Fate/Stay Night Fan Fiction ❯ Escaping Fate ❯ Strategy Meeting ( Chapter 24 )

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

AN: Yes, releases be machinegunning at you as we near the end and I get excited to do the climax.  Also, I have fully thought up Fate/Far Side and maybe want to get to that in the near future.


Escaping Fate
Chapter 17
Strategy Meeting


The taxi driver regarded me oddly, first at my injured and sleeveless arm, then when I asked him to take me to the edge of the forest surrounding Fuyuki.  He didn’t complain, though, as I paid fine and, well, I must have looked exhausted enough to earn some sympathy.
Trudging through the forest to get to the castle while beat, though, was a real painful experience.  I felt dizziness and nausea come in waves, and tripped a couple of times, the first time even falling right onto my left arm.  It took me that shock to remember Yumi had given me bandages, and when I found a suitable place to rest, wrapped my arm in the red bandage.
And immediately felt better.
I don’t know what, if anything Yumi did to it, but something about it seemed to give me a second wind.  Though I still felt bone sore and in need of a nap, it no longer felt like every sound was constantly jabbing me in the brainstem.
I glanced around, and laughed.  The pain had hazed my mind so much that I hadn’t even realized where it was I had stumbled into until now.  
“Hah, I could really use that prana now,” I chuckled.
By the time I had the Einzbern castle-mansion in sight, I was actually jogging at a fairly decent clip, though even still it was nearing sundown.  I carefully pushed the doors open and, climbing over the rubble still present in the main hall, ascended the stairs and made for the bedrooms that faced the same direction as the entryway.  Tohsaka would be keeping watch from there and she might have made Sakura and Caren lie down and get some rest.
I opened the first door and got a pillow to the face.
“You idiot,” Tohsaka complained, clearly the instigator of the throw, sitting at the foot of the bed.  You would think that, after getting used to waking her in the morning and getting this in response, I would have known to duck.  “You should’ve phoned Yumi or Sakura to let us know you were okay!”
I could not help but stare at Tohsaka in surprise.  She was giving me a lecture that included the use of technology?  What strange world have I stumbled into now?  “Reception in the forest doesn’t work, so you’d never have been able to get any bars out here anyway.”
“Reception?  Bars?” Tohsaka asked, confused.
Ah, better.
Sakura and Caren were on the oversized bed in the room, though Caren was fast asleep.  She had her hands together beneath her cheek, in a very obvious I-am-sleeping-like-a-child pose.  Did she do that on purpose?  Sakura, on the other hand, was sitting up and wore new clothing.  “Are you alright?” I asked her.
She nodded.  “The cuts weren’t as deep as I thought.  We treated everything and I took a nap, so I’m feeling much better.”  The cut on her cheek was closed, though she brushed her fingers against it.  “Nothing I can’t handle, senpai.”
Yumi was sitting on the floor to the other side of the bed, staring out the window, her head peeking out just beyond Sakura’s legs.  “Yumi?”
“Unhurt,” she reported.
I sighed.  This girl really needed to stop bottling up everything, if recent events were any indication.  I rounded the bed and found her also wearing new clothing.  “Where did you find that?” I asked.
Yumi shrugged.  She had apparently decided to replace the waistcoat that was now stained with Sakura’s blood.  This one had a male cut and looked like it belonged under a suit blazer rather than as a single piece.  “It was in one of the room closets here.  I went exploring.”
It explained that and Sakura’s new clothing, I guess.  I looked her over carefully, feeling what was left unsaid there: to try and get my mind off things.
“It feels nice.  It feels like Shirou,” she said, quieter.
I crouched down next to her, fingering the bandage around my arm.  “An Addition?”
“Something like that,” Yumi said.  “When I put it on…it feels like what Shirou feels.  When you’re right here, like this.”
“That’s good…I guess,” I said, smiling.  
“Anyway,” Tohsaka said, rounding on me and staring down, arms crossed, “I rather doubt it, but, did you kill it?”
I felt my eyebrow twitch.  I know I’m no Heroic Spirit, but, still, qualifying it like that stung a little.  “Doubtful.  Probably only served to make it angry, to be honest.”
“…And?”
I could feel the unasked question and glanced up at Sakura, feeling the overwhelming urge to hold her.  Thinking about her, thrown into that mass of cackling evil every night—
When I had punched Shinji, all those years ago for hurting his little sister, I had wondered what made her still seek out the good in him.  I knew that, for me, it was because I wanted to feel that people like Shinji, despite their problems, could still be saved, and could still find a way to live in peace.  But the part of me that empathized, that put me in her shoes, wondered how, without my sort of detachment, one could not come to just hate him utterly.
I think maybe I got it now: you live in a darkness that utterly bleak, you lose sight of all other darkness, big and small.  It just becomes one giant blur of the same thing.  Any light, any flicker of good beyond it…
Must be the only thing you see.
“I’m pretty sure it was him, Zouken Matou.  Maybe that’s why it was waiting, calculating.  Certainly seemed to focus its attention one at a time, not like a demon would,” I said.
Sakura shuddered.  “I thought…he was gone for good.  The times I’ve gone back, it seemed like…he was silent.  Never showed himself before me again.  I thought you were the reason why, senpai.”
I nodded.  I had thought so too.  Illya had seemed to believe he was completely docile, in any case.
“The demon would seek familiar ground,” Caren said suddenly, rolling over to look at us.  I could make her out over Sakura’s knee and glared, wondering if she had been feigning sleep the entire time or truly had been woken to our talk.  “If this Zouken Matou is familiar to you, Sakura-san, and a thing of darkness and evil, it is understandable that the demon would sniff him out.”
Not that sniffing him out was difficult, as he was quite the stench.  “But then, which one is in control?  The demon, or Zouken?”
“One that accepts possession is neither, as they become one in the same,” Caren said.  “Much as Yumi, who says she feels she is like multiple people within one body, it would be the same for this.  Yumi is still Yumi, a unique existence, but also more than what she was before.  This Zouken would be the same.”
Yumi stood, looking ready to leave, possibly overwhelmed at that statement, but Sakura quickly reached out to pull the girl onto the bed.  Like a little child, she embraced Yumi until the girl relented, putting her head in Sakura’s lap.
I’m not sure I wanted to know what kind of internal struggle must have occurred in her head at that point, but I was glad at which one won.  “And what about Yuushi?”
Tohsaka scowled.  “We were talking about that when you arrived.  Sakura tried to drain him of prana, but it didn’t work.”
“Like you did with those dragon-demon-things?” I asked.
Sakura nodded, brushing her hand through Yumi’s hair.  It looked very, well, motherly, I suppose you could say, though I’d never actually seen anyone do such a thing or remember if my mother had done anything likewise.  “I felt it drain, but he suddenly had more, like a second wind.  I can’t actually absorb that much without hurting myself.”
Like a second wind?  I guess I’ve somewhat done that in the past, but I’ve actually risked draining my entire life away doing so, and trained magi avoid that like the plague.  They’re generally smart enough to come up with contingency plans that do not involve my level of stupidity.
Or…
Wait.
“Like…additional prana?” I asked.
Yumi’s head came up at that, and she looked at me in suspicion.  
Tohsaka got it immediately.  “We need to go back to that orphanage.”
Sakura looked confused.  “Why?  Didn’t you take and destroy his research?”
“Yes, but that’s not why.  If he’s been experimenting on himself, he might have used the place again before coming after us.”  Tohsaka looked absolutely pissed, now.  “And if what we’re thinking is right, we’re going to have to be the ones to attack him.”
Well, I understood that we would want to check the orphanage, but not that last part.  “Why attack him?  He’s coming after us, isn’t he?”
“Shirou, think about it.”  Tohsaka did not look to Yumi, but her eyes briefly darted that way before looking back to me.
If Yuushi had taken his knowledge, had applied it to himself, he might be, in fact, like Yumi, with multiple souls tethered to his own, making for additional magical circuits.  It explained why Yumi seemed to have more than average prana, and why she was irregular at utilizing it; Yuushi, on the other hand, with training, be able to organize it enough within himself to work everything out fine and efficiently.  It would also mean that when Sakura said she drained him, she was merely draining one set of circuits, and he was simply moving on to the next set, like he had multiple tanks of gas.
For an immediate concern, it meant he must have killed more people and has many times the amount of prana to the average magus.  And while that might not be a concern to someone like Tohsaka, if he could outlast anything I threw at him, it nailed one of the few advantages I had against the average magus in that I was within a mere acceptable range of output.  That demon, for instance, was much harder than a magus, simply—
Oh.  Oh that was bad.
It must have shown on my face, because Tohsaka nodded, but it was Caren who spoke up.  “So, this Setsuka Yuushi could give birth to another demon.”
Yumi groaned from Sakura’s lap.
“Then we need to definitely check his place out and confront him.  First, even, if Zouken is going to play hide-and-seek with us,” Tohsaka said.
I nodded in agreement.  “Now?  All of us?”
“Yes.  I’m going to go raid the cellar here to see if I can’t find some canned or preserved food first, and then we should go,” Tohsaka said.
“I will get water,” Caren said.  “Five minutes.”
When they had left, I sat up on the bed with Sakura and Yumi, briefly brushing at Yumi’s hair as well.  “Sorry, for all this,” I said, though I’m not really sure who I was apologizing to.
“It…really did look like it,” Sakura said.  She shuddered at the memory of the demon.  “I’m sorry, I don’t want to keep returning to that.”
I put my arm around her, cradling her head and pulling her against my shoulder.  Despite the shaking, though, I saw her fist clench, and could not help but smile a tiny bit.
Allies of justice didn’t fix what was wrong.  They just cleaned up afterward.
I may not be able to save any of them from the terror or sadness they endured, but, maybe…
I could do right by them here, now.
When Tohsaka and Caren returned to gather us, Tohsaka caught my gaze, and she smiled at the image we presented to her, seemingly despite herself.