omg lany fic requests??? i'd love to see your take on post-ubw rin/&sakura, maybe with rin coming back from london to visit fuyuki. and if that doesn't hit for u then maybe a brief conversation between merlin and kiara. in karuna-verse if you're feeling spicy.
Alas I am just starting my playthrough of FSN, but next time...
For now, you're asking me to feed myself! Merlin and Kiara... in Karuna-verse... I will oblige.
CW: sexual harassment, discussion of incest
“Ah, you! Pretty lady over there! Come, come. Sit with me! I have a seat saved just for you.”
She blinks, casting a glance over at the corner of cafeteria where a fluffy white-haired man with a light and easy smile waves at her. He beckons her over, gesturing at one of several empty seats at a table where he sits completely alone.
She carefully picks her way through the rows, stepping back to avoid the trio of child Servants running past on their way to the counter.
“Hello! I don’t believe we’ve spoken before. What can I do for you?” She holds her tray and tilts her head, smiling.
His own tray is sparse—a perfunctory salad, some chips, a few dates. Based on what she’s heard from Ritsuka, it seems like he’s just eating it on a whim. Perhaps even to be polite to others in a half-assed kind of way. It’s not his preferred form of sustenance.
It’s not hers either, but she does love food: the sensory experience, the social construction of it.
“You can favor me with your presence, of course!” Beaming, he offers her a date like he’ll feed it to her by hand, and when she ignores it he shrugs and eats it himself. “That alone is enough for me,” he casually lies.
She looks at him for a moment, and glances away at the spot she had intended.
“Mmm,” she says noncommittally.
“Aw, don’t be like that! Please, I’ll make it worth your while!” He says it like he’s begging. Like he’s harmless. “I hear on the grapevine that you’ve been learning about romance. And I happen to have plenty of experience with that! So stay a while and listen.”
“Aha,” she laughs. Her mouth pulls to the side, scornfully. “No, you didn’t hear that from others. Did you enjoy the show, Mage of Flowers?”
Ritsuka would not have spoken carelessly about their conversation with anyone.
Least of all him.
“Very much, thank you!” His smile touches his eyes. “It’s exactly the kind of thing I love about humanity. That determination to get up and try again… I can’t help but want to see it succeed, eventually.”
“Hm. Well, I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”
“I was happy to see him again, after Babylonia! And, he’s helped us out so much. We… couldn’t have done it without him. …I’m grateful, really.” She crosses an arm across her front, and looks away, eyes distant. “I just… he offered to tutor me.” She looks guilty. Small. “Maybe I should’ve accepted.”
“Alright,” she says. “I have time. Let’s talk, then. Parasite to parasite.”
—
“So then! Would you like me to entertain you with a story over dinner?”
“Tales of your conquests? I’m not sure what I would gain from that. After all, you never loved any of them.”
“No? But plenty of them loved me! I may not know the qualia, but I do know of love. Maybe some of it will be of use to you!
He says it, watching her, taking her in. It is the trade, involuntary, unannounced, for his tutelage.
And when she assents, and he tells her his stories, she sees the same: young ladies, women. Some lost in the woods, pulled into the dark, into the tangle of limbs. Some that strike out with purpose, with understanding, bearing the marks he leaves upon them in exchange. Looking for power. For knowledge. For companionship. Morgan, Vivian, Nimue: and many nameless women, women and girls, forgotten to history.
Girls as Sessyoin Kiara was, once, long ago. As Fujimaru Ritsuka is now.
And, as he promised, sometimes there is love. Love, that distorts the path of life, that subverts their dreams. Love, that deceives. Love, that turns to hate. Love, through which the pain of their circumstance is transfigured into an inner forgiveness, into fragile hope: a dim, radiant light, like a match fire on a cold winter’s evening.
It is not quite enough to satisfy her. Nothing groundbreaking, though something of that ilk could be buried there, deeper, if she would only stay a little longer, come a little closer.
She could if she wanted to. She learned how, long ago, in a village in the mountains.
But she a promising path already, a horizon visible to her, in this journey alongside her Master, and it is pleasing to her. She has no question it is the superior vehicle to grasp the Dharma.
She swallows a bite of her meal.
“I think that’s quite enough of storytime, thank you.”
“Are you sure? Well, if you’re satisfied.”
It is nothing much, but there is at least one truth she has taken away.
—
They sit in silence for a little while after that, while he watches her.
“Hmmm. What’s that you’re eating?”
It’s an artificial question. He observed her whole conversation with Boudica, when she picked up her special order.
“It’s deer. Venison.” She delicately cuts off another piece of flesh with her fork and knife, and takes it from the tines with her mouth. “It’s quite good.”
“Wow, doesn’t that clash with your religious beliefs? That’s quite rebellious!”
He’s not actually curious about it either way, so she supposes it doesn’t matter that he already knows.
“Mmm,” she says, swallowing. “To put it simply. The precepts forbid the consumption of meat. It’s an important practice to accompany fundamental teachings about mastering craving, about considering one’s impact on other living beings. But it is possible to develop an attachment to the rule itself, if one follows it strictly throughout one’s life: it stops being a living practice, an act of intention, and becomes an immutable rule of life. Counterproductive, subtly, to teachings on impermanence, and the very type of boundary the Tachikawa school believes in dissolving. Hence, eating meat that was not taken from an animal killed for the sake of eating it. In this case, a deer killed incidentally in the ravages of combat, brought back for me by my considerate Master, where it has waited for me until today.”
Merlin rests his head on his wrists, watching her talk, watching her eat, watching her think.
“In the village I come from, a senior member of the community would decide the day for such a ritual after much consideration. But now I am the only member of my sect, and so, naturally, it falls to me to decide for myself. I thought I could use some perspective on the meaning of restraint and forbearance.
“If the point was to break down boundaries, then why did everyone have to wait for one person to decide?”
Kiara smiles. “Well, when I inherited the school, I made some changes.”
She wipes her mouth.
“Well, you’ve heard my story. But you seem to have no restrictions on your own diet. Would you like some?” She offers her fork, with a piece of meat speared on it, and he playfully leans across the table and takes it with his teeth.
He winks at her. “You’re right, it is good.”
“Yes! We are blessed fine hands in the kitchen here in Chaldea.
“And fine hands to hold the cutlery, as well. Everything tastes better when it’s fed to you by a beautiful woman.”
“You would accept a beautiful girl as well, I think.”
“I sure would! I certainly have before.”
“And if that hand were offering you the flesh of a lion,” she says. “Would you accept it?”
His face goes still. Not like someone schooling their expression, retreating behind stone walls. Just expressive one second, then flat the next. Like he’d dropped something.
“No, I don’t think so. I doubt it would taste very good.”
“Ah, but what if the chef were excellent? Prepared it to its full potential?”
“Hm. Still no.”
“How interesting! Not even if it were a different subspecies? One you hadn’t encountered before? You’re an adventurous eater, aren’t you? …Ah, this metaphor is growing strained.”
Merlin shifts his head back and forth, as if weighing choices. “Mmm, maybe.”
Kiara smiles patiently. “That’s a lie.”
His eyes work for a second. “Ah! So it is.” He eats a chip.
She looks at him.
“And why, do you think, might that be?”
He blinks. “If you were going to say it’s love, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Ah, but I do feel a sense of responsibility towards her.”
“Not as a father.”
“No, as a meddler.”
She takes another bite, and chews, as they both sit there in silence. He’s no longer collecting her every movement with his eyes.
He eats another date. He seems content to listen. Which is fine by her.
“A man wiser than both of us in matters of the heart once told me that it is love that renders desire powerless.”
If her eyes soften at the edges, or draw tight, who is to say?
“I myself, in my ignorance, can only see the shadows on the wall. So whatever shape your feelings may take in your own heart, or in the grand, romantic narrative of your tragic inhumanity as spun by your formidable ego, I am afraid all I can tell you is that the shape of your ‘responsibility’ looks quite familiar to my eyes.
He laughs. “I would be a terrible father.”
Standing at the entrance to the door, halfway to crossing the threshold. Watching. Then leaving.
“Not the worst I have met. But yes. I think you were.”
She begins to cut the venison steak on her plate once again. “I have met many men like you, Merlin. It’s true, I know very little about you, and your grand motivations, the course of your history. But it doesn’t matter to me. In the way you treat others… in your impact on their lives… in the way you choose to distribute your care, your consideration, and to obscure that choice from yourself.” She takes a bite. “To my eyes, you are as human they come.”
“Ooh,” he says. “Now there’s an interesting thought.”
He blinks a couple times. “Well, you’ve given me something interesting to push around my plate. Is there anything you’d like in exchange?”
“Of course! Don’t get involved with Ritsuka. Beyond that… her influence over her followers is too strong for you to turn all this into another Camelot. So whatever else you do is none of my concern.”
“Done! You know, the Count asked for the same thing. Looks like you fit right in here! And I—ah!” he says, gently smacking both his palms on the table, “I almost overstayed my welcome! If I keep up this dream any longer, I’m afraid you’ll finish figuring out how to reverse the connection, and we definitely can’t have that! Goodness, you work fast.”
She smiles. A fleeting sermon in illusion between two devas in human form, like a morality fable. A dream, located inside of the dream around it. No matter where he is in flesh, he too is part of the mandala, to be seen by an observer from the outside, studying the Dharma, studying the shape of the world.
It was a bold choice of setting, on his part.
She sets down her fork. “There are certainly some downsides to direct psychological interaction, but the privacy for a conversation like this can’t be beat. I would offer to share some of my own research, but I doubt you would be inclined to misuse it in an interesting way.”
“Awww. That’s a shame. But it’s alright, I’d probably flub the incantation anyway.”
He stands up and waves apologetically: an empty gesture made by empty space.
“Well, it was nice to meet you, Beast III/R.”
“Sessyoin, if you please. Don’t contact me again.”
—
She is sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria. Her food is already finished.
She looks down to the other end of the cafeteria, where she had been making her way before she’d been waylaid.
It’s quite late. There are few people left. But the King of Knights, in her Lancer incarnation, has waited all this time, and her patience is rewarded as Archer, finishing his shift, comes to collect her before the two of them leave, together.
Kiara shakes her head, bemused. ‘Maybe.’ Surely there should be some limits to one’s self-ignorance.
