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She recognizes the name, of course. She recognizes the house. But her master is so helpless, so ignorant and frightened, that she can hardly believe Emiya Kiritsugu still lives. Kiritsugu’s son, his long-lost nephew, his carrot-topped homunculus/clone—whoever Shirou is, he was not trained for war.
Saber remembers Kiritsugu and Maiya, seated together on an unmade hotel bed as Maiya demonstrated mastery of some trifling piece of spellwork. A bullet that floated above the palm of her hand, red-gold, wax-soft from heat. In some ways, he shaped his tools thoughtlessly. It was a function of his burning hopes. He had no choice in the matter; though if he had been free, he would have chosen to go on with his work.
It is for this reason that a boy with his name, unmolded and moon-blind, seems to Saber irrefutable proof that the Kiritsugu she knew has vanished from the world.
So it comes as a shock when the confrontation with Tohsaka is interrupted by a screen sliding open, and a familiar silhouette cracking apart the harsh white shell of lamplight. Tohsaka, unfathomably, reacts with a gesture of supreme exasperation and snaps Archer out of existence before running off. Shirou explains later that she “had had enough of witness protection services, thank-you-so-very-much,” in what Saber takes for a verbatim quote.
Very well, Saber says to herself, so Tohsaka scruples at involving innocents. It’s still strange that the girl could mistake Kiritsugu for a witness, a bystander to anything in the world.
But at the moment of discovery he stands perfectly still, a shinai and not a gun cradled in his hands. “Shirou,” he says. “Come inside.”
Shirou casts her a desperate, speculative look. “Father,” he says, “I’ve—found someone—”
"To marry?" Saber stiffens at the smile she hears in his voice: a smile she feels she should know. Then, before she can so much as consider the puzzle, it drops away coldly, which is more comfortable. "Come in, Shirou. We can discuss whatever it is you’ve dug up in the garage later.”
The King of Britain, a miracle in storage. She is familiar with the modern tendency to hoard—was once taken up to the attics of Einzbern Castle, forested with curios and mandrake roots, plus a magical vacuum cleaner or five. What was Irisviel looking for? A movie Kiritsugu had shown her, years earlier—something to prepare Arturia Pendragon for the trials of mechanized flight. Airplane! They didn’t find it. And Saber had in fact needed no preparation for the business of sitting still, holding hands with a stranger, looking down from a terrible height on a fickle, changing country. Green hills swept aside in an hour by the straw broom of the desert.
She follows her master into the house. Pausing on the step, she turns and glares into the night.
*
"…you should order her to exempt herself from the contest," Kiritsugu is saying, when she reaches the kitchen, and stops to listen in the hall. "If you do that, and use up all your command seals, no one will harm you. No one will even know who you were."
Nor do I, still, Saber reflects, “Father” notwithstanding. Then her ears catch up. Exempt myself. Shirou won't intuit the meaning. But she, who received Diarmuid Ua Duibhne’s last curse, can guess how her body would decode the vague order.
She steps lightly and without further hesitation into the room. Kiritsugu meets her gaze as though parrying a sidelong blow: not guilt, and not surprise, but wariness lends force to his swift glance. He would have felt her standing in the hall. Like being in a room with your own severed limb.
"Greetings, Saber," he says, and doesn’t break eye contact, though it appears to cost him something—more, perhaps, than he realizes. Once he snarled and showed her his back. He walked away and his wife fell to the ground, who had not wished to fall beforehand. She’s starting to understand how it is that Shirou came to be so vulnerable.
"Kiritsugu," she says. "I take it you’ve explained what I came for."
"But I don’t understand it," Shirou says, pushing his knuckles into the sides of his nose. "Is it true, Saber? Should I release you from your bond? He said—he said if I make you fight with my poor magic, all that will happen is both of us will die."
"That’s a possibility," Saber says, folding her hands behind her back. "There are ways around the problem of your abilities, however. We could, for example, form an amended contract, in which another provided the raw prana for my materialization." She nods to the man at the counter, domestic and gentle-seeming in his dark yukata. "Your father has enough power to play that role."
At last, Kiritsugu has donned an expression that sits well on his features: disbelief. And something smaller, more resigned and planned than hatred—simple enmity. “You of all people have seen how that ends.”
"I wish to fight," Saber replies. "I will do as I am ordered. But I will not pretend that I was brought here by mistake."
"Um, well, I did sort of trip—"
"I mean," Saber says, "by an error of fate. A coincidence, a blood-drenched nothing. Shirou, you were chosen as a contestant for a reason. What that reason is, I can’t say. But to waste your gifts and hide is less than you are capable of. My presence here—my true sword—tells me that."
"Spoken like a king," says Kiritsugu, bitterly. He is old, she finds. In ten years he has aged out of everything except a childish resentment of the truth. "Arrogant; deluded; cruel—"
"Shirou," she says. "You almost died. You do not have to decide tonight."
He accepts the out with abstract dignity, his brow furrowed in what might pass for uninvolved, intellectual concern. Not the spear touched my heart, but rather, What was Rin doing outside my house? She can almost read his thoughts, it seems, tattooed with the ink of his pulse through the bond. What did she once feel from his father? In general, she had tried to ignore those leavings. The scorn, the rage, the foul prized triumphs; constant, scalding fear. To be bathed in cowardice, buffeted by it like a lone swimmer under the waves—that was what it was to be contracted to Kiritsugu.
When Shirou has slipped off to his bedroom, Kiritsugu says, “I thought the explosion might have destroyed you.”
A disappointment of dire proportions, for him. A death deferred, collected on with interest. She too wondered, when he compelled her to destroy the Grail, whether he was out of range of the blast. The heat and blood. She does respect his evident concern for the boy.
"Where is Ilya?" she asks, imagining with one half of her mind the girl asleep in another part of the complex, undisturbed by the night’s graceless eruptions. Seeing with the other half Iri on the altar, white and dead.
But she does not expect the answer he gives her.
"In Einzbern Castle, I assume. Or she may have come here for the war."
He moves away from the counter and sits down at the kotatsu, indicating with an outstretched palm that—what? That she may join him, she guesses. Or may not. She sits and lets the weight of armor fade; feels herself grow, ring by steel ring, unreal.
"Without the Grail, I was not permitted to return," he says.
Easier to pronounce than I abandoned her.
"I see." She eases her knees under the blanket.
"Is that all?" he says, after a pause; intending, Saber thinks, to sound derisive. His voice a heavy and tremulous cloth. "No reminder of my promises? Ilya and I put on a show for you, once. Playing outside. Have you forgotten? Irisviel told me to be sure to do it under your window. She said that it would help."
"I haven’t forgotten." Saber can’t think how to say—yes, that made an impression on me, that scene in the snow. Whatever you may think of me, I am not a fool; Irisviel was with me, I remember how she smiled. But you could not have manufactured your own smile, your openness, and your wincing, solemn concern. White flakes spangled your hair like an old lady’s knit cap and made you ridiculous. And, in truth, all that impressed me less than the admission that you wanted to save the world. I honored you for your upright desire, which you swiftly betrayed.
After that, what was Ilya? Only the last crumbling vestige of Kiritsugu’s decency. Now that she considers the question more deeply, she believes—with only a hint of self-composing earnestness—that she would have found it strange if he had kept faith with one and not the other. If he’d gone home, retrieved his daughter from the wreckage, and led her, by one hand, through the blizzard and the wood.
He presses the corner of his fist against his temple, and then against the middle of his forehead. He is a man in pain. His eyes screw up, unleaking. “And Shirou?” she says quickly, wishing despite herself to relieve him, and to explain that there is nothing left for him to do. Anything he once could have done is lost beyond recovery. “Is he—?”
"My son. Yes, my son. I found him in the rubble."
Saber doesn’t understand this. She doesn’t understand the relief that runs over his face, like an unclenched hand, water pouring from stone. It masks his terror. Kiritsugu doesn’t say anything more, and she must assume he means—a child, some hurt child, buried alive by what they did together. Whom he saved.
How typical, she reflects, that after all his speeches—for himself, he found that little enough.
Little. Is that unjust? Should she affect to think it more than little? This boy, this bliss, this luck, this scrambling life?
He is still sitting there. The relief as well as the anger have ebbed, fluidly yanked out of reach by her silence, leaving behind not a clean-washed coast but a complex, dingy edifice of a man. The bags are carved in clear under his eyes. He is tired. Only tired: Kiritsugu, who murdered and burned away a swathe. Who caused ruin by accident. She returns to her first, instinctive thought—How is he alive? How is he here with me, moment after moment, his collarbones pearly and wonderfully crafted? His pulse visible in the line of his neck; his pores, a map of scattered, sunken ash. He is drawn out like a held breath, a lungful underwater. His presence, warm and particular, begins to eat at her like static; she has felt this way about one other body, injured mortally, preserved forever, on its knee on a red hill.
"Saber," he says seriously, "I’ll defeat you. You may succeed in dragging Shirou into the war, but I will kill you after, and crush your bones to dust. I’ll see to it that you never come back."
She knows it now. What she is so rarely conscious of, when summoned; conscious of it when at all as from behind a veil, or from under a diaphanous film. A ligament: an anchor weight. The endless, kindly beating of her heart.