Chapter CLXI: Hanging Questions
Coming back from London was one of the first times I wasn’t in a rush to stumble out of my Klein Coffin. My senses returned to me just in time to hear the lid lift away with the hiss of hydraulics and let the cool lights of the Rayshift Chamber shine across my face, but for several long moments more, I stayed there, unmoving, trying to get my thoughts in order and dreading the questions I knew were coming.
I didn’t think even Marie would be able to stop them this time. Not after the enemy behind it all had called me out by name and thanked me personally.
“Mommy?” a worried Jackie asked.
A sigh heaved out of my nostrils, weighty and weary. There was no avoiding it. Standing there inside my coffin was just delaying the inevitable, and those questions wouldn’t just magically disappear if I waited long enough and wished for it hard enough.
When I opened my eyes, she was hovering outside my coffin, brow furrowed and peering up at me with naked concern.
“I’m fine, Jackie,” was the answer I gave her, even though I was anything but.
At least my procrastinating had given me enough time to reorient myself from the sense of being crammed back into my too small, too human body, so by the time I stepped out — with Arash there to offer me a helping hand, because of course he was — my footing was much surer than the rest of me was. I did my best not to let it show on my face.
The twins and Mash, of course, were already outside and waiting out the disorientation, and Emiya was helping a confused Renée out of the spare coffin that must have been arranged for her in order to bring her back from London. An errant thought wondered how long they were planning on playing up the rivalry and how much of it was still honest when he seemed to have grown so attached to her. I hadn’t forgotten how he was one of the first people to rush back to the apartment when we found out she’d been kidnapped.
“So this is Chaldea, huh?” said Mordred, head swiveling as she looked around the room.
“Home sweet home,” said Rika, although it lacked some of her usual pep. I guess even she was still feeling the weight of everything that had happened at the end.
“I’m sure someone will arrange a tour for you and Jackie later on,” said Ritsuka. “For now, though…”
Mordred heaved out a sigh of her own. “Yeah. We got some shit to talk about, don’t we?” Her head turned my way. “Like why that guy called you out by name.”
“I don’t know.”
And while it wasn’t the whole truth, it was still the truth. I didn’t know why Solomon thanked me. I had some idea, but only an idea, and it wasn’t like any part of Gold Morning had happened for his sake at all.
“Bullshit,” Mordred growled.
“Don’t get your panties in a knot, British,” said Jeanne Alter, apparently leaping to my defense. “I’ve been around here long enough to get a sense that this bitch doesn’t lie all that often.” She grinned at me. “She just doesn’t always tell the whole truth.”
Fuck you, too.
But no one spoke out to correct her, which said more than enough about where they stood on the issue.
“Senpai,” said Ritsuka, “we’ve been willing to respect your privacy so far because, well, it wasn’t really any of our business and we didn’t really need to know. We didn’t have any right to pry.”
“No matter how much the curiosity was killing me,” Rika added. “The cat had nothing on me, you know?”
“But the King of Mages talked to you and called you by name,” Ritsuka went on. “He thanked you and said you did him a favor. At the very least, Doctor Roman and Director Marie need to know —”
“And what makes you think I don’t already?” Marie’s voice interrupted as she strode into the room. Her shoes clacked thunderously against the floor. “I told you a long time ago, didn’t I, Ritsuka, Rika? Taylor is a candidate with an accomplished record that I personally recruited to be a Master of Chaldea. Is there any part of her history that you think I don’t know about?”
Romani, trailing behind her, said, “But it’s only you, Director. Her unredacted files are locked behind your permissions. If we hadn’t managed to…bring you back, Da Vinci and me wouldn’t have any idea what was going on either. In fact, we still don’t.”
“There comes a point where the secrecy starts to affect unit cohesion,” Emiya chimed in. He shrugged. “I have to admit, it worries me a little, too.” He jerked a thumb at Arash. “That guy probably knows enough that he can keep going just like this, and even if he didn’t, he’s not the kind to protest. That’s not going to stop the rest of us from wondering, just what secrets is Taylor protecting that even the enemy knows about before we do?”
“Coming from you, that’s rich!” Marie seethed. “There’s still so much we don’t know about you, Emiya, because you haven’t told us any of it! Not even about your Reality Marble!”
“The difference is, the King of Mages himself didn’t call me out in front of everyone,” Emiya countered.
“You — !”
“Hey, hey, let’s not start a fight,” said Arash, holding up his hands placatingly as he stepped between the two of them. “Listen, we’re all allies here, aren’t we? We’re all here to correct the Singularities and beat the King of Mages so that history can be put to right. He’s the only one who benefits from us being at each other’s throats.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Emiya replied, folding his arms over his chest. “Most of us have been here long enough to believe there has to be some kind of explanation for all of this that makes sense, but most of us have our own doubts about things, too, and that bastard just brought them all to the forefront. ‘Stop asking and forget about it’ isn’t going to work anymore.”
“Miss Taylor was the first person to suspect Flauros was a demon possessing Professor Lev,” Mash muttered, and when we all turned to look at her and she realized she’d said that loud enough to be heard, she scrambled to excuse it. “Ah, n-not that I think that means she’s in league with them or anything! After all, Miss Da Vinci said that was what she suspected, too! It’s just…”
She trailed off, leaving the thought unfinished. Ritsuka picked it up for her. “It’s just that we don’t understand, Director, and this isn’t…really something we can just let go. Not when there’s so much at stake.”
None of it helped Marie’s temper, but she struggled for something to say, some excuse that wasn’t just a tyrannical “I’m the Director and you’ll do what I order you to do!” because that wouldn’t have helped anything and she knew it. The trouble was, they all had fairly good points, and this wasn’t something that could just be waved away with empty platitudes and hollow reassurances. This was a real problem that couldn’t just be ignored until everyone forgot about it or soothed with a few honeyed words.
I wasn’t sure even Lisa could have navigated her way out of this one without having to give ground.
I’d known it before, but this had all just driven the point home: there was no getting around it, I was going to have to tell them something about what had happened. We had been through too much together for me to let my own secrets destroy this team now.
“I’m not going to tell this more than once.”
Marie’s head whipped around so fast that I wasn’t sure I hadn’t heard her neck crack. “What?”
“You’re only going to get the relevant details as it is,” I went on, “so if you’re expecting my life story, you’re going to be disappointed.”
Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash all shared looks.
“That’s fair,” said Ritsuka. “We just want to understand, Senpai. That’s all.”
There were some things that I just didn’t want him to understand. Some things that were just too dangerous for him to understand. Like I’d thought ages ago, ignorance might not be the perfect shield, but the twins couldn’t be forced to tell anyone the things that they themselves didn’t know, and Mash…
Well, Mash might not live long enough to face interrogation by the Association. That might have been the sole upside to her situation.
“Take an hour to relax,” I said. “We’ll meet up in the orientation room. I’ll…try to explain what little I’ve guessed at then.” I turned to Marie. “Director, we need to talk.”
Her mouth drew into a thin line. “Yes, it seems like we do.”
I guess it was finally time for her and I to hash out what it was safe for me to tell the twins now that El-Melloi II — and since they knew each other, apparently Emiya, as well — had admitted he was from a parallel world.
I turned next to Arash. “Can you take care of Jackie in the meantime?”
“Sure,” he said immediately.
“Mommy?” asked Jackie. “Is something wrong?”
I crouched down to her level and gave her the best smile I could muster, just then. I wasn’t sure it was a very good one. She probably saw right through it.
“I’m sorry, Jackie, but I have to take care of this now,” I told her patiently. “I’ll see you later, okay? I just need you to be a good girl for Arash until then.”
“Okay,” said Jackie, although she still seemed a little worried. “We will.”
“Excuse me,” said Renée, speaking up for the first time since we got back, “is there someplace I should be? I am…not entirely sure these matters concern me.”
Marie glanced at her and grimaced. Grimly, she muttered, “One way or another, they probably will.”
Emiya sighed. “I’ll see about getting her settled in. Are there any restrictions I need to worry about when it comes to finding her a room to stay in?”
“I should probably see about getting her a proper physical, too,” Romani mumbled to himself. He scribbled something on his clipboard, then stopped, hesitating. “Although homunculi aren’t really my specialty, so maybe I should hand that one off to Da Vinci…”
“For now, she can stay in a room near the Masters,” Marie answered. “Seeing as her…personal effects right now are limited, there’s no reason we can’t move her later on if we have to.”
“Ah.” Renée reached for her wrist, fiddling with the communicator that she still had on. “Now that the…Singularity in London has been resolved, should I not return this device?”
“Keep it for now,” Marie told her shortly. “You’re going to need one, and we can worry about reformatting it for your personal use later.”
Renée stopped and let her arms fall. They landed in front of her, her hands folding together as though that was her most natural state. “I see. I understand, Director.”
Marie looked at her for a moment longer, lips slowly pulling into an even deeper frown, and then she turned around and started back towards the door — her eyes paused on me for only fractions of a second, but it was long enough for me to get her message. I fell into step behind her, and an unnerving silence followed us out into the corridor.
The trip back to her office was similarly silent, accompanied only by the clack of our shoes against the tiles beneath our feet, and she said nothing the whole way there. Not even to grumble under her breath about the circumstances or vent about people questioning her authority, which was as much of a sign as anything about how much this all was stressing her out.
It was a relief, then, when the door to her office loomed ahead of us, sliding open when she input her keycode, and we stepped out of the cold, sterile white of the rest of the facility and into the warmer, softer environs of her own personal space. The familiar sight of a stack of paperwork piled high on her desk was almost comforting.
Only once the door had whooshed shut behind us did she finally let loose a growl and reach up to grab fistfuls of her hair. “This is a catastrophe!”
“I know.”
“Not only did we find out that our suspicions were correct and Solomon himself was the one behind this whole farce —” she swung one arm out violently — “but he had the audacity to thank you for helping him!”
“I know.”
“And two years ago!” she continued on, ranting. “The others might not have any idea what that means, but you and I know damn well that there weren’t exactly any other options, were there? What, were you just supposed to let that golden lunatic do whatever he wanted and kill whole timelines?”
“I know.”
“It’s not like you did it for him either! You didn’t even know he existed before this, before Chaldea!” She gestured in a wide, sweeping arc at the office around us, as though to encompass the entirety of the facility. “If it helped him at all, it was a coincidence! Mere chance! A happenstance of fate!”
“I know.”
She grunted and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. “And now he’s left a mess behind for us to try and clean up! There’s a reason so much of your past was classified, for my eyes only! I never even told Lev…!”
The words died on her tongue, and her shoulders slumped. A heavy sigh wheezed out of her mouth, and when she spoke again, it was quieter, softer: “What are we supposed to do with this?”
I didn’t know. But…
“I’m not sure we have too many options.”
She favored me with a glare out of the corner of her eyes, mouth drawn into a tight scowl. “I refuse to let that overblown familiar dictate Chaldea’s policies.”
I didn’t like it either. Doing anything the enemy wanted us to do was never going to be something that sounded like a good idea to me, especially when we knew so little of the actual plan behind it. Unfortunately, if the goal had been to create a rift between me and the rest of the team — or worse, between me and Marie and the rest of the team — then clamming up and refusing to answer the others would be playing exactly into it.
And I couldn’t say it enough times, but letting a rift form in the team this far into things, after all we’d been through together, was absolutely not an option.
“Telling them nothing isn’t an option anymore,” I said. “Whether it’s what he wants or not, he’s forcing our hand on the issue. And it’s not like…”
I let a breath out through my nose. How to put this?
“It’s a miracle we’ve managed to keep as much secret as we have,” I settled on. “But I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now, ever since El-Melloi II — and Emiya by proxy — revealed they’re from a parallel world themselves: how much do we really need to keep secret anymore?”
“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped at me. “Servants are one thing, but living human beings? It shouldn’t be possible to move through parallel worlds — not without Lord Zelretch and the Kaleidoscope — and that very knowledge would be enough to draw attention from the Association that I refuse to let fall on you!”
I wasn’t really sure what anyone could possibly learn about Doormaker or Doctor Haywire or whatever portal power Contessa had used from examining my body, but I wasn’t so ignorant that I didn’t recognize that the source of my powers would be equally enticing a mystery for some.
But okay. For the sake of argument, I was willing to concede that the whole parallel world part should stay secret, and so should my passenger. Da Vinci…might figure something out somehow, because she was a genius and I didn’t put it past her, but I trusted her enough to keep whatever she discovered to herself. Romani…about as much so, but only because he was too decent a person to reveal something that could put my life in danger.
“Then we keep the things secret that might bring the Association sniffing around,” I allowed. “But if any of that does come out, one way or the other —”
“Not if I —” Marie began.
I cut across her. “That guy was perfectly willing to reference an event that only two people in this entire universe should know about. Do you think there’s anything that would stop him from spilling it all, if he thought he had a reason to? In front of all of our monitoring equipment, which will record every word he says and preserve it for the UN and the Association to comb over later.”
Marie’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Everyone here knows what’s at stake. If something like that happens, Da Vinci can edit the data to delete any compromising information, and the rest of the staff can be sworn to secrecy.”
That was all well and good, but it didn’t solve the human issue.
“It won’t delete the information from Rika and Ritsuka’s minds,” I told her. “Or from the technicians’ either. And if they know, then the Association can find it out from them, one way or the other. What I’m asking is, would your name still have enough weight to protect us, if it wound up being Chaldea against the world?”
Marie bit her lip, and for a moment, she was silent. Her eyes darted back and forth, like she was playing a series of events out in her mind, rapid fire. When she looked back at me several long seconds later, her brow knitted together with worry.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “There’s no way the Association and the UN won’t have questions after this is all over. The very secret of magecraft may be threatened as a result of…all of this, and against that, with the expectation that I should have been able to prevent all of this from happening…”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
She bit her bottom lip again, chewing on it between her teeth.
“You couldn’t have done anything to stop it,” I said. “Lev was a respected member of the organization, and he betrayed all of us.”
“That doesn’t…!” She cut herself off, taking a deep, shuddering breath, and in a smaller voice, she continued, “That won’t make a difference. Chaldea and its mission are my responsibility. I might even…”
She closed her eyes briefly, eyelids fluttering, and the words seemed to cause her physical pain. In a whisper, she finished, “I might even be removed as Director.”
“None of us here would accept that,” I said immediately.
“It wouldn’t matter,” she said, grim and resigned. “The resources the Association would bring to bear against us are more than any of us here could hope to overcome. For that matter, if they learn of any of this, then that means that they’re already here and already have access to the facility.”
“The Association,” I began deliberately, “doesn’t have Servants.”
Carefully, I drew out the shape of a rune on the surface of the nearest chair, just enough to demonstrate my point. On its own, of course, it was just me drawing shapes with my finger, but if I’d gone through the whole process, it would have been one of Aífe’s Primordial Runes, the kind that the Association itself would kill to have access to.
Marie’s eyes watched me. Her mouth slowly pulled into a tight line.
“As part of the process of investigating us,” she told me, “the first step would be to order us to stand down and cancel any active Servant contracts.”
That was probably true. In their position, it was probably what I would do, too, although I would never make a demand like that without the ability to enforce it or a way to get around the problem first.
“And how are they going to make us do that?”
Her lips pulled into a tighter line, but she didn’t have an immediate answer. I wasn’t sure there was one. Just between the Servants we already had on hand, this place was a fortress, and they could trap the entire place with any number of spells that the Association couldn’t possibly have a counter for.
I wasn’t ignorant of the problem with that way of doing things, though. This wasn’t like Brockton when the Undersiders took it over. Unless we could exploit the Singularities indefinitely, the big threat the Association and the UN could level against us was to starve us out. And even if we could hold out forever, it would mean none of us could ever leave without being snatched up instantly.
We were also out here in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t sure if even our Servants had a solution for it if someone decided to drop a nuke on us to solve the problem.
“It’s a worst case scenario,” I allowed. “Better to try and keep the sensitive stuff under wraps. We…might have to tell Da Vinci and Romani, but if you’re saying that we can’t risk the twins and Mash knowing even now, then we’ll keep the stuff about the source of my powers and my…refugee status secret. So we tell them…what, exactly?”
Marie’s lips pursed. “An unspecified crisis. We…need to avoid too much detail, but there are enough things like that happening across the world every decade or so that we can get away with telling them a few details. Just…not everything. Not about the true scope of…of Scion and his rampage. Or what it took to kill him.” She let out a short breath from her nostrils. “And maybe a hint about your origins. Something that they can infer on their own without having more than a suspicion when the questions come.”
It was going to take more than that, I sensed, but…fine. I could edit the story selectively and give the cliff notes version. I wasn’t sure yet exactly how much I was going to share, exactly how much detail I could go into. Was there a way to talk about the passengers and Scion without revealing everything I’d learned in those final days? Probably.
Okay. Maybe we could do this after all.
“And Romani and Da Vinci?” I asked.
She frowned deeply. “It…may become unavoidable,” she admitted reluctantly. “No, but first… What he said about the next Singularity. He specifically mentioned you going home and making peace with your past. I… If that’s what I think it means, then we might have to tell at least Da Vinci more of the story.” She sighed, exasperated, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “At that point, she might have enough information to start making guesses anyway, and it would be troublesome if she came to the wrong conclusions.”
Basically as I’d been thinking, then. I nodded. “Then we should see about preparing the orientation room.”
“There’s…one other thing,” Marie said. “Or, well, not related to this specific subject exactly, but… The homunculus, Renée. The Philosopher’s Stone she has inside of her.”
“What about it?”
Marie didn’t answer me, not immediately. Instead, she looked away from me and said, “No, it’s nothing. I need to talk to Da Vinci about it first. There’s no point in even bringing it up before then.”
I was tempted to push, to get her to say what was on her mind, because it was obviously important if she tried to talk about it here and now, but we’d come far enough that I thought I could trust her to talk to me about it after she learned whatever it was she needed to know. She’d told me about Mash, after all, and what Marisbury’s experiments meant for her, and that was as deep and troubling a problem as it got.
“Later, then.”
She nodded and promised, “Later.”
The conversation wasn’t entirely over and not everything had been resolved, but I knew we were probably going to have to have multiple talks about the inevitability of what happened to us and Chaldea once all of the Singularities had been fixed and Solomon was beaten. The Association would have too many questions for any of it to be as simple or as easy as just answering everything we could as honestly as possible.
Those were concerns for later, though, and we left her office with that vague plan solidified enough that I felt confident I could give the twins and the Servants something workable. We walked through the empty halls in silence again and made our way to the orientation room, and by the time we got there and the door opened, several Servants were waiting for us, including El-Melloi II, Aífe, Siegfried, and Hippolyta.
Marie, seeing them, wasn’t exactly pleased, but wasn’t exactly surprised either. “You’ve been informed, then?”
“About the King of Mages and what he said? Yes,” said Aífe.
“Needless to say, some of us want these questions answered, too,” added El-Melloi II, sour-faced and solemn. “Even if the reason why we’re getting them isn’t the most desirable.”
“I’m sorry, Master, but it’s not a matter of trust,” said Siegfried.
“It’s a matter of strategy,” said Hippolyta. “Whatever this secret is, it is obvious to me that its keeping is meant to divide us. That is only possible so long as we don’t know the truth of the matter. Even magi understand that a secret loses power when it is no longer a secret.”
“I see.” Marie clicked her tongue. “It’s not like you weren’t going to be told anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
And that seemed to be enough to satisfy them, at least for the moment. They didn’t try to justify their curiosity again or make any demands, so it looked like they were content to wait.
Slowly, the others filtered in, the other Servants, the twins and Mash, Da Vinci and Romani, and Arash and Jackie, who peeled off from him and came up to join me at the front of the room. I didn’t have it in me to reprimand her and order her to go sit with the others so that I could get this over with, so I let her stay there, so close that she was practically clinging to my side.
Once everyone was assembled and the door had hissed shut, Marie stepped forward.
“You all know what this is about,” she said imperiously. “You all know why we’re here. If you have any questions about what you’re about to learn, hold it to the end. The fact that the King of Mages forced us into this situation doesn’t change the fact that most of this was classified and for good reason. Got it?”
No one spoke, but she got a lot of nods, and when she was satisfied with that, she nodded herself and turned to me to give me the metaphorical stage. I took a deep breath.
“Four years ago, I was told a…prophecy, of sorts, that a madman would start the end of the world,” I began. “Not how or why, not what the end of the world would mean, exactly, just that it would be the end of the world and a lot of people would die. I spent the next two years preparing for it as best as I could, trying to hunt down the madman, trying to cut off any avenues he could use to do it, trying to prepare in case he succeeded.”
I thought about explaining powers a little, but it seemed… Well, it wasn’t necessary information. It was context, but little more than fluff. There wasn’t a point in trying to explain Earth Bet in all its wonderful, horrid eccentricities.
Unless Solomon was being more literal about the next Singularity than I hoped. Then this was all going to implode and I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to do about that.
“Like me, the madman had powers,” I went on. “I didn’t know how he would or could use them to destroy the world, but I had enough confidence in the person who told me the prophecy to trust that he could do it, however he did it. At the end of the day, nothing I did to prepare wound up mattering.”
That might not have wound up being completely true, now that I thought about it. All of those attempts to contact my passenger might have played some hand in how everything had ended once it was all over. There was just no way to tell with any kind of certainty.
“Two years ago, that madman woke up a god.”
There were several sharp intakes of breath and more than one wide-eyed stare. Romani was the only one who didn’t seem completely surprised, although he was still surprised enough to look stricken, and El-Melloi II had gone chalk white, fingers trembling around the stick of his lollipop.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, simply laughed like he had just heard the funniest joke.
“Wait a minute,” said Da Vinci, “you don’t mean that metaphorically, do you? You’re talking about an actual, honest-to-goodness god, in the flesh!”
Marie glared her way and looked ready to offer some choice words for the interruption, but I just went with it.
“Or close enough that the distinction didn’t matter,” I agreed. “That madman convinced that god to go on a rampage, and a…lot of people died. I was nearly one of them.” I wasn’t, I decided, going to show them where Scion had cut me in half, not the least of which because there wasn’t even a scar to show for it. “The battle lasted five days while we scrambled for a way to keep that god from killing everyone. I was…one of the leaders in the fight, I guess you could say, and the one who figured out that his weakness was the fact he’d chosen to take a human form.”
“And then you killed him,” said Ritsuka, like he’d seen it coming.
I wasn’t sure that I had. At that point, it might have been an act of patricide more than anything else.
“Not myself,” I said instead. “The best you could say was that I gave the order that landed the final blow. At the end of the day, I was just the person in charge of the group that managed to do it.” When they seemed to be expecting more, I continued, “That’s it. That’s the only thing that happened two years ago that I can think of that the King of Mages would thank me for.”
“Really?” Bradamante blurted out, and then she backtracked. “I-I mean, not that it’s nothing, Master! It’s certainly an impressive accomplishment, especially for someone from the modern day! B-but I suppose it’s…not what I was expecting.”
If she thought being party to killing a god wasn’t impressive enough, then I had no idea what she’d been thinking I was going to admit to. Would a whole pantheon have sounded better to her? Beating Thor in arm-wrestling or shoving Zeus’s lightning bolt up his ass?
“The part that I’m still not clear about is where and how all of this happened,” said El-Melloi II gruffly. “For that matter, something like that is a big enough deal that I would think there’d be news about it all over the place, if only from whatever story the Association — or the American equivalent, at any rate — invented to cover it all up.”
I’d been afraid he would say something like that. I didn’t have a good excuse, and maybe it was okay if I didn’t.
“I thought you were from a parallel world,” I said, stalling a little. “You and Emiya both.”
El-Melloi II grimaced.
“No, no,” said Rika, “I didn’t hear about this either! A-and, hey, Senpai, is this that natural disaster you were talking about before? The one that made it impossible for you to finish high school?”
She’d remembered that, had she? My lips pulled into a grimace and I couldn’t stop myself from awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot as I took an extra second to word my response.
“No. This and that were two separate things.” As a kind of apology, I added, “And, strictly speaking, we’re getting pretty close to the stuff I shouldn’t be talking about.”
Ritsuka and Rika both looked frustrated. I couldn’t blame them, and I had to look away and focus on a point vaguely to their left so I couldn’t see their faces. But how many times could I tell them that keeping this stuff compartmentalized was as much for their own safety as mine? How many times before they stopped believing it was that and not me jealously guarding my secrets like a miser might his gold?
“There is one question that remains at the forefront of my mind, my dear!” Shakespeare spoke up. “Yes, verily, a question that you might say is of most urgent import! How was it you came to be at Chaldea?” He grinned broadly. “That is to say, just how did you come to be from some unnameable place — in America, one would presume — and arrive here, at the bottom of the world itself?”
“Oh,” said Mash. “That’s a good point. I…don’t remember Miss Taylor ever actually arriving at Chaldea. Just…one day, she wasn’t there, and the next, Director Animusphere was introducing her to the rest of Team A.”
That…that one, I didn’t have a good answer for. Strictly speaking, I hadn’t been conscious for any of it, but Marie had told me enough — and I could have guessed the rest on my own — to have a decent picture of what happened.
Shakespeare, you bastard.
“I…”
I wasn’t conscious for it, that was as good as admitting something was fishy. I don’t know, that was only the truth in the strictest, most technical sense. Neither was a good answer.
“She was dragged into my office half-dead by a woman who never introduced herself,” Marie said, coming to my rescue. “The reason you didn’t see Taylor until she was being introduced was because the only people who were even allowed to know she was on-base were the ones treating her wounds.”
Mash blinked, astonished. “B-but that would have been all over the facility! Everyone would have been talking about it!”
“There aren’t many ways of crossing large distances like that,” Marie admitted, “but they do exist, Mash, as I’m certain this last Singularity and Tohsaka’s circumstances should remind you. What method the woman used, she never explained, and I never had the chance to ask. I was too focused on making sure that Taylor survived.”
For which I was incredibly thankful. People were getting to see more and more of the Marie I knew, but I didn’t think anyone really, truly understood exactly how much she’d done for me. Not all of it, at least.
“Hang on,” said Mordred, “what does this supposed god have to do with that Solly guy and his favor?”
Romani’s face twisted into a grimace, like what he’d just heard physically pained him. It was Da Vinci, however, who answered:
“It should be obvious, shouldn’t it? Based upon what he said about the Grails and his complete lack of concern about the resolved Singularities, perhaps the Singularities themselves are only a means to an end.” She hummed. “He confirmed that the rings of light in the sky inside every Singularity so far are his Noble Phantasm, didn’t he? It may be that he doesn’t actually need to overturn history completely on its own, only that it would serve his purposes if he did. No, no, if those rings of light are his Noble Phantasm and they’ve been inside every Singularity since the beginning —”
She cut off suddenly. “I’ll need to investigate this,” she changed course. “But, yes, if it’s not the propagation of the Singularities themselves that are the goal of their existence but their existence itself is necessary for the deployment of his Noble Phantasm — whatever he’s using it for — then if the world were to end before he could put all of them into place and enact the incineration, his entire plan would fall apart, wouldn’t it?”
“So by saving the world, I saved his plan.”
That was all I’d been able to come up with, too. I…still wasn’t entirely sure how, since we still didn’t really know what his plan really was or how it was meant to work, but the only explanation I had was that Scion destroying everything would have ruined Solomon’s plans.
“Essentially,” Da Vinci agreed. “Unless you’re going to say that you made contact with him at some point during those events or that the fight against this god of yours activated some key part of his scheme.”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Wait,” said Rika, “so Solly was actually just fucking with us?”
“Language,” Jeanne Alter hissed at her mockingly. Rika ignored her entirely.
“What the fuck! Seriously?”
“What does this mean for us now, though?” asked Ritsuka. “That guy…he also mentioned something about you going home and making peace with your past or something, didn’t he?”
I was completely honest when I told him, “I don’t know.”
None of them looked satisfied to hear that. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t a matter of secrets and keeping sensitive information private, because I really couldn’t make more than wild guesses.
“We still don’t have anything like a full grasp on what the next Singularity will look like,” Marie chimed in. “The only thing we know for sure is that it’s located on the North American continent and seems to originate from somewhere on the east coast.”
Ritsuka nodded. “And Senpai is American.”
“And I was born on the east coast, yes.”
Brockton Bay didn’t even exist in this world, and by all accounts, it never had, so I avoided mentioning it entirely.
“It seems kind of simple that the answer would be so straightforward,” Emiya said suspiciously.
“But until we know more, we can’t say anything else about it,” said Arash. Emiya just shook his head and sighed.
Hippolyta let out a sigh of her own. “This just leaves us with more questions, doesn’t it?”
“And no way to answer them except to wait for more information to present itself.” Aífe levered herself out of her seat. “Well. If that was all, Director, then I don’t see a need for me to stay.”
“It was a little disappointing,” Bradamante agreed awkwardly.
“At least it was three paragraphs of exposition, this time,” said Rika.
“I…I suppose it was!”
“If you don’t have any questions, then feel free to leave,” Marie said. Rika opened her mouth, and Marie shot her a glare. “And if you’re just going to ask for more about Taylor’s background, then you can leave now, too!”
Rika’s mouth snapped shut and she mimed pulling a zipper across her lips.
“Well then,” said Da Vinci, climbing up out of her own seat, “I suppose I might as well return to the projects I was working on.”
“Hold on,” said Marie. “Da Vinci, Romani, there’s more we need to discuss, so you two aren’t going anywhere!”
Emiya huffed. “Hint received. Come on, Master.”
“Fine,” Rika grumbled. “I expect dinner ASAP, though!”
“Of course, of course…”
Slowly, the group filed out the same way they came, vanishing off back to whatever and wherever they’d been before. Mash lingered, coming up to me.
“Yes, Mash?”
“Miss Taylor,” she said quietly, “that fight… That was when you lost your arm, wasn’t it?”
The port for my prosthetic gave a sympathetic throb. “Yes.”
“And that was also…” She shook her head. “Nevermind. Miss Taylor.” She bent forward in a respectful bow. “Thank you for saving the world. I’m glad Director Animusphere managed to find someone so experienced to be a Master.”
And then she turned and jogged off to catch up with Ritsuka, who had turned to look for her just outside the door when he realized she wasn’t still there.
For a long moment, I stood there, unsure of exactly how to feel. It wasn’t like I’d gone into Gold Morning and fought Scion for the glory of it. Getting praise or accolades had been the furthest thing from my mind the whole time. I’d done it because it had to be done, because I wasn’t willing to roll over and die, and because there were people I happened to care about who would have died if I didn’t.
Being thanked for it was… I didn’t know what to do with that. Because no one had ever thanked me at the end either, not that I think I would have been able to understand it if they had. In fact, I wasn’t sure anyone had ever really thanked me my entire career, with the exception of maybe Dinah and some of the people I’d looked out for after Leviathan.
It was…a strange feeling.
Eventually, it was just me, Da Vinci, Romani, and Marie in the room, and Arash had taken Jackie in hand again with the promise that I’d be with her soon. Once the door had whooshed shut and we were alone, Da Vinci said, “You needed something, Director?”
“Yes,” said Marie, glancing first at me, then at Romani. “Romani knows some of this already, of course, but…”
“We’re going to give you as much of the full story as we can,” I told her bluntly.
And so we did. We spent the next hour or so going into as much detail as we dared, explaining the scope of what Earth Bet had been like as much as was possible. The Endbringers, the nature of powers and how they worked, the game of cops and robbers that so many capes had lived by up until the moment they didn’t. There was so much I had to just leave out, just because it was too much to go into all at once.
Eventually, however, we had to get to the final part, the most important part, the one that had so much weight that keeping it a secret kept finding the worst possible moments to try and crush the team.
I had to explain Scion. Everything I knew about him, everything he’d been capable of, how much damage he’d done and how close Earth and all its branches had come to total annihilation.
And the only thing Da Vinci could do…
“Oh dear,” she said faintly. It was the smallest she had ever sounded, like a goldfish that suddenly found itself stranded in an ocean whose bottom seemed to stretch on forever.
…was stare at me, wide-eyed and pale-faced, as the enormity of it all threatened to drown her.