Chapter CLXVI: Lingering Regrets

“I think we’ve left it to fester for long enough,” said Da Vinci, “don’t you?”

It wasn’t what I’d been expecting when this meeting was originally called in Marie’s office, but in hindsight, I’d had a reprieve from this for long enough that I should have seen it coming. Marie and I both knew that the topic being broached was inevitable, just as inevitable as the discussion on Scion had been, but we’d both been comfortable enough with pretending it wouldn’t happen for as long as Da Vinci and Romani would let us.

“Yeah,” Romani said with a sigh. He gave me a grim smile. “I really am sorry about this, Taylor, but it just isn’t something we can brush off and bury.”

‘As long as they would let us’ wound up being one more week, just under three weeks since the London Singularity had been resolved, long enough for me to nurture some vain hope, no matter how small, that it would just disappear without a mention. Unfortunately, whatever they acted like, Romani and Da Vinci took their roles and responsibilities in the organization too seriously to just let it slide.

I wanted to cross my arms. Some instinct from those days in Winslow to close myself off and shield myself from what was to come remained behind, and the spider puppets and Huginn and Muninn were not large enough of a ‘swarm’ to fully shunt my emotional cues into. It took an effort of supreme will to keep my arms down by my sides, even if I couldn’t stop my hands from clenching.

“Let’s just get it over with,” I said stonily.

“You’re aware that I already know all of this,” Marie said. She looked back and forth between Romani and Da Vinci. “That, as director, I already knew about it when I recruited her two years ago.”

“I’m not surprised, at least,” Da Vinci answered. “Even so, Director, you must be aware that there are protocols for this. We’re already bending a number of them simply to account for the fact that we only have an effective roster of three Masters.”

“That’s why we’re having this meeting,” Romani added. “If the rest of Team A was still…available, then we would’ve put Taylor on psychiatric leave, pending a full evaluation.”

“I’m aware of the protocols,” Marie ground out. “Ugh. Fine. Ask the questions, then.”

“Well. Um, first… Context?” Romani turned to me. “Da Vinci showed me the records, including the argument you had with Hans Christian Andersen. You mentioned something there about how this…child whose death you were involved in —”

“Don’t sugarcoat it,” I bit out. “I killed her, Romani. That’s more than just being involved in her death.”

Romani grimaced, lips drawing into a tight line. “…this girl you killed, then. When Andersen confronted you about it, you said that her own mother had decided that a quick death was kinder than what was going to happen to her. Can you elaborate on that?”

For a moment, I didn’t answer as I considered my words, how I should respond, how I should explain this. In that regard, the fact that we had already told him and Da Vinci as much of my past as we had, even if we’d had to skim over a lot of the finer details, made it a little bit easier. It meant I didn’t have to explain quite as much or dig into too many old wounds.

Eventually, I settled on, “Do you remember the madman I told you about? The one who set off Scion?”

“You said that he called himself Jack Slash,” Da Vinci supplied. “In hindsight, obviously some kind of derivative of the infamous Jack the Ripper — an irony that I’m sure escapes none of us here.”

Someone up there must have been laughing for sure. Fighting a man who called himself Jack Slash with his “adopted” daughter Bonesaw, only to later adopt Jack the Ripper in the form of a prepubescent girl? If you’d told me that two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.

“He was the leader of a roving band of serial killers,” I said. “They called themselves the Slaughterhouse Nine. Over the twenty-something years they were active, they depopulated a number of small towns, killed, maimed, and tortured thousands of people at the low end. When I was fifteen, they decided to pay my city a visit in the aftermath of another disaster, while everyone was still picking up the pieces of their lives and trying to get the city back on its feet.”

“Wait,” Romani choked out. “Depopulate?”

I looked him straight in the eye. “There was a reason why being a member of the Nine meant you received an automatic kill order, Romani. I called Jack Slash a madman, but only because the word terrorist implies what he did had some sort of political or ideological reason behind it, and his motivations were never that deep.”

That was why I couldn’t call him a mass-murderer either, and my Wards training had informed me that serial killers often had a method to their madness, like the age of the victims, or gender, or hair color, or even the method of killing. Jack Slash was none of those things. He was just a psycho who liked to pick people apart and watch what crawled out of the remains, and if he wasn’t entertained, then he just killed them.

I didn’t want to imagine how many Bonesaws there must have been, how many kids he’d played with, only to kill them when they failed to trigger with something that he deemed worth his attention. Just what I did know about him was fucked up enough without trying to figure out exactly how he’d ruined each life he touched.

“More than twenty years of activity, you said,” Da Vinci murmured. “That…must have been quite the record. In the tens of thousands, at the minimum. And he…had something to do with this child you say you killed?”

“After what you just heard, you haven’t figured out that he was responsible for the whole thing?” Marie huffed.

I could appreciate the sentiment, but it didn’t erase the sin. Aster’s name was still in my ledger, and nothing could change that, no matter how I treated Jackie or what anyone said to try and shift the blame.

“Responsible or not, I still pulled the trigger,” I pointed out.

“The circumstances matter!” Marie argued hotly.

“But they don’t change what happened. I still made the choice, I still shot her.”

But Marie wasn’t willing to let it drop there.

“And what would it have changed if you hadn’t? Even in the best case scenario, she still winds up dead, doesn’t she? At least with the way things went, it was quick and painless! That monster would have slit her throat and made you watch her drown just so that he could enjoy your suffering!”

Not mine. Jack hadn’t ever considered me someone worth paying much attention to — whatever the reason, he hadn’t ever seemed to think of me as particularly interesting. Theo, however? Yes. Jack absolutely would have tortured Aster as a sort of twisted punishment for Theo failing their wager.

“That doesn’t absolve me —”

“Stop!” Romani cut in. “Stop, the both of you!”

My mouth snapped shut. Marie’s did, too, although she didn’t seem all that happy to let him take control of the conversation.

“Look,” he said, “it’s obvious you both have your own feelings about this whole thing, but Da Vinci and I still don’t have the full picture! Can…can we at least get that far before we start arguing about the morality of it?”

Marie grimaced, and I was sure my own expression must have mirrored hers. Neither of us said anything, but Romani took our silence as agreement and heaved out a sigh. “Okay. Okay. This Jack Slash guy, what does he have to do with why you killed this girl?”

I took a slow breath and let it hiss out of my nostrils, then picked up where I’d left off: “While the Nine were in Brockton Bay, Jack met with a boy my age, and for whatever reason, made a…kind of a bet with him. Theo was his name. Jack gave Theo two years to become a hero and kill him, and if Theo failed, Jack would kill one thousand people as punishment, ending with Theo’s younger half-sister, Aster, and then Theo himself.”

Some part of me still wondered why Jack had even bothered, what he’d seen in Theo that was more entertaining than any other kid he’d killed or hero whose throat he’d slit. Most of me didn’t care, because the why didn’t make a difference to the outcome either way.

“Two years later, as we were hunting down Jack and the Nine, Aster was kidnapped by one of Jack’s henchmen.”

“Ah.” Da Vinci closed her eyes briefly. “And so the young girl you killed —”

“Yes.” And the worst part was that it hadn’t meant anything. The world still ended. Gold Morning still happened. Aster died for nothing. “One of the Nine was a person they called Gray Boy. His power let him make…what I guess you’d call stable self-contained time loops.”

“Time travel?” Romani squeaked.

“Not really. He couldn’t go back in time and make changes or anything like that. He touched you, and he could set the duration of the loop. Once you reached the end, you reset back to the beginning of the loop, even as the rest of the world kept moving. The only thing that didn’t reset was your mind.”

It was Da Vinci’s turn to heave out a sigh. “Let me guess: he used this incredible power to torture people. Off the top of my head, I imagine he started the loop by introducing some form of pain, so that when the loop reset, the wound would be fresh. The pain would be new.”

I probably should have expected that Da Vinci would figure it out without me needing to explain it all.

“He did it to Aster’s mother,” I confirmed, “and then threatened to do it to Aster herself if she didn’t get Aster to settle down and cooperate.”

“Fuck!” Romani said for the first time I could remember, and he turned away, pacing across the floor with sudden energy as he raked a hand through his hair. “God! That’s…!”

“This shouldn’t be news to you!” Marie snapped at him. “There are plenty of magi who would do something just as horrific, if they thought it would further their research!”

“I know that!” said Romani, snapping back at her. “That doesn’t make this any easier to listen to!”

“I don’t think we need to hear the rest of it regardless,” said Da Vinci, and she gave me a sympathetic look. “I think I largely see the shape of things as it is — but to confirm, Aster was trapped with a collection of mass-murderers, almost certainly doomed to a fate worse than death, and the only option you had available was a mercy kill, yes?”

It would have been so easy to let it go at that…but no. Romani and Da Vinci already had so much of my story and so much of the truth. As convenient as it would have been to let the lie stand, I couldn’t, not now.

“We didn’t know exactly how Jack was going to cause the end of the world,” I said by way of answering. “Only that he would be the catalyst that set it off. That he would say something or do something to someone that would spark the end. And Aster… Aster’s mom had powers. That meant it was likely that Aster would, too, and that she would get them younger than her mother did.”

Da Vinci sucked in a breath. “Oh. And you thought…”

“One of the Nine was a girl they called Bonesaw,” I answered quietly. “She was six when Jack…recruited her.”

“Six?” Romani whirled around. “Six? There was a kill order out on a six-year-old? The government sanctioned the killing of a six-year-old?”

“That six-year-old went on to do things that would have made Doctor Mengele look like a saint!” it was my turn to snap. “Six years later, she splayed out one of my teammates — still alive and conscious — with his limbs flayed and his organs spread out over a walk-in freezer! So that she could memorialize him as one of her art pieces! And then she tried to do elective brain surgery on me so she could play with my powers and see what made them tick! At what point do you think I’m allowed to stop thinking of her as another one of Jack’s victims and start treating her like another of his pet monsters?”

Romani’s mouth snapped shut. To this, he didn’t seem to have an answer, or at least it wasn’t one he was comfortable giving, and the expression on his face said so even more clearly than his silence. I took a deep breath, as much to give myself some space from my own temper as anything else.

“I had to make a split second decision,” I eventually managed to say, steering the conversation back away from Bonesaw. “I knew I wasn’t going to get Jack or Bonesaw, not with the gun I had on me, not in the time I had, and not with what was between me and them. So I took out who I could, the people I knew would cause us the most trouble in a future fight — an emotion sensor and manipulator named Cherish, a sound manipulator named Screamer — and Aster was…”

Stolen novel; please report.

Collateral wasn’t the right word. Calling her a bonus didn’t fit either. I wanted to claim that the decision had been a deliberate one, that I’d decided I was going to give her the mercy of not having to live through whatever else the Nine would do to her, but the reality of the situation was that it had all been about the momentum. It had been a split second decision, made in the moment, and even still, I had hesitated.

But that hesitation hadn’t stopped me from going through with it.

My fingers curled into fists. Shook.

“When I told Theo what happened, he said it was for the best.”

Romani looked stricken, and Marie closed her eyes for a moment, lips drawn into a line so thin and tight that they turned as white as the rest of her face. Even Da Vinci wasn’t entirely unaffected, her entire visage a cast of mournful sympathy.

I wasn’t any better. Aster had been put away in a box — left there ever since the moment it happened. There hadn’t been any time to face it, to come to terms with it and feel its full weight. Too much had happened too quickly. The world had needed me before I could own up to what I’d done.

It was for the best. That was always the part I hated most, that Theo had never blamed me for making that choice. That he hadn’t ever cursed me for killing Aster, not even a little, just accepted it as something that couldn’t be fixed.

“And so, when faced with a little girl looking for a mother to care for her, you couldn’t bring yourself to kill her the way you killed Aster,” Da Vinci concluded.

My throat felt raw, as though the admission had to be dragged out of me the whole way. “Yes.”

She sighed. “It’s certainly an emotional vulnerability,” she reasoned. “I’m sure an argument could be made that it might be enough to see you suspended, under normal circumstances. But, current circumstances being what they are, I’m not sure it’s a major enough issue that we need to consider that now. Romani?”

For several long, drawn out seconds, Romani didn’t answer. “No,” he said eventually. “It’s…”

He raked a hand through his hair again, and then he regarded me with a lopsided frown. “I’m not naive,” he said, as though justifying himself to us. “The sort of thing you said this Bonesaw girl did, there are magi who do that sort of thing, too. Whatever this…world of superheroes you come from was like, Taylor, the only thing that really changed as a result is that people could do that sort of thing out in the open. That sort of ugliness exists in any world where people exist, too.”

“You’re not wrong,” Marie agreed grimly, thinking, no doubt, about what her own father had done to create Mash.

“I guess I just…wanted to believe you never had to face that kind of ugliness,” Romani said. “That there was still some kind of innocence to someone so young. Stupid of me, I know,” he added, “considering the kind of shape you were in the first time I saw you.”

“Well, it’s not as though we should expect you to come into contact with a plethora of Servants who take the form of children,” said Da Vinci, and then she smiled ruefully. “Although, having said so, we weren’t exactly expecting Jack the Ripper to be a prepubescent girl either, were we?”

Romani sighed, scrubbing at his scalp. “I’m not sure it makes much difference, in the end,” he admitted. “If they had been in Taylor’s shoes, Ritsuka and Rika…might have attempted to recruit Jackie, too. I don’t think they could have ordered any of the Servants to kill her, although I don’t think Emiya or Mordred would have flinched at actually doing it, orders or not.”

“Certainly Jeanne Alter wouldn’t,” said Da Vinci. “I suppose that’s all missing the point, though, isn’t it? The question isn’t whether the Servants were capable of committing the act of killing another Servant, even one that takes the form of a child, the question is whether Taylor’s unwillingness to do so in that one instance is grounds to have her suspended from the team.”

“The circumstances were unique enough that we shouldn’t expect them to happen again,” said Marie, and she tilted her chin up, as though daring them to contradict her. “After all, Taylor didn’t hesitate to attack Nursery Rhyme with lethal intent, did she?”

I hadn’t. Maybe because, when it came down to it, Nursery Rhyme’s mentality was wrong enough to twig some association in my mind with the likes of Bonesaw. She hadn’t had the same sort of guilelessness to her that Jackie had, and more to the point, she had never been so defenseless that she had ever been at my mercy, so it had been easier to see through the guise of a young girl and to her inhuman core from the beginning.

“I can’t say I’m not worried that something like this won’t happen in the future,” said Romani, “especially since this is right after we had to talk about why the enemy — whatever face he might be wearing — thanked Taylor for doing him a favor —”

Marie leapt at it. “We’ve already gone over —”

“Having said that,” Romani said, talking over her loudly, and the expression on Marie’s face might have killed a lesser man, “I don’t think I…like the message it would send if we say that Taylor should have killed a child, Servant or not, without flinching. As much as I would say that this is evidence she’s emotionally compromised, I also agree that this…probably isn’t a set of circumstances that we should expect to see repeated.” Quieter, he added, “We all have our traumas and our blindspots. If we expected our Masters to be perfect, unfeeling machines, then none of the candidates would have made it on the team in the first place.”

Against my will, one corner of my mouth curled upwards.

Romani cleared his throat. “Anyway. What I’m trying to say is…I don’t think this is grounds to have her suspended.” And then, he sighed. “Honestly, I’m not sure the twins would let us get away with it if we tried.”

“A very important point,” Da Vinci agreed, amused. “Well, I suppose it’s not as though I was going to vote to suspend her myself anyway, so there’s no point in being obstinate for the sake of obstinacy. I think we can consider the issue tabled for now…?”

No one contradicted her. Who would have? Romani had already put in his vote, and Marie had been on my side from the beginning. It was such a weird feeling that I was almost tempted to vote against myself, just so that there was someone there who would.

Da Vinci nodded. “Good. And now that we’ve gotten that issue cleared up, I believe I shall see myself out and return to my projects. Always more work to be done, yes?”

“Ugh,” Romani grunted. “H-hey, I don’t suppose we could stand around and argue some more, could we? M-maybe another few hours?”

Marie made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat. “Not a chance. You’re the only one left qualified to be Vice Director. If you didn’t want the responsibility, you shouldn’t have taken over for me while I was…” The words caught in her throat. After a few seconds, however, she managed to squeeze out, “i-indisposed.”

“No good deed goes unpunished, huh?” he lamented.

The meeting broke up, and one after another, we filtered out of Marie’s office. Da Vinci returned to her workshop to continue what had been interrupted, and Marie and Romani went back to the Command Room and their own responsibilities.

I was left alone, lingering in the hallway, a complicated knot of emotion swirling in my chest like a swarm of angry bees.

With the rest of my morning clear until lunchtime, I…didn’t quite know what to do. Somehow or another, though, I wound up back at my room, where I found Jackie napping on my bed. I wasn’t too proud to admit that I was startled when Arash spoke up next to me:

“We played Tag for a little while in the gym,” he told me softly. I wasn’t sure if he’d just appeared or if he’d approached and I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts that I hadn’t noticed. “She tired herself out enough that she didn’t kick up a fuss when I brought her back here for a nap.”

“I see,” I said quietly, and then I stepped back out of the doorway and let the door whoosh shut. Without another word, I took several long strides down the hall, just to put enough room between me and Jackie that I wouldn’t accidentally wake her.

Perhaps sensing something amiss, Arash followed after me, and he softly asked, “Master?”

When I stopped, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. The conversation in Marie’s office stuck in my mind, and the contents festered in my chest like tar. Even so, I guess…the whole thing had brought up something that I had been fine with leaving well enough alone for a while now, and now that it had, I couldn’t just shove it away for another day anymore.

So much of my past had been coming to light lately. So many things that had been left buried for two years — some of them for very good reasons — were being dug up and shown the light of day. With so much about the next Singularity, one that we already knew would take place in America, in the United States, still a mystery, there were so many things that might yet wind up revealed, no matter how desperately I wanted to leave them where they were.

It felt like I didn’t have any other choice than to ask him, “How much do you already know?”

I felt his eyes on the back of my head like lasers. “About?” he asked cautiously.

“My past. My life before…” I made a half-hearted gesture at the hallway around us. “This.”

“Not everything,” he answered, still in that same tone, “but probably more than you’d want me to.” Without letting me say anything, he went on, “The dream cycle cuts both ways, that’s true, and I won’t pretend I’ve been staying awake every night just because regular Servants like me don’t really need sleep, but what I get is…fragments. Pivotal and important moments that stick out in your memories because of how much they meant to you. Couldn’t tell you all of the science stuff behind it, but people forget a lot of stuff day over day, you know? It’s more like a highlight reel than a movie.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not I was supposed to be relieved. It was an answer, but it also felt like a little bit of a copout, and maybe that wasn’t fair. Arash might not have told me everything, and he might have kept plenty of things to himself, but he was pretty straightforward with me. He always had been. If he didn’t say anything, it was out of respect for my feelings, my privacy.

But I had to ask, “Aster?”

A moment of pregnant silence followed. Then, quietly, solemnly, he gave me a simple, “Yeah.”

In some ways, it was a bit of a relief. That I didn’t have to explain it to him or try to justify what happened. If he saw Aster, what happened to Aster, then he must have seen what led up to it, the consideration that went into it, the hesitation when I actually had to pull the trigger.

I wasn’t sure how much that hesitation counted for, not when I’d still gone through with it, but I had to believe it meant something. That, whatever it meant, Arash could see it, too.

Finally, I turned to face him and met his gaze straight on. “Gold Morning?”

This time, he didn’t give me anything more than a nod. No judgment, no condemnation, not even approval or pity, just confirmation that he had seen me at my worst — and, some mad fool might say, my best — and that was it. He didn’t offer praise or scorn, just acknowledgment that it was something that had happened and he’d seen it.

A part of me wanted to ask what he thought of it, what his opinion was — but, really, I wasn’t sure I needed it, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted it. He understood, I knew he did, because he was also someone who had given everything he had, no matter what it cost him, to save his people and put an end to the conflict. What did the exact scale matter, what did the precise motivations even mean, when we were cut from the same cloth at the end of the day?

I might have wondered if he resented me for getting to continue on even after giving up everything, but that just wasn’t the kind of person he was.

“I see.”

He smiled, a small, honest thing, without guile. Unprompted, he told me, “It answered the question I’m sure everyone’s been asking since Orléans, though.”

It took me an extra second or two to realize what he was saying: why was it that Arash appeared when I tried to summon a Servant there not long after we arrived?

My lips curled, too, not quite a smile, not quite a smirk. “I guess it did.”

And that was where we left it, because that was all the more that really needed to be said. In some ways, it reminded me of how things had been with Rachel, how much had passed between her and me with so few words actually exchanged, and I was grateful for it. I had already dragged up the memories once today, and I didn’t want to have to do it again, to try and explain myself when I wasn’t sure any explanation could really make what had happened and what I’d done excusable.

Understandable, maybe. But for whatever he’d said at the time, I didn’t think Theo would have been able to do it, too, and whatever box he’d shoved it all into at the time, whatever mask he’d put on to become the person he needed to be in that moment, I wasn’t sure he’d ever actually forgiven me for making the choice I had.

Arash went off to do his own thing for the day, and I turned back around and went back to my room, slipping through the door as quietly as I could manage. Jackie was still napping on my bed, fast asleep, completely ignorant of that exchange, short as it was, that had happened not that far away. She didn’t stir, not even as I stripped off my socks and shoes and shucked off my top layer, leaving the white, gray, and orange jacket draped haphazardly over my chair.

When I climbed back into bed with her, however, that was when she noticed me, and in the dark, she asked, “Mommy?”

“Go back to sleep, Jackie,” I whispered to her.

“Mm. Okay.”

I pulled the sheets up and covered us both, and as she snuggled up against me in her usual way, I pulled her close and wrapped my arms around her, took a deep breath and smelled the scent of the shampoo I’d been using to wash her hair. Something inside of me was wounded and aching, and as my eyes prickled, I squeezed them closed and pulled Jackie closer, held her tighter.

But I couldn’t escape the face of another little girl, frozen in a rictus of confused terror as she struggled to keep herself from crying.

It had been a long time since I last gave any real thought to actually being a mother. Having kids of my own had been so far off for a full half of my life, first because I was way too young, then because I was just trying to survive high school, and then because the end of the world was looming and I just didn’t have the time to even worry about whether I would get to be old enough to have the chance.

And now… I wasn’t sure I deserved the chance. Forget about whether or not I would make it to the end of the Grand Order and come out intact enough to even try, I could only think that any child of mine would be fucked up. That I was too fucked up to raise a normal kid who lived a normal life and grew up to worry about normal things, like dates and boys and acne. That I had done too many fucked up things to even deserve a shot at a happily ever after like that.

Maybe that meant that Jackie would be the closest thing I’d ever have to a daughter of my own.

And if that was the case, I guess we deserved each other, didn’t we? Me, the woman who had killed a little girl, regardless of the reasons why, and her, the little girl who had killed women in search of love. Both of us were monsters, but I guess we could be each other’s monsters, and if the world said that was more than we deserved, then it could fuck off.

I tilted my head down, buried my nose in Jackie’s hair, and took another deep breath, letting the smell of her shampoo soothe my nerves.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, Jackie?” I murmured against her head.

“We love Mommy,” she said like it was a fact of the universe. “Because Mommy is Mommy and that’s all we care about, no matter what Mommy did before she was Mommy.”

My heart froze in my chest, and for a wild, frenzied second, a dozen questions chased themselves through my head. Did she know about Aster? How much had she seen? How much of my life had the dream cycle shown her? Was it a mistake to let her sleep with me every night, or was it inevitable that she would have eventually seen it all anyway?

But she didn’t try to escape me. She didn’t pull away. She stayed in my arms, snuggled up against my chest, completely at ease. Because whatever she saw, whatever she now knew I was capable of, and despite having heard mere moments after making our contract that I had been preparing to kill her, all she cared about was that I was her mother.

Total acceptance, the way only a child could have.

Something hot dribbled down over the bridge of my nose and dripped onto the pillow. The wound inside of me bled, and as it did, it took the pain with it, leaving behind a pleasant, hollow ache.

“Thank you, Jackie.”