical circuits. A body once belonging to a fit young man was almost unrecognizable under the armoury of weapons poking out of his flesh and used as grotesque approximations of stilts.

He looked absolutely ruined, but she knew better. He would keep walking on broken legs. He would keep swinging weapons with torn shoulders. He would keep casting that spell even though his circuits had long since been burned to a crisp.

Ah… but then again, this wasn't really Emiya Shirou, was it?

Emiya Shirou had died.

Maybe not in the literal sense, but in every way that mattered, that boy was no more.

When she killed the heiress of the Matou household, he was left with no other choice –she left him with no other choice– but to either get out of her way or die trying to win. Like a fool, he chose death.

And so, he fought.

And fought.

"When was it that he had thrown himself away so thoroughly?" she wondered. Id, ego, super-ego. Kindness, morals, aspirations. Such things could not be attributed to a broken machine. All that remained was some demented equivalent of preprogrammed instruction and the means to follow it.

She had to kill him.

Had their past camaraderie been of any significance, then it would have been comforting to think of it as an act of mercy and pity. As it stood, however, it was nothing more than her doing her duty as a Tohsaka.

That was right… this wasn't anything that she had to worry about anymore. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

Nothing but her objective as a magus. The Holy Grail. The Akashic Records.

For her to think this way was perfectly fine. It was what would have been expected of her.

He took another step toward her. She grinned through bloodied teeth.

"I'm impressed. You've already eliminated the others somehow, right? And now Archer is trapped. All that's left for you to do is to deal with me."

The thing that was once Emiya Shirou smiled back. It wasn't a regretful smile, nor was it a smile that reveled in her suffering.

"Sorry, Tohsaka."

Was he? Was he really? Perhaps he was, in a way that she couldn't really understand.

She couldn't beat him. She had lost. Nonetheless, until she drew her last breath, she would not back away from her objective of killing the thing in front of her and fulfilling the wishes of her ancestors.

"…Tell me," she muttered. "Assuming you win the war, what is it that you'll do with the Holy Grail?"

It was a fair question. If she couldn't have the one thing that mattered, then she'd at least like a glimpse into the future of the one who would.

Unfortunately, her enemy didn't have an answer. He just kept staring at her blankly.

Anger simmered within her for all of an instant before she understood. Had she been able to muster a little more energy, she would have scoffed.

This was expected too, in a way.

There was no reason for what had become of Emiya to desire anything. After all, he was nothing more than a cheap throwaway. The only way for him to have gotten this far was if he tempered his body, his mind, over and over and over again until he got ahead of himself and broke. What he did could only have been done once, and there wasn't really a point for him to look to the future.

For Emiya Shirou, there wouldn't be one.

After a long, drawn-out battle, her legs eventually gave out. They offered one last uneasy wobble before she completely lost her footing.

Lying prone on the ground, she felt more vulnerable than ever. However, she could draw solace in the fact that it was just an illusion: she was no more defenceless while immobile and on the ground than while immobile and standing on two feet.

The thing that was once Emiya Shirou watched, his expression unchanging, as her body struck the concrete with a crackling "thump".

And "watch" was all he did.

Having realized that he had yet to approach her, Tohsaka Rin craned her head to see why she was still alive.

"You…" she croaked out.

Two blank expressions stared at one another. One unconscious, the other merely looking on in apathy.

Emiya Shirou was unresponsive. It would seem that his mind had finally given out in its entirety just as her body had given up on her.

Hah.

For a moment, Rin allowed herself to think back on everything that brought her to this moment. Was it all horrible? Tragic? She couldn't call it that. Not when she got exactly what she wanted.

"Looks like I win, Shirou," she whispered to the air.

Unable to do anything but lay on her back for now, the girl stared up at the lifeless eyes of the immobile pile of blades.

"This means I win, doesn't it?"

Her question would not receive a response. Not from him and not from Archer. She had no more magical energy to spare and her Servant's Independent Action class skill would only go so far as weakened as he was.

Maybe it was better this way. She wouldn't have to look Archer in the eye as his vessel was given back to the grail as the last of seven tributes of the Heaven's Feel.

A new door to the Akashic Records would belong to her. It was practically written in stone.

Now, passing the time was all that she could do.

"I wonder," she said aloud. Was she speaking to Shirou? At him? Not even she could say for certain. "If you had to kill Sakura with your own two hands as I did, would you have been able to do it at the time?"

His feelings for that girl couldn't be described as anything other than love, she decided. If it only took that much to break him, she couldn't imagine that he could do the deed himself.

No. He was weak.

He wasn't a magus. Not like her. He was only a boy. A normal boy.

She saw red. Just for a moment.

"That's an ugly face you're making, Rin."

"..."

Whatever she thought she saw, it was gone now. Her Servant had been taken.

Her mind would not let go of the immobile figure that she knew stood over her until the grips of unconsciousness were finally too much for her to bear.

X

X

"Tohsaka."

Emiya-kun's voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

"Oh," she exclaimed softly. "I apologize. Ah! Right. I was about to tell you why you're still alive."

"You didn't kill me because you couldn't," he guessed. "Was that what you were going to say? You probably weren't in any better condition than I was at the time."

"No. It's because I have a question that I wanted answered."

She spoke with a candor that put Emiya on quirked a brow.

"And you never asked until now?"

"Just because I want to know the answer doesn't mean you'll have it if I ask you."

"..."

He was sick of this. She could tell because it was written as clear as day on his face.

Was she being deliberately cryptic? Was she just avoiding the subject? Perhaps she had her own hangups; it was difficult for him to see things from her perspective, after all. Something like that, right? Surely that was what was going through his head.

"In fact," she continued before he could decide whether or not he wanted to speak up, "for the longest time, it was my impression that I would never get that answer."

"And that's changed," he gathered.

"Mhm."

Again, there was a silence between them. It was difficult to label it as anything as black and white as "awkward" or "comfortable". It simply "was".

Hah… How to broach the topic…

"We're similar in many ways," she began to explain. "We weigh our options and act in a fashion that we believe will result in the best possible outcome. Like killing Sakura."

"What—"

"I did it because I had to, and that's that. You did too, only… you couldn't. Not really. You said you could, but not all of you came out the other end. It's baffling, in a way. It was as though you followed through on something you fundamentally weren't capable of doing. As a researcher and a magus, am I supposed to applaud you for doing something that I thought would be impossible? Who can say. Ah!" Her eyes widened a little before remarking, "This is another tangent."

She wouldn't allow him to interrupt her. Not now. This was difficult enough to explain as it was.

She picked up her thought once more.

"Anyway, this is all to say… I want to see if you can do it again."

This time, she patiently and properly waited for his response.

"Do what again?"

She smiled.

"Killing the one you love, of course."

She didn't know what she was waiting for, but that blank expression of his turned out to be exactly what she wanted to see. She took advantage of his silence and elaborated.

"It's a pretty unique scenario that you find yourself in, Emiya-kun. Killing your 'love' should have been a once time thing; I'm fairly certain you killed off any part of you that was capable of loving anyone like that again along with her, right? What's interesting about Sekirei, however—what I've learned quite recently—is that it doesn't matter what you're capable of. To these creatures, love is not something earned: it's something thrust upon you. A blind man having his vision restored is not at all the same as a man with no eyes being given the ability to see, isn't that right? I'm sorry if my analogy is a little rudimentary but you understand how this is miraculous in a way, don't you?"

"I don't—"

"You do love her. The Sekirei, Karasuba, that is."

Again, he froze.

She seemed to have that effect on him, didn't she?

He was a man who operated in a strange fantasy in which the world was black and white. Binary. Nothing was black or white to her. Not anymore. She supposed it only made sense that someone who existed in direct opposition to his inner machinations would make it difficult for him to reconcile whatever was before him.

She hated him so much.

Regardless of what she was telling him right now, letting him live was a mistake. Regardless of what she did believe, that was what she wanted to believe.

If there was ever such a thing as "right" or "wrong", the entirety of whatever was left of Emiya Shirou was almost surely "wrong". There was nothing worth saving: happiness had been forever lost to him and misery was all that he could bring to others. Why shouldn't she have killed him?

If Emiya Shirou died, the world would be a better place. If he lived, the world would be worse off.

By this logic, she had made the wrong decision at that time, letting him live.

Alternatively, if Emiya Shirou's continued existence was neither good nor bad—if he simply was—then it wouldn't be fair to say that her decision had been the wrong one.

Wouldn't that be a truly awful outcome?

To think that maybe—just maybe—much of what she thought irredeemable about that man could be fixed by a gaggle of literal aliens, oblivious to the workings of the world as they were. Amazing.

In the same vein, killing Sakura was not the "right" choice. It would never be proven to be anything more than one of the many that she would make over the course of her life.

Haha.

Alas, whether she was wrong and guilty or right and miserable was up to Shirou to decide. She could do nothing but guide him.

Rin placed her hands on his shoulders; he snapped out of his daze.

"I'd wager you can't kill her, for the record."

Close as they were, she could feel his heartbeat quicken.

"I will if I have to," he insisted. She caught him flatfooted.

"Oh?" she voiced in mock surprise. "If you have to? If you want to erase all signs of these aliens before the Clock Tower gets involved, I imagine your intention was to commit to something a little more definitive than 'If I have to'."

She saw the moment that her words struck him. Beautiful. How despairing.

Ah… this was about everything she wanted to get out of this conversation. For now, at least.

She leaned forward to whisper her parting remark.

"A woman who isn't capable of love and a man who isn't capable of devotion, forced into both of those things. Isn't that funny? I think so."

With a near-patronizing pat on the back, she walked past him and dropped the bounded field.

"We'll catch up again later, okay? This was a nice talk we had, Emiya-kun."

X

Minato knocked on Kagari-san's door one more time.

"..."

His shoulders slumped. Why wasn't Kagari-san—

"Mina-chan!"

Hm?

He turned around. He barely had the time to register the fact that Matsu-san was jumping on him before the woman smashed her lips against his.

A few seconds later, she still hadn't pulled away. He had to force her off of him.

"Huah!" He tried to catch his breath. "Matsu-san, what—"

"We'll talk in a bit, okay? Buh-bye!"

She scampered right back up the stairs. He was stuck motionless in front of Kagari-san's door as he tried to wrap his head around what had just happened.

"...Huh?"

Minato shook his head and tried to snap out of it.

Whatever Matsu-san was up to wasn't important right now.

He knocked on Kagari-san's door again.

"Ah? He's not in his room. If he's in one of his moods, he might be on the roof," remarked the voice of a different woman.

Minato froze once more with his knuckles raised for another knock. He backed off.

"Really? Thanks for letting me know, Uzume-san," he exclaimed, thanking her. The black-haired boy gave her a once-over once he noticed that the woman was fully dressed, for once. "Are you going out?"

"Yeah!" Uzume waved at him and started to make her way toward the front entrance. "Actually, if Miya asks, can you tell her that I'm going out for a walk? Shouldn't be too long; I'll be back in an hour or so."

"Oh. Okay."

The sound of the door sliding shut behind her as she left the inn was what got him moving.

X

Climbing onto the roof was tough, he decided.

Honestly, he didn't really think this through. He figured it would be easy enough to climb through the window of his room—it was upstairs, so all he had to do was reach his hands over maybe a fifteen or twenty centimeter gap and pull himself up—but he failed to account for the fact that he was neither a gymnast nor a contortionist; he wasn't flexible or strong enough to get onto the roof at such an awkward angle.

His body trembled and he mustered all of his willpower to keep his fingers from losing their grip. Even still, it just wasn't enough. He was barely able to get his chin over his fingers before he felt himself slip—

A hand grabbed him by the back of his shirt and dragged him all the way up in one swoop.

"K-Kagari-san!"

The man in question stared back at him impassively before turning his head away and continuing to stare at nothing.

"Climbing around like that is dangerous," the older man chastised him. "You shouldn't be up here."

Minato frowned.

"I just wanted to check in on you! You—"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine."

Minato was even surprising himself with how assertive he was being. His heart felt like it was beating a mile a minute; nonetheless, he was fine with being a little uncomfortable because this mattered to him.

"Kagari-san," Minato tried again before hesitating for a moment. "Is this happening because you're a Sekirei?"

The older man still wasn't looking at him, and yet he remarked flatly, "You knew about that, then."

"I did."

Kagari-san seemed angry all of a sudden. Minato kept talking before he could get a word in.

"I know you're a Sekirei but I also know that you're my friend! We're the only two guys around here, you know? It's… it's kind of nice. That's why if there's anything that I can do to help—"

"Do you know what happens when a Sekirei reacts to an Ashikabi?"

The question caught him off guard; he was getting pretty into the whole "you can rely on me" thing.

"No?" was all that Minato felt he could say. It came out sounding more like a question than a proper answer. What did he mean by "What happens"? Was he talking about the winging?

Kagari-san didn't seem too hung up on his answer either way.

"It's the equivalent of what a human would call "falling in love". Our thoughts become completely taken over by our Ashikabi-to be. We yearn for their acceptance, both physically and emotionally. Our hearts flutter when we're near them. We want to be a version of ourselves that they would accept."

"Isn't that—"

"But it doesn't stop there."

For a reason he couldn't quite explain, that "but" filled Minato with an intense feeling of trepidation.

Kagari-san's entire body tensed. His fingers were balled into fists so tight that blood began trickling out from the cracks between his fingers.

He still wouldn't look Minato in the eye.

"That concept: love. The difference between yours and ours is that ours is singular and ever-lasting. A much bigger deal than the fleeting human equivalent. We don't want to be with that other person; we need to be with them. The longer we keep ourselves from our Ashikabi, the worse our symptoms become: passion turns into obsession; a fluttering heart turns into a total upheaval of our internal system that might just make us topple over and die."

The slowly onsetting horror that welled within Minato could only be expressed through silence.

That was…

That was awful. There was no other way to put it.

Did love even have anything to do with this?

…That was the wrong thing to ask. To deny that what the Sekirei felt was love was to spit in the face of whatever little good resulted from this morbid physiological disposition.

Being a "slave to love" was a common term in popular culture. They used it all the time in movies whenever a character did something fuelled by their admiration for another person instead of their own common sense, but it was never literal. To be blinded by love was one thing, but this…

Minato felt sick to his stomach.

Musubi-san, Tsukiumi-san, Kazehana-san, Matsu-san, even little Kuu-chan…

The worst part was that he couldn't even tell himself that "they didn't deserve this". At least then he could take all the guilt onto himself.

But what should he have done instead? Leave them be? Force them to be free and miserable instead of enslaved and—

Happy.

That was it, wasn't it? Whether they were really happy or not. Could it be called that?

"Listen to me, Minato."

Minato hadn't even realized that he was hunched over until he had to lift his head to look at Kagari-san.

Their eyes finally met.

"You are my Ashikabi."

Minato's jaw shook.

His reaction would have been different in any other circumstance, probably. Comical, even. He wasn't interested in men, after all. For someone as socially awkward as he was, Kagari-san's revelation would have sent him reeling.

Now, he could only feel regret and helplessness.

"I will not be winged by you, Minato. Just because I'm going through this does not mean that I will allow myself to be manipulated. I will stand by this decision even if it kills me. When—when it inevitably kills me."

Minato felt like his heart broke.

"Please!" he cried out. Self-consciously, he hoped it didn't come across as a whine to this man who he had grown to admire quite a bit. "I want to help! I don't know how, but I have to—"

"Have to what?"

The question did a great job of interrupting the black-haired boy's entire thought.

Kagari-san took a deep breath and walked toward the edge of the roof.

"Look. I'm sorry. This isn't really your fault—rather, it's something completely out of your control. You don't deserve me lashing out at you like this but I feel pretty bitter right now. I hope that you can understand.

"This was all to say… if you care about—if you care about anything I just said, just stay away from me. Leave me alone. I know that I might have painted things in a bad light, but not all Sekirei are like me. Most aren't, actually. Please don't think that my feelings on the matter reflect those of those close to you. Musubi, Tsukiumi, Kazehana and Kuu all love you because they want to love you. Believe that much, at least."

Before anything more could be said, Kagari-san jumped off the roof. Minato had, for the third time in the past hour, found himself left alone. Only this time he felt utterly stranded.

…Literally as well as metaphorically, if getting off this roof was going to be as difficult as he thought it would be.

"Hoh? Sahashi-kun. What are you doing all the way up there?"

Minato forced his shoulders to relax as a woman's voice spoke to him. He peered his head over the edge of the roof and saw Tohsaka-san staring up at him curiously.

Ah. How much of that did she hear?

"I—well, I'm just… sunbathing, I suppose."

"...Oh. Okay. A strange way to do it but who am I to judge?"

She giggled and he felt relief wash over him. She didn't know that he had been speaking with Kagari-san.

"Are you going to stay up there?"

Her question reignited his previous concerns. He sheepishly scratched the back of his head.

"Well, you see…"

She tilted her head confusedly before seemingly understanding his predicament. She smiled.

"Hold on," she said. "I've got just the thing."

The woman moved closer to the wall—his current perch not giving him the right angle to see her— and when she reappeared, it was with an extendable ladder. Was that thing leaning against the wall the whole time? He never noticed it hanging around until now.

"Thanks!" he exclaimed a little meekly. Carefully, he lowered himself back onto the ground step by step.

"You seem a little out of it, Sahashi-kun," Tohsaka-san observed. Almost making him jump, she place a hand on his shoulder and visibly gestured with her head as she looked him over. "Are you all right?"

At first, he thought it would be best to dismiss her worries and simply lie. Even if Tohsaka-san was observant enough to catch on, she was the sort of person that was emotionally intelligent enough to know that he didn't want to talk about it, right?

"...I have a lot on my mind, is all," Minato told her despite himself.

Suddenly, he was being swept along. The woman dragged him into the house—he must have been really out of it because he didn't even see her put the ladder away.

"Come. Let's speak in private, hm?"

He could only nod.

X

Minato didn't recognize the room that he was in, not that he was paying enough attention to pick up on those details to begin with. It was a spacious, didn't have any distinguishable furniture, and honestly looked just like every other room at the inn. That was as much thought as he was going to put into it.

Once more, Tohsaka-san put a hand on his shoulder.

"Now. Tell me what's wrong."

Her urgings felt more inviting than uncomfortable. As though he knew he could trust her to help.

"I…" he trailed off, thinking about how he should phrase it or how much he should really say. "I keep running into situations where the people I want to help won't let me help them."

She tapped her finger against her chin.

"Well, sometimes that's for the best. When someone refuses help, there's often a reason."

It must have been written on his face that her answer wasn't satisfactory; she asked, "Maybe if you told me who it is that you're talking about…"

Should he tell her?

Yeah. It couldn't hurt.

"It started with Emiya-san. You know how it is."

She giggled.

"I do."

"And then… Kagari-san wasn't feeling well, as you know. I went to check in on him, but—Tohsaka-san, if you wanted to help someone and they told you that you'd just make it worse, what would you do?"

She kept her smile, but it was sad. Sympathetic.

"Sometimes we aren't the right people for the job. If you really want to help, it could be that the best way is to find the person who can."

Someone who can help?

Why can't that be me?

That thought left him just as quickly as it came.

How awful. This wasn't about him, right?

Right.

It was about Kagari-san. And Emiya-san.

"Then… who's the right person?" he could only ask.

"I'm not too familiar with Kagari-san, I'm afraid, but Emiya-kun…"

He tried to make himself appear as attentive as possible. It wasn't a question that he expected to receive an answer for at all.

"Well, what is it that you think he needs help with?"

He blinked.

Why was she asking him that? He needed to see that…

That Karasuba needed to be saved? Was that really it?

No.

"It's not obvious, is it?" mused Tohsaka-san. "It would be easy to say that he's being difficult, but that's not quite it either."

"...Yeah," he admitted.

"The only person who can 'save' Emiya-kun, to get him to understand—to truly understand—what his relation to Karasuba is and why it matters is Karasuba herself."

Minato thought back to how Emiya-san acted at the breakfast table.

Was that the nagging feeling that he couldn't put his finger on? That thing that just felt off about that man: was it his relationship with his Sekirei that was broken?

"Tohsaka-san. You really care for Emiya-kun, don't you?"

Her eyes widened owlishly; her mouth formed a tight "o" shape. She wasn't expecting the question.

It only lasted for a moment, however. Her expression relaxed into something pleasant.

"Things would be much easier if it were that simple."

He was a little taken aback by her reply.

"What do you mean?"

Her smile widened. He was slowly beginning to understand that its pleasantness did not reflect happiness.

"My desire to help Emiya-kun is inherently selfish, Sahashi-kun. I'm afraid there isn't anything within either of us left for me to truly care about."

X

After jumping off the roof, Homura didn't realize that he had landed right next to someone until they spoke up.

"Kagari-san. Are you feeling well enough to be moving around like that?"

He froze.

Emiya Shirou was sitting at the edge of the engawa, seemingly in a trance as he stared at the garden before him.

How long had he been there? Had he overheard his conversation with Minato?

"Emiya-san," he returned the greeting. "Were you here this whole time? I didn't even notice you."

He hoped the line of questioning came across innocently enough.

"Indeed. I could say the same, actually; you startled me. I thought I was alone out here."

Homura almost let out a breath he didn't know that he was holding.

"Ah, well, I apologise for that. I'm a little busy, but we'll talk again later, hm?"

Emiya-san smiled pleasantly. He left him with a parting wave.

The Sekirei didn't notice Emiya's face tighten as he turned his back on the white-haired human, nor did he notice the strange visual disturbance that occurred near Emiya's ear as Homura left the premises.

"..."

Shirou idly tapped his finger against the side of the projected earpiece as he thought of what he wanted to say. There wasn't any rush; it wasn't like Karasuba was going to be the first one to speak up.

"For whatever reason, you don't want to talk; that's fine. Just listen to me."