Morning came grey and cold. Griswald stood in the farmyard with his uniform half-buttoned, watching his breath fog in front of him while the others moved through the packing routine they'd already fallen into.
Mash checked the straps on her gauntlet by the doorway. Jeanne knelt in the dirt, tightening the buckles at her greaves, banner propped against the crumbling wall beside her. Ritsuka sat on an overturned bucket eating something she'd scavenged from the pantry, legs swinging, looking for all the world like a girl on a picnic.
She caught him looking and threw him a wink so quick and casual it might have been a trick of the light.
Griswald looked away fast.
His stomach turned over. Not from the wink, exactly. From the weight sitting underneath it, the thing he'd woken up carrying and hadn't been able to set down while he splashed cold water on his face from the well.
Last night. Ritsuka's body over his, under his, around his. The way she'd climbed on top of him at midnight and refused to hear no. It had been the mission. Just a mana transfer. He knew that. She knew that. They'd both walked into it with their eyes open and a clear reason between them.
And Mash didn't know.
That was the part gnawing at him. Not guilt over the act, precisely, but the shape of the silence. He and Mash had talked about this, in their fumbling way, about other Servants and mana and what his role demanded of him. She'd said she never expected to ever have a relationship. She'd said her world was expanding faster than she could hold. But talking about a hypothetical in a gym was a different animal than the fact of it, warm and real, that he'd been inside another woman a few feet from where Mash kept watch.
He should tell her. Before someone else did. Before it curdled into something worse than the thing itself.
The problem was Jeanne. And the problem was Ritsuka, who would absolutely turn any private conversation into a performance if she caught wind of it.
He crossed the yard to where Ritsuka sat.
"Hey," he said, keeping his voice low. "Can you do something for me."
She raised an eyebrow, still chewing. "Depends on what it is. If it's another round I'm gonna need breakfast first."
"No. Not that." He felt his ears go hot regardless. "Jeanne. Can you keep her occupied for a bit. Ask her about the terrain, the roads, whatever. I need to talk to Mash."
Ritsuka's face did something complicated, a flicker of understanding sliding under the teasing. She swallowed. Looked at him for a long moment.
"Yeah," she said, quieter now, the joke folded away. "Yeah, okay. Go on."
She hopped off the bucket and sauntered toward Jeanne, calling out something bright about which road cut fastest toward Orléans, and whether the false Jeanne's wyverns patrolled by day. Jeanne looked up and within a breath the two of them were bent over a patch of dirt where Jeanne began scratching a rough map with her fingertip.
Griswald went to Mash.
"Mash." He kept his voice down. "Walk with me a second?"
She looked up. Something in his face made her still. "Senpai? Is something wrong?"
"No. Maybe. I just." He tipped his head toward the far side of the farmhouse, away from the others. "Can we talk. Just us."
She nodded and followed him around the corner of the building, into the narrow gap between the wall and an old collapsed. Out of sight and out of earshot.
He turned to face her and found he had no idea how to start.
"Senpai." Her violet eyes searched his. "You're doing the thing where you rehearse a sentence six times before you say it. What is it?"
That startled a weak laugh out of him. "You've noticed that."
"You always push your glasses up when you do it." She reached out, hesitant, and touched his sleeve. "Whatever it is, you can just say it."
He breathed out.
"Last night," he said. "While you and Jeanne were on the roof. Ritsuka came to me and we..." He made himself hold her gaze instead of looking at his boots. "We had sex. She wanted to test whether it would activate whatever abilities she has now, as a Servant."
Mash didn't move. Her hand stayed on his sleeve. The stillness of her was worse than any reaction he'd braced for.
"I wanted you to hear it from me," he went on, the words coming faster now that he'd started. "Not from her, not by accident. I know we talked about this being part of what I have to do. But talking about it and it actually happening aren't the same, and it didn't feel right to just... Not say anything. Like it was a secret. I don't want secrets with you."
Mash's face went scarlet as she shifted uneasily.
"I… that's, of course… senpai, I understand, it's, we discussed this, it's completely, it's fine, it's a mana transfer, it's for the mission." The words tumbled out of her faster and faster, tripping over each other, her free hand rising to press against her own cheek as if she could push the heat back down. "You don't have to, I mean, I appreciate that you told me, that was very, um, considerate, and Ritsuka-senpai needs to know if her abilities, and you're the only one who can, so it makes sense that you would. That you two would…"
"Mash."
"It's fine!" She said it too loud, then flinched at her own volume and dropped back to a whisper. "It's fine. Really."
But her ears had gone as red as the tie she normally is wearing, and she couldn't hold his eyes anymore, her gaze skittering off to the collapsed cart, the wall, the patch of weeds growing out of the mortar. Something moved behind her expression that she clearly didn't have a name for.
Griswald opened his mouth and nothing came out.
That was the trouble. Before all of this, before CHALDEAS turned red and took the whole world with it, he hadn't let himself think about Mash as anything more than the one person at Chaldea who looked at him without annoyance. He'd catalogued the softness in his chest when she smiled and filed it away somewhere he wouldn't have to look at it, because a boy who couldn't pass a single Clock Tower exam had no business imagining. And now his whole world had flipped inside out. Now closeness wasn't a thing he might one day work up the nerve to reach for. It was a requirement. His job. Not just with Mash but with Ritsuka, with whoever came next, with every Servant who might need what only his ridiculous body could give them.
He didn't know what to say to that. He didn't know how to say that the things he'd wanted to.
"Mash, I'm not… I'm trying to say that you're not just… that this isn't the same as."
"We should get back." She turned. Her shoulders squared with a brittle precision, spine straight, chin up, doing her best impression of someone entirely composed. "Jeanne will want to leave soon. The roads, um, the roads are dangerous by midday, she said so. We shouldn't keep everyone waiting."
He watched the back of her head, the neat pastel-lavender fall of her hair, and felt the whole conversation slipping out of his hands. She wasn't going to let him finish. She was going to armor herself in cheerful efficiency and pretend the last three minutes hadn't cracked something open in both of them.
"Right," he said, defeated. "Yeah. We should."
He was already turning to follow her back toward the farmyard, already resigning himself to letting it sit unfinished and rot, when she stopped.
She didn't face him. She half-turned instead, glancing back over her shoulder, and the composure had gone. In its place was something small, shy, and impossibly earnest, her cheeks flushed pink, her lower lip caught for half a second between her teeth before she let it go.
"Senpai," she said. Quiet. Barely a thread of voice. "Before we go. Could you… Um."
The bodysuit hugged every line of her, black and purple, the paneling snug across her hips, and as she shifted her weight her backside swayed, one hip cocking, the fabric pulling taut over the curve of it. She didn't have her shield. Just the tight combat outfit and the straps banding her thighs and the flush climbing her throat.
"Could you give me one too," she finished in a rush. "A mana transfer. We don't know the next time we might have to fight. And… I'm not saying because Ritsuka-senpai did, it's not that, it's just, my reserves, and if there are wyverns, and I'd rather be, um, prepared."
Heat crawled up the back of Griswald's neck. She was terrible at hiding it. The reason underneath the reason was written all over her, in the way she wouldn't quite meet his eyes, in the way she'd waited until they were alone and around the corner to ask, in the tremor riding under her attempt at soldierly practicality.
And God help him, he wanted to.
"We don't," he started, and cleared his throat, and made himself think about the logistics instead of the way she was looking at him. "A full transfer takes a while. And the others are right there, and Jeanne can't know, so. We don't really have time for. All of it."
Her face fell. Just slightly. A flicker of disappointment she smothered as fast as it surfaced, her gaze dropping to the frozen ground.
"But," he went on, and her eyes came back up, "we could do something quick. If you want. Enough to top you off before we move."
The change in her was immediate and startling. The disappointment burned off and something else replaced it, a bright hard glint of resolve, the same look she got when she planted her shield and refused to be moved. She turned to face him fully, hands curling into small determined fists at her sides.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. I want that. Quick is… quick is good."
"Ya… good" he echoed, weak.
"Very efficient." She stepped closer, into the narrow shadow between the wall and the cart, close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her. Her voice dropped to almost nothing, and that flush was back in full force. "Tell me what to do, senpai."
Griswald took a breath. It seemed so different than when he'd done it with Ritsuka.
With Ritsuka there had been no room to think. She'd taken and taken, driving the whole thing with that reckless confidence, and he'd been swept along in the current of her. There had been no fumbling because she hadn't allowed any. It had happened to him more than he'd chosen it.
This was different. Mash stood in the cold narrow gap with her fists still half-curled and her face turned up to his, waiting. Trusting him to lead when he had no idea if he was capable of leading anything. And that difference, the sheer weight of her looking at him like he mattered, made his heart hammer against his ribs in a way Ritsuka never had.
"Come here," he managed.
He reached for her before he could second-guess it. His hand found the curve of her jaw, thumb brushing the soft skin below her ear, and she leaned into his palm like she'd been starving for the contact. Her eyes fluttered half-closed.
He kissed her.
It wasn't the desperate, choking rescue of their first kiss in the ruined store of Fuyuki, when he'd been fumbling to save her life and terrified he'd fail. It wasn't the mechanical rhythm of stockpiling mana on the eve of a battle. It was slow. It was soft. Her lips parted under his and she made a small sound in the back of her throat, and then they both simply melted into it, the tension bleeding out of her shoulders, her body sagging forward against him until her chest pressed to his through the layers of fabric.
His mana stirred. His circuits, weak and inconstant as they were, lit like coals catching, and he felt the current begin to move, the faint pull of it flowing from his mouth to hers. Mash shivered against him, and he knew she felt it too. Her hands came up to fist in the front of his half-buttoned uniform, holding on.
"Senpai," she breathed against his mouth, and there was wonder in it.
He deepened the kiss. His tongue slid against hers, and she met him without hesitation now, the two of them finding a rhythm that felt less like technique and more like instinct. The transfer thickened. He could feel her circuits drinking it down through their joined mouths, the sensation running back into him like a warm loop closing.
Her hands began to move.
They slid up from his chest to his shoulders, then down again, tracing him through his clothes, palms flattening against his ribs as though she needed to confirm he was really there, really hers to touch. Her fingers curled into the muscle of his back and pulled him closer. She wasn't the timid patient in Roman's office anymore. She was pressing into him with a hunger she'd clearly been holding behind that brittle composure the whole time she'd been telling him it was fine, it was fine, it was fine.
He let his own hands move.
He skimmed them down the line of her back, over the segmented paneling of her bodysuit, feeling the flex of her skin underneath. His palms reached the small of her back and stopped, hesitant. She broke the kiss just enough to press her forehead to his, breathing hard, and pushed her hips back into his hands in silent permission.
He kept going. His hands slid lower, over the swell of her backside, the fabric taut and warm beneath his fingers, and he gripped her there, drawing her flush against him. Mash gasped, a high startled sound, and then bit it off, her whole body going rigid for a heartbeat before it dissolved into something molten. Her arms wound around his neck. She kissed him again, harder, chasing the mana and chasing him both.
The current between them surged. His circuits burned brighter than they ever had. There was something about her, about the way she gave herself over completely once she'd decided to, that made his weak flickering magic pour out of him like a broken dam. He could feel her reserves filling, could feel the glow of it rising in her the way her Demi-Servant frame drank it in.
Her hands found the gap where his uniform hung open. Cool fingertips slipped against the bare skin of his chest and he sucked in a breath through his nose, the sensation jolting straight down his spine. She explored him blindly, learning the shape of him by feel, her palm flattening over his racing heart.
"Master you're shaking," she whispered.
"So are you," he whispered back.
She laughed, breathless and small, than buried her face in his neck. Her lips found his pulse. She kissed it, once, soft, and he felt her mouth curve into something that might have been a smile against his skin.
He ran his hands up her sides, over the curve of her waist, thumbs grazing the exposed strip of her stomach where the hole in her bodysuit bared her skin. She trembled under the touch, her stomach flexing, and made that same small sound again. Encouraged, he mapped the line of her ribs upward. His hands hesitated at the swell of her chest, the paneling snug over her small breasts, and he glanced down at her.
Mash lifted her head. Her face was flushed crimson, her lavender hair mussed where he'd threaded his fingers through it, her violet eyes glassy and dark and fixed on him with a want that stole the breath from his lungs.
"It's fine," she said, and this time it wasn't a wall to hide behind. This time she meant it. She caught his wrist and pressed his hand fully against her. "It's fine, senpai. Keep going."
Griswald's fingers pressed against her, feeling the give of her breast beneath the taut fabric, and Mash's breath hitched into a whine she caught behind her teeth. He kneaded her, thumb tracing the peak that stiffened under the paneling, and she arched into his palm, her spine bowing, her mouth falling open against his jaw. The mana kept flowing but he could feel it thinning, the current from a simple kiss no longer enough to fill the depth of what her Demi-Servant frame could hold.
He knew what that meant. His face burned even as his hands didn't stop.
"Mash," he murmured against her hair. "A kiss isn't going to be enough. Not if you want to be topped off before a fight."
She stilled. Then she pulled back just far enough to look at him, and understanding moved across her flushed face, followed fast by that same hard glint of resolve she got when she planted her shield.
"Then tell me what you need," she said. Her voice shook but her eyes didn't waver. "I want to do it right, senpai. I want to be full for you."
The words went through him like a current all their own. He swallowed hard.
"You'd have to..." He couldn't quite get it out, so he reached down instead, guiding her hand from his chest to the front of his trousers, where he'd gone painfully hard against the seam. Her fingers closed over the shape of him and her lips parted in a soft startled circle.
"Oh," she breathed. Then, quieter. "Oh. Yes. I can do that."
She sank to her knees in the frozen dirt of the narrow gap without a second's hesitation, her hands already working at his belt with clumsy, eager fingers. He glanced over his shoulder toward the far corner of the farmhouse where Ritsuka's bright chatter still drifted, keeping Jeanne bent over her dirt-map. They had minutes. Maybe less.
Then Mash freed him from his trousers and every thought about time evaporated.
She wrapped her small hand around his cock and just looked at it for a moment, up close, her breath fanning warm against the head, her lavender bangs falling over one eye. When she glanced up at him through her lashes, cheeks scarlet, mouth wet, he thought his heart might actually stop.
"Like Da Vinci taught me," she whispered, more to herself than to him.
She leaned in and dragged her tongue up the underside of him, base to tip, slow, and Griswald's knees nearly buckled. He caught himself against the cold wall with one hand. Mash swirled her tongue over the swollen head, tasting him, then wrapped those soft lips around it and sank down, taking him into the wet heat of her mouth inch by careful inch until he bumped the back of her throat and she gagged, pulling back with a slick pop and a string of spit connecting her lip to his cock.
"Sorry," she gasped, "sorry, I'm still learning."
"Don't apologize," he choked. "God, Mash, don't apologize for that."
She smiled, and went back down.
This time she found her rhythm. Her head bobbed on him, cheeks hollowing as she sucked, one hand fisted around the base to stroke what her mouth couldn't reach. Her other hand crept up to cup and roll his balls, gentle and curious. The sensation dragged a groan out of him that he barely muffled. The wet obscene sounds of her mouth filled the narrow space, her tongue flattening along his shaft on every downstroke, drool sliding down her chin and dripping off onto the strip of bare stomach the hole in her bodysuit exposed.
"That's it," he breathed, one hand finding the back of her head, threading into her hair. "That's perfect. You're doing so good, Mash."
The praise undid her. She whimpered and doubled her pace, sucking him with a desperate hunger now, her eyes half-lidded and glazed, tears beading at the corners as she pushed him deeper than she should have and held him there, throat working around the head. Her fist twisted on him, spit-slick and fast. She looked up at him the whole time, watching his face, learning what made his breath stutter and chasing it relentlessly.
He wasn't going to last. The wet heat of her mouth, the sight of her on her knees in the dirt with his cock stuffed between those soft lips, the mana screaming through his circuits, all of it coiled tight and low in his gut.
"Mash, I'm close," he warned, voice ragged. "I am almost—"
She pulled off just long enough to look up at him, spit-shined and flushed and utterly determined.
"I want all of it," she said. "Give me everything, senpai."
And she took him back into her throat.
That was the end of him. He came with a strangled sound, hips jerking against her mouth, and Mash held him deep and swallowed, throat pulsing around him, drinking down every pulse. The moment his release hit her he felt his healing magecraft kick in on instinct, his body refilling faster than he emptied, and the mana that had spent through her mouth now flooded into her twice over. She moaned around him, greedy, hips squirming as the transfer washed through her circuits and overflowed.
She sucked him clean, gentle now, coaxing every last drop, before finally sliding off him with a soft, satisfied breath. A thin trail glistened at the corner of her mouth. She wiped it with the back of her hand and looked up at him, glowing, radiant, absolutely brimming with power.
"Full," she whispered, dazed and delighted. "I'm full, senpai."
Griswald looked down at her, at the flush high in her cheeks and the way her whole frame seemed to hum with borrowed light, and something warm cracked open in his chest.
"I'm glad that you are." he said.
Mash beamed up at him from the frozen dirt, and for a moment neither of them moved, caught in the narrow shadow between the wall and the cart like the rest of the world had politely agreed to wait.
Then reality reasserted itself. Ritsuka's bright voice still carried around the corner, and somewhere beyond it Jeanne would be finishing her map, and the two of them were standing in a gap between buildings with his trousers half-open and Mash's chin still glistening.
"We should," Griswald started, and had to clear his throat. "We should fix ourselves. Before we go back."
Mash scrambled up, brushing the dirt from her knees, and the efficient servant slid back over her like armor going on. She wiped her mouth a second time, more thoroughly, and tucked a strand of lavender hair behind her ear. Griswald did up his belt with fumbling fingers and buttoned his uniform.
He risked a glance at Mash. She was smoothing the front of her bodysuit down, checking the straps at her thighs, her breathing already evened out. The frantic brittleness that had ridden under her voice all morning, the too-loud it's fine, the way she couldn't hold his eyes, all of it had burned off. In its place was something steadier.
He didn't know if what he'd done had actually helped with the things going on underneath it all for her. He didn't know if a mana transfer could fix that, or if he'd only papered over it. But she looked more ready than she had when they'd stepped behind the wall. More like herself. The version of her that planted a shield and refused to be moved.
Maybe that was enough for now. Maybe that was all he could give.
Griswald tucked the last button through its hole and straightened his collar. Mash had gone quiet beside him, her fingers idle now on the straps at her thigh, the busywork of composing herself finally run out. She stood there in the narrow cold shadow, glowing faintly with the power he'd poured into her, and looked at him like she wasn't sure whether the moment had ended or not.
He wasn't sure either. But something about the way she lingered, close enough that he could feel the warmth off her, made the words rise up before he could talk himself out of them.
"Mash," he said. Low. His pulse ticked up again, the way it always did around her. "Tonight. If we find somewhere safe to stop." He pushed his glasses up his nose. "Would you want to do a full transfer? The whole thing?"
Her breath caught.
She understood exactly what he meant. He watched the comprehension move across her face, watched the flush he'd only just seen fade come roaring back twice as fierce, climbing from her throat to her ears until she looked like she might combust on the spot. Her hands twisted together in front of her stomach.
"A full," she started, and stopped. Her gaze darted to his mouth, then away, then back. "You mean—"
"Only if you want to," he said quickly. "You don't have to. I'm not asking because of because Ritsuka, or anything like that. I just—" He faltered, then made himself keep going.
Mash pressed her lips together. For a moment she looked down at her twisting hands, and he braced himself for the brittle it's fine to come back out, for her to armor up and deflect.
Instead she lifted her head. Her cheeks were scarlet, her violet eyes shining, but she held his gaze this time and didn't let it skitter away.
"Yes," she whispered. "I'd like that, senpai. Tonight. With you."
Something warm and enormous unfolded in his chest.
Griswald smiled at her, helpless and wide, then bent to brush a smudge of dirt from her knee and finished setting them both to rights.
"Do I look..." Mash gestured vaguely at her own face. "Um. Normal?"
"You look fine." He winced at the word. "Good. You look good."
"So do you." She hesitated, then reached up and pushed his glasses back into place where they'd slid down his nose. Her fingertips lingered at his temple for half a second. "There. Better."
The touch went through him more than everything that had come before it, somehow. Griswald swallowed and nodded, and the two of them turned and walked back toward the farmyard together, close enough that their sleeves nearly brushed.
Jeanne knelt over her dirt-map, the point of one finger tracing a line through the scratched roads. Ritsuka crouched beside her, nodding along with an attentiveness that was, Griswald suspected, entirely performative. Fou sat on the low wall above them, tail curled around his paws, watching the whole thing with the expression of a creature who understood far more than he let on.
Both of them looked up as Griswald and Mash approached.
Jeanne rose and dusted the soil from her gauntlet, and her face opened into a smile that was warm and unguarded and completely without suspicion. It made Griswald feel briefly, sharply guilty, though he couldn't have said exactly for what.
"Ah, there you are," Jeanne said. "I was starting to think we'd have to leave without you. Are you ready to go?"
Behind her, Ritsuka rose too, and the moment Jeanne's back was to her she caught Griswald's eye and waggled her eyebrows with theatrical, obscene delight, her gaze flicking pointedly from him to Mash and back again. She mouthed something he chose not to read.
Griswald ignored her completely.
"Yes," he said to Jeanne. "We're ready."
"Good." Jeanne bent and scooped up her banner, settling it against her shoulder with the ease of long habit. "The road south stays close to the treeline for a few miles, which will give us cover from the sky. The wyverns patrol the open country by day, but they don't like the forest. Too many things to snag their wings." She nodded toward the map she'd drawn, though it was already half-scuffed under her own boots. "If we keep a good pace we can reach the abbey at Neufchâteau before dark. There may be people there. People who might know where she's massing her army."
"And whether the Grail's with her," Griswald said.
"And that." Jeanne's smile faded into something graver. "Yes."
Ritsuka slung her scavenged pack over one shoulder and rolled her neck. "Then let's not waste the daylight. I've been sitting on a bucket for twenty minutes, my legs are asleep." She fell into step beside Jeanne as the Ruler turned toward the road, and Griswald heard her ask something about the abbey, whether the nuns there would recognize the real Jeanne or run screaming like the soldier had.
Griswald watched them go a step ahead, the silver of Jeanne's armor catching the grey morning light, Ritsuka's red-orange ponytail bobbing beside her. Fou dropped from the wall and trotted after them, then thought better of it and bounded up onto Mash's shield instead, riding along like a strange white ornament.
Mash fell into place at Griswald's side. She glanced at him, and there was still a faint pink in her cheeks, but she was smiling, small and private and steady.
"Ready, Master?" she asked.
"Ready," he said.