The Road Home

[old_man_acht]

The driver does not protest at being awakened at this late hour; he has had protest culled from his code and replaced with a perfect knowledge of the roadways between Fuyuki and the nearest airfield. When Acht says, "There is a man on the road ahead. Keep the headlamps off, and search for his light," the driver says only, "Yes, sir" in reply and starts the car.

Acht has never heard him say anything but "Where to?" and "Yes, sir." While rage burns hot in his breast, he thinks that he would never like to hear anything but "Yes, sir" again.

He forces himself calm, forces his circuits open. He lacks Larasviel's innate ability to interface with the terrain--but one man on a smooth-stuttering engine, while the rest of the forest huddles under the new-fallen snow, he can follow like a trail of blood.

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[come_to_spoil_everything]

Risei is almost out of the forest roads and onto the parkway now--it's been slow going with so many turns past the trees, and everything still caked in yesterday's snow. It's strange, to think about his own soul like that--Lara always seems to make him question, and think, and the last things she said before the projection disappeared are still with him--but the thoughts are almost armor against the cold wind and the low stinging branches.

The cost of achieving the impossible. Isn't that what all these magi are fighting for in the first place?

--then even the wishes of their false Grail must come with a price.

[old_man_acht]

By the time they reach the parkway, Acht has reconciled himself to the impossibility of catching Risei up by mechanical means. The sedan is too slow on these snow-covered roads--and the driver too cautious--to permit him to gain more than a hard-earned meter.

So it will always be, when magi rely on technology.

Acht, though, has learned well the art of channeling water ... and on this bitterly cold night, with the sun long gone, that water can only turn to pitch-black ice on the road ahead of Risei. He withdraws a vial of mercury from his breast pocket, and as he drives energy along his open circuits, the mercury stills and solidifies behind the glass.

[come_to_spoil_everything]

Of course Risei doesn't see the black ice coming. He's used to hills and cobbles but almost never snow, and the slipperiness of the road is as insidious as it is sudden. He skids, spins around one and a half times until the headlights of the sedan behind him are whirling behind his eyes.

He's just as worried about the passengers in the car behind him as he is about his own life and safety. That doesn't mean he's not worried.

[old_man_acht]

The driver's first directive is to protect the car and its passengers, his second to protect pedestrians; he skids to a stop, throwing Acht from his seat--his brow strikes the glass and shatters it.

If Acht has concussed himself, it's light enough that he's lucid. He tells himself that he's lucid, even as blood washes down into his eye and over his lips. He flings open the door of the sedan (his collarbone has a crack that he can feel like a thread of fire when he moves his arm) and stalks out into the snow.

[come_to_spoil_everything]

Risei pries himself out of the snowbank but can't quite heave the bike off his leg--he doesn't think anything's broken, but the weight and heat are getting to him and the exposed pipes could burn through his clothes and sear his skin if he doesn't get it off soon. And the car's stopped as well now: Risei watches, dizzily, as an old man emerges from the backseat. No one comes out of the front.

"Are you all right, sir?" Risei asks, in Italian, because his Japanese is failing him right now.

[old_man_acht]

Acht's Japanese has completely left him; he can barely find words in German. He leans over gently steaming motorcycle and tips up the priest's chin with a fingertip.

For a moment, he sees another face--a heroic spirit's saintly face, all anguished betrayal as the blade pierced him through. If he does not kill the priest at once, perhaps this is the reason.

If Larasviel couldn't bring herself to kill him, perhaps this was a reason.

"Stay--stay out of the forest," he says instead. Some of it might be Italian, some of it German; the translation spell accounts for it and renders it intelligible. "Stay away from the girl."

[come_to_spoil_everything]

The old man's face is dripping blood, into his white beard and his withered hand and the snow. A trail of it bounces gently on the black ice like oil in a skillet. Risei can barely breathe. He should tell the man he's bleeding, he should offer help, he should ask after the driver or to be freed from the twist of the bike.

And then the garbledness of the translation spell hits him, in the same place in his mind where every magus has tripped it since the Golem's master on the train.

"You're here to fight," Risei says, dazed and terrified. "You're here for the war."

[old_man_acht]

"Stay out of the forest," he repeats, and this time, at least, it's all in German. There is blood on the priest's chin where Acht's fingers have marked it. "Stay away from the girl."

The first time, it might have been a warning. This time, it is unmistakably a threat.

[come_to_spoil_everything]

The magic translates it all as one language, all German this time, but Risei's head is still spinning, and now the leg of his pants is beginning to singe. The engine burns. The snow is as wet as the blood.

"She told me to do the same," he says, and remembers the name Lady Tohsaka gave him, the one that made Risei seek Lara out again in the first place, "Mr. Einzbern."

[old_man_acht]

The name recalls him a little to himself; it recalls to him the gravity of what he has tried to do, in pursuing the priest. I could kill him, and no one would be able to say he hadn't slipped on the ice and frozen to death, a part of him says, but it is a part he has conjured into being, and that part has jarred loose in the collision. An older part withdraws, eyes going shuttered. "Did she tell you that, too?"

[come_to_spoil_everything]

"No," Risei says, struggling to push the bike off his body before anything else burns, "no, she hasn't told me anything--I found out about this place from Lady Tohsaka. Don't hurt Lara. Please, don't hurt her--"

[old_man_acht]

"Why would I hurt her?" He still has that shuttered look; he sees Risei as through a window of pieced glass, tinted snow-blue and blood-red. "She has no intention of calling Executors down on Fuyuki. She had nothing to do with the bloodbath on the train." SORRY YOU MISSED THE PARTY, PRIEST, those bloody letters had said; those passengers had died for him, had they not?

[come_to_spoil_everything]

Risei chokes on his breath and the swelling steam from his bike. The train. Of course they know about the tragedy on the train, and of course a magus would use that to hurt Risei, make him seem the monster. "Good, then--then there's nothing. Don't blame her. I came to the forest. She told me not to and I came anyway. I'm sorry, Mr. Einzbern."

And with that, he barely manages to lift the bike a precious three inches off his leg. The old man's blood drips onto it, the same color as the casing.

[old_man_acht]

"Stay." The melting snow around the hot bike freezes to ice--holds the bike clear of Risei, but also holds Risei to the frozen ground. "Think on why you disobeyed her until the ice takes you."

He returns unsteadily to the car; the driver has arisen from his seat to hold the door for him. "Drive," he says, this time in Japanese, and the driver restarts the engine.

[come_to_spoil_everything]

Risei's heart stalls, then flares up until the arteries in his neck protrude from his skin with every burst. The cold is unbearable, holds him frozen up to the thigh, and it's all Risei can do to open his circuits and call on his ability to heal so that he doesn't lose the leg entirely. But that healing is confined to his skin, and if anything the expansion of his flesh makes the ice even more painful.

The car drives away, skirts the pool of black ice and takes off back into the forest. A slap of slush floors over the bike and Risei's legs, adding insult to injury and compounding the thickness of the ice. He'll never be able to get the bike out on his own now, no matter the magic, but he has to survive first--

The flare casing. That first. If Risei pulls himself up from the snow he can just barely reach it. He does, cracks the top and sets one flare alight and rams it into the snow beside him in case he passes out. The next, he brings closer to the ice around his leg, carefully strafes it until the ice begins to melt. He can spare enough magic to warm his body and speed this along, but only that, and he mostly just twists and pries, millimeter by millimeter, until the ice chips and the circumference is wide enough escape.

It takes nearly an hour to free his leg. If not for his healing magic he would have died of exposure fifteen minutes ago.

And he still has a long ride--no, walk--back to the church.