For the rest of the evening, Shirou and Rin played together as if they had known each other for far longer than a single afternoon.
It happened so naturally that neither of them seemed to notice it. One moment they had just met, and the next they were arguing over which animals at the zoo would win in a fight, whether melon soda was actually good or just looked cool, and whether sandcastle walls counted as cheating if you pressed them down to make them harder.
They talked with the total sincerity only children could manage, as if every stupid little opinion was a matter of life and death and every answer genuinely mattered.
Somehow, without either of them realizing it, they carefully avoided stepping anywhere near certain topics. Neither of them said anything about things they had been taught not to say out loud, and neither of them noticed the absence.
They were just two kids in a park, talking about things that meant absolutely nothing and therefore, at that age, meant everything.
Rin turned out to be much funnier than Shirou had expected.
That had taken him a little off guard at first, mostly because she carried herself like some tiny queen sent down from on high to judge ordinary people. She always seemed one second away from putting her hands on her hips and declaring something beneath her notice.
But once Shirou got used to that and stopped being dazzled every time she looked at him directly, he realized that half the things she said were either dry little jabs or unexpectedly brutal observations delivered in the calmest voice possible.
At one point, one of the boys who had run off earlier came back from the swings, tripped over his own feet, and nearly faceplanted into a bush.
Rin watched it happen with a blank, mildly amused stare as her hand lifted to cover her grin in a bid to look more proper.
"That looked like it hurt his dignity more than his body."
Shirou laughed so hard he nearly inhaled sand.
After that, Rin seemed to relax.
She sat with him in the sandbox, then wandered with him over to the jungle gym, then sat again on the curb near the swings with one leg crossed over the other, talking in that perfectly composed way of hers while Shirou listened with complete attention.
She told him which snacks were overrated. And then went on to explain how her guardian had this terrible way with words, and the worst jokes known to mankind. So that's why Shirou should never trust priests and always consider them to be suspicious till proven innocent.
Shirou found that last one especially profound.
He nodded so seriously that Rin looked absurdly pleased with herself for a moment before catching it and pretending she had not.
He told her about a stray cat that kept appearing near his house and kept meowing at him to give her food, as if it paid rent. He had then told her about the time he had asked his big sis to make toast, and she had burned so bad they had needed to replace the entire toaster.
At some point, the subject turned, as it almost always did with Shirou, to his dad.
It was not even a deliberate turn. It just happened. Rin asked some small question about whether he usually came to the park alone, and the answer led to Taiga, and Taiga led to the house, and the house led to Kiritsugu, and once Kiritsugu came up, that was basically the end of any hope of Shirou shutting up.
He brightened immediately.
"My dad is really cool!" He said with the absolute certainty of a child making an objective statement about the structure of reality.
"He knows all kinds of things. Like, really weird things. And normal things too, but mostly weird things. He can fix stuff, and he goes away for a while sometimes, but when he comes back he always brings stories, and he knows all this amazing stuff and says things that sound really important even when I do not totally get it yet!"
Rin sat beside him quietly listening with her hands folded in her lap.
But Shirou, tragically, did not notice the look on her face.
He noticed that she was listening, sure, and that only made him more enthusiastic. But he did not notice the shape of her smile, or the way her eyes went a little softer and a little sadder all at once, or the small thread of jealousy woven through it.
Because there was jealousy there, the sharp little ache of hearing someone talk about their father like that. So openly and easily, and with so much warmth, admiration, and uncomplicated love.
It made something twist in Rin's chest. She hated that, but it was not enough to make her stop listening.
Shirou kept going, because of course he did.
"He is kind of weird sometimes." Shirou admitted, lowering his voice like he was revealing a great family secret. "He says really strange stuff, and he gets this look on his face like he is thinking about something really far away. But he is still amazing. I want to be just like him when I grow up. A Hero!"
He said it with such bright confidence that Rin had to look away for a moment.
Because what was she supposed to do with that?
He was just saying it. He was just a boy talking about his father.
But he said it like it was so easy. Like love and admiration did not have to tangle themselves up with grief and disappointment.
Shirou finally ran out of momentum enough to take a breath.
"What about your dad, Rin?" He asked as he turned to her, entirely unknowing of what such words meant to her.
The change in her was immediate.
It was not dramatic. She did not flinch or gasp or look like she had been struck. If anything, the shift was small enough that most people probably would not have caught it.
"...This was a mistake." Rin muttered, after a few moments of solemn silence.
Shirou blinked.
He did not understand what she meant.
Judging by the way Rin's lips pressed together, she regretted saying even that much. She began to pull back, shifting as if to stand.
"Sorry." She murmured, not meeting his eyes. "I should go."
Shirou's chest tightened.
He did not know what he had done wrong. Worse, he had that awful sinking feeling that he had somehow stepped on something important without even seeing it first.
He opened his mouth, probably to apologize, maybe to ask her not to go, maybe to blurt out something stupid that would only make it worse.
And then Taiga arrived sprinting across the park with a paper bag in one hand and two ice creams in the other, took one look at the two children sitting close together in the sandbox, and gasped so dramatically that several pigeons took off from a nearby tree.
"Oh my God!"
Both Shirou and Rin jerked their heads toward her.
Taiga stopped a few feet away and stared at them like she had just stumbled upon a scandal of national importance.
"What is this?!" She demanded. "What is this suspiciously adorable atmosphere?! Shirou, explain yourself immediately!"
Shirou went bright red in under a second.
"Huh?! W-What are you even talking about?!"
Rin, who had still been halfway through standing up, froze in place and went pink just as quickly.
Taiga's grin turned downright villainous.
"So this is what was going on while I was gone~..." She whispered slyly, waggling one finger at them both. "I leave you alone for one tiny little trip and suddenly there is a girl. A cute girl. A very cute girl! Shirou, you move fast for a little kid."
She sounded personally shocked by the last sentence.
"We were just talking!" Shirou protested.
"Yes." Rin added firmly, finding enough composure to lift her chin a little. "And it was perfectly normal."
"BAH–?!" Taiga gasped again. "They are already presenting a united front!?"
"We are not doing that!" Shirou said.
"You are absolutely doing it right now!"
Rin's face got even warmer, and she folded her arms with as much dignity as a blushing child could manage.
"You are being ridiculous."
Taiga leaned down closer, narrowing her eyes in theatrical suspicion.
"Oh, are you the bold type? I see. So you are the kind of girl who swoops in when I am gone and steals my little brother's attention…"
Shirou made the exact same face he always made when Taiga said something especially stupid. That flat, deeply tired expression of someone who had been forced by fate to coexist with a clown.
"Fuji-nee, please stop saying weird things. People might misunderstand…" He said with pained patience.
"Weird things? Weird things?! Shirou, there is a mysterious beautiful girl next to you in a park at sunset and I am the weird one?" Taiga barked as she whipped toward him in outrage.
"Yes!"
"Absolutely not!"
Rin, meanwhile, had gone from flustered to deeply confused.
She pointed at herself. "Beautiful?"
"Hn, hn, hn!" Taiga turned back toward her and nodded rapidly, as though this were the least controversial part of the conversation.
"Yes. Very suspiciously so. You have a dangerous face."
Rin stared.
"What does that even mean?"
"It means that you look like the sort of young vixen who would charm a sweet, innocent boy and lure him to your side." Taiga said, placing one hand dramatically over her own chest righteously.
Rin made a tiny strangled noise.
"A... A vixen?!"
The word hit her so hard it seemed to override every other emotion for a moment. Her whole face turned scarlet. Bashfully offended in a way that only made her look more embarrassed, which probably would have been humiliating if she had the spare mental capacity to process it.
Shirou got there first.
"Do not call her that!" He said, horrified.
Taiga spun toward him with the raw expression of a woman betrayed.
There was genuine heartbreak in her eyes.
"Shirou…" She whispered, hand still over her chest. "You are taking her side?"
Shirou frowned. "Of course I am! You are bullying her!"
Taiga recoiled like he had stabbed her in the soul.
"Betrayal! Unbelievable betrayal! I raise you with love, care, and occasional food, and this is how you repay me? For a young vixen?"
"I am not a vixen!" Rin burst out mortified, waving her clenched hands up and down. "And you did not raise him!"
"Wa-Waat?! I literally gave birth to that boy!"
"I freaking beg to differ!"
Shirou tried very hard not to laugh, he really did. And for a few heroic seconds, he managed to keep a straight face.
Then he looked at Taiga clutching her heart like an actress in a melodrama, looked at Rin blushing furiously and trying to defend her own dignity from a word she had clearly never expected to be called in her life, and the whole thing finally broke him.
"Pftt… Ahahahaha~!"
Rin and Taiga both turned on him instantly, but unfortunately for everyone involved, it was far too late to stop his laughter.
"Don't laugh!" Rin snapped.
"Yeah, don't laugh!" Taiga barked while pointing at him accusingly. "This is very serious!"
A moment later, Taiga paused in slow realisation. "Wait a minute… My Shirou is laughing? I can barely get him to laugh much anymore!"
She turned to Rin, and with the distraught sadness of a grieving mother, cried out.
"It's not fair, it should have been me!"
That only made it worse as Shirou tried to stop and failed immediately, shoulders shaking as he laughed into one hand.
"I-I'm s-sorry, I'm so sorry–! I c-can't, this is too– pfft– Ahahahaha~!"
"Shirou!" "Emiya!"
Shirou was helpless as the laughter drove him to hunch over onto his hands and knees, and both girls were glaring at him with the exact same expression without realizing it.
That somehow made the scene even funnier.
In that ridiculous little moment, the sadness that had settled over Rin earlier, the awkwardness that had followed Shirou's careless question, and all the strange little heaviness neither of them had known how to name got blown away by pure nonsense.
Eventually, Taiga huffed and thrust one of the ice creams toward Shirou.
"Here." She said with immense dignity, as if she had not just accused a seven-year-old girl of being a predatory enchantress. "Eat this and calm down."
She then shoved the other one toward Rin.
Rin stared at it for a moment, before turning up to face Taiga. She accepted it with quiet caution after a few moments, like she was not entirely sure whether this was a peace offering or the next phase of the attack.
Taiga just grinned dopily.
Shirou finally got himself under control enough to breathe again.
The three of them sat there awkwardly for a moment, eating ice cream in the cooling evening light.
"So…"
Or well, at least for a little while.
"...Are you his girlfriend now?"
Unfortunately, peace and common sense dies in contact with Fujimura Taiga.
…
It took a couple of weeks for Rin to finally meet Shirou's dad.
By then, their meeting at the park had stopped feeling like an accident and had quietly become a pattern. They didn't meet every day, unfortunately their lives and schedules didn't always align, but they had met often enough that the park started to feel less like public ground and more like a place that belonged to the two of them for an hour or two in the late afternoon.
Every other day, more or less, they met there.
They played, they talked.
And once the park itself got too small for their curiosity, they wandered off to explore Fuyuki together under the vague and reckless assumption that the whole town was basically an extension of their playground.
Somehow, little by little, Rin got pulled out of her shell.
Shirou did not do it on purpose. He was not nearly self-aware enough for that. He just had a habit of treating her like she was already part of whatever he was doing, and that weirdly left her with very little room to stay aloof about it.
If he wanted to cross the street, he grabbed her hand and crossed the street.
If he saw something interesting two blocks away, he did not ask for permission or offer polite alternatives. He just looked at her, brightened, said, "Come on, Rin," and then dragged her along by the hand without a care in the world.
He seemed completely oblivious to how much it embarrassed her.
The first few times it happened, Rin had gone so red she looked ready to combust on the spot. She would tense up from head to toe, glance around to make sure no one was looking, and then march after him anyway while trying very hard to pretend the contact did not matter.
It mattered. A lot.
She was just too proud to make a real issue out of it, especially when Shirou himself looked so utterly innocent about the whole thing that accusing him of anything felt impossible.
Taiga, on the other hand, had been utterly devastated.
The first time she saw Shirou casually holding Rin's hand while leading her across the road, she had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and made a sound like her soul was leaving her body. Then, after a solid five seconds of staring, that devastation somehow twisted into a strange, tearfully proud sort of awe that Shirou did not understand at all.
"My baby brother…" She whispered dramatically, clutching at her chest. "He's growing up into a future womanizer right before my eyes. After all the love and effort I put into raising him."
Rin had gone crimson.
Shirou hadn't bothered trying to unpack what she said mostly because Taiga had already moved on to insisting that he at least wait a few more years till he graduated middle school before starting his harem.
By the day Shirou invited Rin over for dinner, the hand-holding had become something she had mostly gotten used to.
Mostly.
She still blushed a little whenever he reached for her. She still stiffened for the first second before resigning herself to it. But now she let him pull her along with only mild embarrassment instead of full-body shutdown, which counted as enormous progress by any reasonable standard.
They arrived at the Emiya house in the late evening, just as the sky was shifting into those deep blue shades before night fully settled.
Rin stopped dead at the gate.
The house was huge.
That was her first thought. It looked like a proper manor. The kind of place she would have expected from some old family with too much money and perhaps some deeper secrets, not from Shirou, who talked about his home with the same casual tone most children used for apartments and snack cupboards.
She looked up at the long roofline and the broad grounds and the traditional structure sitting with quiet weight in the fading light.
She looked at Shirou for a moment before turning to look back at the house.
"...How does your father afford all of this?" She asked, trying and failing to keep the disbelief out of her voice.
Shirou, already halfway through opening the gate, answered without even pausing to think.
"My dad is awesome, duh?" He stated, as if that explained literally everything. "So that is probably why."
Rin stared at him for a second. It was such a useless answer that it somehow looped all the way around into being impossible to argue with.
So it seemed like she had no choice but to accept it.
"...I see." She said carefully.
Inside, the house felt even larger. Shirou took her inside with no sense at all that this place might be intimidating to anyone else. He just slipped off his shoes, waited for her to do the same, and led her toward the living room.
As soon as they entered, she saw that Taiga was already there.
She sat by the low table watching television with complete dedication, one leg folded under her and a tangerine in her hands. She was in the middle of peeling it in one long spiral with the air of someone performing sacred work.
"Fuji-nee, I brought Tohsaka!" Shirou called.
Taiga turned, saw them, and brightened immediately.
"Rin-chan!" She said, as if they were already old friends. "Welcome!"
Rin gave a small polite bow, she could still not figure out how to handle Taiga when she was being sincere
"T-Thank you for having me."
"Of course, of course…" Taiga said, waving off the formality with her sticky tangerine hand. "Come sit down. You can sit next to me. I promise I only look dangerous when I am hungry."
"That is not reassuring." Rin murmured before she could stop herself.
Taiga either did not hear that or chose to take it as a compliment.
Rin sat beside her a little nervously and watched as Shirou, without fanfare or hesitation, walked off toward the kitchen by himself.
That gave her pause as she looked after him. She stared for a moment before turning back to Taiga who was still freely humming and peeling the tangerine, clearly not paying attention to her little brother cooking alone.
Rin frowned slightly.
"Why is he doing it by himself?" She asked after a small moment.
Taiga blinked at her.
Rin tried again, gentler this time. "I mean, why are you not helping him? Or his father?"
Taiga's expression shifted into genuine confusion, as if Rin had just asked if the sky was truly blue or if it was secretly green all along.
"...B-But..." Taiga said slowly. "Shirou's place is in the kitchen, n-no?"
Bless her heart.
God knew there was not enough going on up there for her to understand what was wrong with that statement.
Rin stared at her in silence, she did not know what to say. There were too many possible responses and all of them felt rude.
So instead she just sat there for another minute, listening to the sounds of the television and the faint clatter coming from the kitchen, until the whole thing became unbearable.
She stood up, a determined expression covering her face slowly.
Taiga looked up at her. "Hm?"
Rin squared her shoulders and marched toward the kitchen like a tiny warlord on a mission.
When she reached the doorway, she saw Shirou standing on a small step stool at the counter, already in the middle of washing vegetables and setting ingredients out with the calm rhythm of someone completely in his element.
He looked over at the sound of her steps.
"Oh. Tohsaka?"
Rin huffed, rolled up her sleeves with a small annoyed motion. "Move over and tell me what you were planning to make."
Shirou looked confused for exactly one second, before a small, bright smile covered his face. He nodded without argument and stepped aside just enough to make space for her, like this was the most natural development in the world.
"I was going to make a simple Japanese dinner." He explained, pointing out ingredients as he spoke. "Rice, grilled fish, miso soup, and a few side dishes. I was still deciding on the vegetables."
Rin nodded, already scanning the counter. She spotted a few things he had not laid out yet and adjusted the plan in her head without saying so aloud. If it was going to be dinner with guests, then it should be proper.
Between the two of them, the kitchen filled with noise.
Shirou handled the basics with surprising competence. His knife work was a little awkward in places, but careful. His timing was good. He washed things properly. He moved around the space like he belonged there, and somehow that made the whole room feel warmer.
Rin, once she stopped being self-conscious about stepping in, found the rhythm with him quickly.
She added Chinese side dishes to the meal, first on impulse and then with growing confidence as Shirou listened to her suggestions without protest. He just nodded and adjusted, helping where she asked and copying what she showed him when she took over part of the preparation.
Together they cooked a simple Japanese dinner with a few Chinese dishes worked in at the sides, the sort of meal that felt homey rather than formal.
Vegetables hissed in the pan as the soup simmered gently, and the rice was steamed.
The air slowly filled with the layered smell of soy, stock, toasted sesame, fish, and warm starch. It was the kind of smell that made a house feel lived in.
At some point, the two of them fell into an easy back-and-forth without even noticing.
"Not like that." Rin said, reaching over to adjust the angle of his knife. "If you cut it that thick, it will not cook evenly."
"Like this?" Shirou asked.
"A little thinner."
He tried again, and Rin nodded a few moments later.
"That is better."
Shirou looked absurdly pleased by the approval.
A little later, while Rin was stirring one of the side dishes, Shirou leaned over slightly to look.
"How did you know to add that?"
Rin lifted her chin with faint pride, and not wanting to give any kind of credit to her useless guardian. "Because it obviously needs it."
He laughed under his breath. "That is not really an explanation."
"It is if you have common sense."
"I think that was an insult."
"It was half an insult."
"That is very generous of you."
Rin tried not to smile and failed a little anyway.
By the time they were done, the kitchen had gone soft with heat and the windows had slightly fogged at the corners.
Shirou looked over the finished dishes with satisfaction. He turned to her with his signature stupidly bright smile at the ready.
"Thanks, Tohsaka. That helped a lot."
Rin froze. The steam in the room may as well have burst straight out of her head.
She looked down immediately, trying and failing to keep her face composed. Her cheeks felt too warm. Her heartbeat had gone strange for reasons she refused to examine. It was only after a few seconds that she managed to look back up at him.
When she did, her voice came out softer than before.
"Call me Rin."
Shirou gave her a shocked stare, like the idea had stunned him on a fundamental level. Then, because he was Shirou, he recovered almost instantly and took it in stride with no understanding whatsoever of how much courage that had just cost her.
"Okay, Rin." The way he said it so easily made something in her stomach flip. "Then you should call me Shirou." He added a moment later.
Rin opened her mouth, but nothing useful came out. She closed it, then tried again.
"You are..." She began, then gave up halfway and muttered under her breath. "You are such a dummy."
Even so, she nodded. And that was answer enough for him. He giggled softly and went back to finishing up their cooking.
Rin's face heated further at that and she punched him weakly on the shoulder.
"Don't laugh!"
"I am not making fun of you!" He said, which was technically true even if he was still clearly amused by something.
It did not reassure her.
In the meanwhile, neither of them noticed the audience they had acquired.
Taiga had long since muted the television and turned fully in her seat to watch them with a deeply satisfied grin, like a woman observing a crop finally come in after months of hard labor.
The living room door was still open behind her. And in that doorway stood Kiritsugu Emiya.
His face was twisted, filled with shock, recognition, and disbelief.
How could it not?
He had obviously heard about her from Shirou by now. Heard the name. Heard vague descriptions. Heard that his son had made a new friend at the park and that she was "cool", "kind of bossy", "really smart", and "sometimes weirdly red in the face for no reason".
Part of him had not wanted to believe it. Or maybe it was more honest to say that he had not known what to do with the possibility, so he had avoided thinking about it too hard.
But now she was here, in his house. Standing in the kitchen beside Shirou.
Tohsaka Rin.
The daughter of the man he had fought in the previous Holy Grail War. Tohsaka Tokiomi.
For one terrible second, memory overlapped with the present so sharply that Kiritsugu felt almost sick. A distant nobleman's face. Choices that had seemed inevitable then and monstrous afterward. The daughter of that man was here, blushing in his kitchen because his son had just called her by her first name.
Life was insane.
The children turned toward him when he spoke, both brightening immediately at the sight of him, and Kiritsugu's face smoothed over with practiced speed.
The shock vanished, the complexity buried itself, and in its place came an easy smile so natural that only someone who knew him extremely well would have noticed how deliberate it was.
"Dinner smells good."
Shirou brightened instantly. "Dad, you're back!"
Kiritsugu stepped further into the room.
Rin straightened right away.
For just a second she looked taken aback by him, and Kiritsugu understood why. He did not exactly look like the father Shirou described when he got excited. He looked tired, gaunt. A little too worn around the edges.
Yet, somehow, he didn't seem immediately weak to her, it was more like life had taken a hammer to his soul and never quite stopped.
Still, Rin gathered herself quickly and bowed with perfect manners.
"My name is Rin Tohsaka, thank you for allowing me to visit."
Kiritsugu looked at her.
And immediately, he saw in her the inheritance of blood and history in a child who should have had no business standing in his home and yet somehow fit into the scene in front of him too naturally.
"I am Emiya Kiritsugu. It is nice to meet you, Tohsaka-chan."
His smile turned slightly complicated.
"And thank you for taking care of my son." He added after glancing between the two children with a softness he had not quite intended.
Shirou went red. Rin somehow managed to go even redder.
And behind them, Taiga's grin sharpened into something teasing and unbearably proud.
Kiritsugu noticed all of it and kept his expression steady by force.
Rin looked down for a second, then back up, clearly fighting to regain some amount of composure.
When she finally answered, her voice came out bashful in a way she probably would have denied under torture.
"Yeah, well…" She said softly. "Of course I would. Shirou's... my best friend, after all."
…
Unfortunately, Fate had no intention of letting their story continue as it was.
Maybe that was giving fate too much credit. Perhaps there was no grand will behind it, no invisible author smirking over the page and deciding that two lonely children finding each other was too warm and suspiciously merciful.
It could have just been pure chance. The world was simply ugly in small, ordinary ways, and sometimes those small uglinesses arrived with a knife in hand.
But looking back, Shirou always felt like that day had been a turning point.
It had been the day of a fireworks festival, the sort of summer evening where the whole town seemed to dress itself in noise and color.
Stalls lined the streets, red lanterns swayed in the humid air, and the smell of grilled squid, fried batter, sugar, and smoke mixed together until the whole world felt like it had been dipped in festival grease. Children ran with masks pushed crooked over their heads. Couples walked too close together and pretended no one noticed. Adults complained about the crowd while clearly enjoying themselves.
Shirou and Rin were trying to reach the main courtyard before the fireworks started.
Trying was the key word.
The main road was packed so tightly that moving through it felt like being trapped in a river of people. Everyone had the same idea, and apparently that idea was to stand exactly where Shirou wanted to go. Rin, after enduring all of twenty seconds of this nonsense, had clicked her tongue and pointed toward a side alley.
"This way is faster!" She had said with absolute confidence, tugging lightly at his sleeve. "If we cut through here, we can reach the main road near the courtyard without dealing with all these people."
Shirou had looked into the alley.
It was darker than the festival street, narrow and quiet, with the lantern glow barely reaching inside. A normal person might have found it a little suspicious. Shirou, unfortunately, had been a child, and more importantly, he trusted Rin's sense of direction with reckless certainty.
"Okay!"
So they went.
The festival sounds softened behind them, turning distant and muffled. Their footsteps echoed lightly against old pavement. The walls on either side trapped the heat of the day, but the alley itself carried a faint smell of damp concrete and old trash.
It was not pleasant, exactly, but it was quieter, and the strip of darkening sky overhead still glowed with the last blue of evening.
Rin walked slightly ahead, pleased with herself for finding a better route. Shirou followed close behind, carrying the small paper bag of snacks Taiga had forced into his hands before declaring she would secure their future dinner opportunities by raiding every food stall in sight.
Everything was normal, until the man stepped out from behind a stack of crates.
He looked wrong before Shirou even saw the knife.
His clothes hung loose and dirty on a thin frame. His hair was tangled. His eyes were too wide, unfocused and shining in the dim alley light. He smelled of sweat, alcohol, and something sour that made Shirou's nose wrinkle before fear fully arrived.
In one hand, low at his side, he held a kitchen knife with a chipped handle.
For a heartbeat, all three of them stared at each other.
Rin moved first.
Shirou saw it in the way her posture changed, the way her shoulders tightened and her hand shifted toward him without quite touching him. Her eyes darted once to the knife, then to the narrow space behind them, then to the man's face.
She was thinking. Even then, even as a child, Rin was unbearably smart.
"Excuse us." She said carefully, her voice much steadier than Shirou's would have been. "We are just passing through. We do not want any trouble, so please let us leave."
The man's jaw twitched.
He muttered something Shirou could not make out. It might have been words. But whatever he would have said was lost to the world long before any one of them had entered this alleyway.
Rin took a small step back, fingers brushing Shirou's wrist.
"We should go…" She said softly, barely moving her mouth.
The man's gaze snapped to that movement, his knife coming up.
Shirou moved immediately.
There was no thought behind it. No plan or careful heroic decision. His body simply stepped in front of Rin as that was where it had always belonged, and the world narrowed to the knife, the distance, and the thin, burning lines waking beneath his skin.
His Magic Circuits flared, followed by pain racing along his body.
It should have staggered him, and it had, once. Long ago, when the circuits had first been left open and raw, when every activation had torn through him like live wires buried under his skin. But Kiritsugu had slowly, and patiently trained him through that.
So Shirou swallowed the pain with practiced ease.
His breath tightened along as his fingers curled around the hilt of the knife.
"Trace On...!"
He whispered the words before he even realized he had chosen to.
Od surged and a shape formed. Metal gathered into being at his palm, it lacked the clean perfection he would one day chase, but it would do for this moment. A knife appeared in his hand, simple and short, the only projection he could reliably call on at that age besides basic reinforcement.
He lunged.
And behind him, Rin made a sound of horror.
Shirou did not understand it then, because he could not look back. He could only see the man ahead, the knife in the man's hand, the angle of the wrist, the panic in the shoulders. Kiritsugu's lessons moved through him like someone else had taken hold of his bones.
Do not match strength when you do not need to.
The man slashed.
Shirou ducked under it by instinct more than skill. The blade hissed over his hair. His projected knife came up and struck the man's wrist shallowly. His other hand slammed into the man's forearm with more force than a child should have had, reinforcement flashing through muscles and bone for a single, ugly second.
The kitchen knife fell, clattering loudly against the pavement.
The man shouted and stumbled. Shirou stepped in because Kiritsugu had taught him that distance was either safety or death depending on who controlled it, then drove his shoulder into the man's stomach.
The man was shoved back against the wall, he bounced off and fell hard to the ground. Shirou grabbed the fallen knife and kicked it away before the man could reach for it again. When the man tried to rise, Shirou's projected blade hovered near his throat with a trembling hand.
"Don't move." Shirou said, breathing hard, sweat falling along his forehead. "Please. Just don't move."
The man stared up at him before the fight seemed to go out of him quickly. His eyes rolled back slightly, and he sagged against the ground, unconscious or close enough that Shirou could not tell the difference.
For several seconds, the alley was silent except for Shirou's ragged breathing and the distant boom of the first firework splitting open above the town.
Color flashed faintly overhead, flashing between red, blue, and gold. The colours painted their small world, and their small explosions rang in their ears.
Shirou lowered the projected knife. It flickered in his hand, unstable now that the moment had passed and his concentration had nowhere safe to land. A second later it broke apart into faint motes of light and vanished.
He turned back to Rin, panting, sweat running down his neck despite the night air.
"Rin, are you okay?" He asked quickly. "He did not get you, right?"
She did not answer.
She was staring at him, face going quickly pale. The color someone turned when the world had dropped out from under them and left nothing to stand on. Her eyes were fixed on his empty hand, where the knife had been a moment ago. Her lips parted slightly, but no words came out.
Shirou frowned.
"Rin?"
She looked from his hand to his face. By the time she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper, and her eyes were already filling with tears.
"S-Shirou... y-you are a ̾Mͥaⷫgⷫeͤʳ?"
Shirou blinked, he completely misunderstood the situation for a moment.
She knew that word. She knew what he was.
The surprise hit him first, then happiness rushed in right after, so bright and eager that it nearly tripped over itself. All the old warnings from Kiritsugu about secrecy and consequences and the Clock Tower and the Association were crushed under the simple childish joy of being understood by his best friend.
"You know about Mages?" Shirou asked, his face lighting up.
"That is amazing! My dad taught me about magecraft, and he helped me learn how to control my circuits because they were stuck active after the fire, and it used to hurt a lot, but now I can do this kind of thing if I focus. I can only really make knives right now, and sometimes basic reinforcement, but Dad said projection is probably my best area, so I have been practicing every day, and I thought maybe if I get better I can make even cooler things, like swords, because swords are obviously the best kind of weapon, and…"
His excited rambling died when Rin's breath hitched.
Only then did he really see her.
She was crying like something precious had just been stolen from her, and Shirou had no idea what it was or why he was suddenly holding the knife.
The joy drained out of him so quickly it almost made him dizzy.
"R-Rin?" He asked timidly. "Are you okay?"
Her hands clenched at her sides, shaking along with the rest of her whole body.
"No, I am not freaking okay!" She exploded, inevitably.
The shout cracked through the alley, sharp enough to cut through the distant festival noise. Shirou flinched back like she had struck him. Rin seemed to realize she had yelled, but it did not stop her. If anything, it made her tears come faster, and she wiped at them angrily, as if furious with her own face for betraying her.
"You were supposed to be n-normal!" She said, her voice shaking. "You were supposed to be the only normal thing I had. The only thing that did not have anything to do with all of this. I thought I could have one thing, just one thing, that had nothing to do with magecraft…"
Shirou stared at her.
He did not understand.
The words made sense individually, but together they became something that he just could not accept.
He wanted to step closer. He wanted to explain that this did not have to change anything. He wanted to tell her that it was good news, because now they could talk about it and not hide, because she understood, because she was Rin and he was Shirou and they were best friends.
But Rin kept talking.
She sniffled and wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her hand, her composure crumbling and hardening at the same time.
"But of course I cannot ever get away from it, I was really just kidding myself. I thought that if I did not ask, if I did not look too closely, if I just pretended hard enough, maybe it would not matter. But it always matters. It always comes back."
"Rin, wait!" Shirou said, panic beginning to creep into his voice. "Please, stop. Let me explain."
She stepped back.
The look she gave him stopped him in his tracks.
It was sad, angry, terrified, and worst of all, it was gentle in the place where anger should have been clean.
"Shirou…" She said, and her voice broke around his name. "Please forget about me, and do not let anyone else know you are a Mage."
The alley seemed to tilt around the small, red-haired child.
"...What?" Shirou whispered.
Rin took another step back. She could not meet his eyes for long. Every time she tried, her face twisted like it hurt.
"This is for the best, for both of us. I cannot protect you if they find out about you."
"Who is 'they'?!" Shirou asked, his throat tightening. "Rin, what are you talking about?! I do not need you to protect me from anything. I just saved you, right?! So it is okay. It is fine! We can just…!"
He trailed off because she was shaking her head.
She was already leaving.
"No, Rin, wait!" He shouted, the words coming out small.
But she did not wait. Before he could speak again, reach for her hand, before either of them could say anything that might have changed the shape of the wound opening between them, Rin Tohsaka turned and ran.
Shirou stumbled after her for half a step, but he did not chase her down.
Not that he could if he wanted to, he could not see where she had gone.
His vision was too blurry with tears.
…
Back in the present, Shirou sighed.
The hallway around him felt too bright and too ordinary, full of passing students and lunchtime chatter and the soft scrape of shoes against polished floor. It was absurd how normal everything could be while old memories sat in his chest like rusted hooks.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried his best to ignore the ache there.
"Sorry…" He whispered, bowingly slightly. "I wasn't looking where I was going."
Rin looked away before their eyes could meet properly.
She had always been good at that, these days. She simply angled her face a little, shifted her gaze past him, and made the avoidance look natural. To anyone else, it would have seemed like basic politeness between classmates who were not especially close.
To Shirou, it still hurt.
"Don't worry about it, I wasn't paying attention either."
Her voice was composed, perfectly controlled. But there was something beneath it.
A hint of regret, deep and buried so thoroughly that no one else in the hallway could possibly have heard it. It was the kind of emotion that only showed because Shirou had once known what her voice sounded like when she forgot to guard it.
He heard it, but he did not have the will to chase it anymore.
'I do not know if I will eventually forget those summer days we spent together, Rin. But I will never regret them. I swear it.'
He straightened and noted for a moment how close they were standing.
They were close enough that he could see the faint tension in her jaw. That she could probably see the way his hand had curled at his side, as if some younger version of him still wanted to reach for hers and drag her back to a time that no longer existed.
He did not. Instead, he just nodded politely and stepped past her.
"Have a good day, Tohsaka-san."
Rin's hand clenched tighter around her other wrist, her jaw tightening slightly.
For one brief second, it looked like she wanted to say something. Anything. A name, maybe. An apology, maybe. Some small, broken thing that had been lodged in her throat for years and still had not found its way out.
But she cleanly and brutally crushed it before it grew any more traitorous.
"...You as well, Emiya-kun."
Shirou kept walking with a dull ache he had learned to live around.
He did not look back.
'After all, you can try to return to the past… but no one will ever be there waiting for you.'