Chapter Text
The moon was nearly full, hanging over your head like an anxious mother at a birthing, waiting for the reassuring weight of her new child to be passed into her arms; and in many ways, this was a birthing -- blood was to be spilled, new life called forth; but the one to hold this newborn would be you, not the anxious moon over your head, and the realization of it all filled you with the pressing weight of lead, so that each step took longer than it should have, so that your procession was slow and languorous, as though you had no where to go, nothing to do, and no reason to be anywhere but these dark, misty woods at this time of night.
Ireland, so far, had not been what you’d expected; the tourist guides had talked of a rustic charm, trying to sell the bitter winds and dirt roads as a reminder of times long gone; your imagination had been filled with faerie spirits and doorways to other lands. For the most part, it had been like anywhere else in the world -- certainly, people had their own way of things, but the sun rose and the sun set, and you were still kept indoors, away from prying eyes and anyone who might steal you away, faeries included.
But at night, it seemed as though everything had changed; your guards -- your parents hadn’t been able to come, though surely this should have been their responsibility, not yours, since it was their dream, not yours, that was to be fulfilled after tonight -- your guards kept silent, mist crept in from the shores, and the moonlight turned everything around you silver and black, so that it seemed you’d stepped into the halls of the dead rather than a forest, and you were reminded that this was a world where there were consequences, unlike the cloistered life you’d lived until now.
You were stepping into a war; you had a say in who lived and who died, and one of those people you doomed could even be yourself.
And so your procession wound through the forest, until you reached a point where the magus whom your family had hired to help raise you raised their hand; your guards stopped, but you continued forward until you were at the mage’s side.
“Is it here?” you asked; your voice was as quiet as you could make it, and even still it hurt to speak in this silent forest, as though each word, or the slightest sound, were a gunshot or a shriek. The mage nodded; their face was obscured by a hood, as was your own and those of your guards, but their face in particular was one you were used to seeing in a hood, and so you focused on it.
Maybe you were afraid of change, after having prayed for it for so long.
“I’ll go then,” you said, and stepped passed them; you were stepping under a tangle of tree branches -- rowan, if you remembered correctly. Rowan made up the entire copse of trees you’d been lead too, presumably for protection or because, since magic did not like to pass through such things, it had no choice but to pool there, trapped for centuries by innocent roots and leaves.
No one bid you farewell, or good luck, or any sort of encouragement. You left your silent procession behind like ghosts, to find that someone had already prepared a summoning circle -- the metallic odor drifted through the air, mingling with dead leaves and grass like an elusive rot.
Rituals like this were a rot on the whole planet, weren’t they? Blood magic, calling to specters long gone, stirring up old feuds and old tragedies as though a single person could stop them from repeating themselves. As if there was ever a tragedy that wasn’t firmly the responsibility of it’s victims, wrought by their own weaknesses and vices and blindness.
The word to the spell were in latin, and you didn’t know what they meant -- just that you’d been reciting them for months now, over and over, until they stuck in your head. You weren’t sure how rote memory was supposed to be helpful in magic -- everything you’d ever been taught had relied on visualization -- but perhaps you didn’t need to know what you were saying because you still knew what you were doing.
Perhaps you didn’t need to know anything because your magic circuits were nearly the best in the world, if not impossible to surpass. You’d been bred for this, after all. And that was why you were kept up in your tower, away from a world that would deny your talents and existence. That was why you were here now.
It didn’t matter what you summoned on this night; you were too powerful for the Holy Grail War you were about to start to have any outcome but one -- everyone would die, and you would be the sole survivor, covered in the blood and dreams of strangers, and you didn’t have to know anything, not what you doing or how, or why. And maybe, when it was all said and done, you’d coat your hands with your own blood too; cast your own life among those of your victims.
A tragedy in the making.
And you could feel the magic now, picking up around you -- what had been here, yes, but also your own magic, trapped by the rowan trees around you, harbored and guided so that not a bit of it went unused.
It was like a thunderstorm, rolling in unexpectedly from the wrong direction, calling to something deep, deep in the ground, or high, high in the air, something only you would be able to recognize -- a storm from your childhood, creating the impossible, only now it was focused, collected into a single point, capable of doing so much more than causing toads to rain from the sky or time to stop for hours over your hometown.
You pulled the catalyst from under your cloak; it had grown warm, and now you placed it in the circle of blood, and now you said the words out loud, and you imagined the strength and power of the spirit you were summoning, because you didn’t know what else you were to focus on.
You hadn’t been given a name, or a face -- nothing but the catalyst, a tattered piece of ribbon, so old as to have lost it’s color, bleached to the ivory white of the dead and drenched in sorrow; and now it fluttered from your hands, as though it could feel the call home, caught on the tides of your draft of your magic and torn free, back to the world it had belonged too, and as it fluttered you swore you saw it regain it’s color, regain it’s old softness, as though centuries or millenia had been shed from it’s silk.
Maybe the spirit saw it too; saw those old memories as though they were yesterday, for a hand reached out of the darkness before anything else, groping until it could catch the ribbon, and slowly a figure became visible in the shadows, clad in somber black, that only made his skin seem to be made of milk and moonlight; and as he became visible, your heart began to pound, as though it had never beat before this moment, and as though, once this man was out of your sight, it never would again.
The curve of his cheeks -- round and ruddy, as though he himself were blushing, or as though he’d taken so heavily of the joys of youth that it would forever stain his face -- and the soft brush of his forelock against his brow; the smooth curve of his shoulder, muscles flexing under his clothes as though nothing and no one that you had seen until this moment had ever been alive; the nearly delicate way he shifted, so that each step he took were silent, even in this silent grove, and above all that, his eyes, averted from your own face, and gleaming like the cold of a sunken kingdom, perhaps with unshed tears, or perhaps just as a trick of the magic and the moonlight.
He stared at the ribbon in his hand, as though he couldn’t believe it was his own again, and a long moment passed. You didn’t dare to interrupt him, unsure what sort of predicament you would find yourself in if you did, and he was lost deep to his own thoughts. Finally, though, he stirred, shaking himself all over like a man waking from a long, unpleasant sleep. And then he looked at you, and it was your turn to freeze, fixed under his gaze as though he were capable of rendering you undone with nothing but that look, as though in that moment you’d been unmade.
And it was with perfect grace that he knelt now, one hand crossing over his chest as though to show fealty, and the other supporting his weight from the side, as though rather than kneeling, he’d simply fallen, and hadn’t the strength to bring himself to rise.
“I am Diarmuid Ua Duibhne, summoned forth as the Lancer class servant,” he said, and his voice had the kind of brittle strength of someone who’s pushed themselves for so long that they didn’t know how to stop, “And I ask you this: Are you my Master?”
It took a moment for your mind to catch up; you told yourself it was not because of the way your heart still continued to pound, or the way your breath refused to catch itself, and it was certainly not because you’d been half expecting no one at all -- you’d seen, and caused, much more impossible things than just a man appearing out of no where, called back to this world when he should be dead -- and so if it was neither of those things -- and it wasn’t, you wouldn’t let it be -- then it was one thing and one thing only.
You hadn’t had to spoke to someone new since you were five years old, and your magic tutor had arrived at the door of your tower, and even if you added all of your guards and your tutor together, there were maybe a dozen words spoken in a week that weren’t about magic.
So it was not that you’d fallen in love at first sight -- falling in love with a heroic spirit, who would exist for the duration of the Holy Grail War and not a moment longer, was beyond foolish -- but rather that you had never quite learned how to talk to strangers, and so it took you several tries now.
“That. . . that is correct,” you managed, finally, “I am [Name], of the house [Surname], and I am your Master for the duration of the Holy Grail War.”
The man bowed his head, and then rose -- gracefully, as though the exhaustion and desperation you felt in him were an illusion -- but no.
No, it wasn’t an illusion, you realized with a start, staring at him as he stood there, head still bowed, awaiting orders you had no idea how to give. The feelings emanating off of him were those feelings he tried to push from his mind, and so they were the feelings that were pushed into you through the newly formed bond of Master and Servant -- just like the more familiar bond of a Master and . . .well, a familiar.
You held out your hand, doing your best to smile. It was not an action you were used to.
“Diarmuid Ua Duibhne,” you said, “Come. It is a long road home.”
He stared at your hand for a long moment; it was difficult to make sense of the emotions coursing through your bond together, but you could feel his longing and regret most clearly, so that even when he took your hand it was not as satisfying as it would have been.
Physical contact had been something you’d longed for all your life, and it was only now that you realized how much of a burden it could be. Not because you weren’t happy to hold his hand as you lead him back to your guards and your magus, but because you could feel his anxieties and bitterness coursing through him with each beat of your shared heart, and there was nothing you could do for him but to act as though you’d done this a thousand and one times before.