When Shirou came to, the world was red.
It was a consuming, suffocating red that swallowed everything else and left nothing behind. The town he knew had been reduced to ash, cinders, and blackened ruin.
Buildings sagged where they stood or had already collapsed into heaps of splintered wood and stone. The streets looked like the remains of a battlefield from some film, except this was real, and the heat pressing against his skin made that impossible to forget.
He lifted himself off of the ground, his body so numb it felt like he was watching everything move from a different body. The red haired boy stood on shaky feet, hazy mind drawing his vision out into the town he once knew.
And for a few seconds, he could only stare.
His mind did not catch up all at once. His eyes saw the flames. They saw the smoke. They saw shapes on the ground that should not have been shaped like that. But understanding came slowly, like something crawling through mud.
The pain hit him a moment later, coming from within the broken corpse.
It was not the sting of burned skin, or the ache of bruises, or the scrape of smoke in his throat. It was something buried deeper, something wrong. It felt as though a tiny piece of the fire itself had been driven into his chest, and the agony spilling out of it was far too large for something so small.
Shirou choked on a scream and dropped to one knee.
His fingers clawed at his shirt, trying to find whatever was hurting him, trying to rip it out, but there was nothing there to grab. The pain was rooted inside him. It throbbed beneath his ribs like a sliver of molten iron lodged in his body.
It soon got worse.
For one horrible instant, it felt like that thing spread through him. Heat raced out from the point of impact in thin, jagged lines, like liquid metal forced into veins that had never been meant to carry it. His arms locked. His jaw clenched so hard it hurt. The world flashed white at the edges of his vision.
He had no words for it. All he knew was that it felt like his bones were being filled with fire. It felt like his nerves were being ripped apart and restrung wrong. It felt like his head was splitting open from the inside, thoughts melting into static as something black and hateful pressed deeper into him.
He bent over and vomited onto the scorched ground.
Almost nothing came up. There was barely anything left in him.
The fire crackled all around him. Somewhere nearby, a roof gave way with a heavy crash. Sparks leapt into the air. Shirou dragged in a breath and nearly gagged on the smoke. The stench was unbearable. Burned wood. Burned metal. Burned things he did not want to understand.
He looked up.
There were blackened bodies scattered across the ground.
His stomach twisted hard enough to hurt.
He knew, in some distant and detached way, that he should be crying for his mother and father. He should be screaming. He should be calling for help. But all of that felt far away, drowned out by the shard of agony buried in his chest and the unbearable crawling sensation of that heat still moving through his body.
It felt like the fire had gotten inside him and decided to stay.
He pushed himself upright on trembling legs.
The town swayed around him. Most of the flames were lower now than they must have been before. The great walls of fire had shortened. More buildings had already fallen in on themselves. Dawn was creeping in somewhere beyond the smoke, pale and gray and horribly ordinary.
It felt wrong.
Everything felt wrong.
He was still standing.
That was the strangest part of all. The streets were full of the dead. Homes were gone. The whole world looked like it had been chewed up and spat back out. And somehow, impossibly, he was still standing in the middle of it.
Wͪhͦyⷲ?
He did not know. Maybe his house had been in a lucky place. Maybe he had been lucky. Maybe the world had simply picked him at random and decided not to kill him yet.
It did not matter. So he started walking.
One step, then another, and another.
He had no destination. He only knew that staying still in a sea of fire felt wrong, so he moved. Every step jarred whatever was lodged inside him, and every jolt sent another wave of burning pain through his body hard enough to make his teeth chatter. His thoughts kept breaking apart under it.
One second he was trying to breathe.
The next he was sure his spine was on fire. The next he thought he heard something whispering right beside his ear, before realising there was no one there.
The thing inside his gut pulsed again.
His knees nearly buckled.
'This is bad…' He thought dimly. 'This is really bad.'
He kept walking anyway.
Whether it was stubbornness or shock, it didn't seem like there was a difference anymore.
He was not even scared of getting burned. That should have terrified him, but the fear was drowned beneath something stronger. The pain inside him had become too big. Too immediate. Compared to that, even the burning city around him felt distant.
The bodies around him were still. Too still.
Shirou looked at them and understood, in the simple and brutal way only a child could, that he was not going to survive this.
Being alive right now was not the same thing as making it out.
Shirou was already dead.
He could feel the truth of it in the weakness in his legs, in the way his breathing kept catching, in the wrongness spreading through him from that thing lodged inside his chest. He was not getting out of this red world. Whatever had happened here, whatever hell had swallowed the town, it was not done with him.
The thought should have broken him.
Instead, it just made him tired.
By the time his legs finally gave out, it almost felt like relief.
He hit the ground hard and rolled onto his back, staring up at the smoke-choked sky. Dark clouds loomed overhead, swollen with rain. Rain would come soon. He could tell that much.
'Good…' He thought hazily.
If it rained, maybe the fire would finally die.
Maybe the city would stop burning, even if only because there would be nothing left to burn.
His chest throbbed. No, his whole body throbbed.
Another spike of pain tore through the boy from the shard inside him, so fierce that his vision went black for a second. He gasped and dug his fingers into the dirt, tears spilling hot and useless down the sides of his face.
It hurt.
God, it hurt.
His skin hurt. His lungs hurt. His head hurt. But the worst pain came from that buried fragment, like a piece of hell itself had been lodged in his body and was slowly melting him around it.
He opened his mouth and forced the words out.
"It hurts."
His voice was hoarse and small. The words vanished into the smoke. He said them again anyway, because someone had to.
Because all around him were people who could not say it anymore.
Because if he did not say it, then maybe this would all stop being real.
"It hurts."
His voice cracked.
The clouds above him drifted in and out of focus. The red light from the burning city flickered at the edges of his vision. Somewhere far away, something groaned and collapsed in a shower of sparks.
Shirou lay there in the ashes and thought, with the simple clarity of a child too exhausted to lie to himself, that if everything was gone, his home, his parents, the whole shape of his world, then maybe there was nothing left of him either.
Maybe only the body had survived.
Maybe everything else had already burned away.
The rain still had not started.
For a while, there was only the crackle of dying fires, the settling groan of ruined buildings, and the ragged sound of his own breathing.
Then, through the pain trying to hollow him out from within, he heard it.
Footsteps.
Someone was approaching.
Shirou heard the footsteps and, in the end, realised he did not care.
How could he care?
Tͥheⷲ ͣtⷫhͭinͭgͦ iͩnͥsͤi̇deͥ hⷲiͣmⷫ ͭpuͥlͭseͭdͦ aͤgⷫaͩin.
It was not just pain this time. Pain would have been simple. Pain would have been merciful. This was something worse, something deeper, something that did not stop at flesh and blood and nerves but kept going, boring straight into whatever made a person a person.
Something in him cracked, and broke irreparably.
The last fragile pieces of Shirou that still felt human splintered apart under that pulse, and did not shatter cleanly. They were peeled away, torn loose in strips, and what remained of him sank into the darkness waiting underneath.
Hell was printed onto his brain.
It was branded into him with the force of revelation, as if some hateful hand had pried open his skull and started stamping truths into the softest parts of him.
Words flooded him.
"Elimination of human rights by castration, exile, execution."
"Torture and sadism upon the body through digestion."
"Denial by consensus of the colony that eliminates all honor."
"Scorn from judgment and selfishness that takes away men's fortunes."
The phrases came one after another, not spoken by any voice he could identify, but pressed into his mind all the same. They were dry. Formal. Almost bureaucratic.
That only made them worse. There was no rage in them. No grief. No pity. Just the cold recording of ugliness so old and so constant it had stopped needing emotion.
Then more followed, faster and faster, until they no longer even felt like thoughts.
Death penalty. Penal servitude. Imprisonment. Custody. Fine. Penalty. Crime from a grudge. Crime from self-interest. Unconscious crime. Self-conscious crime. Civil war. Inducement. False statement. Theft. Robbery. Kidnap. Suicide. Rape. Arson. Bombing. Violation. Negligent homicide. Mass violence. Death at work. Overconfident accident—
On and on and on.
The thing that used to be his mind exploded under the weight of it.
Shirou could not have said how long it lasted. Time was gone. Sense was gone. He was drowning in a catalogue of human filth so vast it made the burning city around him feel small.
Every cruelty people had ever justified. Every sin they had ever named. Every ugly impulse they had dressed up and made respectable. It all poured into him through all five senses until he no longer knew where his own thoughts ended and that darkness began.
He saw darkness he could not look at directly.
He felt ugliness he could not acknowledge.
He knew crimes he wanted to run from even as they soaked through him.
Every crime of the people in this world.
That was what was inside him. That was what was eating him alive.
His body arched off the ground with a broken scream.
The thin, glowing lines beneath his skin flared brighter, like veins full of electricity, and the burning became even harsher. It raced through his limbs in savage pulses, forcing his muscles to seize and his spine to bow. He writhed in the ash like something caught on a hook, fingers clawing at dirt that offered no relief.
It hurt too much.
It was beyond too much. Past the point where pain should have made sense.
His throat tore itself raw on cries that barely sounded human. His vision stuttered between red firelight and absolute black. The thing inside him kept gnawing away at him, stealing his warmth piece by piece, and with every second he felt himself thinning out, hollowing out, disappearing.
'ͥIͭ'̾m ⷫdͦyͭiᶠnͣgͥ.ͬ'
The thought came dimly, almost calmly.
It was not because he accepted it, or even because he was brave. He was just too broken to lie to himself.
He was weak. Shirou was weak, and the thing inside him had overrun him completely.
The slow and uneven footsteps came closer, though he heard them as if from underwater. They stopped right next to him, and a hand seized his body a moment later.
It was firm and shaking at the same time, pinning him in place, stopping the frantic twisting of his limbs. Shirou tried to flinch, tried to cry out, but all that came out was a ragged, wet gasp. His body barely obeyed him anymore. He was meat and pain and smoke and fear.
Something sharp and smooth then split his chest open.
The sensation was so sudden, so clean, that for one impossible second he did not understand what had happened. Then understanding hit, and agony followed it like a tidal wave.
He screamed, or at least tried to.
The sound came out strangled and thin, torn apart by the pressure crushing his lungs. He felt hands, trembling hands, push into his opened body. They shoved burning organs aside with desperate haste. They searched inside him with the blind urgency of someone groping through rubble for a single survivor.
They found it, eventually, torturously. The rotten thing lodged inside him.
He felt fingers close around the jagged shard buried near his heart. And then they pulled.
The pain that followed was beyond anything he had ever endured.
It felt as if his entire body had been hooked from the inside and was being turned inside out through the wound in his chest. The shard did not want to leave. It clung. It tore. It dragged burning roots through him as it moved.
Shirou blacked out, then woke, and then blacked out again. Then woke again into the exact same pain, so quickly and so completely that it felt less like fainting and more like being erased and redrawn over and over.
Consciousness meant agony. Unconsciousness lasted less than a second before the next brutal wrench dragged him back into it. He could not tell which was worse.
It was as if he had never been born in the first place, only repeatedly forced into existence for the sole purpose of suffering.
The hand kept pulling.
The body over him made a noise that might have been a sob or a groan or a prayer. Shirou could not tell. He could feel the effort in it, though. The rough, heaving desperation of someone trying to rip a thorn out of the world with their bare hands.
Until, finally, with one heaving, savage wrench, the thing came free.
Shirou did not even have the strength to scream anymore.
The relief hit first.
His chest was still split open. His body had been gutted like a fish while he was awake. His insides were agony and blood and raw air. But even so, the absence of that thing felt so immense, so sudden, that his whole body sagged around it. It was like having a blade pulled out of his soul.
His body preferred this. This relief bereft of comfort or safety.
It preferred being opened up and dying honestly over whatever that thing had been doing to him from the inside.
He then felt something cool touch the wound, a new object. It was smooth and pure. It slipped into the hollow inside him with an impossible gentleness, and the moment it settled, a strange numbness spread through his ruined body.
This was different to the rotten shard that inhabited him a moment ago. It was cool water on scorched ground. It was moonlight poured into a furnace. It sank through him like a panacea, soothing and alien all at once, and as it spread, Shirou felt something fundamental change.
The numbness reached deep places. Places under flesh, under nerves, under bone. It touched the place where that darkness had tried to root itself and claimed the space instead. He could feel it rewriting him in silence.
Shirou was no longer human. Perhaps he never had been. Not since the fire.
He did not understand that thought in any complete way. He was too far gone, too broken for anything but sensation. But somewhere, dimly, he knew that whatever he had been before this moment was gone now. Burned off. Cut out. Replaced by something that fit into him too well and too permanently.
He was then put back together. He remembered that. He remembered it because forgetting it was impossible.
His body was being reconstructed slowly, painfully, as if invisible hands were knitting his flesh together with needles made of scrap metal. Every connection ground. Every new seam was scraped. Every place being closed up felt jagged and wrong before it felt right.
It was like being assembled from wreckage. Like he was being healed by a thousand metal scraps grinding against each other.
His nerves lit up one by one. His chest tightened. His lungs dragged in air like they had forgotten how. His ribs felt as though they were being forced into place with pliers. The wound sealed in increments, each one a tiny violence, and he floated in and out of awareness through all of it.
At some point, the pain dropped from impossible to merely unbearable.
At some point after that, he found enough strength to open his hazy eyes slightly.
The world above him wavered. Smoke drifted across the sky. Firelight flickered somewhere off to the side. A face leaned over him.
It was a man.
For a second Shirou thought he was still hallucinating. The figure was blurred by tears, except they were not Shirou's tears. They were the man's. His eyes were wet, overflowing, and his expression was so openly, fiercely joyful that Shirou could not make sense of it.
"He's alive..!" The man choked out. "Y-You're alive…!"
His voice broke on the words.
He looked like someone who had just been saved from drowning. Not like someone who had found a half-dead child in a wasteland of ash.
The man's hands were still trembling. Soot streaked his face. His hair was a mess. He looked exhausted, ruined, and desperate. And still, somehow, joy shone through all of it so brightly it almost hurt to look at.
"...T-Thank you!"
The words came out of him like a prayer forced through a cracked throat.
"Thank you for being alive!"
Shirou stared up at him.
Even half-dead, even broken open and stitched back together with pain and metal and something cold and impossible, he understood one thing with total clarity.
This man was not acting like someone who had saved a life. He was acting like someone who had been saved by finding one.
The happiness on his face was too fervent, too genuine, and too full of desperate hope.
And on the edge of death, the dead child lying in the ashes felt jealous.
He was jealous that someone could look at a single surviving life in this hell and smile like the world still had meaning.
Something in Shirou shifted. The weakness that had let him accept death did not vanish. It shifted and hardened. And it became, paradoxically, a fierce and miserable desire to live.
The mind that had been too broken to hold onto anything filled with a single, blazing feeling.
Hⷲeͪ ⷱhaͥd̾ bͥeͭeʲnͧ ̾sͭavͫeͤd.
That joy, irrational and fragile and painfully bright, flooded into the hollow places inside him. It hurt almost as much as everything else, but he clung to it anyway.
He wanted that warmth. He wanted that expression. He wanted to keep existing long enough to understand why this stranger was thanking him for surviving.
He moved his fingers.
It took everything he had.
His hand twitched once against the ash, then dragged itself upward with all the desperate strength left in his ruined body. Small fingers, blackened with soot and shaking violently, reached for the man's hand and closed around it as tightly as they could.
He did not want to let go.
Not of that hand. Not of that light. Not of life.
The darkness came again a moment later, softly this time, and Shirou lost consciousness with the man's warmth still in his grasp.
When what remained of Shirou woke again, it was to helpless convulsions.
There was no gentle return. No drifting up from sleep. His body simply seized.
His back arched off the mattress hard enough to hurt. His arms jerked against something holding them down. His legs kicked uselessly beneath blankets he could not even feel properly. Invisible veins lit up beneath his skin in savage pulses, racing over every inch of him like lines of green-blue lightning buried in flesh. They burned. They shocked. They carved new definitions of agony straight into his nerves.
Shirou could not even scream properly.
His jaw locked. His throat spasmed. What came out was a thin, broken sound, the kind an animal made when it had already gone past panic and hit something lower and uglier.
Whatever that thing had done to him, whatever it had changed in his weak, ruined body, it had stayed.
Permanently.
Even after the jagged black thing had been ripped out of him. Even after the cool salvation that had replaced it. Even after the man with shaking hands had dragged him back from death.
His body still remembered. It remembered too well.
The convulsions kept tearing through him for what felt like forever and probably only lasted a few minutes. Time had become stupid lately. Either everything happened at once, or it dragged on so long it felt like punishment. There was never an in-between.
Eventually, slowly, the shaking eased. Not because it was done with him.
It was more like it had gotten bored for now.
His limbs dropped back to the bed one by one. The burning lines under his skin dimmed until they were only a phantom ache, an afterimage of pain stamped somewhere too deep to touch. He lay there panting, drenched in sweat, chest heaving against whatever held him in place.
Only then did he manage to open his eyes, light stabbing into them hard enough to make him squint.
"...Huh!?"
It was too bright.
That was his first thought. Not where he was or whether he was alive. Just that it was bright in a way his eyes were not used to anymore.
The fire had been bright too, but that brightness had been wrong. It was violent and hungry. This was different. Daylight slipped in through glass and painted everything soft with white, clean light.
He blinked up at it, dazed.
'What is this?'
His vision took a second to settle. When it did, surprise came a little late, like everything else.
He was lying on a bed he did not know, in a room he did not know.
The ceiling above him was white. The sheets were white. The walls were white. The whole room looked painfully clean, as though the world had decided to overcorrect after showing him too much ash and blood and red. It should have felt alien. Instead, in a way he could not explain, it felt safe.
He turned his head.
The room was large, lined with bed after bed. There were people in them. Men, women, children. Some wrapped in bandages. Some asleep. Some staring blankly at ceilings of their own. Everyone looked hurt.
But nothing here felt wrong.
No, that was not quite it. Nothing here felt like the fire.
The hurt in this room was the hurt of people who had been pulled out. People who had lost and broken and bled, but had still been saved in the end.
Shirou looked down at himself.
He was covered in bandages and restraints. His skin too pale where it showed, his arms thin, wrong, and not entirely his.
A dull thought drifted through his head, so flat it almost circled around to funny.
Wⷲhͪyͤ ͬiͤs ͥa̾ cͫoⷱrᶠpͣsͫeͥᶫ ⷱlyⷲiͪnⷱg ͣoͫn ͥth̾iͭsͥᶫ ᶫbeͪdͤ?ͬᵉ
He stared at the ceiling for another second. Before, because there was nothing else to do, he let his gaze wander toward the window.
Outside, the sky was blue. So blue it looked fake, like somebody had painted it there to mess with him. After all that red, all that smoke, all that black, the sight of it was almost offensive.
It was beautiful. And for a while, he just looked at it.
After a few days, Shirou finally understood what had happened.
Bits and pieces clicked into place while the rest of him lagged behind. But by then, he could remember the important parts. The terrible fire. The ash. The pain. The man with the trembling hands. The black shard ripped from his chest. The cool thing pressed into its place. He remembered enough to know that he had been saved.
His body had made it.
Everything else was harder to define. Even then, he was not much different from a newborn baby.
That was not just a metaphor. It was close to the truth.
He had to relearn simple things.
How to wake without panicking. How to breathe through the flare of the invisible veins crawling under his skin. How to wait for the convulsions to pass instead of thinking every single one meant he was dying all over again. How to understand that the bed beneath him was real, the ceiling was real, the nurses were real, and none of it would suddenly melt back into fire if he blinked for too long.
Anyway, it had been a terrible fire.
He had been saved from it. He was in a hospital. His body was wrapped in bandages. His parents were gone.
He did not fully understand the situation at first, but he vaguely understood that he was alone.
He thought he understood quickly.
There were other children around him. More than enough. Children with burns. Children with vacant eyes. Children who cried in their sleep. Children who stared too long at doors that never opened for the people they wanted. Seeing them made it impossible to pretend he was special.
So all he could do was absorb the fact.
He was alone. They were alone.
Did that make them brothers and sisters?
But the strange new thing living in his body did not care.
The convulsions remained.
They came less violently than that first waking fit, but they came. A sudden seizure in the middle of the night. A flare of those invisible electric veins running wild under his skin until he bit his own lip to keep from crying out. Doctors called it shock, or trauma, or some vague medical word adults used when they did not know what the hell they were looking at.
They strapped him down gently when he slept so he would not throw himself from the bed. They gave him medicine that did nothing. They spoke in soft voices outside the curtain and pretended he could not hear the uncertainty in them.
Shirou did hear it. He heard all of it.
And then that man came. He came right when Shirou had started to wonder what would happen to him next.
It was the day Shirou's bandages had finally come off enough that he could sit up without help and eat on his own. The day the nurses had stopped looking at him like he might shatter if spoken to too loudly.
The convulsions and those invisible electric veins were still there, still lurking under his skin like buried wires waiting to flare, but the rest of him looked well enough to be moved.
That was the day the man arrived.
He had a wrinkled coat and uncombed hair.
He looked a bit younger than the doctors. Less like an adult in charge and more like someone's useless older brother who had wandered into the wrong building by accident and somehow not been kicked out yet.
He was not imposing or dignified, and not especially trustworthy on first glance, if Shirou was being honest.
But his face was kind.
"Hello. You must be Shirou-kun."
His smile seemed to melt into the white sunlight coming through the window.
Shirou thought it was a suspicious voice, but a very kind one.
The man crouched down to be at eye level with him, hands shoved into the pockets of that battered coat like he was trying to look casual and not quite pulling it off.
"I'll ask you directly. Which would you prefer? To go to an orphanage, or to be adopted by this man you've never seen before?"
That got Shirou's attention.
He blinked at him.
The man was saying he could adopt him.
As if that were a normal thing to say.
As if people just walked into hospital rooms and offered to change the course of a life like they were asking what you wanted for lunch.
Before Shirou could answer, the man's expression softened further. "And before you ask, yes, I know about the shaking. The convulsions. The pain. I can help with that too. It's something no doctor here is going to be able to fix."
Shirou stared at him.
The doctors had not helped. The nurses had been kind, but kindness was not the same as answers. Every time his body spasmed and those hidden veins lit him up from the inside, every time he woke with his jaw aching from clenching against pain no one else could see, the adults around him had only ever looked helpless.
This stranger did not look helpless. He looked tired, kind, and maybe a little suspicious, but not helpless.
"Are you a relative?" Shirou asked after a moment.
The man shook his head easily.
"Nope. Just a stranger."
That should have made the decision harder.
It really should have.
The man looked unreliable. He had no polished air about him, no steady doctor voice, no guardian-like gravity. He looked like the sort of person who forgot meals and lost things and maybe slept on couches because organizing his own life was apparently too much work.
He looked, in the blunt judgment of a child, like an unreliable guy with no future.
But it made no difference.
Shirou knew nothing about this man. He knew nothing about the orphanage either. Between one unknown and another, the choice stopped feeling like a choice at all.
So he decided to go with him.
The answer came easier than he expected.
"I'll go with you."
The man's eyes widened just slightly, like he had not really believed it would be that simple.
He smiled.
"I see. That's good. Get ready quickly, then. You should get used to your new place as fast as you can."
He said it lightly, but there was relief under it. A huge, almost hidden relief, like he had been bracing for refusal and had only just now realized he did not have to.
He immediately started packing Shirou's things.
He fumbled folded clothes into a bag like he was trying to beat them into submission. He nearly dropped a set of eating utensils. He put one thing away, forgot where he put it, pulled three others out looking for it, and somehow created a bigger mess than the one he had started with.
Shirou watched all this from the bed in silence.
'Wow.' He thought. 'He's kind of terrible at this.'
The man finally noticed the wreckage he had made and laughed awkwardly, scratching the back of his head.
"Oh, I forgot to mention something important. I have to tell you one thing before you come with me. Is that okay?"
He turned back to Shirou with that same careless, lighthearted look, like what he was about to say was no big deal at all.
"Yeah, to start off with, I'm a Magician."
He said it in a serious, exaggerated tone.
It happened in an instant.
Come to think of it now, Shirou really had been a child back then.
He believed him immediately.
His eyes lit up.
"Wow…" He said, and he meant it with his whole heart. "You're awesome."
That might not have been the exact wording. He did not really remember. Memory was weird around that time. Some moments stayed sharp forever, and others blurred into feelings more than facts.
But his father would tell that story again and again later, always with the same fond, helpless smile, like that single reaction had hit him harder than bullets ever could.
So for Emiya Kiritsugu, that might have been the happiest day of his life.
It was strange, looking back. It was strange for that man to say he was a Magician with a straight face. And it was stranger still for Shirou to admire that so instantly and completely.
But that was how it happened. Since that time, he became his child.
And thus, his last name became Emiya.
Emiya Shirou.
The name had felt new and warm and strange on his tongue.
But he had been proud of it before he even fully understood why.
...
CLAANG!
A loud crash jolted him awake.
"SHIIROUUU!"
His eyes snapped open.
For one disoriented second, all he saw was the dim interior of the shed and the silhouette of a woman charging into it like a natural disaster given human form. He flinched backward on instinct, hit something behind him, and the metal pipe he had been holding loosely while half-asleep slipped right out of his grasp and smacked him square in the face.
"Ow, damn it!"
What an amazing start to the morning.
The young woman with brown hair either did not notice or did not care. With Fujimura Taiga, both options were equally possible.
She planted herself in the doorway like she owned the place and pointed dramatically at him.
"Get up! Breakfast is not going to make itself, you know! And how many times have I told you not to sleep in this dusty-musty, dangerous shed? Honestly, Shirou, do you want tetanus? Do you want some rusty murder-nail to jump out and get you?! Because this is exactly how that happens!"
Shirou sat there in his work clothes, rubbing his face with one hand and staring up at her through a haze of fresh annoyance.
He had fallen asleep while working again. That much was obvious now. The pipe in his lap, the half-finished stove beside him, the faint ache in his shoulders. Yeah. Checks out.
He sighed.
"G-God damn it, Fuji-nee…" He muttered, voice rough with sleep. "Do you have to be so loud in the morning?"
Taiga put both hands on her hips and puffed out her chest proudly, as if she had just been praised instead of insulted.
"If I'm not here to do this for you, who will?!" She declared.
Shirou looked at her for a long, flat second.
"...Lucky me." He muttered with a deadpan stare.
Taiga's face lit up with complete sincerity, she nodded repeatedly, firmly, and with complete conviction.
"Hn! Hn! Lucky you!"
Yeah.
Unfortunately for him, she actually meant it.