“You look cheerful today,” Shirou told his wife, taking the spoon out of the pot he’d been stirring and tapping it on the rim to shake the excess off. The light of the winter afternoon tinted the kitchen rather gray, but the red ceramic rest he set it on made things rather more cheerful, as did her smile.
“Why shouldn’t I be? Sakura teased back, tossing ebony hair back off the shoulder of her modest green blouse. “My sister and yours say that their presentation on modern Sorcery to the Clocktower went well, my brother was refused parole, Taiga’s trapped with her family for once-”
“That’s mean,” Shirou protested, fighting laughter, “she’s taken care of me for years.”
“-and best of all, I’m going to get to spend the night with the biggest, strongest, handsomest man on the planet.”
He couldn’t help blushing at the way her voice scaled down into a sultry purr, but a part of him he rarely listened to made him step forward to fold her into a hug, and trace his hands up her smooth, bare back. “Well, in that case,” he answered, letting his voice rumble up out of the depths of his chest, and enjoying the way she melted against him in response, “why don’t I go get your gift for you while we wait for dinner to finish?”
“Ooh,” she cooed, “what did you get me?”
He chuckled and let go to tap her playfully on the nose. “That’d be telling,” he said, knowing that she’d be delighted to ‘unwrap’ her lavender-haired ‘present’, and let his other rest on the doorframe as he stepped into the warm chill of his girlfriend’s Workshop. As usual, Rin was bent alone over a pile of papers and diagrams finely detailed enough to make him once again glad he’d talked her into letting him install electric lighting.
He set the tea service in his hands down next to her papers and said, “Here you go.”
Rin glanced up and said, “Thanks,” then stretched, one arm upright and the other hooked over her head onto its elbow, making the cartilage of her vertebrae pop and the threads of her sweater creak against the pressure exerted by her soft, round, inviting-
Her giggle broke him out of his staring, and the blush chasing across his cheeks grew hotter as she gave him a saucy wink and promised, “I’ll be down to give you a special lesson just as soon as I finish this. Don’t worry, I haven’t been at it too long.”
Shirou raised a dubious eyebrow at her, then cocked an eyebrow at where Saber had been watching her master work from a comfortable armchair in the corner. “Five hours,” the Servant answered, confirming his suspicion, and he sighed.
“Right, then,” he said, “it’s time for you to come to dinner, then.”
“I already ate, Mother and Sakura called and made sure I did,” Rin told him, already leaning over her papers with her bust perched on the edge of the table.
Since, unlike him, she was short enough to do it without crouching all the way down, Saber slipped an arm around her shoulder and another under her knees and lifted their lover into his arms, despite the female Magus’s squawk of protest. “Well, it’s time for you to come to bed, then,” she said.
He carried his girlfriend through the halls of their home - ignoring her playful protests - and laid her down on their bed with a deep kiss, then went to close the door to keep out the draft as Saber slipped into the covers beside her and Ilya grinned up at him in the balmy spring sunshine. “I’m gonna chase off those two Tohsaka girls,” she said, “so Mama and Papa can grill you properly without me interfering.”
At his expression his fiance laughed and deliberately misinterpreted. “Don’t worry,” she told him, “I know they’re your friends and I won’t do anything too mean, I just need to make sure that in a couple years they still understand who’s the wife and who are the mistresses.”
Shirou glanced awkwardly over his shoulder at the somewhat older albino woman and the scruffy-haired, skinny man standing five feet away. “...Please don’t say ridiculous things,” he begged, and she laughed at him and headed for the gate as he turned to face his inevitable doom.
Emiya Irisviel smiled happily at him. “If my Ilya is happy with the things, then I have no complaints!” she said. “So as long as that’s true, I’ll go back to working on dinner!”
Under other circumstances, that statement and the memory of Ilya’s stories of the disaster that inevitably followed her mother around any kitchen she touched would have had Shirou flinching in sympathetic horror, but as things were he was trapped under the dark and empty gaze of the murderous man still feared as The Magus Killer.
Who smiled and gestured him to sit beside him on the verandah. “Don’t look like that,” he said. “I can tell you’re a sincere young man, and Ilyasviel is perfectly capable of being her own advocate. As long as you’ve resolved your mind that this is what you want, I have no concerns.”
Shirou sat quietly for a long moment. “Honestly, I don’t think I am,” he admitted. “There are some things that have been bothering me.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one thing, I know that I’m not married to Sakura, and I’m not dating Rin, and I’m certainly not engaged to Ilya.
“Sakura’s hair isn’t black, it’s purple, and there’s no way she could have completely dissolved all of her clothes except the apron in the space of thirty seconds without me noticing.
“Rin’s workshop isn’t right next to my kitchen, and a tea set wouldn’t just appear in my hands by magic, and her breasts aren’t that large, and there’s absolutely no way Saber would put up with her dragging her into a threesome even if she hadn’t just appeared in a room that I know she wasn’t when I came in.
“Even if it wasn’t winter rather than spring, the door to the hallway outside Rin’s room wouldn’t lead to my porch, and all four of our parents are dead, and even if you were alive, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve met because you adopted me after the fire killed my biological parents.
“Since the last thing I remember before talking with Sakura in my kitchen was being doused in the blood of a mindless monster controlled by the Grail, and since you’re the first person I’ve talked to so far that isn’t obviously directly part of one of the girls’ dreams and desires, that would make you the only mind that the ritual would have, the corrupting existence that’s taken over the heart of it.
“Wouldn’t it.”
Kiritsugu - it was as good a name to use for him as any - let out a huff of breath and looked up into the blue sky. “I guess it would,” he admitted. “But you know, this isn’t just a dream or a hallucination. I was created to make the impossible possible, and you and your comrades have won a war - perhaps not the one that was supposed to happen, but enough of one. All you have to do is decide. What do you want?”
Shirou looked at the sky himself, and thought carefully.
“Nothing you can give,” he decided.
“Are you sure?”
“Just because I don’t think of myself, doesn’t make me too stupid to realize what a wish granted through destruction would mean.”
“What about you, Sakura?” Kiritsugu said, obviously not satisfied with his answer.
Shirou turned his head a little to watch her face out of the corner of his eye. “Having Senpai only counts if he gives himself to me,” she said, “and if he wants another girl then as long as he’s still my friend then I’ll be... Okay.” Not happy, he noted, but she thought she would survive. “If it’s Rin, or Ilya, or Saber or even Berserker, I can even smile and wish them luck, because I like them and I can see why he’d make those choices. And if I decide to change my mind about punishing Shinji, I can always do that myself.”
There was something burbling, unhealthy, in the voice that said, “Ilya, don’t you want a wish?”
Warm arms slipped around one of his own. “I want Shirou, and I already decided that I’d rather share than trust a failed experiment to give him to me.”
The Grail’s voice was obviously inhuman, and the figure from which it emanated about as lifelike as a wax dummy, but somehow it sounded weak, desperate. “Rin, I can give you everything, lay love and Root alike at your-”
“No,” she interrupted. “Even Ilya’s earned a break I won’t interfere with - and if I wanted to, I wouldn’t do it in such an unsightly way. No.”
“dAMn yOU WhY wOn’t yOu HATE?!” the Grail howled, as the world began to come apart around them, its details bleeding away into blackness.
Sakura wrapped herself around the side of his body Ilya wasn’t filling, and Rin’s voice came from right next to his ear as her arms slipped around his neck from behind. “It’s the wrong season for it,” she told the nightmare, and then all sensation and awareness vanished.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."