Originally written for Kirby's Tanabata contest. Reposting for archival purposes.
A bit under 4800 words.
Working from the prompt:
- Shirou & Ilya - DO NOT GO TO SPECIAL HELL. A non-romantic, sibling moment of some sort, from main-verse rather than Prisma. Sweet/contemplative: would prefer feels over flat-out humour.
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"And don't forget to study, okay? I know the Center Test is over, but that's just the beginning!"
With a look that was both concerned and chastising, Taiga continued to heckle me as she slipped into her shoes.
"Come on, I do nothing but study all day. What more do you want from me?"
Immediately, her eyes narrowed as she looked past me into the hallway, searching for the girl that wasn't there.
"Really? I find it hard to believe that you study at all with that brat hanging around all day."
This time it was my turn to give the disapproving look. "Keep talking about her like that and she'll keep pulling pranks on you, you know."
Taiga just crossed her arms with a huff. "I don't see why I have to be the adult in this situation. She's the one who lounges around home all day like she's a retired old woman. Honestly, she's acting more like her father every day."
I couldn't help but smile at that. I hadn't thought about it like that before, but thinking about it now...sitting around at home all day, floating around on her whims, childish to an almost helpless degree...she really did seem to be the spitting image of Kiritsugu.
Looking back down the hallway again, this time Taiga's expression was devoid of humour.
"You know, Shirou...a girl her age should really be in school. It's not good for her to spend all her time at home like this."
"This again?" I sighed. "You know just as well as I do that she couldn't handle school. Her personality is the complete opposite of a student."
"And that's precisely why she needs to go!" Taiga huffed, keeping her voice low so the subject of their conversation wouldn't overhear. "She's a smart kid, but being smart isn't enough! She needs to learn how to get along with real people, how to function in society. Her future is being crippled like this!"
It was a conversation we had had countless times over the past year. I couldn't blame her for always bringing it up - she was a teacher, after all - but the fact of the matter was that there was just no way to make it happen. For anyone else, Taiga would have been right, but in her case...
"Alright. I'll talk to her. I can't promise anything, but I'll at least talk to her. Okay?"
Though she didn't look convinced, Taiga nodded. "At the very least, it's late enough in the year that she won't be able to start until April, so she has some time. Try to get her to at least think about it, okay? And if worse comes to worst, don't be afraid to put your foot down."
"I'll do what I can," I replied with a half-hearted salute. "Now you need to get going. It's already late, and you have class first thing tomorrow morning, right?"
"Ha! Don't worry about me, little Shirou! There's a reason they call me the Indestructible Fujimura!"
Choosing to let slide the fact that I was pretty sure no one had ever called her that in her life, I held myself to just answering her goodbye wave with a wave of my own as she slid out the front door and closed it behind her.
Shaking my head with another sigh, I turned around and headed back into the house. As I had just said, it was getting quite late, and I still had some cleaning up to do from dinner before I could justify going to bed. Pausing for a moment as I returned to the strangely empty living room, I shrugged before picking up the leftover dishes from dinner and taking them into the kitchen. She had seemed awfully tired lately. Maybe she had just gone back to her room.
Turning on the water in the sink, I rolled up my sleeves, determined to get these dishes clean as soon as possible. It had only been the three of us eating tonight, so I could probably finish in only a few minutes. But as I picked up the first plate and brought it to the water, I stopped.
The sound of water running into an empty sink mixed with the unnatural silence in the room behind me, causing a restless feeling in my chest. Watching the water pour down just inches away from the plate in my hand, I pondered the situation. It wasn't that I was worried or anxious, but...
After a few long moments and a quiet sigh, I put the plate back on the counter and stopped the water. Wiping my still dry hands on a nearby towel, I rolled my sleeves back down and headed back into the house.
I had promised that I would talk to her. Now was as good a time as any.
"Illya!" I called out in a loud voice as I stepped out into the hallway leading to her bedroom. "Do you have a- oh."
In the middle of the hallway in front of me was Illya, sitting down facing out into the courtyard. As she turned to look at me with a half asleep look, I lowered my voice to a more appropriate level.
"Mind if I join you for a bit?"
With a bright smile, she patted the floor beside her before turning back to look out into the night. Sitting down beside her, I looked out at the scenery that was holding her attention.
The open door in front of us leading into the courtyard let in a cold breeze. I doubted I could stand it for all that long, but it was hard to deny that Illya's tolerance for the cold was remarkable. Though she had probably already been sitting here for a while, she was showing no signs of discomfort, despite the air outside being only a few degrees above freezing. Instead, she seemed completely absorbed in watching the cold outdoors, illuminated by a brilliant moon. The scattered clouds did nothing to impede the moonlight, but otherwise the sky was empty.
For a few moments, the two of us sat in silence. Though I tried to spend as much time with her as I could, between my part time jobs, preparing for my end of high school exams, and entertaining Taiga, Sakura, and occasionally even Tohsaka almost every night, there were surprisingly few times when we were alone with just the two of us. And being Illya, she of course huffed and puffed about it in front of everyone else, but when it was just the two of us she would become much quieter.
After a few minutes of watching the night sky together, it finally occurred to me that I had come out here to talk to her for a reason, but before I could say anything she spoke first.
"Today's a special day. Did you know?" Without turning to look at me, she asked in a quiet voice.
"Today? Umm..." January 31st? I suppose it was the end of the month but was there anything that special about it? It certainly wasn't her birthday. I was at least confident of that. But was there something else?
Thinking back, one year ago today, what was I doing? That would be...
"Oh."
My memory wasn't that precise, but certainly around that time was the beginning of the Fifth Holy Grail War. I remember I first met Saber at the beginning of February, so January 31st would be...
Illya smiled, happy that I seemed to remember. "Yep. You probably don't remember exactly, but one year ago today was the first time we met."
"A year ago, huh?" It seemed totally bizarre to think of the events of that War as being only a year ago. It felt like it had happened in another lifetime - like it had happened to another person entirely.
"It's a good thing I didn't kill you that night," she said with a teasing tone. "I almost did, but in the end I decided it would be better to wait until you summoned a Servant. It saved me the trouble of finding another Master, after all."
I snorted in reply. "Yeah. Good thing you waited to kill me until two days later."
Illya turned to look at me with an offended huff. "If you jumped in front of a moving car, would you blame the driver for hitting you too?"
"...I guess that's a fair point."
"Anyways, you're still alive, so it's fine, right?" she continued, looking back up at the night sky.
If I recalled correctly, I think I had actually died twice that day. Not exactly what I'd call 'fine,' but I guess the fact that I was still alive was probably the most important thing in the end.
"And I'm glad, too," she went on. "Living here is a lot more fun then living back in the castle." Illya trailed off, a flicker of something deeper passing over her expression before it returned to its previous sleepy state.
It wasn't often that we talked about the past. She never brought it up, and I had no real reason to, so really the only time it happened was when Tohsaka dug up an old grudge. I hadn't really thought it all that strange - after all, the past was past. Clearly we both had things we didn't want to talk about, and so it was just easier to avoid the subject entirely.
"I still can't believe my Berserker lost," she broke the awkward silence on her own, now pouting.
"To be honest, I can't really believe it either. He was absolutely terrifying."
"I'm even more amazed that he lost because of you. I have no idea how a magus of your...stature, managed to project a sword strong enough to hurt him, let alone kill him."
Ignoring the barb in what I decided to take as a compliment, I replied with a sheepish grin. "Well, I had a bit of help. If it wasn't for Saber and Tohsaka there helping me out, I couldn't have done anything with a hundred of those swords."
"Of course not," Illya said with a dismissive sniff. "Forget Berserker, you couldn't have beaten my maids."
For a moment, it seemed like the tiredness in her voice lessened somewhat. As I gave her a flat look for her brutal honesty, I couldn't help but smile inwardly at her being so puffed up with pride in her own superiority while talking about how she had lost to a complete failure of a magus like myself.
"Well, I guess it was for the best," she said softly. I couldn't say whether she meant to say that to me, or meant to say it out loud at all, so although I agreed with her, I remained silent.
If Berserker - if she had won the war, all of us would likely be dead right now. Of course Tohsaka and I, who were her opponents, but as the vessel for the Holy Grail herself, there was no way she would have come out unscathed. To say nothing of the Holy Grail itself.
After another long silence, I decided this time it was my turn to pick the conversation up again.
"You know," I started, looking up at the moon with her, "with my exams done in a few weeks, I'm going to have an awful lot of free time coming up until the next school year starts." As she turned to look at me, I returned her gaze and continued. "Is there anything you wanted to do? Anywhere you wanted to go?"
After blinking a few times as if the question had caught her off-guard, she folded her arms and gave a thoughtful hum, apparently taking the question a bit more seriously than I had intended. Not that I minded, of course. With how little time we had with just the two of us, I was sure she would like to do something special now that we had the opportunity.
It felt a little unfair to ask her that now, since she had been so out of sorts lately. She would likely feel too worn out to actually go anywhere significantly far, so while my first instinct was to ask a more broadly scoped question, a much stronger instinct demanded that I didn't.
We didn't often talk about the past. But we never talked about the future.
Of course, simple things like later in the day, or in the next few weeks were not a problem. We could comfortably talk about what was going to happen a month from now, but I could feel that was pushing it. Anything more than that was strictly off limits.
I had made that mistake exactly once.
It had been what I thought was a completely innocuous question. Of course there was no way I could have known what I was asking her at the time, but that somehow just made it worse.
What do you want to do after this?
Of course, she replied, she wanted to stay with me. She had no reason to go back to her family in Europe, if they would even accept her back. But I had offered her a family here if she needed it, and she had taken that offer with a fervour I could barely have anticipated.
No, I mean after that. I'm not going to be around forever, you know? As much as you are welcome to stay with me, you won't be happy cramped up in my house for the rest of your life, right?
This time her reply was more forceful. She wanted to stay with me. After that didn't matter.
Well that's fine, but you're going to grow up and move on eventually right? What do you want to do when-
At that point, though I didn't think so at the time, I was thankfully interrupted by a punch to the back of my head. Without a word, and despite ample protest on my part, Tohsaka smacked me again and pulled me out of the room by the arm. As I continued to protest, I looked back at Illya in a vain attempt to ask for some support against Tohsaka's apparently random acts of violence, but instead I was immediately struck speechless by the look on Illya's face.
As she pulled me into a room far enough away that Illya couldn't hear us, Tohsaka turned to me.
Are you some kind of jerk, or are you just stupid?
The happy, carefree atmosphere of just a few moments prior had been shattered in two swift steps. Both Tohsaka's ice cold expression and the hollow emptiness haunting Illya's face had turned the friendly after dinner chat into a disaster, and I was stuck somewhere in the middle, not understanding at all what was happening yet knowing somehow it was all my fault.
I told you before, didn't I? Illya isn't like us. She wasn't just born - she was made to be a Holy Grail. Now that the Grail War is over, she doesn't have a future. At all. And I don't mean that metaphorically.
Thinking back on it, in the year Illya had been with us, I think that was the only time Tohsaka had ever taken Illya's side on anything. At the time, I had naturally thought Tohsaka was being overly harsh, but whenever I thought back to the look on Illya's face I realized again how appropriate her response had been.
By the time I had gone back to apologize, Illya had returned to her normal cheerful self, and the chance to apologize had never even come. Just like that, the event was swept under the rug, but it left enough of an impression on me that I knew to never bring the subject up again.
Though it never came up again, though Illya never showed any signs that she had let that event bother her, I couldn't say the same about myself. I hadn't thought particularly hard about my future. I knew I wanted to help people - I wanted to save people. That was about it. Such a nebulous wish could hardly be called a dream, but it was at least something.
She didn't even have that. Where my classmates and I saw an uncertain future, where we worried about whether we could make our dreams come true, about whether we would find happiness...she saw nothing.
All she had was a past she hated and a present she loved. To her that seemed to be all that mattered but...was it?
Was she really happy with that?
Of course, I couldn't accept that. For months and months I assailed Tohsaka with question after question, searching desperately for any method that could help. A normal hospital couldn't help her any more than than it could help a geriatric. And even if a method to help her existed in magecraft somewhere, finding someone who cared enough to volunteer their help was impossible for people with no connections like us. And finding someone who would sell us their help at a rate a high school student could afford barely passed as a joke.
And as Tohsaka put it when she finally got fed up of me asking, even if we could find someone, it would be like entrusting your sick pet mouse to a pack of wolves.
Even if they could help, what do you honestly think they would do in that situation?
And so every time Illya and I spoke, every time our gazes met, the despair she faced would come to mind. That ever present shadow haunted every conversation, every meal, every trip downtown to go shopping, every weekend spent at the park. Though I did my best to hide my feelings about it, and though it did spur me on to enjoy the time we did have together, that despair still ate at the back of my mind day in and day out.
And I was just watching it happen. Helpless to do anything, all I could do was sit by and watch as her clock ticked slowly downward, not knowing when that last hour would strike. As my naivety in believing that somehow, someway we would find a way to save her slowly died, that shadow in the back of my head grew ever darker, ever more real. That was how I felt just being near her as it happened.
How must she have felt?
A sudden punch to my arm brought me back to the present.
"Are you even listening to me?" Illya almost shouted with a frown as I snapped back to attention, punching my arm repeatedly.
"Nope." My straight, honest reply took her completely off-guard, causing the barrage of fists to pause for a moment. After one more punch, she wrapped herself around my arm and leaned on me as if she hadn't just been attacking me.
"I said," she spoke with an indignant huff, "I want to spend time with you. Just the two of us."
After a few moments of trying to remember what question she was even answering, I did my best to stifle a laugh as I replied. "Well...yeah okay, but the point of the question was 'where?'"
"Right here." Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.
"...you want to spend a month lounging around the house like a lazy bum?"
Her only reply was to look at me with a big grin, like a kid who had been caught cheating in a game but was proud of themselves for doing it anyways.
"You really are exactly like your dad, you know that?" Her only reply was a soft giggle as she rested her head on my shoulder again.
Really, lounging around the house all day, doing nothing productive at all, so helpless an actual child could have taken better care of them than they themselves could. It was a perfect description of either of them.
...slowly, day by day, growing weaker and weaker, their life slipping away.
...slowly, breath by breath, the bright, joyful future they longed for - and deserved - being stolen from them by the long-destroyed Holy Grail.
I see. Then I guess it couldn't be helped.
Unbidden, words from six years ago rose to the forefront of my mind.
Yeah, it can't be helped, so I'll take your place.
Sitting in exactly this spot, looking at the same darkened garden, under the same cold moonlight.
Let me take on your dream. I'll make it come true.
At the time, I had lamented the fact I hadn't noticed earlier. It should have been obvious, I thought to myself, I should have realized that his time was running out.
Now I was in the same situation again. Only this time, I knew.
Was it any better?
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. I would have all the time in the world to lament how unfair life was later. For now, though, for her sake, I pushed the shadow from my mind.
"Alright. If you just want to sit around the house together, that makes it easy for me." I was almost disappointed by her decision, or lack thereof, but there was no sense in pushing her.
A satisfied sigh answered me before the two of us lapsed back into a prolonged silence.
For a while, I didn't think about anything. Just sitting, looking up at the moon with Illya still wrapped around my arm, I waited.
A memory of forever ago, swearing to take on his dream, to become a superhero that saves everybody.
A lingering shadow, the weight of a young girl who had had her childhood and her future stolen from her, who I was powerless to help, pressing against my arm.
As the two ghosts warred in my head, I sat silently, unable to raise my eyes to watch their struggle.
After what I felt was a suitable pause, I spoke up again.
"Hey, Illya?"
No.
Stop.
You can't go there.
That's the rule.
"Hmm?" As Illya's voice came back to me, it was clear she was on the edge of sleep. Had I not said anything, she likely would have dozed off in another few moments. If I didn't say anything now, she might anyways.
Are you some kind of jerk, or are you just stupid?
As I opened my mouth to speak, those vicious words headed me off. Taking a breath, I pushed past them.
"You know how I'm going to be going to a new school this spring, right?"
Looking up at the night sky, I felt her nod on my shoulder more than I saw it.
What was I thinking? How could talking about this possibly make anything better?
How could it do anything but make things worse?
"Well, since I was starting a new school, I was wondering. Would you be interested in going to school?"
"School?" As she spoke around a yawn, I couldn't help but feel like she might not be awake enough for this conversation. Pushing my excuses to the side, I continued.
"Yeah. Go to school, make some friends. Study together, play together, make some great memories."
Don't be stupid, Shirou. I ignored the voice of the shadow creeping back up as Illya replied with a thoughtful hum.
"Is it fun?"
Tilting my head to the side, I thought about it for a moment. "Well, its not all fun. There are tough times, and boring times, and sad times too. But in the end, if I had to sum it up...yeah, I'd say I was glad I went."
"...will you be there?"
"No," I had to resist laughing as I spoke. "But I'll be here, at home. Ready to wake you up in the morning, to help you with your homework in the evening, and to cook you dinner at night. Just like always."
Illya sighed with what seemed to be equal parts relief and sleepiness.
"...that does sound...fun..."
Yeah...I'm relieved.
As the girl still wrapped around my arm went quiet, the voice of someone that was not me called out from my memories.
The last words of a man that was both our hero and our villain.
For a moment I choked, unable to look down at the girl sitting beside me. The seconds felt like hours as I sat, quietly watching the moon.
Just as I felt my mind might freeze up, the sound of her soft, even breaths reached my ears, flooding me with relief.
Not today.
We had no idea how much time she had left. Maybe she did, but she wouldn't tell us, and we sure as hell couldn't ask. She wanted to live life to the fullest, to enjoy every moment, and so that's what we would do. Whether it was another year, or another month, or another day, we would enjoy the time we had together.
And even if I couldn't save her, I could give her something to look forward to. And maybe, if the stars aligned, we could show her a small fragment of what it meant to be an ordinary girl.
It was a stupid idea. There was no way it could possibly end well to send Illya to an ordinary school.
...but even if it was just a pretty lie, if it made her happy, even if nothing came from it in the end...was it so wrong?
She was doing her best to stay positive, to enjoy life despite her circumstances. And though it seemed fate was conspiring against her, she never showed a shred of doubt or uncertainty.
Despite everything, she was happy.
"Yeah...I'm relieved."
A whisper so quiet, I could hardly hear my own voice.
I couldn't save her. No matter how I struggled, there was nothing more I could do than try to make her happy now. But that was all she asked for. And though he had never mentioned her, though I had to learn of Kiritsugu's daughter years after he had died, I felt like if he could see her now, he would be relieved too.
And for the first time, in a way so slight I almost missed it...that shadow receded a little of its own accord.
After a long pause, a gust of wind reminded me of just how cold it was outside. Gently disentangling my arm from the sleeping girl's grasp, I picked her up in my arms as I got off the floor of the hallway. Though she may have been seemingly impervious to the cold, even she had to have her limits. Sleeping out here in the middle of winter without even a blanket was just begging to get sick.
Quietly sliding the door outside shut with my foot, I carried Illya back to her room, where she could at least sleep warmly. Though she snuggled up against me as I walked, she showed no signs up waking up.
With what could only be described as an act of god-like dexterity, I managed to retrieve her futon from the closet and lay it out on the floor, all without dropping or waking her up. Laying her down as gently as I could, I then tucked her in, earning a smile from her sleeping face as she curled up under the covers. Without a word, I got up and left the room, sliding the door quietly shut behind me.
For a moment, I stood silent in the hallway. Once again, my mind was blank, empty of any thought, even that familiar shadow nowhere in sight. After a deep breath, I turned back to the living room and started walking.
It was getting late, and I still had dishes to do.
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Originally Posted by Imperial
