The mattress pressed against her back, thin and regulation-standard, offering little comfort. Mash stared at nothing. Her hands rested on her stomach, fingers laced together over the black fabric of her shirt, and she breathed.
Three days of tests. Blood draws, mana circuit scans, spiritron density measurements, reflex examinations, psychological evaluations. Da Vinci's instruments had prodded every inch of her spiritual composition while Romani asked questions in that gentle voice of his. They'd been kind about it. They always were. But kindness didn't change the fact that she was still, after everything, a specimen on a table.
She turned her head to the side. The room greeted her with its familiar emptiness. A desk. A chair. A shelf with seven books she'd read so many times the spines had cracked. No photographs. No decorations. No evidence that a person lived here rather than occupied it.
Galahad.
The name sat in her chest like a stone she'd swallowed. The purest knight of the Round Table. The one who found the Holy Grail. The Heroic Spirit who had been sleeping inside her body all this time, refusing to speak, refusing to acknowledge her, refusing to do anything except keep her alive through sheer passive presence.
Then Fuyuki came.
Mash pressed her palms against her eyes. The memory surfaced regardless. That moment in the collapsing cave when Excalibur Morgan bore down on her shield and something inside her chest had unlocked. A door she hadn't known existed, thrown open by desperation and need. Lord Chaldeas. The words had come from somewhere deeper than her own knowledge, pulled from a well she couldn't reach on her own.
He'd given her his power. His Noble Phantasm. His legacy.
And then gone silent again.
She dropped her hands back to her stomach. Her fingers found each other and squeezed until the knuckles whitened.
Was she angry? She searched for the emotion the way someone searches a dark room by touch. There was something there. Something that tasted like resentment when she pressed against it. All this time wondering what was wrong with her, why she couldn't manifest, why the fusion had been declared a failure. She'd internalized that failure. Made it part of her identity. The defective experiment. The Demi-Servant who was not a servant.
And all along, he'd simply chosen not to participate.
She rolled onto her side, pulling her knees toward her chest. The position was childish. She didn't care.
Chaldea the only place she had ever know was attacked and now so many lied dead. Once it was full of tons of people living lives she could only dream of. Now the facility felt hollow. Echoing. So few survivors rattling around in spaces designed for hundreds.
Professor Lainur's face kept appearing behind her eyelids. That gentle smile he'd worn when he spoke. The patient way he'd explained temporal mechanics when she'd asked. The absolute nothing in his eyes as he'd pulled Olga Marie into CHALDEAS.
Mash pressed her face into the pillow. It smelled like antiseptic. Everything in this room smelled like antiseptic.
The routine of Chaldea had been her entire existence. Wake at 0600. Morning vitals check at 0630. Breakfast alone in the cafeteria at 0700. Reading until 0900. Physical examination at 1000. Lunch alone at 1200. Afternoon observation period. Evening meal. Sleep. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Years of repetition so precise she could have set atomic clocks by it.
Now, in the span of forty-eight hours, she had fought monsters, watched people die, kissed a boy, killed a corrupted king, been attacks by a naked women with snake hair, watched a woman she knew dissolve into light, learned her Heroic Spirit's name, and lost one hundred and eighty-seven colleagues she'd never spoken to but whose footsteps in the corridor she'd memorized by sound alone.
More had happened in two days than in her entire life combined. Her brain kept trying to file it all into neat categories the way she organized her bookshelf, but the events refused to sit still. They tumbled over each other, bleeding together. The wet sound Cú's body made when Saber Alter carved through him. The taste of copper in Fuyuki's air. The warmth of Griswald's hand in hers as reality dissolved. Ritsuka's tears catching firelight. Olga's falling into the portal.
She did not want to think about Fuyuki.
She thought about Fuyuki.
No matter how hard she tried her mind kept bringing her back to those red sky's. But she tried anyway to use any method she could to push it from her mind.
She did not want to think about death. She did not want to think about the black sludge or the burning sky or the way Lev's voice had gone flat and mechanical when he stopped pretending.
She especially did not want to think about what happened during Excalibur Morgan.
Her body betrayed her immediately. Heat flooded her cheeks, her ears, the back of her neck. The sense-memory crashed through her defenses with no warning whatsoever. His hands gripping her hips. The sudden fullness of him inside her. The shock of it, the impossibility of it, and then the mana pouring through their connection like a river breaking a dam and she had never felt anything like that in her entire carefully monitored, clinically observed, antiseptically maintained life.
"Nnn!"
She grabbed the pillow and shoved it against her face, the strangled cry muffled into its flat surface. Her legs curled tighter, thighs pressing together as if she could physically squeeze the memory out.
She could not believe she did that with Senpai.
The kissing had been one thing. Terrifying and strange and wonderful in equal measure. His lips tentative against hers, both of them fumbling, neither knowing where to put their hands. It all felt intimate in a way that made her feel seen. Touched in a way that meant something beyond measurement.
But that moment in the cave. His body against her back, his breath hot on her neck, the desperate necessity of it mixing with something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with survival and everything to do with wanting.
She had liked it.
She pressed the pillow harder against her burning face. Her pulse hammered in her ears.
She had liked it so much.
The books Peperoncino used to slip under her door never prepared her for this. He'd arrive at her room with that theatrical flourish of his, lavender hair catching corridor light, and deposit a paperback wrapped in plain brown paper with a wink and a "Consider it education, darling." Romance novels. Some tasteful, some decidedly not. She'd read them in guilty secrecy, absorbing descriptions of passion and desire the way she absorbed everything, analytically, from a distance. They were data about human experiences she assumed would never apply to her.
Fiction bore no resemblance to reality.
The books described pleasure in poetry. Waves crashing. Fires igniting. Stars exploding. Clean metaphors for clean bodies doing clean things between clean sheets.
No one wrote about the grit of cave dust against her knees. The sound of her own voice breaking in a way she didn't recognize. The trembling in her thighs that she couldn't control. The raw, animal satisfaction of being full, of being connected so completely to another person that their mana circuits sang the same frequency. The way her shield had blazed brighter with his thrust, Lord Chaldeas feeding on the transfer like a furnace fed coal.
And his sounds. The small, sharp exhale when he first entered her. The groan he buried against her shoulder blade. The way his fingers dug into her hips hard enough that she suspected there were bruises beneath her bodysuit.
She rolled onto her stomach and pressed the pillow against the back of her skull, face buried in the mattress.
Physical touch was not something she possessed experience with. After all these years of existence, and she could count meaningful human contact on both hands. Romani's careful fingers during examinations, always gloved, always professional. The technicians who attached monitoring electrodes to her skin with the same emotional engagement one might show when plugging in equipment. Beryl's… attention.
Before Griswald, the longest she had ever been touched by another person was forty-three seconds. A respiratory assessment. Romani's stethoscope cold against her chest while she breathed in, breathed out, breathed in.
Then Griswald had held her hand not long after they became friends, and forty-three seconds became a minute became ten became an hour, and her skin woke up. Every nerve she possessed had apparently been dormant her entire life, waiting for someone to actually mean it when they touched her. Not clinically. Not experimentally. Not with gloves and instruments and the detached interest of a scientist observing a specimen.
His palm against hers. Warm and slightly damp with nervous sweat. Fingers that didn't quite know how to interlace with hers but tried anyway.
She had senses she didn't know she had. That was the only way to describe it. Like being colorblind your entire life and someone switching on a light that reveals the spectrum. His proximity activated something in her nervous system that no medical scan had ever detected. His voice against her ear made the fine hairs on her arms stand. His breath on her skin raised goosebumps that traveled in waves down her spine. When he kissed her, she tasted lightning.
This was not what Peperoncino's books described. This was messier and more frightening and infinitely better.
Mash turned her head to the side, one cheek pressed against the mattress. Her breathing had settled into something almost normal, though the heat in her face persisted.
What was he thinking right now?
The question slid into her consciousness like a blade between ribs. She sat up abruptly, the pillow falling forgotten to the floor.
Was he thinking about it at all? They had not gotten a chance to talk since they got back. The extraction pulled them back to Chaldea, and then Romani separated them for examinations. Three days of tests. She'd asked about Griswald every hour, received clinical updates about his unconscious state, been told he was stable, been told to rest.
Did… did he like it?
She pulled her knees to her chest again, wrapping her arms around them. The question gnawed at her with teeth she couldn't blunt.
Did she feel good to him? She had no frame of reference. No previous experience to compare against. She knew objectively that her body was young, that the genetic engineering had produced what the scientists called "optimal physical parameters," but those terms meant nothing in the dark of a cave with corrupted grail screaming overhead.
Had he enjoyed it, or had he simply done what was necessary?
That thought opened a pit beneath her ribs.
Was it all just so they didn't die?
She pressed her forehead against her knees. The pressure grounded her, kept her from spiraling further, but the ache in her chest expanded regardless. A hollow feeling, like hunger but located wrong. Too high. Too sharp.
Of course it was necessary. They would have died otherwise. Excalibur Morgan would have shattered her shield and annihilated them all. The mana transfer saved their lives. That was the reason. That was the only reason. She had needed power and he had given it the fastest way available.
Logic. Clean. Simple.
Except his hand had found hers afterward. In the rubble, covered in dust and blood, with Olga screaming at them and Cú dissolving into light, Griswald's fingers had sought Mash's and held on with a grip that had nothing to do with mana transfer efficiency.
She lifted her head.
He was awake now. Romani confirmed it hours ago. Awake and being briefed on the state of the world, which meant soon they would have to face each other and one of them would have to acknowledge what happened in that cave and Mash did not know if she possessed the vocabulary for that conversation.
Her eyes drifted to the door of her room. Closed. Locked from inside, as always. Beyond it, the half-empty corridors of a dying facility. Somewhere out there, a boy with messy blond hair and grey eyes was learning that the world had ended and that he was the only person who could fix it.
And that she would be beside him when he tried.
Her hand moved to the center of her chest. Beneath skin and bone, Galahad's presence sat heavy and silent as ever. But the connection she felt with Griswald pulsed there too, thin as spider silk, warm as a held breath.
She needed to see him.
The certainty arrived without fanfare. No dramatic realization. Just a simple, human need, rising through the complicated machinery of her engineered body like groundwater through stone.
She swung her legs off the bed.
Her bare feet met the cold floor. Three steps to the door. Her hand found the lock mechanism, twisted it, pulled the handle.
Griswald stood on the other side with his fist raised mid-knock.
They both froze.
His hair stuck out at odd angles, unwashed and flattened on one side from thirty-one hours of unconscious sleep. His glasses sat slightly crooked on his nose. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath his grey eyes, and his Chaldea uniform hung wrinkled and loose on his lanky frame.
Something crested inside her chest. A wave that started at the base of her ribs and rose through her throat, behind her eyes, into the roots of her hair. It filled every hollow space she possessed. Every empty room she'd catalogued in herself over sixteen years of clinical existence suddenly had someone standing in it.
"Mash, I..." His mouth worked around sounds that wouldn't form properly. "I wanted to... I'm really glad you're..." His hand dropped from its knocking position, fingers twitching at his side. "You look... I mean, I'm happy to see you're okay, I was worried the whole time they wouldn't let me..."
"Senpai."
She threw herself forward.
The impact knocked them both half a step back. Her arms locked around his torso with the full force of a Demi-Servant's enhanced strength, and she heard the breath leave him in a sharp huff. The top of her head collided with his chin, jolting both their glasses. His frames slid sideways. Hers bounced against his collarbone.
For a moment he stood rigid with surprise, arms floating uselessly at his sides. Then his hands settled on her back. Tentative at first. One between her shoulder blades. The other lower, against the curve of her spine. His fingers spread and pressed, drawing her closer rather than holding her at a distance, and his chin came to rest on the crown of her head.
She could hear his heartbeat through his chest. Rapid. Alive.
Alive.
"Senpai." The word came out muffled against his uniform. She pulled back, hands flying to his face, his shoulders, his arms. Her fingers found the faded rune scars Cú had carved into his forearms and traced them with clinical precision. "Are you hurt anywhere? Did Romani clear you? Your circuits, are they strained? You were unconscious for thirty-one hours, that's not normal recovery time for mana exhaustion, it could indicate deeper damage to your..."
"Mash." His hands caught hers, stilling them mid-inspection. The corner of his mouth pulled up. "Shouldn't I be doing that to you? You're the one who blocked Excalibur."
"I am fine. All of Da Vinci's scans came back within acceptable parameters. My mana reserves have stabilized and my physical body shows no degradation beyond expected levels."
"Expected levels?"
She sidestepped the question with practiced ease. "And you?"
He adjusted his glasses with his free hand, the nervous tic she'd memorized during two years of medical checkups. "Clean bill of health."
She examined his face for deception and found none. The tension in her shoulders released by a fraction.
"Come inside." She tugged his hand, pulling him across the threshold into her small room. The door clicked shut behind them.
Immediately, a voice in the back of her mind, warm and theatrical and carrying the distinct cadence of Scandinavia Peperoncino, observed: You're alone. In your room. With a boy. On your bed, darling. How deliciously forward of you.
Heat prickled up her neck. She sat on the edge of her mattress and gestured for him to join her, refusing to acknowledge the thought. Griswald settled beside her, leaving a careful gap between their hips. The mattress dipped under their combined weight. His knee nearly touched hers.
My, my. Not even a chaperone.
She clasped her hands in her lap. Hard.
Silence filled the room. Not uncomfortable, exactly. More like two people standing on opposite sides of a bridge neither knew how to cross. Griswald's eyes moved across her bookshelf, her desk, the bare walls. Taking inventory of the space that contained her entire private existence. She watched him look and felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with clothing.
"Thank you."
Mash blinked. "What?"
He turned to face her, and the earnestness in his expression was so raw it made her chest ache. "Thank you. For everything. In Fuyuki. I never said it properly. I was going to, but then Lev appeared and..." He swallowed. Pushed his glasses up. "You saved my life. Multiple times. Against Lancer, you threw yourself between me and a scythe that would have taken my head off. During the Archer fight, you deflected dozens of arrows that would have killed me before I could blink. And Saber." His voice caught on the word. "What you did against Saber. The way you held that shield when everything was falling apart and the ceiling was coming down and that blast..."
"Senpai..."
"Let me finish." His fingers fidgeted in his lap, twisting the fabric of his uniform pants. "I would have died. Not once, not twice. Over and over. Every single fight, every moment something came at us, you were there. You put yourself between me and things that could destroy you, and you did it without hesitation. Every single time." His voice dropped. "I don't know how to repay that. I don't even know if I can. But I want you to know that I see it. What you did."
The warmth spread through her like sunlight through glass. It pooled in her chest and radiated outward, filling spaces she hadn't realized were cold. His words settled into her the way water settles into dry earth. Absorbing. Nourishing something that had been parched.
Then the warmth cooled.
She looked down at her interlaced fingers. The knuckles white. The nails bitten short from three days of anxious waiting.
"I didn't do much myself."
Griswald made a sound of protest, but she continued before he could form words.
"The shield. The Noble Phantasm. The speed, the strength, the instincts that let me block attacks I shouldn't be able to see coming." Her voice came out flat. Clinical. The tone of a girl reading her own medical file. "Those are Galahad's. The training I received with Team A did meant little when the singularity showed its teeth..." She uncurled one hand and stared at her palm. "That was his. Not mine."
The silence between them changed shape. Grew heavier.
"If a normal human had been holding that shield, they would have died. I know that. The parameters are clear. Without Galahad's spiritual core reinforcing my body, without his Noble Phantasm activating at the critical moment, we would all be dead." She closed her fist. "Everything that mattered, the things that actually saved us, came from him."
Griswald said nothing.
His hand found hers instead. Long fingers sliding between her clenched ones, gently prying them apart, settling his palm against hers the way he had on those crumbling temple steps when the sky unraveled above Fuyuki.
"How are you feeling about it?"
The question was so simple. So direct. Not "what do you think" or "what's your assessment" or "please describe your psychological state for the record." How are you feeling.
She let herself feel his hand. The warmth of his skin. The slight roughness of his fingertips. The way his thumb moved in a small arc across her knuckle, back and forth, unhurried.
"I don't know."
The honesty surprised her. She'd expected to produce something more articulate. Something measured and analytical that would demonstrate she'd processed the information in a mature, rational manner.
"I always wondered," she said. "About the Spirit they put inside me. For years, I wondered. Who they were. Why they wouldn't wake. Whether it was something wrong with me that kept them dormant. Whether I was too weak, or too broken, or too..." She pressed her lips together. "And now I know it's Galahad. The knight who achieved the Grail. The purest of the Round Table."
Her free hand pressed against her sternum, over the place where his presence resided.
"I am not enough for that. For him." The words tasted like ash. "He is the knight who achieved what no other could. Perfect. Pure. A legend that transcended the Round Table itself. And I am..." She gestured at her room. The bare walls. The seven worn books. The antiseptic emptiness of a life measured in check-ups and observation periods. "This."
Griswald's thumb stilled on her knuckle. He squeezed her hand once, firm and deliberate.
"I don't think you're inadequate."
She looked up. His grey eyes held hers without flinching, without the nervous darting she'd grown accustomed to.
"And I don't think Galahad does either."
She opened her mouth. He continued.
"He gave you his power, Mash. His Noble Phantasm. The most precious thing a Heroic Spirit possesses, the crystallization of their legend, and he handed it to you." Griswald's free hand gestured as he spoke, the way he always did when working through an idea. "I don't think other Spirits do that. Not willingly. Not without being forced. He could have kept it locked away. Could have stayed dormant and let us die. But he didn't."
His fingers tightened around hers.
"He chose you. Not because you're his vessel or because the scientists put him there or because he had no option. He watched you fight. He watched you throw yourself between me and Excalibur Morgan, knowing your shield alone wasn't enough. And in that moment, he decided you were worthy of everything he had."
The words landed in her chest like stones dropped into still water. Ripples spreading outward through her entire body.
"That's not the action of a Spirit who thinks his host is inadequate." Griswald's voice softened.
Her vision blurred. She blinked rapidly, refusing to let the moisture fall, but her throat had closed around something too large to swallow. His hand remained steady in hers.
He always did this. Found the exact thing she needed to hear buried beneath layers of her own doubt. Not through brilliance or eloquence, but through a simple willingness to look at her and see something she couldn't see in herself.
The tears didn't fall. She held them there, suspended behind her lashes through sheer force of will, until the pressure behind her eyes softened into something bearable. Not gone. Just manageable. The way most things in her life were. Not solved, just managed.
She didn't speak. Didn't trust the architecture of her voice to hold the weight of what she wanted to say. So she sat with his words still resonating through her, let them settle into the soil of her, and simply existed beside him.
His hand stayed in hers. Warm. Present. Real.
"Thank you, Senpai."
Small. Quiet. Barely a sound at all. But enough.
Griswald's thumb resumed its slow arc across her knuckle. Back and forth. A metronome counting time that belonged only to them.
She didn't know how long they sat like that. Minutes bled into each other, unmarked by the clinical precision that governed every other aspect of her existence. No vitals check at the thirty-minute mark. No technician knocking to attach electrodes. No observation log requiring timestamps. Just the sound of two people breathing in a room that smelled like antiseptic and was, for the first time since she'd been assigned it, warm.
Their fingers began to move. Not with purpose or direction. Small explorations. His index finger traced the line between her ring and middle finger, pressing gently into the soft webbing of skin. She responded by curling her pinky around his, hooking them together. His thumb found the ridge of her wrist bone and circled it. She mapped the calluses on his palm, the ones that hadn't been there two years ago when he first held her hand, rough patches earned from gripping Mash's shield harness during the Archer fight.
A conversation conducted entirely in skin.
His fingers asked questions she couldn't parse into language. Hers answered in kind. The pad of his thumb pressed against the center of her palm and held there, a gentle weight, and something inside her chest unlocked a fraction further. She traced the length of his fingers from base to tip, measuring them against her own. His were longer. Thinner. The fingers of someone who spent years handling delicate medical instruments rather than weapons.
She turned his hand over and examined the fading red marks on his forearm where Cú's runes had been carved. The scarring was minimal. Romani's healing work, probably, supplemented by Griswald's own abilities. She traced one line with her fingernail, feather-light, and felt him shiver.
Neither spoke. Neither needed to.
Eventually, Griswald broke the silence. His voice came out careful, measured.
"Have you heard anything about Ritsuka?"
Mash's expression shifted. The softness around her mouth tightened. Her brow creased, and she shook her head slowly.
"I know she became a Servant." The words felt strange in her mouth. Wrong, somehow, like reciting a formula with a variable that refused to resolve. "Da Vinci mentioned it during one of my examinations. But nothing beyond that."
She looked down at their intertwined hands.
"I don't know how I feel about it."
The admission hung between them. Ritsuka, who had been alive and laughing and teasing them about kissing less than four days ago. Ritsuka, whose body burned in the explosion while her spiritron pattern survived through mechanisms no one at Chaldea could explain. Human one moment, Servant the next. The boundary between the two categories was supposed to be absolute. Mash occupied the uncomfortable middle ground as a Demi-Servant, and she understood intimately how disorienting that space could be.
But Ritsuka hadn't been engineered for it. Hadn't been designed with compatibility in mind. Hadn't spent years being monitored and measured for precisely this kind of transformation.
Ritsuka had just... become.
Griswald nodded. A slow, heavy movement. He didn't press for more. He understood, she realized, that some feelings needed time to find their shape before they could be named.
Silence reclaimed the space between them. Comfortable. Patient.
Mash turned her head to look at his profile. The sharp line of his jaw. The way his blond hair fell across his forehead in messy layers. The glasses sitting slightly askew because she'd knocked them crooked when she crashed into him at the door and neither of them had bothered to fix them.
"Senpai." She watched his expression carefully. "What are you going to do now?"
He didn't answer immediately. His fingers stilled against hers.
She already knew. Romani would have told him. Da Vinci would have laid out the facts with that calm, calculated precision of hers. Seven Singularities. The incineration of human history. The entire weight of civilization's survival resting on the shoulders of a medical assistant who'd spent years filing rejected Clock Tower applications.
Griswald took a breath. Deep. The kind that fills the lungs completely because the body knows it will need the air.
"I'm going to have to fix them."
His voice started steady. Clinical, almost. The way he spoke when reporting medical findings to Romani. Detached from the content of his own words.
"The Singularities. Like Fuyuki."
The steadiness eroded on the last two words. His volume dropped until she had to strain to hear him. Like Fuyuki. Like the burning sky and the corrupted Grail and the king in black armor and the man who murdered one hundred and eighty-seven people and smiled while doing it.
Like Fuyuki, but seven times over. Each one larger. Each one worse.
Mash studied him. The way his shoulders had drawn inward, his spine curving slightly forward, his tall frame compressing itself smaller. His free hand gripped the edge of the mattress, knuckles bloodless. His gaze fixed on the floor between his feet as though the tiles held answers the ceiling couldn't provide.
He looked small.
The observation pierced her with unexpected sharpness. Not small in the physical sense. He was tall, taller than most of the staff who'd survived. But something about the way he held himself in this moment, the architecture of his body folding inward around the enormity of what he'd just said, made him look like a boy sitting in a room too large for him.
She knew why.
She was made for this. Engineered from conception. Her genetic code written with combat parameters in mind, her body designed to house a Heroic Spirit, her entire existence oriented toward the singular purpose of entering hostile environments and surviving them. Every cell in her body had been built for war, even if the war had taken sixteen years to arrive.
Griswald was not.
He was a healer. A medical assistant who bandaged cuts and checked blood pressure and counted supply inventories because the alternative was talking to people who made him nervous. His magical circuits were weak. His combat training was nonexistent. His greatest professional ambition before four days ago had been gaining admission to an academic institution that had rejected him three times.
He was never supposed to leave the medical wing. Never supposed to hold a Command Seal. Never supposed to stand in front of corrupted Servants and burning Grails and the living extinction of the human race. He was supposed to be safe. Tucked away in Chaldea's sterile corridors, healing minor injuries and submitting paperwork, unremarkable and alive.
He was not Kirschtaria Wodime, born with circuits that burned like constellations, groomed from birth to reshape the world. He was not Kadoc Zemlupus, whose bitterness at least came packaged with encyclopedic knowledge and defensive mastery. He was not any of the Team A candidates who had trained for years to enter Singularities, who had been selected and evaluated and deemed worthy of the burden.
He was Griswald Von Garmisch. Third son of a declining family. Three-time Clock Tower reject. The person no one would choose.
She knew what that was like.
The parallel cut deep enough to draw something that wasn't quite blood.
She knew exactly what it felt like to be the option nobody selected. The experiment declared a failure. The vessel deemed insufficient. She had lived her entire life inside that knowledge, breathing it like air, letting it settle into the marrow of her bones until she couldn't distinguish it from her own identity.
And now this boy who understood that same specific loneliness was being asked to carry the world.
She didn't want him to go.
The thought surfaced raw and selfish and completely unanalytical. She didn't want him walking through burning cities and collapsing caves and spaces where things existed that could end him between heartbeats. She didn't want his grey eyes going dull the way they had when Lev called him unimportant. She didn't want to hear his voice drop to that barely-there whisper again, the one that meant he was looking at something too large to comprehend and finding himself too small beside it.
She didn't want him out there.
But he was going. That much was carved in stone already, written in the Command Seals on his hand and the burning red of CHALDEAS and the empty corridors of a facility that once held hundreds. He was going because there was no one else.
"Senpai."
He lifted his eyes from the floor. Grey meeting violet.
"Are you going to need a shield?"
His gaze dropped. But not to the floor. To their hands. Still tangled together, still speaking that wordless language of pressure and warmth and presence. The corner of his mouth pulled. A slow, incremental movement that he tried to hide by ducking his chin toward his chest.
It didn't work. She saw it.
"I couldn't do it without one."
Mash leaned into him. The movement carried her weight against his side, her shoulder fitting into the space below his. Her head came to rest against him. She felt the rhythm of his breathing shift, then steady. His cheek settled against the top of her hair.
Their hands remained clasped between them.
She let go. Not of his hand. Of everything else.
The questions that had been circling her mind for three days, vultures over carrion, finally lost their grip. What were they now? She and Griswald. What word described the space between Master and Servant that included hands held in collapsing realities and first kisses in ruined cities and a frantic coupling in a cave while Excalibur screamed overhead? What category. What label. What clinical designation would satisfy the part of her brain that organized everything into neat rows on a shelf.
She released them. All of them. Let them fall away like dead leaves in a wind she couldn't see. They would return. She knew that. Questions like those always did. But for now, in this room that smelled like antiseptic and for the first time contained warmth, she let them go.
What mattered was simpler than any question she'd been asking.
He needed a shield. She was one.
Not a worthy one. Not the one Galahad would have chosen if the choice had been his to make freely. She was not pure or legendary. She was a girl with a borrowed weapon and a borrowed name and a few years of borrowed time that was already running out.
But she could be enough. For him, she could be enough.
For him, she would carry that shield into every Singularity, every burning city, every cave where corrupted kings waited with weapons that could unmake her. She would plant herself between Griswald Von Garmisch and everything in existence that wanted to hurt him, and she would hold.
Her shield would not break in his defense. Not again. Not like it almost had against Excalibur Morgan when the strain cracked her barrier and forced them into desperate measures. Not ever again.
She pressed closer against his side. His arm shifted, settling around her shoulders. The weight of it grounded her like an anchor dropped into still water.
She swore it to herself in silence. No grand declarations. No dramatic oaths. Just a girl making a promise in a bare room to a boy who smelled like antiseptic and nervous sweat and something underneath both that she'd started to recognize as simply him.
For him, it would never break.