Archive of Our Own

The first thing he learned about being Emiya Shirou was that the body possessed an appalling amount of muscle memory for things no reasonable teenager should know how to do.

The second thing he learned was that wood glue and reinforcement magic felt remarkably similar when applied to a broken circuit breaker at three in the morning, except one of them made your teeth ache with the taste of rusted copper and the other just smelled like low-grade polyvinyl acetate.

He sat on the polished wooden floor of the Emiya household’s central engawa, his knees drawn up to his chest, staring blankly out at the moonlit gravel yard. In his hands, he held a porcelain teacup. It was slightly chipped near the rim. He had fixed it four hours ago using a trace amount of structural reinforcement and a prayer, only for the ceramic to crack again because his internal prana flow had flickered like a dying neon sign.

I was a university student, he thought, numbly watching a solitary leaf drift off the tall maple tree near the wall. I had an apartment. I had a small, reasonable collection of art books. I had a degree in progress that was eighty percent complete. I was a functioning, law-abiding individual whose primary vice was reading slow-burn, multi-chapter fiction about emotionally emotionally compromised men in red coats.

He took a sip of the tea. It was tepid, bitter, and tasted slightly of iron.

I wanted to date him, his mind repeated for what felt like the ten-thousandth time since the fever broke three weeks ago. I wanted to meet a tall, sarcastic, darkly tanned man with white hair, terrible coping mechanisms, and a coat that cost more than my annual tuition. I wanted to hand him a warm meal, tell him his cynicism was pathetic, and slowly wear down his defenses until he admitted he liked sitting on the porch with me.

He squeezed his eyes shut. A sharp, needle-like pain throbbed behind his left temple—a gentle reminder from his soul that his current physical hardware was distinctly lacking in the "tall, dark, and brooding" department.

Instead, I am the teenager.

He opened his eyes and stared at his own hands. They were small. Calloused along the inner joints from carrying wooden swords, bamboo poles, and heavy buckets of water. The knuckles were rough, stained with motor oil from fixing Fujimura Taiga’s scooter earlier that afternoon.

"I am the teenager," he whispered aloud to the empty yard. His voice was too high, too bright, entirely devoid of the rich, velvety baritone he had spent years listening to through high-end headphones. "I am the future walking disaster. I am the boy who is going to burn his own lungs out trying to turn his nervous system into a series of fake gun barrels."

He leaned his head back against the wooden pillar, letting out a long, ragged sigh.

This is a scam. The universe has conducted a fraudulent transaction. I requested a partner, and instead, I was delivered the raw materials for my own existential crisis.

The sheer absurdity of it made him want to laugh, but the lingering ghost of the Fuyuki fire—a memory that was not his, yet sat inside his chest like a lump of cold lead—kept the laughter stuck in his throat. The trauma was there. It didn't belong to the university student who had died after being hit by a delivery van outside a convenience store, but it belonged to Emiya Shirou, and since their souls had been mashed together like two mismatched pieces of modeling clay, the nightmare belonged to him now too.

He could still smell the smoke if he breathed in too deeply through his nose.

"Right," he muttered, setting the teacup down on the floorboards with a small, precise clack. "Panic is unhelpful. Panic does not fix the timeline. Panic does not prevent me from turning into a miserable, self-sacrificing ghost who lives in a wasteland made of infinite swords."

He stood up, his joints popping in the cool night air. He stretched his arms over his head, feeling the tight pull of muscles in his shoulders.

If he was going to survive this, he needed a plan.

First: avoid dying in the Fifth Holy Grail War, which was still several years away.

Second: avoid turning into the canonical Archer EMIYA.

Third: somehow, against all physical and metaphysical logic, find a way to meet the real Archer EMIYA without causing a paradox that collapsed the Far East into a localized Singularity.

Fourth: obtain a husband.

Preferably in that order, he thought grimly as he walked down the hallway toward the storehouse. Though honestly, if I can secure the husband first, the rest of it might feel slightly less like an administrative punishment.

The storehouse smelled of old iron, dust, and engine oil.

He knelt in the center of the concrete floor, surrounded by broken rice cookers, discarded bicycle frames, and stacks of yellowing manuals left behind by Emiya Kiritsugu. The ambient prana in the room was cold and thin, drifting through the gaps in the corrugated tin roof.

He closed his eyes and reached inward.

In the canon, Shirou’s Magic Circuits were a mess—a jagged, improperly opened series of nerves that he forcefully converted into temporary circuits every time he practiced, risking his life with every single pass of prana. The OC, possessing full conceptual knowledge of how ridiculously stupid that method was, had spent the last three weeks carefully tracing the actual twenty-seven circuits embedded in his soul.

They were dormant, but they were there. They felt like thin, silver wires laid across his spine, waiting to be cleared of rust.

"If I act completely out of character," he whispered to the dark, "the world notices. Alaya notices. The Counter Force starts twitching."

He had tried, on his fourth day in this body, to simply pack a bag and tell Fujimura Taiga that he was moving to Tokyo to pursue an art history degree. The moment the words had formed in his throat, his heart had seized up with such violent, suffocating pressure that he had dropped to his knees in the kitchen, vomiting blood onto the tatami while his circuits flared like magnesium strips.

The world did not like it when the central anchor of a local Fate route tried to resign before the play had even started.

"So," he said, opening his eyes and looking down at a broken iron heater resting on the workbench. "A compromise."

He raised his right hand. He didn't use the insane visualization Kiritsugu had taught the original Shirou—the whole "igniting a trigger inside the mind" nonsense that treated the body like a gun. Instead, he visualized a simple circuit board flipping a switch.

Connect.

A faint, blue-white light rippled beneath his skin. The silver lines along his arms lit up, humming with a low, pitch-perfect tone. It didn't hurt. It felt cold, precise, and slightly sharp, like breathing in winter air through your mouth.

"I will play the role," he announced to the empty storehouse, setting his terms with the invisible mechanics of the universe. "I will be Emiya Shirou. I will fix the heaters. I will cook the meals. I will run until my lungs burn. I will be the nice, helpful boy who cannot say no to the archery club."

He paused, his fingers hovering an inch above the cold iron of the heater.

"But in exchange, I retain my intent. I am doing this under duress and for the explicit purpose of personal survival and eventual romantic satisfaction. I will not die for an abstract ideal. I will not become a tool for humanity's cleanup crew. And if the original Archer shows up..."

His circuit flickered, the prana surging slightly before stabilizing.

"...I am allowed to attempt courtship. This is a non-negotiable term of my performance."

The air in the storehouse grew momentarily still. For a fraction of a second, the smell of ozone filled the room, followed by a faint, metallic vibration that ran through the soles of his feet—a localized, minor backlash from the universe registering his self-imposed restriction. A small Geas, bound not by a scroll or a Command Seal, but by the sheer, stubborn refusal of an adult soul occupying a teenager's skin.

Rule established, his mind noted with dry satisfaction. Roleplay properly until the War ends. Deviate only when necessary. Keep the modern brain locked behind the domestic mask.

He touched the iron heater.

"Trace, on," he murmured.

The structure of the metal opened up before his mind's eye—every crack, every rusted screw, every imperfection in the alloy laid out like a blueprint. He didn't build a sword. He didn't project a Noble Phantasm.

He simply repaired the heating element so Fujimura wouldn't freeze her knees off during tomorrow's dinner.

"Step one complete," he said, wiping a line of cold sweat from his forehead as the blue light faded. "Now I just need to figure out how to look charmingly vulnerable while carrying fifty pounds of groceries."

The next morning, Fujimura Taiga slammed the front door open with the force of a minor gas explosion.

"SHIROU!" she roared, kicking off her wooden clogs with complete disregard for the polished entryway. "The rice! Tell me you made the salmon with the sweet glaze! If it's just salted kelp again, I'm going to challenge the entire kendo team to a duel of honor!"

Shirou emerged from the kitchen wearing a clean, dark blue apron tied neatly around his waist. He held a wooden rice paddle in one hand and a plate of perfectly glazed, golden-brown salmon in the other. The aroma of sweet soy sauce, mirin, and toasted sesame seeds drifted into the hallway like a physical force.

"It’s salmon, Fuji-nee," he said smoothly, his tone carrying the exact blend of long-suffering patience and genuine affection that Emiya Shirou was supposed to possess. "And I made extra soup because you left the window open in your room last night."

Taiga froze mid-stride, her eyes widening to the size of tea saucers. She sniffed the air once, twice, and then let out a sound like a deflating balloon.

"You... you are an angel," she wept, collapsing onto her knees near the low table. "An actual, red-headed saint sent to preserve my youth and beauty. Why can't the boys at the academy be like this? Why are they all loud, sweaty, and completely incapable of handling a frying pan?"

Shirou set the plate down and began ladling rice into two porcelain bowls.

Because they are normal teenagers, Fuji-nee, he thought privately, taking his seat across from her. While I am an exhausted adult trapped in a vessel that is currently computing the optimal calorie-to-protein ratio required to keep my physical frame from collapsing during afternoon sprint drills.

"Eat slowly," Shirou said aloud, handing her the bowl. "You'll give yourself hiccups again."

"Mmm-ph!" Taiga was already chewing, her face radiant with pure, unadulterated bliss. "Shirou, seriously. When you grow up, some girl is going to steal you away and I'm going to starve to death in a ditch. You need to promise me you'll marry someone who lives within five minutes of this house."

Shirou stopped with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth.

"I don't think you have to worry about a girl stealing me away," he said dryly.

Taiga swallowed, blinking at him. "Eh? What's that supposed to mean? Don't tell me you're thinking about joining a monastery like Kiritsugu’s weird friend down at the church?"

At the mention of the church, Shirou’s left eyelid twitched.

A sudden, terrible image flashed through his mind: high ceilings, the smell of burning incense, cold marble floors, and a tall man in a black cassock with eyes like two empty wells, holding a plate of unnaturally red mapo tofu.

His stomach did a strange, uncomfortable flip that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with a deeply embarrassing, highly inconvenient preference he had developed during his previous life while watching certain anime adaptations at two in the morning.

No, he told himself fiercely, shoving a piece of salmon into his mouth with more force than necessary. Absolutely not. We are not going there. That is a toxic, hazardous, morally bankrupt line of thought. He is an evil priest. He is the main antagonist. He smells like cheap chili oil and dark secrets.

"Shirou?" Taiga tilted her head, her cheeks stuffed like a squirrel's. "You look like you just swallowed a lemon."

"I was just thinking," Shirou said, his voice flat, "that the church administrator is an extremely strange person and I have no intention of visiting him unless forced by supernatural law."

"Ah, Kotomine-san?" Taiga waved a hand dismissively. "Yeah, he’s creepy. Handsome in a 'looks like he’s about to bury a body' kind of way, but definitely creepy. My grandfather says you should never trust a priest who doesn't drink sake."

Handsome in a 'looks like he’s about to bury a body' kind of way, Shirou repeated internally, staring down at his rice.

Why must my brain be like this? Why couldn't I have been reincarnated with an interest in wholesome, age-appropriate, local high school students? Why is my ideal type exclusively limited to men who require a minimum of three psychological interventions and a restraining order?

"Anyway," Taiga said, completely oblivious to the internal structural damage she had just inflicted on his psyche, "I need you to fix the lock on the archery club shed after school. Shinji said he couldn't turn the key."

Shirou let out a slow, controlled breath.

"Shinji," he said softly, "can't turn the key because he turns it the wrong way every single time."

"Well, go help him anyway! You're the reliable Emiya-kun!"

"Right," Shirou muttered, picking up his tea. "The reliable Emiya-kun. The boy who fixes locks, cooks salmon, and prepares himself for an eventual confrontation with his own future ghost while secretly wishing he had a boyfriend who could handle a sword."

"Did you say something, Shirou?"

"I said I'll make sure to oil the latch," Shirou lied seamlessly, taking a drink. "It's no trouble at all."