Fate/Stay Night Fan Fiction ❯ Escaping Fate ❯ Disassociation ( Chapter 8 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

AN: Despite the references to Dead Apostles, we won’t be seeing the Tsukihime cast in this story.  Except perhaps in an omake.  I’ve tossed around the idea of possibly doing a story after this on that topic regarding a throwaway mention I’ve read about in F/HA about Shirou hunting Dead Apostles and I’m considering going with a UBW good end Shirou + Satsujinki setting since I want to actually feature Saber and make fun of the fact that Shirou/Saber and Shiki/Arc are complete opposites of one another…anyway.  That won’t be for a while, since I’ve got another fifteen or so chapters and a handful of interludes to go.  


Escaping Fate
Interlude 6-1
Disassociation


Now that she had seen it, returning was out of the question.
Yumi knew the option was there.  Since coming into the family, since Shirou and Rin and Sakura had opened their house to her, Yumi had come to realize she could find peace.  That the painful and terrible days before could be, if not forgotten, distanced and set aside, a part of her but no longer all she knew.  She could regain a semblance of normality and live like she had dreamed of while in the orphanage, with a new life, a life resembling what she had with her long-gone mother.
She couldn’t any longer.
The world was not that place for her, not a safe haven of adventure and intrigue.  It was dark and scary and had beings that would do terrible things.  There were nightmares in the world that no human could hope to face, and there were nightmares made up even of humans that no human should hope to comprehend.
It seemed like there was Shirou, and there were the evils of the world.
The look on his face made sense to her, as hopeless as she felt it was.
In the darkness, one light was all the more apparent.
When Yumi returned to school that week, she could no longer look at it through the same frame.  It was certainly reality, a carefree and positive one, even with the negativity of fights and feuds and jealousy and misunderstandings.  But it was no longer the world she could wholly immerse herself in.  It was like those countries she had visited before, a real and tangible location, but different.  It was like Sidney or Dublin or LA, real, but separate from where she called home.
It was just another land amidst many.
School was merely a visit, not a home.  Yumi would answer questions when asked—a part of her at least was certainly good at most academia—but would default to staring out the window from her second-to-corner seat* and her thoughts drift off to what was out there.  
And that earned her some hostility.
A couple of the girls in class thought it arrogant and aloof that she would answer so precisely and then stare off out the window like she were bored.  It didn’t help that she already stood out, her pale hair and unhealthy complexion.  Perhaps that week before seeing Shirou and Rin fight, she had not seemed so distant, but now…
It didn’t help that Takumi Hoshino would check in on her more than just for club activities, as he seemed to have taken Sakura’s request to heart.  It wasn’t frequent, but once or twice a week he might stop in and ask if she wanted to have lunch with him and a couple of friends from the club.  Hoshino was not the most popular boy in school, but he was kind and well-liked, and the added attention she got only served to give those unhappy with Yumi a little more fuel.So some of the girls would smile at her, present her with a polite face, but say things.  Passive-aggressive things, like, “We would invite you to lunch, but you obviously are too busy for us.”  They were the lashings of small girls that knew nothing but to return hurt with hurt, even insignificant hurt.
She couldn’t return, and some people didn’t want her there anyway.
Yumi was fine with it, though a little disappointed.  Rin and Shirou had both told her that they had lived relatively normal lives at school and that the everyday they encountered there helped ground them.  Though they never explicitly said so, it was implied that the everyday they had there kept them from becoming the kind of terror that Yuushi had become.  She very much had hoped to have that as well, regardless of what direction she took her life in.
The feelings inside her swelled up instead.
Though she was fine with it, there were urges.  Not her own, again, not fully from the person she considered herself.  Echoes of different additions, of things not of her making.  A violent urge sometimes presented itself, to hit those girls that scoffed at her, or even suicidal urges, that she didn’t belong and never would.  They floated up into her head and she could peer at them as if she were outside herself, curious as to why things not of her own nature appeared.
She had certainly wanted to die while on that table.
She had certainly wanted to live longer on that table.
Here, though, darker thoughts really had no place.  Yumi had no reason to think about life or death, or even have a real reason to be angry or jealous or negative in any fashion.
Yet another reason she couldn’t go back.  If she had these unnatural thoughts and feelings at such a peaceful location, there really wasn’t much for her there.
So, she went to school, went through the motions.  She exercised her arm muscles for Archery Club and enjoyed a little interaction with Hoshino and a couple of his friends, and she went home.
And at home, she practiced.
Shirou would often go out—he didn’t say where—and Rin had left shortly after the fight, traveling to London.  Why, she hadn’t told Yumi, though Yumi suspected that it was to prepare for something bigger, as Rin’s trip was rushed in creation but was not to be long.  With Rin gone and Shirou often wandering off by himself, Yumi was free.
It had not worked out at first, not at all.  When she had first turned her circuit on, when she had finally figured out her own trigger, it had been erratic and overwhelming.  Even Sakura, present at the time, had looked on in worry.  The cycle of energy inside Yumi was fine, but when it came out, when it was released, it was jumbled and overwhelming.  It felt like too much water trying to come out of too small a hose, or eating an entire meal when you were already full.
And with that flow, came the irregular feelings.  Even more than normal, the opening of her circuit felt like too much, a mixture of anger, ecstasy, fear, happiness, pain, sorrow, contentment.  All at once, all trying, like a din of voices, to be heard louder than the other.
The first item she tried to Reinforce, an old unused mop, had shattered into splinters.
She was irregular at school and irregular at magic.
Sakura, though, had solved the problem.  Merely two days later, she had come to Yumi with a bolt of red cloth.  “A present from Caren Ortensia-san, the woman at the church.”
“Why?” Yumi had asked.
Sakura’s eyes had fallen, though her lips had flattened into a determined line.  “To help seal off what you don’t need.”
Yumi understood immediately what she meant, but not the reasoning.  “Why are you helping?  I thought…you didn’t like magic.”
“Yes,” Sakura said.  Her lips fell to match her eyes.  “I don’t.   But…it is a part of me, and a part of us.  This family.”  The mention of family, though, seemed to set something off behind her expression, and Yumi could see her jaw set.  “I want to help you the way I was not.  So you can do what you have to, if that’s the way you decide to go.”  She gave a shaky smile.  “And if I help you, maybe I can understand.  Senp—Shirou saved your life, and, though he doesn’t really realize it, mine too.  If you’re going to help him someday…I want to help too.”
Yumi understood then.
Sakura was like her.
Saved.  But desiring to be more than saved.  To save the one that saved her.
Yumi took the offered cloth.  “What is it called?”
Sakura took Yumi’s left arm, extended it, pulled back her sleeve.  “The Shroud of Martin.”


*Pay attention to this the next time you watch an anime set at school: the location of the hero protagonists are often the same spot, second-to-last next to the window.  Though generally the domain of characters voiced by Tomokazu Sugita—Kyon (Haruhi Suzumiya), Yuuichi Aisawa (Kanon), and Rin Tsuchimi (Shuffle!) all sit there—it also houses pretty much half of the school-born protagonists, including Alto Saotome (Macross Frontier), Touma Kamijou (Magical Index), Light Yagami (Death Note), Sawako Kuronuma (Kimi ni Todoke), Junichi Tachibana (Amagami), Mikado Ryuugamine (Durarara!!)…the list goes on.  The game implies both Shirou and Rin’s desks to be in the general vicinity in their respective classes, though the anime shows Shirou in the middle of the back row.
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