Ch 4.3 These Tragic Souls and a Sword Reborn in an Intergalactic Space Opera
These Tragic Souls and a Sword Reborn
in an Intergalactic Space Opera
Story Intro: "Welcome! I'm an evil god, though not that evil of a god!" is what they woke up to. Join our heroes and heroines, having just met their demise, displaced by an extradimensional event.”
Story Starts
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Book 1 - The Empty Twin
Ch 4.3 Depersonalization-Derealization
Time did not pass inside the gem. That was the first thing I learnt, and the last, and everything in between.
There was no light in there, and no dark either—darkness would have been something, and the gem held nothing. No hunger to mark the hours. No sleep to end a day. Only me, and the memories, which arrived without being called and stayed for as long as they liked, because in a place without time, everything stays for as long as it likes.
I'd had years to name what I carried. Guilt. Anger. Confusion. Sadness. Apathy. Self-pity. Doubt. Hate. Jealousy. Shame. Fear. Frustration. Loneliness. Disgust. Resentment. I recited them the way other people counted sheep, except counting sheep is meant to bring sleep and there was no sleep, so the list simply went round again. Fifteen names. I had checked. I had had nothing to do but check.
The naming was supposed to help. I'd read that once, in the years when I still read things—that naming a feeling gives you power over it. Whoever wrote that had never been sealed inside a jewel by their sister and left to marinate in their own history. Naming the feelings changed nothing. They didn't answer to their names. They churned regardless, all fifteen at once, none of them ever resolving into anything so clean and finished as grief. Grief has a shape. Grief ends, or so I'm told. This didn't end. It circulated—anger curdling into self-pity, self-pity souring into shame, shame feeding the hate, the hate exhausting itself back into apathy, and apathy, patient apathy, waiting underneath the whole rotation like a floor.
And beneath the floor, something else. The thing all the others fed. A hatred so old and so total that it no longer felt like an emotion at all. It felt like an organ. Something I had grown around.
I remembered my father's words—my first father, my real father, though both words had long since stopped fitting him—and in the gem I could examine them at leisure, turn them over, hold them to the light that wasn't there. This is Sakura's best opportunity. He had believed it. That was the detail I kept returning to, worrying at it the way the tongue worries a broken tooth. He hadn't lied to comfort himself. Tokiomi Tohsaka did not require comfort. He had looked at his younger daughter, weighed her, and concluded—calmly, correctly, by every standard his world honoured—that she would be of more use elsewhere.
I used to wonder what my face had looked like, that day. I was five. I don't remember crying. I remember the smell of the Matou house, which is not a memory anyone should have as their first memory of a new home: damp earth and old wood and under it something sweetish and wrong, like fruit forgotten at the bottom of a bag.
I learnt what the smell was soon enough.
Zouken. Every road led back to Zouken. Every feeling on my list, traced to its source, arrived at the same withered figure, and the pit beneath the house, and the things that lived in the pit.
I will not describe the pit. Not because I can't—I can describe it in more detail than anything else in my life; I could map it blind—but because describing it grants it a dignity it doesn't deserve, and because some memories should stay where I keep them, in the room in my mind with the door I hold shut. What I will say is this: the pit taught me arithmetic. How many seconds in a minute. How many minutes in an hour. How many hours until the servant came with the lamp, and the ladder, and the bath that never made me feel clean. I counted because counting was a thing the mind could do that the body wasn't part of. I counted, and somewhere below me the body screamed itself hoarse and then stopped screaming, because screaming changed nothing, and the mind noted this from its high clean place among the numbers and kept counting.
That was where I learnt to leave myself. People speak of it as a mercy, that leaving. The mind protecting itself. Perhaps. But no one tells you that the door out of yourself only opens one way. That each time you leave, you return a little less. That eventually you stop returning at all, and simply hover somewhere behind your own eyes, watching a girl called Sakura Matou pour tea and attend school and say yes, Grandfather in a voice that has learnt exactly how much emptiness it is permitted to contain.
And through it all—his eyes. Cold, amused, ancient. Watching from the edge of the pit while his familiars did what he had made them to do, draining my od drop by drop, remaking me drop by drop. Most of the pit I have locked away. His eyes I cannot lock away. They watched me from above for eleven years and they watch me still, from the ceiling of every dark room I have ever slept in.
Yet here is the thing I understood only later, only in the gem, with all that time to study the machinery of my own destruction: Zouken never simply broke me. Breaking would have been careless. A broken tool is a useless tool. What he practised was a craft—and I mean that precisely, the way one means it of a potter. Bend without snapping. Warp without mending. Destabilise without shattering. He would let me approach the edge of true collapse, and then, with unerring instinct, he would feed me hope.
Hope was his finest instrument. I want that recorded somewhere, in some ledger of his crimes. Not the worms. The hope.
The first scrap came three days after he first put me in the pit. Three days—I had counted—of believing, with the whole ferocious idiot faith of a five-year-old, that someone was coming. That my father had not understood what this place was. That Rin would appear at the rim of the pit with her ribbons and her scowl and demand her sister back. Three days of listening for footsteps that belonged to a rescue.
The footsteps, when they came, belonged to Kariya Matou.
My adoptive uncle. The only member of that household in whom the human parts still outnumbered the rest. He struck a bargain with Zouken—win the Holy Grail War for the Matou, and in exchange, my freedom—and I have spent years trying to decide whether I am grateful to him or whether I hate him too, for teaching me that hope has a taste, because everything that came afterwards would have hurt less if I had never tasted it.
The bargain granted me no reprieve. That was the design of it. While Kariya laboured at his impossible task, his body rotting around the worms he had accepted for my sake—for my sake; I carried that, I carry it still, it has a weight and I can tell you exactly what it weighs—the training continued without pause. Zouken saw no reason to suspend the shaping of his vessel merely because the vessel might soon be redeemed. Hope, I learnt, does not suspend suffering. Hope merely gives suffering something to measure itself against. Every night in the dark I now had a number to hold: when Uncle Kariya wins. And every night the dark took the number from me and showed me how far away it was.
He did not win.
I watched what Zouken's familiars did to him afterwards. I was made to watch—no. That's not true, and in the gem I promised myself I would stop softening it. I was not made to watch. I was permitted to watch, and I watched, because by then the girl behind my eyes no longer looked away from anything. She had nowhere to look away to. I watched my uncle, the one person who had spent himself trying to buy me back, be devoured as a bitter epilogue to his defeat—and the lesson carved itself into me deeper than any worm ever reached.
You did not oppose Zouken. You did not escape Zouken. Opposition and escape were stories, and stories were bait, and I was done taking bait.
Something finished in me that day. I felt it go the way you feel a tooth come out—a wrongness, then an absence, then your tongue returning again and again to the smooth new gap. Where the hope had been. I stopped waiting. I want to be understood: I did not despair, because despair is loud, despair still wants something. I simply stopped. The house continued its cruelties and I received them the way a doorstep receives rain.
Shinji came next, though "came" suggests an arrival, and Shinji had always been there. My adoptive brother's torment started small—the needling of an older brother towards a younger sister, so ordinary in its shape that for a while I mistook it for family, and treasured it, which shames me now more than almost anything else. I think, at some point, he genuinely did see me as a sister. I hold on to that. Not for his sake. For the sake of the boy he might have been, in a house that hadn't been a wormery wearing walls.
But Zouken tended Shinji's jealousy the way he tended everything—patiently, expertly, drop by drop. The heirship did the rest. I had been named Matou heir: a privilege, they called it, and I would have traded it and my soul together for one night of unbroken sleep. Shinji could never have held the title. The Matou blood had thinned past usefulness generations ago; he had no circuits worth the name, and no ritual could put them in him. The impossibility didn't temper his resentment. It distilled it. Every year he understood a little more clearly that the family's future had been poured into the adopted girl, the outsider, the replacement—and every year he found new ways to make me pay the difference.
I pitied him at first. That was my error, and Zouken, who wasted nothing, showed him how to use it. My pity was twisted into obligation, obligation into subservience, and from then on I was his whenever the mood took him—my body a possession to be used and set aside, and the girl behind my eyes watching from her high clean place, counting, always counting, while the worms nested in me drank whatever the ordeal produced and grew sleek on it. That was the joke underneath everything, the one Zouken must have savoured: even my violations were productive. Even my worst nights were maintenance. I was less a person than a container being kept in working order, and the household's cruelty was simply the schedule of its upkeep.
I tell all of this flatly because flatly is the only way I can tell it. If you want weeping, I used it up. There is a finite amount and mine was spent by nine years old.
And yet—and I have turned this over more than any other thing, alone in the gem with my fifteen named companions—despite everything the Matou did to me, the wound that would not close, the one that fed all the others, came from my own blood.
Nothing embodied it like Rin.
My former sister. Even the phrase is a knot: former pulling one way, sister pulling the other. Hate, anger, resentment, guilt, jealousy, frustration, shame, fear—all fifteen, if I'm honest, every name on my list converging on one small figure in a red coat—each strand pulled so tight against the others that I could not tell where one ended and the next began, and pulling on any of them only tightened the rest.
The injustice had such a simple shape. That was what made it unanswerable. My elemental alignment—the deep, still property of my soul, the one thing about me I had not chosen and could not change—had been judged an inconvenience and a boon in the same breath. An inconvenience, because it made me incompatible with the Tohsaka sorcery trait. A boon, because it made the choice of heir simple. Rin would inherit the crest. Sakura would be adopted out. The Tohsaka name detached from me as cleanly as a label peeled from a jar, and the jar was rinsed, and something else was poured in.
For years I kept one small candle lit in the dark: they didn't know. Father could not have understood what the Matou truly practised. It was ignorance, not sacrifice. I nursed that candle through the pit and the worms and the long arithmetic of the nights.
Zouken blew it out personally. Of course he did. He had been saving it.
He liked to talk while I recovered—recovery being his word for the hours I spent relearning how to stand. He would settle into his chair above the pit and tell me about my former family in the fond, unhurried tones of a man describing old friends. Tokiomi the quintessential magus. Rin the perfect heir, the living embodiment of the Tohsaka tradition—the mindset, the discipline, the beautiful hunger for discovery. And then, when he judged me soft enough, the words that sealed the doubt in permanently. I can still recite them. In the gem I recited them often, the way you press a bruise.
"Do you think they would save you if they knew what the Matou heir experiences? Anything is justified for the betterment of magecraft, for discovery, for any pathway towards the Root. I assure you—" and here he paused, and found my eyes, and his withered face arranged itself into perfect serenity— "were they given the chance to learn the Matou's magecraft, they wouldn't bat an eye at your predicament."
I had no answer. That was the poison's elegance: I had no evidence for one. Eleven years, and no one from that bright house on the hill had ever come to check.
So I endured. Not bravely—endurance implies a choice, a grip, and I had neither. I persisted the way furniture persists. Every year, every experiment, every night. And through the last and greyest of those years, one thing—one single, unaccountable thing—kept a pilot light burning in a building I had otherwise closed.
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It began about a year and a half before the Holy Grail War.
I had already noticed his constant presence around my adoptive brother. At first I paid him no attention. He was just another tool Shinji exploited—there may have been some genuine friendship buried in it somewhere, but tools were tools, and amongst tools I was the most used of all. Why would one instrument spare a thought for another?
But exposure breeds observation, and observation, against my will, bred recognition. There was something off about Shirou Emiya. His eyes didn't always match his projected emotions. The smile arrived on schedule, assembled from all the correct components—and yet, caught at the wrong angle, it resembled those pictures rendered so close to real that they tip over into uncanny. A smile worn by something that had studied smiling.
I knew that art. I had practised it in a mirror since I was six.
That was the moment of recognition, and I resented it, because recognition is a form of contact and I had organised my entire existence around avoiding contact: here is a fellow broken person.
But the recognition came with a discrepancy, and the discrepancy would not leave me alone. I drifted through my brokenness. I did the minimum, accepted what was thrown at me, and kept the girl behind my eyes well back from the glass. He refused to stay broken. Whatever had hollowed him out—and something had; I never doubted it, one vacancy knows another—he filled the hollow with motion. Helping. Fixing. Volunteering for every menial task the school could produce until they mocked him for it, the Fake Janitor, earnest and inexhaustible and entirely without self-regard. His lack of self-worth was obvious to anyone who actually looked. It was how Shinji used him. It was how everyone used him. He was the only person I had ever seen being consumed and calling it a life, the way I was consumed and called it one—except that he had somehow kept moving, and I had stopped.
Watching him produced the closest thing to feeling I had. A detached admiration, and beneath it—faint, unwelcome, alive—a sting of jealousy. It is hard to look into a mirror and find yourself lacking. But this mirror, fragmented as it was, stood defiant. It reflected not my passive emptiness but an active, futile, stubborn pursuit of self-repair, hour after hour, arrow after arrow.
How? That question was half the jealousy. What allowed one broken person to keep functioning that way, while another sat quietly rusting? I had no theory. I only had the watching, and I told myself the watching was nothing—idle observation of a curiosity, a habit to pass the time.
Then Zouken learnt of my interest.
Through the worms in me, most likely; nothing in my body was private, and I had long stopped pretending otherwise. He was pleased—his pleasure was the coldest weather I knew—and he ordered the surveillance increased. He told me things I hadn't known. That the boy was the adopted son of the Magus Killer, the infamous and conveniently dead Kiritsugu Emiya. That he might stand as the Einzberns' representative, or a representative, in the coming War. My one private pastime, requisitioned. Even the watching was made into work.
From my observations, Shirou seemed nothing more than a typical high schooler. No double life visible, no slips. Then again, Rin projected perfect normality too, in her own standout way—the school's idol, poised, untouchable, beloved from a safe distance. I knew better than anyone what a public face could be built to hide.
His days followed a pattern I could have set a watch by. Menial tasks around the campus, freely volunteered. And kyudo—hyper-focused, repetitive kyudo, hitting the target without fail for hours, stopping only for water, the toilet, and the moment the other members began cleaning the dojo for closing.
Then came that lunchtime.
I overheard Ayako Mitsuzuri complaining loudly to Rin, glaring across the yard at Shinji, who was holding court before a group of girls with his account of the weekend's kyudo competition.
Ayako relayed what a kouhai had told her. During the post-victory celebrations, the kouhai had gone to deliver food and drinks set aside for Shirou—and overheard Shinji berating him instead. Shirou had embarrassed the school, Shinji claimed, by competing through his injuries: from the judges' perspective, from the other schools' perspective, it must have looked as though Homurahara had shamelessly fielded its injured ace.
But Ayako and those in the know understood the truth. Shirou had concealed the injury himself and pushed through the competition of his own accord. It unravelled during his final draw—the elbow gave itself away in front of everyone, and a judge approached with the medical staff, asked to see it, and bared his entire right arm for the hall. The repetitive practice had damaged both the rotator cuff and the elbow. He had been shooting through it for weeks.
Shirou insisted, to their faces, that he had continued of his own free will and that no blame should fall on the school. For his trouble he was berated in turn by the judge, the medic, and the club adviser—and, in the retelling, by Ayako, whose rant ended in a frustrated shout: his resignation letter had been on her desk that morning, despite everything she'd tried.
Rin allowed that Shinji had a sliver of a point. Ayako refused to concede even the sliver. Shinji had said it with malice, she snapped, and not one person in the club blamed Shirou for anything.
I had caught a glimpse of him arriving at school that morning, more subdued than usual, and had thought little of it. He usually did his busybody rounds after lunch, often with Issei in tow; today he was conspicuously absent. His homeroom teacher, apparently, had sent him straight home with orders for a full week of rest.
What I did next, I still cannot properly account for. There was no decision. I have searched the memory many times for the moment of decision and it isn't there. The girl behind my eyes watched a body that had ignored its instructions walk itself to the faculty room, and stop at Fujimura-sensei's desk, and ask, in a voice I barely recognised as the one I maintained, whether there was any schoolwork that needed bringing to Shirou Emiya.
The famously loud teacher just grinned, gathered documents from her desk, asked me to wait—and then skipped, whistled, and hopped her way towards the photocopier.
While I waited, the sliding door at the far side of the faculty room opened. A knot tightened in my stomach, all fifteen strands of it, as my former sister entered and made a beeline for the energetic teacher at the copier.
I couldn't make out their conversation. Fujimura-sensei's laugh punctuated whatever the poised and dignified Rin Tohsaka was saying. Then the teacher turned my way and performed her skipping return, Rin trailing behind her. Our gazes met. Rin's eyes widened for a second, shifted away—and then she composed herself, easy as breathing. Of course she did. Composure was the family inheritance. I'd simply never received my share.
Fujimura-sensei slammed the photocopied notes onto her desk, scribbled on two sticky notes, and split the pile in two. Half to me. Half to Rin.
"Here as well—I'd appreciate it if you both took over kitchen duties. He'll be stubborn about it, mark my words. This should cover dinner for four. I'll be there around seven, seven-thirty." She pressed five one-thousand-yen notes into my hand without pausing for breath. "Oh, right—Sakura, is your grandfather always home? Rin, do I still need to inform your guardian?"
I nodded dumbly. The teacher bulldozed on, granting neither of us the chance to actually speak.
"Great! I'll let your guardian know you'll be home late." She ushered us both out of the faculty room and slammed the sliding door behind us. The lock clicked. Through the door, she cheered about having no more distractions, declaring she'd finish everything by six.
And so I stood in a corridor, holding schoolwork for a boy I had only ever watched from a distance, shoulder to shoulder with the sister who had not spoken to me in half a decade. If Zouken had arranged it as an experiment, he could not have designed it better.
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I was feeling many things in that moment, and the fact itself alarmed me. Feeling was not something I did any more. Feeling was a door I had shut.
But something had wedged the door, and through the gap came heat—simmering, bubbling, tightening in my chest, an actual physical pressure behind my sternum. It took me most of the walk to identify it, because I was out of practice, the way one forgets a language. It was anger. Not the deep tectonic hatred that lived beneath my floor—that never surfaced; it only radiated. This was small, immediate, personal anger, and it had a target, and the target kept glancing back at me.
Ever since the Matou claimed me, my constants had been apathy, emptiness, and duty. Why feel, when everything was pain? Why care, when everything was suffering? Why hope, when everything could be taken? The equations were old and settled. And yet: every time Rin glanced back—and she kept glancing back, her guilt sitting plainly on her face, worn openly the way she could afford to wear things—the heat pulsed.
Five years of silence. Or six; I'd lost the seam between them. Half a decade of a bright house on a hill and no footsteps. And now—what? Small talk? Sisterhood, resumed at her convenience, in public, where her precious persona might suffer if she walked past me without a word?
I clutched the paperwork tighter against my chest, the bag of groceries looped at my elbow, and slowed my pace as she slowed hers—she trying to fall in step, I holding rigidly to my two arms' length behind. We repeated the cycle twice, three times: an absurd little dance neither of us acknowledged, choreographed entirely in guilt and refusal.
It couldn't last. At the crossing I tempered myself and feigned interest in a video signage across the street—a girl in a maid uniform performing a cute dance as she 'blessed' a steaming plate of omurice. I studied that advertisement as though it contained instructions for my life. In a way it did: smile on schedule. Serve what's put in front of you.
The bus arrived. I quickened my pace, ignored Rin entirely, and boarded—five hundred yen into the farebox, hands cupped beneath for the change—and she scrambled after me, nearly losing the race with the closing doors. Rin Tohsaka, scrambling. On any other day I might have filed it away as a small treasure.
The only free seats were the priority seats, which left the two of us standing close, gripping neighbouring hand straps, swaying to the same corners. I fixed my gaze on the scenery sliding past the window. She shifted into my line of sight anyway, fidgeting, hesitating, visibly wrestling with her words. The perfect heir, at a loss. Another day, another treasure.
"Sakura…"
I gathered what courage I had and tried to meet her eyes. The moment her guilt found mine, my gaze broke and dropped to the floor, obedient as everything else about me. A tired sigh escaped—mine, though it seemed to belong to someone much older.
Light giggling pulled me out of my brooding. Two little girls were playing on one of the seats, the slightly taller one attempting to tie the smaller one's hair into pigtails—clumsy, laughing, starting over—while their mother tried to hush them, mindful of the other passengers.
The smaller one held still for it. That was what undid me. She held perfectly still, chin lifted, trusting the clumsy hands in her hair completely.
From my periphery I saw Rin watching them too. She flinched—visibly, unmistakably—at the reminder of what once was. And I risked a glance at my former sister and found her looking not at the children but at my hair. At my hand, rather, which had risen without my permission and closed around the red ribbon tied there. The ribbon she had given me. The one thing from that bright house I had never once, in eleven years, failed to wear.
My hand. My ribbon. Neither had consulted me.
"Ummm…"
This time I rebuffed her outright—moved to the opposite side of the bus and turned my back, and stood watching the window's ghost of her not approach.
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I pressed the red button for my stop. The moment my feet touched the pavement I set off in the general direction of the Emiya residence, lengthening my stride as I di—
"Wait, Sakura—"
A hand closed around my wrist, halting me mid-step.
I turned and stared down at it. At the hand gripping my wrist. Slender fingers. Neat nails. A hand that had never learnt what hands could be for.
"Could we just talk for a minute? I really wanted to catch up. How are your magus studies going with the Matou?"
I flinched—my whole body, one contraction. She didn't see it. She was already talking, frantic and headlong: her own studies, her excuses for never reaching out, how she'd missed me, more and more words spilling out one after another, as though a sufficient quantity of words might retroactively fill five years. I processed none of it. I stood there, staring blankly at the hand grasping my wrist, while somewhere behind my eyes the girl who did my watching noted, without inflection, that this was the first time my sister had touched me since I was five years old.
“How are your magus studies going with the Matou?”
My mind emptied of everything. The heat went out of me all at once, the way it always eventually did, and the fifteen names went quiet, and even the hatred beneath the floor lay still.
All that remained was tiredness.
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End
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