It was late... really late, at the Central Library of the Mages' Association Headquarters in Central London. Normally, at this time of the night, most of the staff would clean up and close the doors of most venues except the common areas, but tonight seemed to be the exception. The lights of the Library were turned on, and the sound of steps, followed by loud thuds from someone setting down stacks of books could be heard through closed doors.
"With half the archives gone already, I still don't find anything!" exclaimed Shirou in frutration, rubbing his temples as he looked at the folders sprawled across two different tables.
He had been growing curious about one particular thing that had made him decide browsing the archives — or at least the public archives — was worth at least one night of sleeplessness. The matter at hand had cropped up slowly. One could even say it actually 'creeped up' after a peculiar exchange with Rin and most importantly, a peculiar event involving Saber.
Only two nights before, the three of them had separated. While Shirou went to a pub not far from the dorms they were staying at, Rin opted to stay with Lord El Melloi to hold a conversation behind closed doors about something they had termed 'the detail'. Saber, on the other hand, decided she wanted to spend some time in Hyde Park. Normally, separating wasn't something they'd choose to do, but given that Rin wasn't going to be leaving anytime soon and Saber had been rather insistent, Shirou saw little case in fighting the Servant off.
Things were fairly normal through the afternoon as he spent the day watching the Rugby Union matches and having some breadsticks with a few new normal friends he had made in London. However, when the clock read 5 o'clock, he decided he'd had enought fun and went back to their place to fix dinner for that night. It was what he normally did, after all... so he returned to their flat and opened the door, expecting to find Saber and Rin lounging around or still away.
That's when things fell completely off a cliff.
Rin had her discussion with El Melloi, but apparently it had evolved into an argument — one that had gotten violent, no less — and now she was barred from the Clock Tower premises for the rest of the week. Lord El Melloi had convened with Rin to discuss something really sensitive indeed. It was a topic that didn't elicit any kind of response from Shirou at that time: His biological family.
For his part, he was completely unsurprised by the situation, though Shirou still found the idea that Lord El Melloi II of all people wanted to discuss about his biological origin. Shirou died on that night. He was reborn as, well, Shirou Emiya... and nothing else mattered. His past wasn't even his anymore, so what was there to discuss?
Of course, things hadn't been hectic enought then, what with Rin only being frustrated at how El Melloi insisted on talking to him in private and even demanding he go with an armed escort to make sure he wouldn't attempt to dodge 'the interview' as Rin had ominously referred to it. They had to get even worse!
So, naturally, they did.
Saber had entered the house with a series of light cuts and her hair messed up. Her armor, which she had summoned, had been hacked to bits, leaving only the dress, who was tattered at the edges and no longer shone with the splendor of the beautiful blue battlegown she normally used.
According to her, she had spoken with a young man, probably a year or two Shirou's Junior, in Hyde Park. The boy, who had started an idle conversation with her, talked about how he was visiting with some friends and getting to know London better, but then he mentioned something that made Saber's Instinct go haywire.
"He said, and I quote, that they were 'scouting the land'" she had duly noted, pointing to the fact that the last time someone had used that language had been during the Holy Grail War. When she had confronted him, the boy had tried to reason with her, before suspecting her nature.
"There's something off about you..." the boy had argued "Look, I don't know who you are, so I'd rather leave now. Good evening..." he had said, attempting to leave with his near broken mask.
Saber being Saber and them being Magi meant neither of them was having any of it.
So Saber had engaged the boy, who had simply identified himself as 'Jason' in combat. Initially, she had attempted to just engage him in hand to hand, but when she realized the boy's strength exceeded hers, she had dropped the masquerade altogether and summoned her sword and armor. Saber had argued no normal mortal could possess the strength to challenge a Servant. On that, they all agreed. Whatever the boy had been, it was almost certainly bad news.
It was then the boy dropped his side of the act as well, summoning a golden sword from a coin he flipped into the air. Immediately, Saber went charging in, attempting to cleave whichever monster the boy truly was in half. However, the Jason boy had not only been physically stronger. He was faster. Apparently, way faster, and spun so many circles around the King of Knights she almost lost her balance for a second. By the time she was on her feet again, she realized the reason for her sudden lose of stability: she had been wounded. Many times in fact. Her body was a cornucopia of shallow wounds. Whilst rather small and not too deep, there were so many of them she had lost almost half her blood supply when she arrived. Even her mana levels were perilously low. Had the Jason boy not vanished right then and there, he might have finished her off right then and there. Perhaps she could have fought him off and even won at full strength, but she no longer had the vast amounts of mana from a working Holy Grail to help herself to. Shirou and Rin could provide enought mana for her to stay in this world and even fight, but not to use the full extent of her powers.
After then, Shirou had cooked something simply and comforting for Saber whilst Rin healed her. The two of them stayed with the Knight of the Sword until midnight, when she fell asleep and Rin, too tired with what had happened to them that day, decided to go to sleep too.
That was when the nightmares started.
The fire...
The people dying in droves...
The world in flames...
Even to this day, Shirou couldn't help but grimace upon remembering it. The chaos, the confusion, the feeling of his lungs burning as they struggled to breath. The weight of the rubble pressing his body against the floor. The smell of Sulphur and rot. They had made for the most hellish night of his life. The trauma had erased everything he knew of his old past. He could no longer recall what he had done that day, what had happened to the place he was in right now. All he could do was will himself to keep breathing... his heart to keep beating... Until finally, he was saved.
The man who had shaped his life, who had rescued him, who had felt happier than anyone on the city just by finding a kid he had never met before safe and sound... had been true thing driving him forward since then.
That night, whoever lived before perished. That night, Shirou Emiya was born.
So why did he suddenly feel incomplete?
It wasn't that Kiritsugu hadn't been enought... Or that his ideals were borrowed, even stolen, one might say, or that they were doomed from the start. Shirou could deal with that. Anything he thought about he could deal with. But this wasn't something he couldn't think about. It was empty... like an empty page. That was why he couldn't quell the feeling of incompleteness that had emerged since then. That was why the nightmare stopped and everything changed that night.
The disaster had taken place. Kiritsugu had saved him, but suddenly... with no prior warning, the image of the man in tears froze. Shirou, previously devastated by the course of events, felt how his essence went numb and everything ceased to move... then it happened... time started to roll in reverse.
The people were unburied, the buildings started rebuilding themselves. Even his former self's clothes cleaned itself up. The vortex in the sky vanished slowly, eating everything it had expelled from it's profane mouth back in.
Then even Kiritsugu disappeared.
Instead, with a bright flash of light, memories... or so he believed they were... of a past long forgotten seemed to reemerge. A woman with an angelic voice, sitting in a rocking chair, looking at the ocean from the porch of her house, hummed a soft, soothing song as she looked at the sun set beneath the waves, cradling a blue mantle — a baby — in her arms.
The vision changed.
He found himself running, feeling much shorter, behind two women. One he acknowledged as the one from the first vision, with burgundy hair tamed by a long, braided ponytail. The other was a shorter version of the first woman, with a longer ponytail and locks of hair around her face, both seemed to hold the then young boy as they all ran together towards a man with shaggy blonde hair and imposing physique, resting before a rock formation. He was flanked by two surf boards, with one behind him, and held a small one in his white rashguard covered arms. The girls themselves seemed to sport black rashguard and similar camo boardshorts.
The girls slowed down as they all approached the rocks slowly. The man smiled, taking something from behind himself and extending his hands. Before he could see what it was, the vision changed again. Suddenly, he was in the open ocean. The melody the older woman had been humming was then joined by the voice of another woman. Younger, crispier... and even more melodious...
He could now see both of their faces clearly as they seemed to look back at him. Both girls had similar visages and even hair, but one looked slightly rougher, more curt and somewhat tighter skinned. Her bangs and locks were also slightly shorter and her height was taller. The other one was shorter, with much softer features, befitting of a 10 year old child, and longer hair overall. The natural association he made was that they were mother and daughter, since he doubted they could be twin sisters given the one peculiarity he would single out. The daughter had bright blue eyes with a slight haze that seemed to brighten her visage, like a cloud in the sky. The woman he believed was the girl's mother was, on the other hand, a completely different story. Her eyes... They were a color all too familiar to him: amber. Molten, amber colored orbs stared at him in an eerily familiar way. He was well aware of the reason they unsettled him so much... because he had gotten used to seeing those liquid metal irises. He saw them every day, after waking up, whenever he looked at himself in a mirror. They hypnotized him in such a way he almost didn't take in the scene that was happening now. They were in the waves, overlooking the sunset in the horizon.
The vision then started to fade gradually, dissolving into a dark smoke curtain as the screams of misery, the heavy air of a war zone and the smell of sulphur returned to his nostrils. The pleasant feeling of the water on his limbs was cannibalized by dust and burning wood. The feeling of molten concrete under him replaced the healing winds in the violet skies...
Shirou had woken up from that dream in an unusual state of disarray, something that even during the Holy Grail War had been rather odd to him. Nominally, he awoke in either drowsy stupor or alarmed... and at times, even mystified. However, this time he awoke to a different sound he had never heard upon waking up: sobbing. To be specific, his own sobbing.
When he realized it, he was so unnerved by his strange response he had dried his tears, calmed himself down and then gone over to the flat's only computer, which sat in a table at the back of the living room and done what he had learned was a good way to distract himself: he started googling for 'calming landscapes' in the picture search, hoping to be soothed by some of the imagery he found on the internet, before something far too suspicious to be coincidence happened: A picture of a Hawaiian beach in Maui called 'Kanaha Beach' appeared in the 'Image Results'.
He had just intended to look up random soothing pictures until he fell asleep again. Instead, the random search for calming pictures had instead led to that picture making its way to his monitor. A picture that was now burnt into his very gray matter, sealed forever inside his head, mostly due to how unsettling and unexpected its sudden appearance on the search results had been.
It was the same beach he had seen in his dream.
That was when he collapsed altogether, sobbing and crying uncontrollably and (he'd later admit) rather uncharacteristically.
After the ruckus woke the girls up, he had been convinced to tell them what elicited that kind of response from him. When he told both girls about his dream, Rin almost had a mental breakdown of her own. Not just because he'd admitted he might have remembered a part of his former, perhaps past... life, but because when he told them about it, Saber revealed one more thing about her encounter with the blonde guy: he had phoned a girl through his cellular phone and the image that had appeared in the picture fit Shirou's description of either of the red headed women he had seen in his dreams.
She had been so on edge it took him and Saber hugging the prodigy tightly to keep her from falling apart like a China plate under too much stress. Then she had gone over to the phone and asked to meet Luvia in a Cafe the following morning. She had also called a few more mages and told Shirou and Saber to keep off their meeting when it happened. Easy for them since Rin didn't tell anyone the address at the time.
Saber, for her part, opted to stay home and heal for the rest of the week. As a result of the dream though, Shirou had started looking around for more evidence on who the girl from the vision could be.
It had all been for nought. The girl didn't exist. At least not as far as Britain was concerned. He had looked at registries on the internet, on the NHS and then requested information from the US Embassy. The last one had gone horrifically, and ended with him booted off the premises, mostly because, while Shirou felt they actually might know who he was talking about, they wouldn't tell. When he had asked about a 'family of four from Maui' the government agents had laughed at him. Thankfully, he was able to use hypnosis to get them to allow him into the archives, were he'd looked at a registry of four member households in Maui and looked around for 'blue eyes, four members and surfer' among the tags on his Boolean search on the registry database. Only one household matched all tags, and it had only two people: an 18 year old surfing superstar and her mentor old man.
That was when he had told the government agents in the help desk about them, mostly out of curiosity... and they bluntly told him they were under the aegis of the US Marine Corps and couldn't reveal more information on them. That was when he brought up the idea of just googling them... and security promptly tossed him to the sidewalk outside.
He did look on the internet again... and found jack. A series of DMCA notices at the bottom of the page, however, did point to something afoot... and he had spent the whole day looking through other search engines... and while he did find one text article, there were no pictures whatsoever.
And thus he ultimately resorted to MA registry files. They had information about major events through the last 20 years, so they'd cover the Holy Grail War in which the Grail destroyed much of Fuyuki. The files did mention a series of red headed guests staying in the Hotel that had been ground zero for the Grail War's major battles and the subsequent catastrophe that had wiped out an entire ward off the map, but nearly half the names had been redacted for some reason and there were also no pictures.
So here he was, looking at any archives, documents... anything that might quell his curiosity... anything that might have information pertaining to the names in the hotel's guest list and their identity. The hotel had hosted two of the participants in the Grail War. They were Lord El Melloi I and his wife Sola-Ui. However, to keep them safe, almost everyone on the guest list had been assessed and their information relayed to the Clock Tower and later onward to them. The files had everything but the country of origin and age of the guests redacted afterwards and there was no mention of redheads or surfers in the 'Details' section of the guest profile pages. It was the only section besides the aforementioned points that remained visible.
Shirou had however, been somehow, through sheer idiotic luck from outer space, able to find an old archive containing pictures of all guests in the hotel from the start of the grail war and their names and passport information. He was now browsing them and trying to see what he could find. He now had five pictures in his hand, none matching the description of the girls he saw.
"If they aren't here, then they might have been close enought" the redhead said to himself as he dropped the batch, resting his hands on the table and closing his eyes as he contemplated surrendering. He had already been through almost all the pictures except the two remaining ones on the folder. "Maybe they are there..." he whispered again "But what if they weren't in the hotel? They could've been walking past by as the catastrophe unfolded. What if the girls aren't involved and I just had a bad dream. Could it really be?"
Sighing, he took the last two pictures out and looked at the envelopes. There was only a one in five hundred chance the picture or pictures were there. He hadn't found himself in any of the pictures either, but the image files only documented those who had booked the room and Shirou was too young back then. The girl who was 18 now would've been back then, but he believed if her mother or even her pop was involved, they would be in the file.
He opened envelope number one. A Japanese looking businessman with black hair. Shirou groaned while covering his face and sliding his hands to the back of his head. The man was not one of the people in the vision.
Well, obviously...
He sighed one last time, pulling the last picture in the file slowly. If she wasn't here, then the hunt had been for nought. When he started sliding, he saw a white background, then the image started to appear. He closed his eyes instinctively as he slid it out altogether, feeling relief fill his chest and lungs as he slowly opened his eyes and the figure in the picture became clearer.
It was her. Finally. He had found her.
The woman looked like she hadn't aged at all. She was identical to how he had seen her in the vision, but instead of a rashguard, she wore a red flannel shirt with a black sweater underneath and whitewashed jeans with what looked like beaten up sneakers. From her neck hung a necklace with the shape of a bird of prey descending upon his prey.
He turned the page around and looked at the information in the bio. As with the other pictures, everything except age and background was present in the screening.
Miranda Sandra Mercer - married to Kieran Mercer. Mother. Two children: one male, one female. Hails from: Kahului, Hawaii, United States of America.
Shirou then looked for anyone from Kahului in the files of hotel guests. He found one guest, only one guest, from Kahului had registered on the hotel. She had registered a night before the catastrophe that probably took her life.
Details: Subject entered hotel after arriving from LAX at NRT at 8:33 PM JST. She registered on the hotel with (1) children. Male, aged 7 or 8, and booked the Presidential Suite. Slept in the guestroom directly above Kayneth Archibald El Melloi's own Suite. Latter subject was confirmed eliminated from the Grail War by then. Subject was confirmed as leaving the next day, at 7:44 PM JST, and heading to a commerce in the center of the city, according to Hotel Shuttle registries. Was presumably not present when the hotel was destroyed. Left child with private nanny. Other details unknown. Suspected to have vast magical potential due to abnormal signature readings by mages sent to the scene, detecting an strange signature of unknown origin. Given the strength of the signature, signature from a Servant was most likely the source of the anomaly. Probably Signature of Archibald El Melloi's Lancer.
So she might have lived. She might have made it through. However, the file did not mention if she had returned at some point or ever visited the memorial afterwards. In other words, he had no idea if she was still alive, if she lived in her hometown now, or even if the family was still together. For a second, he thought about asking about her at the US Embassy, for only the government would be able to confirm her current whereabouts, but he realized they'd just hide everything related to her and boot him out again. He had a feeling whoever she was, they were trying to keep him away from her and her family.
As he stood up and gathered the papers, he couldn't help but laugh at how far things had gotten out of hand now. Still, he felt he might, for the first time since the fire, have a personal and significant reason to live that didn't make him feel selfish and did not involve living for the sake of others. He never thought he'd be able to feel something like this before, but now that it happened, he realized it was a lot different... nicer... than what he had expected.
And he realized it might not be the US Government keeping him away from just 'her' family...
But 'his' family...
Originally Posted by Arashi_Leonhart
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