Chapter Text
There were two kinds of morning in the Emiya house, and Illyasviel von Einzbern had learned to tell them apart before she was old enough to spell either word.
There were the mornings her brother Ren was away, and those were good mornings, light and ordinary, the toast unburnt, the bathroom free, the whole house breathing easy through its open windows like a person who has set down something heavy. And there were the mornings he was home, which were not.
This was the second kind. She knew it before she opened her eyes, the same way snow announces itself overnight — by the quality of the quiet. A home-Ren morning had a particular silence to it, a held-breath hush, because somewhere below her a grown man was asleep at an hour when grown men were meant to be at work, and the whole household had wordlessly agreed to move around the fact of him like a dropped glass nobody had swept up yet.
She knew it, too, by the warmth.
That was the part she never thought about. She only knew that on a home-Ren morning the floor under her bare feet wasn't the cruel cold it should have been in a house this old in early summer, and that the water ran hot at the first turn of the tap instead of clanking and shuddering and making you wait, and that the air in the hall had a lived-in, radiator-soft thickness to it that the away-mornings, with their honest clean chill, never had. If she had thought about it at all she'd have thought Sella, or the timer, or, on the mornings the radiators ran loud enough to notice, the wasteful idiot who'd come in drunk at four and cranked the heat to tropical and left every pipe in the house ticking for the gas meter to weep over. Never anything kinder than that. The warmth that met her bare feet was just the house being the house; the warmth she actually noticed was only ever one more thing to hold against him.
She got dressed, and went down, and found the evidence of him laid out across the living room like a crime scene.
His coat first: the good coat, the too-good coat, the single nice thing he owned and the only money he had ever spent that you could actually point to, thrown over the back of the sofa instead of hung up, one sleeve trailing the floor. One shoe in the hall. The other nowhere. A glass on the low table with a finger of something amber gone warm and flat in the bottom and a ring of damp soaking slow into the wood, the exact ring Sella would find within the hour and sigh over with the exact sigh that made Illya feel it in her own back teeth. And on the kotatsu, where the morning sun came in earliest and warmest, a long shape under a blanket, one bare foot escaped out the bottom, and a head of white hair that did not so much rest on the cushion as abandon itself to it, the way a coat abandons itself to a hook, the way the dead abandon themselves to the ground. The hair had been that impossible bone-white for as long as she could remember; he'd gone white young and never said how or why, and she'd filed it years ago under affectation, of a piece with the rest of him: striking on purpose, and too lazy to even pretend it was anything else.
"He came in at four," said Shirou, from the kitchen. He didn't look up from the rice he was rinsing, his hands going round and round in the cold water with the patience of someone who had done it ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. He said it flat, without inflection. Weather-plain. "I heard the gate."
"Of course he did."
"There's egg, if you want it. Don't take his — he asked me to save him the soft one."
"He asked you." Illya put as much into the two words as the two words could hold, which was a great deal. "He came home at four in the morning, and asked you, to save him an egg."
Shirou's shoulders did a small, tired thing that wasn't quite a shrug. He was sixteen and built like a boy who carried other people's bags up other people's stairs, and he had been covering for Ren so long and so automatically that Illya didn't think he heard himself do it anymore: the don't take his, the saved egg, the gate heard and never remarked on. It made her want to take him by his earnest shoulders and shake him until the loyalty fell out. You're better than him. Everyone in this house is better than him. Why do you keep saving him eggs.
She did not shake him. She took the egg that was not Ren's, on principle, sat down at the low table where she could glare at the back of her brother's sleeping head over the rim of her bowl, and ate it out of spite, even though it had the firm yolk and she hated the firm yolk, because the alternative was eating his, and she would have gone hungry first.
He was, objectively, the worst person she knew.
She had given this a great deal of thought, because it was important to be fair, and being fair was a thing she took seriously, and she had concluded, fairly, that it was simply true. Ren Emiya was twenty-five years old and had achieved, in those twenty-five years, exactly nothing. He had a job — technically — three days a week teaching music at the school, which was its own renewable humiliation she would arrive at later; but he wore the job like other men wore jury duty, and the pay went where everything else went, which was gone, vanished, swallowed whole by trips he never explained and nights he never accounted for, so that the great recurring event of his life was the moment he sidled up to someone with that smile and said say, you couldn't see your way to lending your favourite brother a little something, could you — it's for a thing, you wouldn't understand. He came home at four in the morning. He vanished for a week at a stretch with no warning and no destination, off on holiday (he actually called it that, holiday, as though any of them got holidays, as though Sella had ever in her life been on a holiday) and came back from it bleary and rumpled and useless, and slept two days, and was somehow broke again at the end of it. He flirted with everything that moved and several things that didn't. He had opinions about the conduct of every life in the house and not the energy to lift a single corner of his own. He had never, in all of Illya's memory, done one thing that mattered.
And her mother was proud of him.
That was the part she couldn't forgive. Not the whisky, not the money, not the four-in-the-morning. Because Mama loved all of them exactly the same. Illya had checked, over the years, going back over the working again and again as you do with a sum you're afraid of, hunting the place it came out wrong; and there were no favourites in Mama, there never had been, she poured the same warm uncomplicated daylight over every one of them and always would. So it was not that she loved Ren best. It was worse than that, and stranger. It was that she believed in him. She defended him. She was proud of him. She looked at the smiling useless ruin of him and saw something there, something real, something worth the defending, that not one other soul in the house could find no matter how long or how hard they squinted. Mama was never wrong about a person. Mama could read a heart clean across a crowded room and tell you the colour of it. And on the single solitary subject of her eldest son she was, as far as Illya could tell, completely and serenely and immovably wrong — and that, the wrongness of the one person who was never wrong, was the splinter Illya could not work out from under her own skin.
Her mother came down while she was still working on it, as she came down most mornings now: slowly, one hand trailing the banister, the soft grey cardigan buttoned to the throat even though the house was warm. Because the house was warm; she had it warm and was cold inside it anyway. She had been a little tired this year. A little tired was the phrase the house had agreed on, as it had agreed on holiday: a small soft word laid down carefully over a larger one nobody would pick up. Illya picked it up. She was the only one who did. Her mother's face was beautiful and pale and had taken on a translucence lately, in the mornings especially, a thinness to the light coming off it, like a paper lantern with the candle inside it burning a fraction too low; and when she thought no one was watching she would stop, on the third stair from the bottom, and rest a moment, just a moment, one hand flat to her own chest, until whatever it was had passed and she could go on.
But she always smiled by the time she reached the floor. And the first thing she did, every single morning, before the tea, before the children, before anything — was look for Ren.
She found him on the kotatsu and her whole face went soft. Soft. At the warm flat ruin of him, the abandoned line of him, the one bare escaped foot. She crossed the room and (Illya watched it happen, watched it with the outrage of a child watching a magician fool a crowd that ought to know better) bent down, with the small care she bent for everything now, and tucked the bare foot back up under the blanket. Gently. Tucked him in. Her terrible, useless, sleeping son.
"Oh, look at him," Irisviel said — to no one, to the room, to the ceiling, beaming down at him with a fondness so bottomless it made Illya's chest hurt to watch it spent on so unworthy a thing. "My great useless darling. Asleep in the sun like a cat that's been paid to do it." She smoothed the blanket flat over the foot. "He'll catch his death with that out — there. He feels the cold dreadfully lately, the poor lamb. More than the rest of us. Always reaching for the warm spot."
"He is asleep at nine in the morning," said Illya, "on the kotatsu, in the sun. He could not be warmer if you basted him and put him in the oven."
"Illya."
"It's true. And he left every radiator in the house roaring all night, Sella said — you can hear them ticking. He came in drunk and turned the heat up to tropical and fell over. That's not being cold, that's being a — a thermostat with a grudge."
"Mm," said her mother, which was not agreement and not argument, smoothing the blanket as though it covered a baby and not a six-foot layabout. "He works very hard, you know. In his way."
"He teaches recorder. To children. Who can't fail."
"Mm."
"He came home at four."
"Did he?" — and there it was, the thing Illya always caught and could never make a single other person hear: her mother's hand went still on the blanket, just for one breath, and her lips parted, not to speak, just slightly, as though the answer had arrived before she was ready for it, and what came over the pale face was not fond at all. Something that looked, for half a second and no longer, like fear: the held-quiet kind, the kind you feel hearing a particular tread on a particular stair in the dark, a fear with a shape to it, a fear that already knew what it was afraid of. Then it was gone, ironed out along with the wrinkle in the blanket, and her mother straightened, one hand going briefly and unconsciously to the small of her own back, and said, brightly, far too brightly, "Then he was somewhere worth it, the wicked creature. Good for him. Now eat, treasure — you've glared a hole clean through that poor egg, I can feel the draught of it from over here. You'll put me right off my tea."
Under the blanket, without opening his eyes, without one degree of change in the long abandoned line of him, Ren said, "It was the firm one, anyway. She took the firm one. On purpose."
"I did not."
"Shirou saved me the soft. You won't touch mine — not on a bet, not if you were starving. So you took the firm one out of pure spite, hated it on the very first bite, and you've been grimly working through the rest ever since on principle, so the spite means something." A pause. The smile audible in his voice even with his face mashed into a cushion, even mostly asleep, even from the floor. "It's all right. I admire it. Spite's the only thing in this family with a real work ethic. Runs like a clock."
Illya set her chopsticks down across her bowl, very precisely, so as not to throw them.
"I hate you," she informed the back of his head.
"I know." Light, easy, a man brushing a fly off the surface of a long warm afternoon. "Get your big brother a coffee while you're up, would you? It's been a long night."
And there it was — all of him, the entire man, in a single sentence; and the sharpest part, the part that put a prickle of pure fury up the back of her scalp that she could never afterward fully explain, was that he was right about the egg. He was always right about the small stupid things. He'd been asleep, face-down, eyes shut, dead to the world, and he knew which egg she'd taken and the reason down to the root of it, the spite under the spite; he always seemed to know exactly what each of them was thinking and feeling and carrying, and had decided, with all of that knowing, to do precisely nothing with it but make a joke at the cost of whoever was nearest. If he'd been a stupid man it would have been bearable. That was the thing. A stupid useless man you could pity. It was the waste of him she couldn't stand — that somewhere in there was someone who saw everything, clear to the bottom, and had looked at all of it and chosen to be this.
She did not get him a coffee.
Kuro arrived as Kuro always arrived: all at once, and at speed, and already chewing, thundering down the last four stairs with her tie undone and a stolen wedge of Shirou's toast in her mouth and her schoolbag over one shoulder, and passing the kotatsu she bent without breaking stride and flicked the sleeping shape hard on the exposed ear.
"Oi. Deadbeat. Some of us have a world to save before lunch."
"Mm," said Ren, not moving, not opening his eyes. "Build a statue to your work ethic. I'll come and sleep at the foot of it. Bring my own blanket."
"You'll sleep through the unveiling." Kuro stole the second piece of toast straight off Shirou's board, grinned wide and unrepentant at the precise indrawn breath that meant Sella had just come into the kitchen, and was at the front door before the breath could finish turning into a sentence. Miyu came after her, quiet as a change in the weather, schoolbag squared on both shoulders, and paused on her way past, just for a second, without comment, without looking at anyone to see if she was seen, to set a clean glass of water on the table beside Ren's flat warm dead one, within reach of his hand. Then she straightened and went out, and Illya watched her do it and loved her for it and was, privately and a little uncomfortably, unnerved all over again by how much of the house Miyu seemed to be steadily keeping the count of, in that watchful unhurried way of hers, like a girl tallying exits.
Then the three of them were out into the cool bright morning together, the ordinary small parade of them down the lane: Kuro three steps ahead and walking backward to win an argument she'd started in the kitchen, Miyu in the middle listening with her grave half-smile, Illya behind complaining for the form of the thing. And she was halfway down the lane, the gate latched behind them, when she heard it — drifting out the open kitchen window into the morning after her, unmistakable, low and warm and delighted past hiding: her mother, laughing at something he'd said. Something Illya hadn't heard. Something that was only ever his.
The humiliation of the school was a specific, renewable, lovingly-maintained thing.
It worked like this. Most of the children at Illya's school had ordinary teachers — tired, kind, forgettable adults who smelled of chalk dust and instant coffee and went home at the end of the day to lives Illya never had to think about for a single second. And then there was the music room, second floor, far end of the east corridor, where three days a week the prefecture's most embarrassing man leaned against a piano he could, infuriatingly, actually play, and let an entire room of children adore him out loud.
Because they did. That was the unbearable kernel of it. The other children loved Emiya-sensei. They loved him as you love a substitute who's announced you're watching a film today — except that Ren actually taught them, that was the sleight of hand, that was the whole rotten trick: he bothered just exactly enough. He'd teach them a song in twenty minutes that ought by rights to have taken a month, get the tone-deaf ones to a passable noise and coax the mouse-shy ones into singing out where they could hear themselves, and then spend the rest of the period perched sideways on the windowsill with one knee up, telling them magnificent lies about dead composers (Beethoven, you understand, owed money to absolutely everyone) and letting them call him by his first name, which no other teacher in the building would have permitted under threat. He was easy. Everything about him was easy. He never raised his voice and never set homework and never once appeared to be working, and the children came spilling out of his room at the bell every time lit up and glowing, as if they'd gotten away with something — and Illya had to walk past that doorway three days a week and meet the back-draught of all that glow and pretend the man on the windowsill was not the identical man who had drunk her father's whisky at four that morning and stolen, or tried to steal, her egg.
She caught it once, that Tuesday, passing the open door. One of the small ones, a boy from the year below, stood at the piano not playing it, his recorder dangling from one hand, his face set in the careful blankness of a child who has decided not to cry at school. Emiya-sensei wasn't even looking at him; he was sprawled along the windowsill watching the yard, and he said something low that Illya only caught the tail of — "—doesn't have to be today. Some days it just won't come, and you let it not come, and you don't make it mean anything about you." And the boy's shoulders dropped from around his ears all at once, like a held breath going out.
Then, breezily, still not turning round: "Also you're holding it backwards, which can't be helping anyone." The boy laughed — wet, startled, surprised out of himself — and the moment was gone, folded back under the joke before it had finished happening.
Illya walked on, and told herself what she always told herself: that it had cost him nothing, that charming a sad child into laughing was only the lazy man's way of getting out of actually teaching him something. But he had hit the exact shape of the thing the boy was carrying, named it and set it down for him without the boy having to say one word; and then, he was always doing that, wasn't he. The egg. Everyone's small stupid griefs, read clean across a room at a glance and spent on a quip. It meant nothing, she decided. It only meant, as everything about him meant, that he could have been something, and had gone to such deliberate trouble not to be.
They took lunch on the roof, the four of them, as they did on every fine day — Illya and Sakura and Kuro and Miyu, tucked into the lee of the stairwell housing where the wind off the mountains couldn't find them. Kuro ate as though her appetite were a tournament she had entered to win, and spent the meal doing an impression of Emiya-sensei on his windowsill so precise and so merciless that even Miyu had to put her chopsticks down to laugh into her hand (the slouch, the lazy gesture, the a man of my standing), and Illya laughed too, against her own will, betrayingly, because it was funny, because Kuro's Ren was every infuriating inch of the real one; which only made the whole thing worse, somehow, that her brother was so completely and thoroughly himself that a twelve-year-old could perform the entire man with two gestures and a sigh.
Illya's phone buzzed against her knee, once, on the roof. She glanced at it without meaning to, and a small involuntary warmth came up the back of her neck before she had decided to let it, because the name on the screen was Yuuto, and the message under it was nothing, was about the maths homework, was did u get number 6 it's evil, and was therefore the most important document in the prefecture. She turned the phone face-down on her knee a half-second too slow.
Kuro, who missed nothing of this kind, lit up like a struck match. "Oh. Oh, what was that. That was a face."
"It was the homework."
"It was a boy. It was a boy-shaped homework. Miyu, she's gone pink, look at her, she's gone completely — Illya's got a boy —"
"It's number six," said Illya, with enormous dignity, going pinker, "and it's evil, and if you tell anyone—" and Sakura, gentle, mortified on her behalf, was already steering the conversation kindly away toward the actual maths, it really is a horrible one, I think you have to do the second part first — and the moment folded itself up small and went into Illya's pocket with the phone, warm and private and entirely her own, the one bright ordinary thing in the day that belonged to nobody in that house but her.
Then Miyu's other pocket chimed: the clear two-note sound out of Sapphire that meant a Card had stirred somewhere across the city and that Luvia was already, three districts off, tapping one expensive shoe about it. In Illya's bag, Ruby stayed sullenly, pointedly silent; the wand had been in a mood the better part of a week and was no use to gods or men. So it was Miyu who rose, neat and quick and resigned, and Kuro who groaned for the principle of the thing and bounced up after her (some of us do the actual saving), the two of them gone in under a minute to that whole other half of Illya's life that was, today at least, going to happen somewhere she wasn't. "Don't wait up," Kuro called, walking backward through the stairwell door, finger-gunning. "Tell the deadbeat he's the deadbeat." And the door banged, and the roof went into the particular flat quiet that always arrived in Kuro's wake, the sudden held stillness of a room a firework has just left.
And then it was only the two of them, Illya and Sakura, in the thin spring sun.
So it was only Sakura there when Illya finally let all of it out — and once it started she could not stop it, it came pouring out of her in a hot fast stream, each grievance elbowing the next aside. "He drank the good whisky. Mama's birthday one, the one from the box — and when I caught him he looked me dead in the eye and told me it was medicinal. He had me make his coffee this morning. Me. Get your big brother a coffee, Illya, you're nearer the kettle in spirit. He calls his whole life a holiday and Mama just says I admire the commitment like it's a virtue, and the radiators ticked till dawn because he fell asleep in the front hall again and he's too big to move, he just lies there like a — like a beached whale that pays no rent—" Sakura was the one kind of quiet you could pour into for an hour and never feel it splash back. Sakura listened with the grave complete attention she gave to everything, her bento balanced on her knees, her dark hair tucked behind one ear, that steadiness turned full on you like a warm lamp; and when Illya at last ran clean out of breath she was quiet a moment, considering, and then she said, in her soft unhurried voice:
"He's not so bad, though. I don't think."
Illya could have screamed. "He stole my egg."
"He sounds lonely," said Sakura.
"He is the least lonely person who has ever drawn breath. People like him — that's the whole entire problem, that's the thing I can't — he hasn't earned a single one of them and they all just like him anyway —"
"That's not the same as not being lonely." Sakura turned her chopsticks over slowly in her fingers, considering them, in no hurry at all. She was like that. She turned things over and looked at the underneath of them before she put them down. "There's a way he looks, sometimes. When the room's loud and nobody's watching him because he's the one making it loud — he stops. Just for a second. And he looks at all of us like —" she paused, and a small line came between her brows while she hunted the word, and then she seemed to decide the word was too big to lift and set it gently back down where she'd found it, "— like someone looking at a photograph. Of a day that's already over. Even though we're right there. Even though the day's still going." She wasn't looking at Illya now; she was looking at the middle distance, eyes on something only she could see. "And then somebody says something and he makes a joke and it's gone, and you'd swear you imagined it. But I don't think I imagine it. I think people like him because they can feel there's something underneath he won't let them have. Even the nine-year-olds. Especially them. People can always tell."
Illya opened her mouth to say that this was the single most romantic and incorrect thing she had ever in her life been forced to hear; that Sakura would defend a wet stray that had bitten her; that the only thing underneath Ren was more Ren, and nothing under that but more.
She thought, without wanting to, of her mother's hand going still on the blanket. Did he?
She closed her mouth.
"You only think that," she said at last, with what dignity she could assemble, "because you're nice. It's a flaw. We're going to work on it."
Sakura laughed, soft and surprised, and the strange small moment passed, and they finished their lunch in the sun and talked about number six, which really was evil. And Illya did not say the thing she was thinking, the thing that was small and cold and entirely unwelcome and that she pushed down hard under the warm bright weight of the ordinary afternoon: that her mother and her best friend, the two gentlest people she knew, the two people in the whole world she would have trusted blind to be right about a person — were the exact two people who insisted, against every available piece of evidence, that there was something in her brother worth the defending. And that she hated, more than she hated him, the little splinter of doubt this drove up under her thumbnail and left there: the suspicion that she was the one missing it. That everyone gentle enough could see a shape standing in the dark, and she was simply too angry to make it out.
She decided, on the walk home, with her bag on both shoulders and her jaw set, that she was not missing anything at all. He was precisely what he looked like. That was the whole tragedy of the man — that he looked like that, and that it went, as far down as you cared to dig, exactly all the way through.
She was wrong about this. She would not learn how wrong for a long time yet, and when she did it would be the worst night of her life.
But that was later. For now there was only the lane, and the gate, and home — and the second thing that happened that day, which was the girl on the wall.
Kuro and Miyu were still out somewhere across the city when Illya turned in at the top of the lane (a big one, evidently, just as Kuro had hoped), so there was no one walking at her shoulder to see the girl sitting on the low wall outside the house, and no one to hear Illya's first thought, which arrived uncharitable and fully formed: one of his.
Because that did happen. Not often. But it happened. A woman would turn up, now and again, asking after Ren, and they were always a particular sort of woman, glossy, amused, faintly and expensively disappointed, and Ren would deal with them on the doorstep, with that same terrible easiness he dealt with everything, and they would go away again down the lane on their nice heels, and the house would tactfully agree it had seen nothing. So Illya looked at the girl on the wall with the contempt already loaded, primed, comfortable in the hand.
And then the contempt wouldn't fit, because the girl was wrong.
She was young, a young woman, only a few years up out of girlhood, and yet she sat as no young woman ever sat: with a complete, unselfconscious, unembarrassed stillness, the kind people lose somewhere around the age of six and spend the rest of their lives failing to find again, so that she seemed at once far older than her smooth unbothered face and somehow much younger: ageless, after a fashion, like very old stone. She was pale in a manner that had nothing to do with staying indoors. She wore a plain dark coat buttoned to the throat, too warm by half for the mild afternoon and too clean by a mile for the dusty top of a garden wall, and she was watching the front of the house with an attention Illya could feel from clear across the lane: not nervous, not impatient, not waiting for anyone, just taking it in, steadily, completely, as though the house were a long column of figures she was running down with her eye and adding as she went. She had no phone out. She did not fidget. Nothing about her was passing the time, because she did not appear to be subject to time at all — not as walls and lanes and girls of twelve were.
When Illya came through the gate the young woman turned her head, unhurried, and looked at her with eyes that were a very strange colour indeed, and smiled: a real smile, warm, quick, delighted, as if Illya were exactly the thing she'd been hoping the afternoon would produce. And said, with no preamble whatsoever:
"Ah — there you are. You'll be Illyasviel. The daughter." A small pause, the smile tucking deeper in at one corner, fond and conspiratorial, like the two of them were already old friends sharing a joke at a third party's expense. "The one who can't stand him."
Illya stopped on the path. "...Excuse me?"
"Oh, don't look like that, it's a compliment, it's the most interesting thing about this whole house and I've been here forty minutes." The girl tipped her head a few precise degrees, considering Illya with open, friendly, slightly alarming enjoyment. "It's lovely, your hate. Truly. Most people's is all tangled up with wanting something back, or being scared, or owing somebody — it's grubby, mostly, hate, when you get up close. Yours is clean. Right through." Her smile warmed another notch, and she added, gently, as if handing over a sweet, "Well. Almost right through. There's a little something underneath it. But we won't poke that today. It's only the first afternoon."
The lane had gone very still. Somewhere in a hedge a bird was being relentlessly, stupidly ordinary.
"Who are you," said Illya, and it came out with rather less force than she'd loaded into it, because the girl had just reached, smiling, into Illya's chest and read off a figure Illya had told no living soul, had barely finished telling herself, on the roof, an hour ago, with Sakura, and had done it in the warm offhand tone of a person reading aloud an amusing line from a book.
"Al," the girl said. As if that settled the entire matter, as if it were a complete and sufficient answer to every question Illya might think to ask, which, coming from her, it very nearly was. She came down off the wall in one smooth unhurried motion, landing light, and stood a little too close, in the easy manner of someone who has simply never been told about the polite amount of space, considering Illya from this nearer vantage with frank and undisguised pleasure. "I'm going to be staying a while. There's a man in this house I've come to keep an eye on." The corner of her mouth did something wry. "You can probably guess which."
"You're with Ren," said Illya, and the contempt found its feet again, gratefully, on familiar ground.
"Colleagues with Ren," Al corrected, with a bright wickedness that made it somehow worse instead of better. "New at the school — well, new next week. I've not stood up in front of a class yet, so don't go racking your brains for where you've seen me; you haven't. Soon, though. I'll be three doors down the corridor from your brother." Her grin sharpened to a point. "You'll have both of us to walk past. Won't that be a treat." She watched whatever Illya's face did about that with open relish, and sailed on, fondly: "He teaches, they tell me. Mostly he perches. I intend to perch better. And yes — that was rude, before. The thing about the hate. I know. I do it on purpose, mind; I'm not sorry. I say the true thing and then I get to watch the face it makes — and yours, just then, did something marvellous, all cross and curious at the very same time, like a cat that's been shown a card trick. I could watch that all afternoon." She beamed. "You'll get used to me. Everyone does — three days, give or take. Then they can't remember how the house ran without me in it."
"You can't just say things like —"
"Your housekeeper's already decided she likes me," Al went on, sailing over the protest as though it were the next happy item on a long agenda. "Sella. The starchy one. Eleven minutes flat — front door to the good tea in the good room, on the tray I'm given to understand does not come out for just anybody." She said it with real, warm delight. "I only told her the truth. That it's the best-kept house I've set foot in for a long age, and that whoever sees to the linen does it like it matters. And her whole face —" Al touched two fingers briefly to her own cheek, chasing the shape of the memory there, "— went soft for about a second, before she remembered herself and pushed a biscuit at me to cover it. Nobody's ever said it to her, you see. Years she's kept this place like a held breath, and not one of you has ever once told her."
And then something crossed Al's face that didn't match the rest of her: the brightness snagged, caught for a heartbeat, the warm certainty of her going briefly, quietly still; and when she spoke again it was lower, almost to herself. "Funny thing. I'd have bet good money that one would take a week to thaw, and she went and did it in eleven minutes over a kind word about the towels." A small surprised breath, very near a laugh. "I'm not often wrong about a person. It's nice, being wrong about her." She turned her hand over, slowly, as though the right word might be sitting in the palm of it, and didn't find the word, and looked oddly content to have come up empty. "I'd half forgotten people could just — do that. Go warm. The moment somebody notices them."
And there, for one heartbeat, the girl who plainly, breezily knew everything was knocked sideways by the single thing she hadn't seen coming — that the hardest heart in the Emiya house had gone soft on a stranger in eleven minutes flat. Because Sella did not like people. Sella tolerated people, provisionally, on a strict probationary basis pending ongoing review. Sella had not warmed to a stranger inside an hour in the whole length of Illya's life.
"Why are you really here," Illya said. She didn't know, herself, why she asked it like that, really, only that the warmth of the girl had a floor under it she couldn't see, and she wanted, suddenly and badly, to know how far down it went.
And for just a moment the brightness went out of Al, not all of it, just the top layer, the party layer, not because she hadn't the answer — she had it, exactly and completely — but because she did not care to set it down on a garden path on the first afternoon. She looked past Illya, over her shoulder, at the house, at the warm lit square of the kitchen window where, even now, a shape was moving that could only be Ren, finally up, mooching toward the kettle with the gait of a man who has nowhere to be and is in no hurry to fail to be there.
And the look that crossed her face then was one Illya had no shelf for. It was warm, still (that was the strange part, it never stopped being warm), but it was a warmth with something underneath it pulled very taut and held very carefully, the way you hold a full cup you already know you're going to have to carry a long way without spilling. In another person, a person who knew how, it might have been the front edge of grief.
"To keep him company," Al said at last, lightly, and the lightness was real and was also a door closing. "He's got rather a lot to get through, and not as long as he thinks to do it in, and I find he's better with someone to talk to." She turned back, and the party-brightness came up again over her face like a blind going up, complete and convincing. "Don't tell him I said the bit about the company. He likes to think he's seeing to me. It's good for him. Men of his standing need a project." She tipped her head, studying Illya with renewed open enjoyment. "You really do hate him, though. All the way through. It's marvellous. Don't let anybody talk you out of it."
"...Why would anybody talk me out of it," said Illya, thoroughly off-balance now.
"No reason," said Al, far too easily, already turning to follow her up the path to the door, "no reason at all," — and then, over her shoulder, almost kind: "It's cleaner this way. Truly. Hold on to it while it's easy."
Illya did not ask what she meant. Later — much later — she would lie awake wishing with her whole chest that she had.
Dinner that night was the full house, which meant chaos administered as a sacred and unbroken rite.
It took the long table to hold them all. Shirou cooked, because Shirou always cooked — had cooked since he was small enough to need a stool at the stove, had taken to it as other boys take to bicycles and never fallen off — and tonight it was the good curry, the deep slow one that made even Saber go quiet and grave with concentration, and the table assembled itself in its long-established order, every plate in its accustomed orbit. Mama at the head, because Papa was away again, a city and three time zones off, his chair left where it always was at the foot's right hand: not cleared, not folded away, just empty, the way you leave a porch light burning for someone whose train you can't meet. Saber on Mama's right, upright as a sword stood in its scabbard, already eyeing the rice with the focused gravity of a knight surveying ground before a charge. Leysritt next along, who ate like slow weather — total, unhurried, without comment or apparent end, three bowls deep before anyone else had got to the bottom of one, surfacing only to ask the table at large, with grave and genuine hope, whether there was meat in the freezer for tomorrow. Sella circling all of it, never seated above a minute together, up again at the smallest blemish in the table's state of grace (a spill, a crooked dish, the suggestion of a draught), refilling, straightening, fussing, her whole short fierce life poured without thanks into the keeping of this room.
And down at the foot, in the chair beside Papa's empty one (close to the head but never in it, the prince who would not be king), sat Ren, tipped back on two legs of his chair in the exact way that made Sella's eye twitch on a four-second cycle, picking at a plate he had no intention of finishing, holding court.
"— so I said to him, I said, Tanaka-sensei, with the greatest respect, the recorder is a children's instrument, you cannot in good conscience fail a child at a children's instrument, it defeats the entire pedagogical purpose of the —"
"You teach recorder," said Illya.
"I teach recorder," Ren agreed, wholly unbothered, "which is precisely why my opinion on the matter carries such tremendous weight. Pass the —" he gestured vaguely down the table, and Saber, without looking up, without breaking her communion with the rice, passed the pickles, because every single person at this table had been trained from infancy to pass Ren things, it was reflex, it was shameful, "— thank you, knight, you're the only one at this table raised with any manners — as I was saying. A man of my standing in the community."
"You have no standing," said Kuro, home an hour ago and still pink at the ears from whatever they'd run down and sealed across the city, delighted to her bones. "You have debts."
"Standing and debt are the same quantity viewed from opposite sides of the ledger," said Ren serenely. "Ask any nobleman. Ask the bank."
And the new girl, Al, sat where she had been put without ceremony, between Miyu and Illya, on the bench, sitting up too straight in that ageless unembarrassed way, and watched the food arrive with the frank proprietary interest of someone who already knew to the grain exactly how it would taste, and then watched the people with even franker enjoyment, turning her strange warm eyes from face to face down the length of the table like someone at a play they have seen before and adore, mouthing the good lines half a beat early. And the maddening thing, the thing Illya kept catching at the edge of her own vision all through the meal, was how easily they were taking to her. Kuro had spent the first ten minutes trying to make her flinch — "So who are you, really? Nobody walks in off a wall and stays for dinner unless they're running from something" — and Al had only turned those warm strange eyes on her and said, "Oh, I'm running from absolutely everything, dear; it's why I've gotten so good at sitting still," and Kuro had opened her mouth, and shut it, and then laughed, beaten, charmed. Which nobody managed, beating Kuro and getting the laugh out of her besides. Leysritt had, without a word, slid the dish of the good pickles a few inches toward her: which from Leysritt was a coronation. Even Shirou kept glancing down the table to check she had enough, was warm enough, was all right (anxious, hospitable Shirou) as though she were a guest and not a stranger Ren had dragged in off a wall. The house had a hundred-year-old crust on it that strangers did not get under, and this one had simply walked through it like a door left open, in an afternoon, and was sitting at the family table being passed the pickles, while the man who had lived here a decade still got looked at like a damp patch on the ceiling.
The inversion of it made Illya's teeth ache. They like her in a day. They've had ten years to like him and they never will. And the only difference I can find is that she's a stranger and he isn't, and that can't be the difference, because it isn't fair, and the world is supposed to be —
Ren flicked a glance down the table. Light, glancing, the lazy half-attention he gave everything. And it landed on Al.
And Illya, who had been watching for it — watching for the flirt, the easy line, the and isn't she something, eh he'd surely have loaded and ready, because that was the entirely predictable shape of the thing — Illya watched the line not come.
Because this one he hadn't handled on the doorstep. That was the part the whole house was still quietly reeling from, under the curry and the noise. Every other woman who had ever come up that lane after Ren had gotten the doorstep and the easy smile and the long polite walk back to wherever she'd come from; none of them, not one, in ten years, had ever come through the door. And this one he had waved straight to the table, parked in the spare room on nothing but his own say-so, and the household had been turning that fact over uneasily all evening like a coin that might be counterfeit.
He looked at her one full second too long. And then he brought the chair down. Down onto four legs, gently, which he never did: so gently that Sella turned around at the sudden absence of the thing she had been winding up to scold him for, blinking, robbed; and his face did nothing Illya could put a name to, but his hands on the chair legs were careful, careful as you are with something fragile you are pretending is not; and he turned over a forkful of rice he had no intention of eating and said, lightly, to the table at large, as if it cost him nothing at all, as if it were the smallest and least interesting fact in the world:
"She's new at the school. No family worth the name, nowhere in particular she needs to be. I told her she could have the spare room." A pause; the fork turned the rice again. "She's staying."
She's staying.
It should have been nothing. Two words. A landlord's words, a brother's careless generosity with a house that wasn't really his to be generous with. And it landed in the warm noisy room like a stone going into a still pond, and Illya felt the ripple of it before she understood she was feeling anything at all.
"Of course she is," said Irisviel, from the head of the table — warm, and easy, and instant. And she did not look at the strange pale girl in the spare room at all. She looked at her son. With the soft unreadable steadiness she kept for him alone, the look that drove Illya half-mad because it had a whole conversation folded up inside it that only one of the two of them could read, as though staying were a word with a great deal more packed into it than he had let on, and she had heard every grain of the more, and was answering all of it, and only the first thin layer of the answer was of course she is.
And then Illya saw her mother's eyes fill.
Just at the rims. Just enough. Her mother, at the head of her own loud happy table, looking down its length at her useless smiling eldest son saying two careless words about a stranger and a spare room — and her pale face doing the held-quiet thing from the stairs, did he, and her eyes brimming up bright and sudden so that she had to drop them to her napkin and busy her hands with it, fold and refold, so that no one would see. And no one did see. Of course no one saw. They were all of them laughing at something Kuro had said, leaning in for more curry, Saber going back for her third helping, Leysritt grave about the meat — nobody else at that table was looking at the head of it, because nobody else ever was.
Illya was looking. Illya was always looking.
She looked from her mother's brimming downturned face — to her brother, at the foot, already gone back to his curry as though the matter were closed and beneath further comment, tipping the chair back up onto two legs again, restored, careless, awful; and then, last, sideways, to the strange certain girl on the bench beside her.
And Al was not laughing either.
Al had gone very still. The party had drained off her, all at once, as it had on the path for that single heartbeat but longer now, held longer, and she was looking down the length of the table at Ren with an expression that had absolutely no business on the face of a young woman meeting her colleague's deadbeat family for the first time over curry. It was not curiosity. It was not a stranger's wariness, or a guest's polite interest, or anything Illya had a shelf to file it on. It was the look (Illya groped for it and the only thing that fit was a thing she'd seen exactly once, on a face at the far end of a hospital corridor, years ago, that she had never told anyone she remembered): the look of a person sitting very still and very upright at the bedside of someone they have already, privately, in the quietest back room of themselves, begun to lose. Grief, held level.
Then Al felt the watching, turned her head, caught Illya's eyes on her, and the blind came back up over her face, smooth and complete, warm and bright and entirely convincing, in the space of a breath. She reached out and picked up the dish of pickles Leysritt had crowned her with, and offered it to Illya, pleasant as anything.
"Pickle?" she said. "You should eat. It's a long house, this one. You'll want your strength." And she smiled, and the smile was warm and easy and gave back nothing at all, and down the table Ren laughed at something, and asked nobody in particular whether anyone could see their way to lending their favourite brother a few thousand yen (it's for a thing, you wouldn't understand), and the warm lit kitchen went on being a warm lit kitchen, full of a family, and the man they could not stand, and the girl who had come to keep him company through whatever it was he had not as long as he thought to get through.
Afterward, while the others scraped and stacked and argued mildly about whose turn the washing was, Al found Illya by the door, putting on her shoes for no reason, only to be out of the noise for a minute and let the strange off-balance evening settle.
"You hate him very cleanly," Al said again, low, just for her, under the clatter from the kitchen. There was no cruelty in it at all. She said it without edge: an observation offered as a small gift, the kind you might make about a sunset. "I meant it, on the path. It's a fine thing, what you've got. Tidy. Whole." She leaned in the doorframe, easy, watching Illya with that warm unhurried attention. "Hold on to it while it's easy to hold."
"You keep saying that." Illya straightened, one shoe on. "While it's easy. Like it's going to stop being."
For a second — just a second — the warmth on Al's face went very gentle, and very tired, and very kind, and a hundred years old.
"Things mostly do," she said. "Stop being easy. That's the whole trouble with them." And then, before Illya could decide whether that was an answer or a dodge, the brightness came up again and Al pushed off the doorframe and ruffled Illya's hair, exactly as though they were already old friends, exactly as though she had every right, which somehow she nearly did. "Go on. Go and be furious at him about something. It suits you, and he's earned it, and it's good for the both of you." She grinned. "I'll do the same in a minute. We can compare notes."
And down the hall Ren was singing — badly, lazily, off-key on purpose, some old nothing of a tune to annoy Sella while he failed to help with the plates — and outside, beyond the warm lit windows of the house that had stayed and stayed and would not stop staying, it had begun, very softly, without one single person in the whole bright kitchen remarking on it, to rain.