The corridors of Chaldea stretched in pale white sameness, fluorescent panels humming their constant lullaby overhead. Griswald walked with his hands in the pockets of his uniform jacket, shoulders hunched in that way he'd never managed to train out of himself despite years of his mother's corrections. The facility felt hollow now. Every hallway held the ghost of someone who should have been walking through it. Maintenance closets that nobody would open again. Desks with half-finished coffee mugs gathering dust behind locked doors because nobody had the heart to clean them out yet.
He turned the corner toward the engineering wing and stopped.
Voices. Two of them, female, drifting from around the next junction where the corridor split toward the engine room access. Close enough to hear clearly. Close enough that they hadn't heard his footsteps.
"I'm just saying what everyone's thinking." Octavia Sylvia. The clipped precision of her consonants carried the unmistakable polish of Clock Tower elocution. "Von Garmisch. The Von Garmisch family. You know them?"
"I know of them." Tomarin's voice was softer, her London accent threading through the words. "Minor lineage. Theoretical contributions, mostly. Nothing practical."
"Nothing practical is generous. They haven't produced a truly capable mage in four generations. And now one of them, the weakest one, the one who couldn't even get accepted to the Clock Tower after three separate applications, is supposed to be our salvation?"
Griswald's feet rooted to the floor. His back pressed flat against the wall, just out of sight of the junction.
"To be fair," Tomarin said, "he did survive Fuyuki."
"Mash Kyrielight survived Fuyuki. Cú Chulainn survived Fuyuki. That girl Fujimaru survived Fuyuki, or whatever she is now. Griswald Von Garmisch hid behind a shield and kissed a girl. That's his contribution to saving the world so far."
A pause. The soft squeak of a boot shifting on polished flooring.
"You sound angry."
"I am angry." No hesitation in Octavia's voice. No softening. "I studied for six years at the Clock Tower. Six years of competitive examinations, practical assessments, peer review. I earned my place here through merit. Tomarin, you were recruited from the engine program based on your technical scores. Every person left alive in this facility got here because they demonstrated competence."
"And he didn't?"
"He got here because his family pulled strings to place him somewhere that wouldn't embarrass them further. A medical assistant. Filing charts and restocking bandages. And now the fate of seven billion people, the entire span of human history, rests on his ability to provide mana to Heroic Spirits." The word came out like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe. "It's an insult."
"Octavia..."
"It's an insult to every mage who trained, who sacrificed, who bled for their craft. Any one of the A-Team candidates could have resolved these Singularities in their sleep. Wodime alone could have done it with one hand behind his back. Instead we have a man who failed his way into the most important position in human history because every qualified person is dead."
Silence settled between them. Griswald stared at the wall opposite him. The fluorescent light caught a hairline crack in the white panel, a fracture that ran from ceiling to floor. Damage from the bombing that maintenance hadn't gotten to yet. Or wouldn't. Not enough hands left.
"Nobody else has the aptitude," Tomarin said quietly. "Dr. Roman confirmed it. The rayshift compatibility is genetic. You can't train it."
"I know." Octavia's voice lost its edge. What remained underneath sounded worse. Resignation. "That's the part that keeps me up at night."
Their footsteps receded. The conversation dissolved into murmurs, then nothing.
Griswald stood with his back against the wall. His fingers had curled into fists inside his pockets at some point, knuckles aching from the pressure. He breathed through his nose. Counted the hairline crack's branches where they spiderwebbed across the panel.
She wasn't wrong.
That was the part that sat in his stomach like a stone. Not the cruelty of it. The accuracy.
He lifted his gaze from the cracked wall and looked down the opposite corridor.
Duston stood forty feet away. Still as a photograph. His teal and black jacket cut sharp lines against the white corridor, silver accents catching the overhead light. Those narrow gray-brown eyes fixed on Griswald with an expression that gave nothing away. It was stern and watchful. The angular planes of his face offered no sympathy, no encouragement, no hostility.
Just assessment.
Griswald met his stare. The silence between them stretched taut as wire. Duston had heard everything. The acoustics in these corridors carried sound with clinical efficiency. There was no pretending otherwise, no polite fiction available to either of them.
Duston waited.
Griswald waited.
Neither moved. Neither spoke. The fluorescent hum filled the space between them like static. Griswald searched the older man's face for some indication of what he expected. Agreement? Defiance? An apology for existing?
Duston's expression remained locked. Evaluating. His arms hung at his sides, hands loose, posture straight in the way of someone who'd spent fifteen years walking these corridors and owned every step. He was waiting for Griswald to do something. Anything. Choose a direction.
The silence held until there was nothing left in it.
Griswald unclenched his fists. Pulled his hands from his pockets. Straightened his spine by a single vertebra and walked past the junction, past the ghosts of Octavia's words still hanging in the recycled air.
Duston's gaze tracked him the entire length of the corridor. Griswald felt it between his shoulder blades like a fingertip pressed to bare skin. Heavy. Unrelenting. Not hostile, but not kind either.
He never looked back and Duston never made a sound.
The Chaldea staff gym occupied a windowless rectangle on sublevel three, sandwiched between a storage bay and an emergency water filtration unit. Before the bombing, it had served as a modest concession to crew morale. Six treadmills, a rack of free weights, a pair of cable machines, resistance bands hung on wall hooks, and rubber matting that smelled perpetually of disinfectant. Nobody had used it much. The staff who cared about fitness preferred the virtual training rooms two floors up, most of which were now rubble.
Griswald gripped the pull-up bar and hauled.
His arms screamed. His shoulders burned with a deep, sick heat that radiated into his chest and spread down through his core. The bar bit into his palms where the skin had already gone raw and pink. He pulled until his chin cleared the bar, held for one shaking second, then lowered himself. Slowly. That was the point. Control the descent. Don't just drop.
Seven.
He'd managed four yesterday. Three the day before that. Progress measured in single digits that would have embarrassed anyone who'd ever held a gym membership. His body had the lanky, undermuscled build of someone who'd spent his formative years hunched over textbooks and medical charts rather than doing anything that required physical exertion. His arms were thin. His chest was flat. His legs had the structural integrity of pipe cleaners. He knew all of this with the clinical detachment of someone who had spent years cataloguing his own inadequacies.
Eight.
His vision pulsed. Sweat ran in continuous streams down his temples, soaking the collar of the grey cotton shirt he'd found in the supply closet. The shirt clung to his torso in dark patches. His hair hung in damp strings across his forehead, plastered to skin that had gone an alarming shade of crimson. His glasses kept sliding down his nose. He'd given up pushing them back.
Nine.
The muscles in his forearms seized. His fingers loosened on the bar. He locked his grip through sheer refusal and pulled again, his body swinging slightly despite his efforts to keep still.
Ten.
He dropped. His feet hit the rubber mat and his knees buckled. He caught himself against the pull-up frame, bent double, breathing in ragged gulps that tasted like copper and rubber. His pulse hammered in his ears so loud it drowned out the ventilation system's hum.
He didn't rest.
He crossed to the free weight rack and picked up the fifteen-pound dumbbells. Light. Pathetically light. He'd watched training videos on Da Vinci's tablet and knew that most adult men started heavier than this. But his shoulders had nearly given out on twelves, so fifteens it was. He curled the weights. Right arm, left arm. Alternating. Each repetition slower than the last as lactic acid flooded the muscle fibers and turned them to wet cement.
Three applications denied.
He curled.
The weakest one.
He curled.
Hid behind a shield and kissed a girl.
He curled until his arms refused to bend. Then he put the weights down, crossed to the treadmill, set it to a speed that would have been a leisurely jog for anyone else, and ran. His lungs felt like crumpled paper bags. His legs moved with the mechanical stiffness of someone operating machinery he'd never been trained on.
He ran anyway.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. His shirt was soaked through completely. His glasses had fogged and he'd finally pulled them off, setting them on the treadmill's console where they sat in a small puddle of condensation. The world blurred into soft shapes and smudged colors. The pain in his legs had transcended specific location and become a general field, a white noise of exhaustion that covered everything below his waist.
He hit the emergency stop. Stumbled off the belt. Leaned against the machine's handrail and concentrated on the simple act of keeping his lungs inflating.
"Senpai?"
The voice came from behind him. Soft. Careful. The particular tone Mash used when she wasn't sure if she was interrupting something.
Griswald turned.
It was a good thing his face was already the color of a boiled beet, because the alternative would have announced itself across the gym.
Mash stood in the doorway in black yoga pants that clung to every curve from hip to ankle, the fabric stretched taut over the flare of her thighs and the shape of her calves. A lavender sports bra crossed her chest, cut low enough to show the soft swell of her breasts pressing together above the elastic band. Her collarbone caught the overhead light. Her stomach was bare, the pale skin smooth and flat with a suggestion of definition beneath, her waist narrow before the fabric of the yoga pants hugged the generous curve of her hips. A small towel hung over one shoulder. She wasn't wearing her glasses.
Without them, her face opened. The frames usually imposed a kind of scholarly distance, a barrier between Mash and the world she observed so carefully. Stripped of that shield, her features were disarmingly soft. Wide violet eyes that caught the gymnasium's harsh fluorescent light and turned it into something gentler. The short lavender hair fell in its usual neat layers, bangs sweeping across her forehead, but without the glasses anchoring the composition of her face, it all looked different somehow. Younger. More vulnerable. Her cheekbones were delicate, her jaw a soft curve that led to a small chin, and her lips, slightly parted in concern, held a natural pink that no cosmetic could replicate.
"Are you alright? You look..." She tilted her head, searching for a diplomatic word. "Very tired."
Griswald grabbed his shirt hem and dragged it across his face. The cotton came away darker. "Fine. Completely fine. Just, you know." He gestured vaguely at the gym equipment. "Working out."
Mash's eyes tracked across the sweat-stained treadmill, the dumbbells he'd left on the floor instead of re-racking, the pull-up bar still wet from his palms. Her gaze returned to him. She didn't look convinced.
"Would you like to take a break with me before I start? I need to stretch first anyway."
His legs answered for him. They buckled slightly, just enough that he had to shift his weight to stay upright. "Yeah. Sure. Break sounds good."
They sat against the wall beneath the resistance band hooks. The rubber mat was cool through Griswald's sweat-soaked shirt. He leaned his head back against the white panel and stared at the ceiling, where a single fluorescent tube flickered every few seconds in an irregular rhythm.
Mash reached into the small bag she'd brought and produced a water bottle. She held it out to him.
"Here."
He took it and drank. The water was cold and hit his raw throat like mercy. He gulped it down, rivulets escaping the corners of his mouth and tracing lines down his jaw. He didn't stop until half the bottle was gone. When he finally lowered it, gasping, Mash sat beside him with her knees drawn up, arms wrapped loosely around her shins, watching him with a small smile.
"I didn't know you worked out, senpai."
The honest approach. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "It's a new thing."
"How new?"
"Three days."
Her smile widened a fraction. "That's very proactive of you. Starting something like this on your own." She said it without a shred of condescension.
"Do you normally work out?" He asked it before realizing it might sound like he was asking about her body, which he was decidedly not doing, except for the part of his brain that had catalogued every visible inch of her when she'd walked through that door. He focused on the flickering fluorescent tube.
Mash cocked her head to one side, her bangs shifting across her forehead. Her expression turned inward for a moment, the way it did when she was sorting through memories she hadn't fully processed.
"I used to do something similar. But it was more..." She paused. Her fingers tightened slightly around her shins. "Medical."
The word landed between them with quiet weight. Griswald nodded. He didn't push. He understood what that word contained when Mash said it. Treadmills connected to heart monitors. Resistance exercises calibrated to measure physiological decay. Endurance tests designed not to build strength but to document its absence. Every session a data point on a chart that tracked the slow countdown of an engineered body's expiration date.
"Right," he said. Nothing more.
They sat with that for a few seconds. The fluorescent tube flickered. The ventilation whispered.
Griswald squinted at the equipment across the room, rendered into vague shapes without his glasses. The cable machine. The weight rack. The treadmill he'd been trying to murder himself on. He turned to look at Mash.
"Does any of this actually do anything for you now? With the Servant abilities, I mean. Can you get stronger from..." He gestured at the gym.
Mash considered the question with the seriousness she gave everything. Her violet eyes tracked across the same equipment he'd indicated, appraising each piece the way a carpenter might examine a set of plastic toy tools.
"No," she said. "Galahad's power defines my physical limits. My strength, my speed, my endurance in combat. Those parameters are fixed by the Spirit Origin. Lifting weights won't change them." She flexed one hand experimentally, studying her own fingers as they curled and uncurled. "But my body is still human. The way I move, the way I react, the way I carry weight or shift my balance. Those are mine. And they're..." She searched for the right word. "Unfamiliar."
She lowered her hand to her knee.
"Before Fuyuki, I couldn't run two hundred meters without my heart rate becoming dangerous. I'd never thrown a punch. I'd never jumped further than I could step. And then suddenly I could do all of those things and more, faster and harder than any human alive." Something complicated moved behind her eyes. "My muscles know what to do. Galahad's instincts handle the combat. But there's a gap between what my body can do and what my mind expects it to do. I'm trying to close that gap."
She pressed her palms flat against the mat and pushed herself to standing in one fluid motion that made the action look effortless.
"Getting my body used to exerting itself. Learning what it feels like to push, to strain, to sweat. So that in combat, none of it surprises me."
Griswald looked up at her from the floor. The overhead light caught the edge of her jaw, the line of her bare shoulder, the gentle rise of her chest as she breathed.
"That makes sense," he said.
They sat shoulder to shoulder against the wall, the rubber mat beneath them still cool despite the warmth radiating off Griswald's overworked body. Neither moved to leave. The gym's ventilation hummed its monotone song overhead and the single flickering fluorescent tube kept its irregular beat, and somehow both of those things felt comfortable instead of oppressive. Like the room had shrunk to fit just the two of them.
Griswald realized, with a pang that sat somewhere behind his sternum, that they had not gotten a lot of chances to simply existed in the same space since returning from Fuyuki. To just sit and breath next to each other.
"I feel like I haven't seen you in days," he said.
Mash pulled her knees tighter against her chest. "Four days. We passed each other in the cafeteria on Tuesday, but you were carrying a stack of binders and Dr. Roman was talking to you about temporal anchor points, so I didn't want to interrupt."
She'd counted. Of course she had.
"You should have interrupted. Temporal anchor points are exactly the kind of thing I need saving from."
Her lips curved. That small, quiet smile that barely changed the shape of her mouth but transformed her entire face. "You looked very focused."
"I looked like I was drowning in a language I don't speak." He let his head fall back against the wall. "They're running me through the entire Team A curriculum. All of it. The briefing modules, the theoretical frameworks, the rayshift protocols, the Servant compatibility matrices. Stuff that Wodime and the others had months to absorb. Romani gave me a week."
"Is it difficult?"
He laughed, a short, hollow sound that bounced off the gym's bare walls. "The theory isn't bad. I can read. I can memorize. The practical simulations are where it falls apart. There's this one exercise where you're supposed to maintain a stable mana link with a simulated Servant across a fluctuating temporal field while recalibrating your spiritual signature in real time. The A-Team candidates could apparently do it in their sleep. I crashed the simulation four times yesterday. Da Vinci had to reboot the entire module."
"Four times isn't failure. Four times is practice."
He turned his head to look at her. She met his gaze without flinching, those wide violet eyes steady and certain in a way that made the knot in his chest loosen by a single degree.
"What about you?" he asked. "How's your training been?"
Mash shifted against the wall. Her bare shoulders rolled in a motion that was half stretch, half fidget. "Intensive. Da Vinci designed a combat adaptation program. Reaction drills, proprioception exercises, spatial awareness under combat conditions. Learning to trust Galahad's instincts without overriding them with my own hesitation." She paused, turning the closed water bottle in her hands. "I'm making progress. My response times have improved by fourteen percent since we started."
"Fourteen percent in four days. That's incredible, Mash."
Pink bloomed across her cheekbones. She looked at the water bottle in her lap as though it held something fascinating. "It's adequate."
"It's incredible and you're not allowed to downgrade it."
The pink deepened. She tucked a strand of lavender hair behind her ear with one finger, the gesture quick and self-conscious.
"And what about this morning?" Griswald asked. "What's on the schedule?"
The reaction was instantaneous.
Mash's spine went rigid. Her eyes widened by a fraction that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn't spent two years learning the micro-expressions of a girl who kept her emotions locked behind reinforced glass. A sound escaped her mouth, something between a squeak and a caught breath, barely vocalized but unmistakable in the gym's silence.
The water bottle slipped from her fingers.
It hit the rubber mat with a dull thud, bounced once, and rolled forward across the floor in a slow arc, coming to rest against the base of the cable machine three meters away.
"I'll get it." Mash was already moving, unfolding from her seated position and shifting forward onto her hands and knees to reach the bottle.
Griswald's brain short-circuited.
The yoga pants clung to her like a second skin. As Mash crawled forward on all fours, the black fabric pulled tight across the full, round curve of her backside, each movement causing the material to shift and stretch in ways that left nothing to imagination. Her ass was generous for her frame, soft and perfectly shaped, two full swells that the thin lycra outlined with obscene fidelity. The fabric dipped into the valley between her cheeks, pulling taut over each globe as she reached forward, and the overhead light caught the sheen of the material where it stretched thinnest across the widest point. Her hips swayed with each small crawling motion, the narrow cinch of her waist making the flare below it look almost exaggerated, like a figure drawn by someone who understood exactly where the eye wanted to rest. The elastic waistband sat low enough that the two small dimples at the base of her spine were visible just above it, twin indentations in pale skin that framed the beginning of that generous curve like punctuation marks.
She grabbed the water bottle and sat back on her heels, turned, and scooted back to her place against the wall. She clutched the bottle against her chest like a lifeline, and a flush had spread from her cheeks down to her collarbones, painting the exposed skin above her sports bra in splotchy rose.
"This morning I have a..." She swallowed. Stared at the far wall. "A private lesson. With Da Vinci."
Griswald waited.
Mash's fingers tightened around the water bottle until the plastic crackled.
"A private lesson," she repeated, quieter. The flush climbed higher, reaching the tips of her ears where they peeked through her lavender hair. "It's. Specialized training. That Da Vinci felt was. Important."
"What kind of specialized training?"
"The kind that is." Mash opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Her violet eyes darted to him and then away so fast they barely registered contact. "Private."
He studied her face. The way she couldn't hold eye contact. The way her chest rose and fell faster than it had moments ago. The way her thighs pressed together beneath the black fabric. The squeak she'd made when he'd asked about her morning schedule.
For one suspended moment, the only thought in Griswald's head was how cute she looked. The fierce, shield-bearing warrior who'd stared down a corrupted King of Knights, reduced to a stammering mess by a simple question about her morning. The pink staining her ears. The way she gripped that water bottle like it could teleport her out of the conversation. The tiny crease between her eyebrows that appeared when she was fighting embarrassment.
Then the actual content of her words caught up to him.
Private lesson. Da Vinci. Specialized training. The kind Mash couldn't name without turning the color of a ripe strawberry.
His face, which had finally been cooling from its post-workout crimson toward something resembling a normal human skin tone, erupted back into full tomato red. The heat hit him all at once, scalp to jaw, like someone had opened a furnace door directly in front of his face.
He knew exactly what kind of lesson Mash was talking about.
Because Da Vinci has given him the same kind of lessons.
The images slammed into his mind with zero regard for his dignity or composure.
Da Vinci's quarters. The warm amber light she preferred over Chaldea's sterile fluorescents. Da Vinci standing behind Mash, that enigmatic smile on her lips as she guided Mash's hands somewhere specific. The chestnut waves of Da Vinci's hair falling across her bare shoulder as she leaned close to Mash's ear, murmuring instruction with the same calm, pedagogical tone she used when explaining rayshift calibration.
Mash on Da Vinci's bed. The sports bra pulled over her head and discarded. Those soft breasts exposed, the pale skin flushed the same pink that colored her cheeks now, nipples hardening under Da Vinci's clinical yet appreciative gaze. Da Vinci cupping one breast from behind, demonstrating something, her olive-skinned fingers pressing into the soft white flesh while her other hand tilted Mash's chin up.
"Like this," Da Vinci would say. Patient. Precise. The same voice she used when teaching him. "Pay attention to how your body responds."
Mash, obedient and eager the way she was with every task she undertook. Violet eyes wide and focused, absorbing every word and demonstration with the same intensity she brought to combat drills. Following Da Vinci's guidance without hesitation, not from submission but from that earnest, whole-hearted commitment she poured into everything she deemed important. Her lips parting as Da Vinci's fingers trailed lower, tracing the flat plane of her stomach, dipping beneath the waistband of those black yoga pants.
Da Vinci naked beside her, because of course she would be. She had zero shame about her body. That slender, curvy frame stretched across the sheets, warm olive skin against white linen. Mash's eyes tracking every inch of her with scholarly concentration, memorizing curves and contours the way she memorized combat formations. Da Vinci spreading Mash's thighs apart with gentle, guiding hands, positioning herself between them, looking up at Mash with those calculating amber eyes.
"Watch what I do. Remember how it feels. You'll need to understand your own body before you can share it with anyone else."
Mash's back arching. Her fingers gripping the sheets. That small, breathy sound she made, the same sound she'd made during their first kiss in Fuyuki but amplified, deeper, drawn from somewhere lower. Her lavender hair fanned across the pillow. Her thighs trembling against Da Vinci's shoulders. The flush spreading from her face down her neck, across her chest, painting every inch of that pale skin in shades of rose and heat.
And Mash following instruction, because Mash always followed instruction. Lowering her head between Da Vinci's thighs with that intense focus, that desperate desire to perform well, to be good enough. Da Vinci's fingers threading through lavender hair, guiding the angle, the pressure. Her composed expression fracturing as Mash's enthusiasm compensated for inexperience.
Griswald realized he had stopped breathing.
He inhaled sharply through his nose. The gym's recycled air hit his lungs like ice water. The rubber mat beneath him was real. The flickering fluorescent tube was real. The wall against his back was real.
Mash was staring at him.
They looked at each other. Two faces the exact same shade of red, separated by eighteen inches of charged air in a basement gymnasium. Neither blinked. Neither spoke. The ventilation system hummed. The fluorescent tube flickered.
Mash's violet eyes searched his face. Something shifted in them. Recognition. She knew that he knew.
"Senpai," she said very quietly. "Please don't think about it."
"I'm not thinking about anything."
"Your ears are red."
"They're always red. It's a medical condition."
Mash's lower lip pushed forward, her cheeks still burning that impossible shade of pink. The pout she aimed at him was the kind of expression that did the opposite of what it was trying to do. All that wounded dignity and flustered indignation compressed into a face too soft to hold either emotion convincingly. Her eyebrows pinched together above those wide violet eyes, and her fingers squeezed the water bottle tight.
Griswald rubbed the back of his neck where the sweat had gone cold against his skin. "If it makes you feel any better, I had to go through the same lessons."
The pout dissolved.
Mash's face went blank. Not the careful, measured blankness she wore during briefings or the composed stillness of her combat stance. This was the vacant expression of a processor hitting maximum load, every available resource redirected to handling a single catastrophic input. Her violet eyes drifted past his shoulder toward the far wall, settling on nothing. The water bottle sagged forgotten in her lap.
"Ah," she said.
One syllable. Flat. Distant. Delivered to the middle distance with the hollow precision of someone whose soul had briefly left the building.
Griswald watched the realization bloom across her face in slow motion. Her lips parted. Her eyes widened by a fraction. The blush that had been retreating surged back across her cheeks and down her neck like a tide reversing course. She was picturing it. He could see it happening in real time, the same way his imagination had betrayed him thirty seconds ago, and there was absolutely nothing either of them could do about it.
He had made it worse. Spectacularly, comprehensively worse.
But something about the shared awkwardness loosened the knot that had been sitting in his chest since he'd overheard Octavia in the corridor. Mash was embarrassed. He was embarrassed. They were both sitting on a rubber mat in a basement gym, red-faced and tongue-tied, and somehow that felt more honest than anything else he'd experienced in the past four days.
He took a slow breath. Released it. Took another.
If they could face a corrupted King of Knights, they could face a conversation.
"Mash." He kept his voice level, or tried to. "Can I ask you something?"
She blinked. The distant focus in her eyes sharpened back to the present. "Of course, senpai."
"The mana transfers." He paused, rolling the words around in his mouth, testing their weight before committing. "Going forward, with the Singularities. There's a good chance I'll need to perform them with other Servants. Not just you."
Mash said nothing.
Griswald just said it. "Mash how do you feel about that?"
Her fingers found the cap of her water bottle. She twisted it. Off. On. Off. On. The small plastic clicks punctuated the silence with metronomic regularity. Her eyes stayed fixed on the bottle in her lap, tracking the rotation of the cap with the concentration of someone defusing an explosive.
Click. Click. Click.
"I haven't really had time to think about it," she said. The words came out careful and measured, each one placed like a step on thin ice. "Everything since Fuyuki has been so... busy. The examinations, the combat training, the briefings. Dr. Roman's schedule doesn't leave much room for..." She trailed off. The cap twisted again. Click. "Thinking."
Griswald waited. He'd learned that with Mash, silence was more useful than prompting. She needed space to find her way to what she actually wanted to say, and filling that space with his own noise only gave her somewhere to hide.
She stopped twisting the cap. Her thumb pressed against its ridged edge, holding it still.
"I never thought I would be in any sort of relationship with anyone." Her voice dropped, quiet enough that the ventilation almost swallowed it. "Chaldea was my world. These corridors, the medical wing, Dr. Roman's office, my room. That was everything. The books I read, the people I saw, the routines I followed. Everything I knew fit inside this building. I did not thing I would have any other bond that was not just for work."
She lifted her head. Not toward him. Toward the ceiling, where the flickering fluorescent tube cast its irregular pulse across the white panels.
"And then Fuyuki happened. And suddenly my world got bigger. Much bigger. An entire city, a burning sky, people fighting and dying for things I'd only read about. And you were there." Her thumb moved against the bottle cap again, but didn't twist it. Just pressed. "And Ritsuka. And Cú Chulainn. And now there are seven Singularities, and Servants I haven't met yet."
She lowered her gaze from the ceiling to her knees, drawn up against her chest inside those black yoga pants.
"I'm not sure how to feel about it. About any of it." The honesty in her voice carried no self-pity. Just the frank bewilderment of someone mapping unfamiliar terrain. "I don't know how to feel about relationships in general. I've read about them. Peperoncino gave me novels, and I watched programs on Dr. Roman's tablet when he wasn't looking. But reading about something and living inside it are different. I don't have a... framework."
Click. She twisted the cap once more, then stilled her hands by pressing them flat against the bottle.
"Everything is new. All of it. At the same time."
Griswald listened. He didn't interrupt. He didn't offer reassurance or perspective or any of the dozen things that rose to his lips and died there because none of them were adequate. He just listened, and let her words settle in the space between them, and understood.
She was not designed for this. None of this was in the blueprint. Not the relationships, not the feelings, not the confused tangle of jealousy and acceptance and longing and fear that came with caring about someone in a world that had never taught her how. Everything he took for granted, the social scripts absorbed through eighteen years of family dinners and overheard conversations between people who knew how human connection was supposed to work, Mash had none of it. She was building the plane while flying it, assembling the emotional vocabulary of an entire lifetime from fragments of borrowed novels and stolen television and four days of experience that would have overwhelmed anyone.
And she was doing it with the same quiet determination she brought to everything else.
Griswald breathed in. Breathed out. His pulse had steadied from the workout but now it climbed again for an entirely different reason. His palms were damp and not from exertion. His throat felt tight.
Man up.
The thought came in a voice that wasn't entirely his own. Something rougher. Blunter. A ghost of blue-spiked hair and a crooked grin and a wooden staff pointed at his chest.
Project authority. Mean what you say. Say what you mean.
He turned to face her.
The shift must have carried something different in it, some quality of intention that his body transmitted before his words could catch up, because Mash noticed immediately. Her violet eyes widened. The fidgeting stopped. She searched his face, and whatever she found there made her sit up straighter, her lips parting.
"Senpai?"
"Mash, I want to tell you something." His voice came out steady. A minor miracle. "I've been thinking about this since we got back, and I've been putting it off because I'm a coward about these things and because every time I try to have a serious conversation my mouth stops cooperating with my brain."
He held her gaze. His heart hammered against his ribs.
"The truth is, I..."
The words jammed. Like a key turned in the wrong lock, grinding metal against metal. He knew what he wanted to say. He'd rehearsed it in his room, in the shower, during Romani's briefings when his mind wandered. Simple words. Direct words. Words that any functional adult could assemble into a coherent sentence.
"What I mean is, you and I, after everything that happened, I feel like we should..."
Wrong. All wrong. Too formal. Too clinical. He sounded like he was proposing a research partnership.
"I care about you. Obviously. And not just as a, not just in a Master and Servant way, but more like..."
Mash leaned closer. Her face drew near to his, violet eyes searching, lips slightly parted. She smelled like clean soap and something faintly floral that might have been shampoo. Her breath was warm against his chin. The distance between them collapsed to inches and every coherent thought in his head scattered like startled birds.
"Like..."
A metallic crash exploded through the gym.
Both of them jumped. Mash's hand flew to where her shield would have been. Griswald nearly bit through his own tongue.
Across the room, a weight rack leaned at a forty-five-degree angle against the cable machine, three dumbbells scattered across the rubber mat in a loose constellation. Standing beside the wreckage, one hand still extended as if trying to catch the evidence before it hit the ground, was Dr. Romani Archaman.
His lab coat was rumpled. His salmon-pink hair had escaped its ponytail on one side, a loose strand hanging across his cheek. His green eyes, wide and caught, fixed on them both with the expression of a man who had been trying very hard to leave undetected and had failed in the most spectacular way available.
"Damn," he said softly.
Nobody moved.
Romani straightened. He pulled his hand back from the weight rack slowly, as if moving too fast might reset the situation. His mouth opened, worked silently for a moment, then produced sound.
"Sorry about that. I was just…." He gestured vaguely behind him. The gesture indicated a blank wall.
Griswald's face burned. Beside him, Mash had gone rigid, her cheeks incandescent, both hands gripping the water bottle like a weapon.
"Dr. Roman," Mash said. Her voice carried the brittle composure of someone constructing dignity from rubble. "Did you need something?"
Romani's expression changed.
It happened in stages, like weather shifting across an open plain. The sheepish embarrassment drained first, pulling the color and the awkward smile with it. Beneath that, something sadder surfaced, a grief that lived in the lines around his eyes and the slight downturn at the corners of his mouth. That, too, faded. What replaced it sat deeper. His jaw set. His green eyes steadied. His shoulders squared beneath the white lab coat and for a moment he looked nothing like the scattered, avoidant doctor who hid in his office watching idol videos. He looked like someone carrying a weight he had never asked for and would never set down.
"It's time," he said.
Three syllables. No explanation needed. The air in the gym changed, the idle warmth of their conversation replaced by something colder and heavier that pressed against the skin.
"The analysis is complete. Da Vinci confirmed the coordinates an hour ago. The first Singularity is locked." Romani held their gazes, moving from one face to the other. "We deploy this afternoon."
Silence filled the gymnasium. The flickering fluorescent tube cast its irregular pulse across the white walls. The ventilation hummed.
Griswald said nothing. His hand found Mash's on the rubber mat between them, fingers sliding between hers.
She squeezed. Hard. Her grip was warm and steady and absolute, the grip of someone who would not let go.