The Emiya Household
The smell of burning eggs woke me.
I blinked against the pale morning light, the rough tatami pressing into my palms as I pushed myself up. For one disorienting moment—just a moment—I forgot. The fire. The grail. The crushing weight of paradox that had dumped me back into this too-small body. Then the scent of smoke—not just from the kitchen, but memory-smoke, thick and choking—coiled in my lungs, and it all came rushing back.
Right. Six years old. Again.
Across the room, Seo Akina was already awake, curled into a tight ball near the far wall as if trying to make herself disappear. The oversized navy blue sweater Kiritsugu had bought her swallowed her frame whole, its ribbed cuffs covering her hands save for the very tips of her fingers. The high collar hid the edge of bandages still wrapped around her throat.
Her dark hair—too smooth, too perfect, courtesy of Avalon's healing—fell in uneven layers around a face that seemed too pale against the dark fabric. The too-long bangs cast shadows that made her hollow eyes look even deeper. When she blinked, it was slow, deliberate, like each movement cost her something. She worried the sweater's sleeves between her fingers in a constant, absent-minded fidget.
Beneath the loose clothes, bandages wrapped around her torso and arms created subtle ridges in the fabric. The charcoal sweatpants pooled around her ankles, hems frayed from being stepped on. Thick winter socks covered her feet completely despite the mild weather. Every inch of skin was hidden away.
Her hands, when they occasionally emerged, were small and delicate, nails bitten short. The left still bore faint marks where an IV had been taped too tightly at the hospital. She'd press that spot sometimes, as if checking she was still there. The motion made her sleeve slide back just enough to reveal a bandage before she quickly tugged the fabric back down.
The only color came from the thin red ribbon on her left wrist—the one thing she'd refused to part with. It stood out stark against the muted blues and grays. She touched it often, fingers brushing the frayed edges when she thought no one was looking.
She hadn't spoken more than a handful of words since the hospital. Not that I blamed her. I remembered the look on her face when Kiritsugu, voice gruff but painfully gentle, had told her the search for her family was over.
"There was… no one else."
She hadn't cried. Just stared, small hands clutching the hospital sheets like they were the only thing tethering her to the world. Then she'd turned her face to the wall and stopped speaking for three days.
I swung my legs over the futon's edge, bare feet hitting the cold floor. Seo flinched but didn't look at me.
"Morning," I said, like I had every day that week.
She didn't answer.
The kitchen was a disaster.
Kiritsugu stood over the stove, brow furrowed as he poked at the charred remains of what might have been an omelet. The man could calculate bullet trajectories in his sleep, but watching him cook was like watching a wolf try to knit.
He glanced up when I entered, expression shifting into something awkwardly hopeful. "Shirou. You're up."
"Yeah," I said, sliding into a chair. "The smoke alarm woke me."
Kiritsugu grimaced.
It was strange seeing him like this. The Kiritsugu in my memories had been a ghost—hollow-eyed and half-dead, moving through the world like a loaded gun with the safety off. But now? Now he was trying. Badly, but trying.
I remembered the day he'd asked us to live with him.
"You don't have anywhere else to go," he'd said, like it was a tactical assessment rather than an offer of salvation. "I have space."
I'd played the shell-shocked orphan perfectly—wide eyes, hesitant nods, the occasional tremor when I thought he was watching. Seo had just stared at the floor, fingers twisting in her hospital gown.
"Do you… want this?" Kiritsugu had asked, so painfully unsure.
I'd nodded. Seo hadn't moved at all.
In the end, he'd taken us both anyway.
Seo shuffled into the kitchen, steps silent as a shadow. She paused in the doorway, gaze darting between Kiritsugu and the table like she was calculating escape routes.
Kiritsugu turned with a plate of blackened eggs. "Akina. Good morning."
She froze.
I watched his jaw tighten, fingers flexing against the plate. He was trying so damn hard, but every interaction with her was a minefield. One wrong move and she'd bolt.
I took a bite of the eggs. They were terrible—rubbery and burnt, with a metallic aftertaste that suggested he'd scraped them straight off the pan.
"Mm. Crispy," I said, chewing thoughtfully.
Kiritsugu's eye twitched.
Seo looked at me. Really looked at me, for the first time all morning. There was something in her eyes—not quite surprise, not quite amusement, but close. You're joking, that look said. About the terrible food.
I grinned and took another exaggerated bite. "Want some?"
A beat. Then, so quiet I almost missed it—a huff. Not a laugh, not yet, but the ghost of one.
Kiritsugu stared at her like she'd performed a miracle.
Seo hesitated, then crept forward, sliding into the chair beside me. She picked at her eggs with tiny, careful bites.
It was progress.
Across the table, Kiritsugu exhaled, shoulders loosening just a fraction. "I'll… buy bread tomorrow," he muttered.
I nodded sagely. "A wise tactical retreat."
This time, the sound Seo made was unmistakable—a tiny, stifled giggle, quickly smothered behind her hand.
Kiritsugu's eyes widened.
And just like that, the kitchen didn't feel quite so empty anymore.
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The breakfast dishes sat in the sink, abandoned. Kiritsugu had left to buy groceries—or more likely, to brood somewhere with a cigarette. Seo had retreated to the corner of the living room with a book she wasn't reading, her fingers tracing the same paragraph over and over.
I stepped into the backyard, the morning air sharp against my skin. My body was a prison of weak muscles and untrained circuits, but that would change. I dropped into the first push-up, my arms trembling under weight they shouldn't have struggled with.
Pathetic.
But necessary.
The rhythm of exertion steadied my thoughts. To escape the fate of a Counter Guardian, I needed to carve my name into the Throne through deeds, not contracts. But this was an era that scoffed at heroes. Cameras dissected miracles into cheap spectacle. Skepticism gutted legends before they could take root.
My forehead touched the dirt. Up again.
Comic books flickered through my mind—Batman, Son Goku, characters who'd become modern myths. Their stories spread through ink and screens, etching themselves into collective consciousness. A blueprint, perhaps. What made them different from the heroes of old wasn't just their medium or their fictional existence, but the way they'd seeped into the cracks of modern consciousness. I'd seen it myself in the futures-that-would-never-come: children staring at manhole covers wondering if ninja turtles really lived below, office workers glancing at alleyways half-expecting to see a cape fluttering in the dark.
Regardless of whether batman or vampires lived in that darkness, the unknown represented a gap for the supernatural to thrive.
That fragile, fleeting doubt was the key.
People didn't truly believe in superheroes, not really—but they wanted to. The same part of the human psyche that made campers whisper about slender man or drivers swear they'd seen ghostly hitchhikers could be harnessed. If I could become that fleeting shadow at the edge of vision, that blur in disaster footage, that nameless savior in a hundred contradictory forum posts...
The internet was about to explode across the world. Message boards, early social media, viral videos—all fertile ground to plant seeds. A grainy photo here of a red-cloaked figure pulling someone from a burning car. An anonymous 4chan post there about a swordsman stopping a mugging in Shinjuku. Let the rumors contradict each other, let them grow wild and untamed. Mystery thrived in inconsistency.
And if I timed my real interventions just right—saving victims of future tragedies I remembered, always vanishing before cameras could focus—the coincidence would do the rest. Humans would connect the dots themselves. The human mind was a pattern-seeking machine, desperate to believe in something greater, even as it scoffed at the idea.
I flexed my fingers, feeling the phantom weight of a blade that wouldn't exist for years yet. A Noble Phantasm born from magecraft, technology and eventually the collective unconscious, forged not in ancient wars but in pixels and urban legends. It was madness.
But then, so was a world where the church hunted vampires and true miracles were hidden under the moonlit sky. If humanity had stopped believing in the old gods, I'd make them believe in a new one.
All it would take was being everywhere and nowhere at once.
The perfect ghost story. The ideal form would be as a rumor, but perhaps a web comic would be a good starting point.
I scoffed to myself as I imagined it. EMIYA the Red Knight. Preventing tragedies before they happen.
But it was something I could do. The Fuyuki fire. The gas leaks. The subway poisonings that would stain 1995. I knew the when and where of countless disasters. Saving those lives would leave ripples. Eyewitness accounts, rumors, the slow seep of a name into the zeitgeist: Someone was there. Someone saved us.
My arms gave out. I rolled onto my back, staring at the sky.
The obstacles were glaring. No overt magecraft—the Association's enforcers would descend like vultures. No allies, not yet. Just this fragile body and a mind packed with futures that might not even unfold the same way.
But the advantages…
I sat up, pressing a hand to my chest. Kiritsugu's contacts. The Emiya fortune, however diminished. And knowledge—decades of technological leaps crammed into my skull. A smartphone in 1990 was a brick. By 2000, it would be a window to the world.
I flexed my fingers.
Magic was bound by Mystery, but technology? Technology thrived on being seen. A "hero" with advanced gadgets wouldn't break the Masquerade—just stretch it. And if I seeded stories online in the coming years, let them mutate in the dark corners of forums and chatrooms…
A twig snapped.
Seo stood in the doorway, her book clutched to her chest. She didn't speak, but her eyes flicked from my shaking arms to the sweat-damp earth.
I forced a grin. "Training to be strong. Wanna join?"
She blinked. Hesitated. Then, so quietly I almost missed it:
"...Okay."
Progress.
I pushed myself up, hiding the wince. The path ahead was madness. But then, so was a boy who'd once believed he could save everyone.
At least this time, I knew the cost.
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The boy—Shirou—sat cross-legged in the yard, his small hands pressed to the dirt as if testing its weight. Kiritsugu watched from the kitchen window, cigarette smoke curling between his fingers as he took in the details he'd cataloged a dozen times before.
The child was too still.
Not the stillness of trauma, not the frozen silence of the girl—Seo—who flinched at shadows. No, this was something else. The way his eyes tracked the wind's path through the grass, the precise angle of his shoulders when he turned his head. Like a soldier scanning a battlefield.
Six years old.
Kiritsugu exhaled slowly. The boy claimed to remember nothing before the fire. Not his name, not his family. They'd chosen Shirou together, a clean slate. Yet he'd insisted on the Emiya name with a quiet intensity that didn't match the hollow-eyed orphans Kiritsugu had known in war zones.
Shirou was slight for his age, his limbs still carrying the gauntness of recent malnutrition. The fire had left its mark in subtler ways too: his hair, a shade of rust-red that caught the light like copper, had grown back uneven in places, shorter where the flames had licked too close to his scalp. His eyes were the wrong color. That was the first thing Kiritsugu had noticed in the hospital. Not the warm brown of most Japanese children, but a hue closer to amber, sharp and assessing in a way that didn't belong on a six-year-old's face.
A magus? Unlikely. Kiritsugu had combed through records, traced bloodlines. There were no minor families in the region, no magus lineages beyond the three of the Grail War. There were also no missing children reports matching his description. And yet...
Shirou moved with a precision that belied his age. He watched people like a strategist assessing a battlefield. He'd flinched the first time he'd seen Kiritsugu's Contender.
A mystery, then. But not an immediate threat.
Kiritsugu's ribs ached, the curse of the grail slithering beneath his skin. He had time. Not much, but enough. To watch. To wait.
His gaze shifted to Seo, hunched over a picture book at the low table. The girl had kept her original name. Her memories haunted her. She was improving, incrementally. No more screaming at night, no more refusing meals. She ate when prompted now, sometimes even ventured a word or two. But her eyes...
She kept them downcast, always. She wouldn't meet anyone's eyes, her gaze perpetually fixed on the ground, on walls, on anything but a human face. As if meeting someone's gaze might invite disaster. As if she was afraid they would see something in her… or she would see something in them.
He'd saved them. That made them his responsibility, at least for now. Until they could stand on their own. When they were a bit older, he would make a trip to retrieve Illya.
Kiritsugu took a drag from his cigarette, letting the nicotine sear his lungs. He had explained magecraft to both children in the vaguest terms—enough to warn them away from his workshop, not enough to invite questions. He was a magecraft user, not a magus and he had no intention of passing on the Emiya magic crest.
Shirou had nodded solemnly, with none of the awe or skepticism the revelation should have provoked. The girl, Seo, had simply shrunk further into her oversized sweater.
A shuffling sound drew his attention. Seo hovered in the doorway, her fingers twisting in the hem of that ever-present navy blue sweater. The bandages were still there now, the burns healed, but she still dressed like the cold might kill her.
Avalon had fully healed her, but the hypnotized nurse still bandaged her up, because Kiritsugu did not want to draw attention to a miraculous survivor who did not even have burns. Since then, Seo had refused to take the bandages off, still convinced that her skin was burnt, even after seeing flawless flesh each time she bathed.
A cough wracked his chest, wet and deep. He pressed a hand to his ribs, feeling the curse coiled there, patient as a snake.
Ten years, maybe. Less if he had to fight.
Outside, Shirou stood abruptly, wiping dirt from his palms with an efficiency that bordered on ritual. For a heartbeat, his eyes flicked to the window—to Kiritsugu—and the man saw something old flicker behind that child's face.
Then it was gone, replaced by a smile too bright for the ruins they'd crawled out of.
Kiritsugu turned away.
Secrets could wait. The dead—and the dying—had all the patience in the world.
Two orphans. One dying man. Two more reasons to continue living.
Feeling a little less tired, Kiritsugu turned away from the window.
For now, this was enough.