Emiya household.
I sat on a tatami mat with my legs splayed apart, back pressed against a wall, staring forward blankly.
To my right, Artoria was settled with both legs folded beneath her, back straight, palms resting on her lap, face lowered toward the floor.
Further to her side, Medea fiddled with a snow globe she had taken from a shelf on her way in, turning it over to watch white flakes drift onto a miniature house again and again.
Medusa was perched on a chair nearby, body curled into a fetal position, peeking up from behind her knees to glance between me and the space opposite us.
Illyasviel lay in that direction, her breathing uniform and calm, and Shirou lay beside her too, eyes closed, body limp and unresponsive.
Two violet eyes glared at us from beside him, both hands cupping Shirou's cheeks, brow furrowed as she tried to shake him awake.
Sakura.
After trying for a minute straight, she snapped her face toward us and wrapped her arms around his neck in a defensive posture. "W-what... what did you do to senpai!?"
Her voice continued to shake, but she didn't loosen her grip. "...Just tell me what's wrong with him."
An awkward silence fell.
"His body shut his mind down on its own, a self-preservation mechanism he developed after repeated exposure to trauma." I explained in an even tone, and Medea's lips twitched at those words.
"Trauma... what trauma? He didn't mention something like that to me." Looking down at Shirou's face, her eyes went wide, fingers digging into his skin.
"Well... he might not know it himself. Would you remember having your body plug your mind out without knowing why?" Medea shrugged as miniature magic circles flared inside the globe, and every flake of snow that passed through them turned sky-blue like my reality marble's.
"If it is trauma as you say, Master, then he should wake up soon." Artoria lifted her face from the floor, gaze landing on me.
"You're right. He'll awaken in approximately a minute." My finger tapped the tatami mat, a thin, unnoticed silver thread boring into it and sliding away beneath the floor.
Sakura gave me a narrow-eyed stare, as if weighing whether to believe my words, but then she shifted toward Illyasviel, and worry broke across her face as she took in the Einzbern's prone form.
"Who is she?" Her eyes darted between Illyasviel and Shirou. "Why is... is she like this too?"
I exchanged a glance with Artoria and Medea, then with Medusa, who had perked up on her chair, face rising from behind her knees. Finally, I turned back toward Sakura and shrugged, pointing a finger at Medusa. "She can explain everything to you."
Following my finger's direction, Sakura turned to Medusa, and her expression eased, brows lifting as tension bled out of her body. "Rider-san? Pardon me, I didn't notice you there."
"...Guh." Medusa pulled her arms tighter around her shins, as if someone had stabbed her in the side, her shoulders trembling imperceptibly.
Tilting her head slightly, Sakura leaned forward, one hand slipping off Shirou's neck as if to reach toward her before catching herself. "Rider-san... are you feeling faint too?"
At those words, Medusa's eyes flitted around in a fluster before she buried her face back between her knees.
Watching from further away, Medea chuckled under her breath at their cute interaction. But Artoria cut a look sideways at her, jaw locked, mistaking her laugh for mockery.
"You have a problem, Saber?" Medea asked, voice dropping low.
"I have several," Artoria said, not looking away, "starting with whoever taught you that laughing at a comrade counts as good humor."
"I wasn't laughing at her," Medea clarified, turning the snow globe over once more. "I was laughing because it was cute. Sue me for having a heart, unlike some people."
"A heart does not require mockery to function."
"It wasn't mockery. Prove you even know the difference, say something funny."
Artoria opened her mouth, then closed it again.
"...That's what I thought."
Ignoring their escalating banter, I tapped the tatami mat one last time, and with that movement, a healing magic circle of silver threads clicked into place beneath the floor under Shirou.
It flared for two seconds, its radiance bleeding into Shirou, then unwound into a single thread that crept back to my finger, vanishing inside.
Both Artoria and Medea shifted their attention toward me for a moment before resuming their verbal spat, each taking jabs at the other.
Meanwhile, Sakura still had her gaze fixed on Medusa. "Rider-san...?"
"Ahem. I'll answer your question in her stead." I cleared my throat, making her turn to me. "This white-haired girl is Shirou's older sister. The daughter of his father... Kiritsugu Emiya."
Before she could even react, Shirou jerked free from her hold, eyes snapping open, sitting up too fast, nearly cracking his head against Sakura's chin.
"Wha—" He blinked hard, hand going to his temple as the room realigned itself around him in pieces. "Sister? My... dad's daughter? Since when do I have a—"
Shirou stopped himself as Illyasviel stirred beside him. He took her in, then swept his gaze across the room at large, Artoria, Medea, Medusa curled on her chair, me, and back to Illyasviel's sleeping face, like he was trying to fit new variables into his old framework called life.
"Is she okay?" He didn't ask who Illyasviel was, already shifting his weight to check on her himself. "Is she in pain?"
"She's fine," I said. "Just asleep and tired from earlier."
That seemed to buy him half a second to actually think, and only then did the rest of what I had said seem to land.
"...Okay." Shirou gulped, looking longer at Illyasviel this time. "Kamukura-san. You said... sister?"
"Kiritsugu's biological daughter, older than you, though the timeline is complicated."
"Yeah... I can see that." Mumbling to himself at Illyasviel's petite frame, he continued, "The old man never said anything about a daughter though, nothing at all."
"I can conclude why, but..." Trailing off, I reached for Medea through our connection. Medea, pass me those forged documents.
Got it, Master. She slipped a hand behind her back and twirled her finger in a ring. One magic circle traced into existence at the gesture, rotating to materialize a rolled-up folder in her grasp.
Bringing it into the open, she passed it to me, which I in turn passed to Shirou. "You can look through these if you're confused."
"What is this, Kamukura-san?" he asked, taking it from me.
"Records of Kiritsugu, his wife, and child."
Shirou flipped it open, eyes scanning the first page, then stopping. Then he turned back a page, as if he'd misread something, then forward again, mouth parting slightly. "You've got to be kidding me..."
Leaning closer, Sakura followed along, her eyes skimming the pages alongside his. "Senpai, there's even a collage of pictures here."
He didn't reply, too lost in flipping through them. A minute passed with the only sound being that of pages being turned.
After Shirou flipped to the last page and finished, he sat there, rigid, face tipping toward the ceiling.
"The old man lived a high life in his prime... and left a sister for me from overseas."
His voice cracked halfway, caught between a laugh and a cry, like he couldn't decide which was true for this moment.
"You could've at least warned me, Kiritsugu."
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Okay so, funny thing happened while writing this chapter. I compared writing Izuru to writing the new Danmachi guy, and it turns out one of them is emotionally constipated by design and the other one just says whatever's in his head like a golden retriever who found a weapon.
Writing Izuru is basically tightrope walking. Every sentence has to be measured, restrained and precisely calibrated, one wrong word and suddenly Ultimate Hope sounds like Ultimate Vibes. Meanwhile the new guy just kind of... exists loudly. Nothing to balance. Just a guy who apparently has an unlimited budget for chaos.
Honestly? It's been refreshing. Turns out building a character from absolute scratch with zero borrowed baggage is way less stressful than handling someone else's already-established fragile porcelain vase of a psyche. Who knew.
Anyway, have a refreshing day, to you and to me, assuming Izuru doesn't find out I called him a porcelain vase.