Hello there I'm Hermitfold here with another new fic. Though I should be working on Fate's Bullet Hell and Starcrossed, regrettably, my muse for those fics have beaten the hell out of me and left me for dead, so I'm writing this to help me get my groove back. I'd like to dedicate this chapter to eddyak, who has always helped me out when I need it, Keyne, the definitive Saber fan and Elf, who inadvertently gave me the idea for this fic.
So therefore, for my reader's consideration, I offer The Spice of Life.
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Chapter One: Saber and the Premier League
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It was a lovely Saturday morning in Fuyuki City. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, and at the Emiya house, Altria Pendragon, High King of the Britons, and the paramount knight on life, was getting ready to watch the English Premier League.
As any football fan could tell you, being a fan was about more than just cheering on your favourite team, and (often ungraciously) heckling the losers- it was also about all the little quirks, rituals and habits that fans built up over a lifetime, adding to the fun, enriching the experience. Though she was new to the football scene, no one could accuse Saber of being slow at picking something up. The swordswoman was in the kitchen, preparing what had quickly become her favourite game snacks: popcorn, chips and soda, along with anything else present in the fridge that could be made ready to eat in less than three minutes. Sometimes if there weren't any leftovers, Shirou might even quickly make her something, but that was out this week, since he was off helping out at the Copenhagen Bar, after an emergency call.
The kitchen hummed cheerfully with the sound of food preparation. The microwave popped the popcorn, Saber poured soda into a large cup then added cubes of frozen soda, something she had picked up from a book she had borrowed from Taiga the other day. A good read, though the author's take on vampires, while interesting, nearly caused Saber to break out into peals of laughter. So much for Dead Apostles…
Placing her popcorn into a large bowl that Shirou had thoughtfully picked up for her in one hand, and with the massive cup in the other, Saber went back into the living room and plopped down on the cushions that she had arranged in front of the television set.
Watching from the couch, munching on some rice balls that she had liberated from the Emiya fridge, Emiya Shirou's self-appointed 'Nee-san' Fujimura Taiga looked at the blonde girl with interest. “You seem pretty stoked about this week, Saber-chan,” she commented, as Saber arranged the cushions for maximum comfort.
“Yes”, Saber replied enthusiastically, reclining on the cushions, “Today's match is between Manchester United and Arsenal- they're pretty close on points and both teams have been doing really well this season, so this should prove to be a great game.”
Taiga tilted her head to the side as she listened to Saber's explanation. “Ehh, sounds like fun.” She looked at Saber again, “You know, I never really took you to be a sports fan, Saber-chan- you never really mentioned it before.”
‘That would probably be because I never knew about it before,’ Saber thought. She couldn't really say that out loud, though- A modern Brit who hadn’t heard of football would be like a Japanese person didn't know about samurai, or sakura trees.
“Well, I only really started getting into it lately,” she replied simply.
Taiga's head bobbed at Saber's declaration and as Saber turned her attention back to the screen, the pre-game commentators introducing themselves, she thought back to just how she had gotten into this game.
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“So, in the new modern world, educators will need to take a long, hard look at our current approach to modern languages and think about just how relevant this system is…”
Near the back of the Fuyuki Grand Hotel's conference room, Saber's head drooped, sheer boredom reducing the third overblown speech in the last few hours to a background drone. The conference had been going on for several hours, and already a number of people had given a series of self-important speeches that, whilst interesting at first, soon degenerated into a memorised drawl.
As a former king, Saber was no stranger to long addresses- boredom was the norm when such things happened. However, that didn't mean she had to like it.
Suppressing a sigh, Saber looked around to see how the person who had brought her here was faring. Against common expectations, Fujimura Taiga was listening in rapt attention to the speaker: she was even taking notes.
‘It’s only times like these,’ Saber thought wryly, ‘that I remember that she's actually a teacher.’ No matter what anyone else said, it couldn’t be denied that Taiga took teaching seriously, and was always looking for ways to improve. This time, Saber had accompanied her to the annual Modern Languages Conference out of interest.
Her interest had died out soon enough.
Shirou would normally be the one to accompany her, but he had taken to working Saturdays more and more often at the Copenhagen bar. Rin, who had been spending more and more time at the Emiya residence since becoming Shirou's girlfriend, was hanging out today with Ayako and Sakura... Well, after a recent change in family circumstances, she was busy sorting out the finances of the Matou family- so when Taiga had dropped some not-so-subtle hints about going off on a trip for the day, Saber had volunteered.
“I'm going for some food”, she muttered to Taiga, who gave an equally soft grunt in reply. Saber moved past her and then through the rest of the people, apologising occasionally as she squeezed past people on her way out of the cramped row of seats.
Easing her way past the door, Saber strolled down the corridor in the direction of a vaguely remembered vending machine, one that happened to be stocked with some of her favourite snacks- just the thing to help her endure the boredom.
She was so intent on following the memories that she almost didn’t notice when someone even shorter than herself came barrelling down the passageway, right at her.
However, her position as a Heroic Spirit was not for nothing. Turning quickly but gracefully, just as the person was about to crash into her, she avoided the impact, simultaneously throwing an arm out, stopping them in their tracks. Something thudded onto the ground between them.
Bending her head down, Saber looked at the young man who had nearly run into her. Though it shouldn’t have been strange, since this was an international hotel, the boy wasn’t Japanese- a British boy no older than 12, in shorts and a t shirt, with knobby looking knees and sandy brown hair looked back up at her.
Saber was about to address the boy- maybe even tell him to be more careful- when she happened to lay eyes on the book that the boy had dropped when they almost collided, and her heart nearly stopped. A moderately thick hardcover book, slightly worn, with a brightly covered cover.
What surprised Saber was the title: The Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
While Saber was no stranger to the immense popularity of the life and adventures she and her knights had enjoyed, she didn’t quite like it. Maybe it was some odd mixture of embarrassment, as well as some lingering guilt, at the way things had turned out- but she tried to stay away from anything to do with the Arthurian mythos, which hadn’t been much of a problem in the 4 months she’d been living in Japan, after the end of the Holy Grail War.
She broke off from her disquiet as she turned her attention back to the sheepish looking young man in her grasp.
“Err, you all right?”, he said in English
“I’m fine”, she replied in the same language, and something about her accent must have surprised the young man.
“Hey, you’re from Wales, right?” he said. “Nice to meet you, my name’s Andrew Cunningham,” he grinned, stretching his hand out.
She shook it with a slight smile. “Altria Pendragon, but my friends call me Saber. Nice to meet you, Andrew.”
“Pendragon…?”
Having noticed Saber staring at his book, he added one and one and ended up with two. When the Holy Grail was involved, though, one plus one might as well be six and a half. ‘I guess with a name like that, people must be bugging you about King Arthur stuff all the time, right?”
“…Yes,” Saber replied. Eager to get the boy to stop thinking about her and ‘King Arthur stuff’, she asked him where he was off to in such a rush.
“Oh, I was gonna go check the match scores. Tottenham Hotspurs are playing Chelsea right now, one of the first matches of the season, but since Dad asked me to help him set up for his lecture, I’ve missed nearly half of it! I want to hurry up and see how it’s going, you know?”
“Right.” Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the jargon the boy was spouting, Saber said the first thing that came to mind. The boy, though, having taken that answer as a sign of interest, continued talking about it.
As the boy continued to wax elegant on the glories of football and this match in particular, Saber felt an emotion she would never have expected herself to feel at a time and place like this: homesickness.
Though Saber was no stranger to that particular feeling, having felt it many times before in her previous life, and, even recently, after the Grail war ended, and her second life her in Japan began, this was something different than anything she had felt before. Andrew was just so… so British… that he made her remember the fact that she was supposed to be British too.
Rin, ever so sensible, would tell her that she was being silly, that the British of today were too different from her former citizens for her to feel homesick after just having talked to a British boy she bumped into, and that she was just feeling that way because the kid happened to have a book about her. While Saber intellectually realized that all that was true, it didn’t change how she felt. King Arthur was a British legend, so some part of her would always be British, and that wasn’t bad at all.
Finally realising he had lost his audience, Andrew stopped his talk about Tottenham’s defenders. “Ah, I must be boring you then,” he said, scratching the back of his head. Breaking out of her thoughts, Saber smiled. “Not at all, I haven’t watched a match in quite a while, maybe I should start again.”
As Andrew gave a quick goodbye and took off at a more sedate pace than he had arrived, Saber continued towards the vending machine. “This football thing sounds rather interesting. Maybe I should give it a try…”
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As the match started, Saber broke off from her little mental flashback and focused on the TV.
“If I ever see him again, I should thank that kid. Football really is very fun…”
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Well, here it is. A little something that just popped into my head. I want to thank eddyak, Keyne and Elf again. Maybe I’ll write some more for this if I get the idea and drive.
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Originally Posted by Keyne
. But I see why Saber prefers to see a Manchester-Arsenal instead of a Real Madrid
