A Matter of Time

"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone."
― Rose Kennedy

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
― Anthony G. Oettinger

A boy of seven years laid in his hospital bed, staring almost obsessively at a clock ticking madly on the wall across from him.

"Did you hear me?" The man offering to become his foster father asked again.

The boy continued to contemplate the clock, not answering for a second. When the man pulled in a breath to repeat his question a final time, Shirou responded, eyes not deviating an inch, "So, you're a magician?"

"Not exactly, but yes. Close enough." Shirou nodded, taking in this information as impassively as he'd taken in everything since the fire. Everything but the mad ticking of that fucking clock.

He had learned some language in the fire. Far be it from most men to pass on without cursing the world, god, and anything else they could think of before they were immolated.

"Perfect. That's perfect." Shirou said, finally taking his eyes off the clock to stare into Emiya with an intensity that seemed to border on insanity. Empty, hungry little eyes.

"And why's that?" Kiritsugu asked, despite himself unnerved. The eyes twinkled madly.

"Because I need to turn back time."

/

This is becoming stupid, Shirou thought as he grit his teeth, feverish sweat dripping down his forehead and back like a politician at a lie detector. Still, he continued to concentrate, slowly shoving the burning steel rod down his back. Not literally, of course, that was just what it felt like to create a magic circuit using one of his nerves.

As the process completed itself, Shirou felt his mind start to drift, and that's what cost him. The steel rod slid from his mental grasp, and a sharp pain made its way through his entire body.

"Aaaaarrrghh!" Shirou screamed as the worst pain he'd ever felt reverberated through him, pressure building in his head as his back curved painfully like a seizure patient. This continued until the pain cut off, quite suddenly, and Shirou's curved back collapsed to the floor while he breathed raggedly.

Staring up at the ceiling of the room where he'd started practicing his magecraft, Shirou repeated the sentiment that had so painfully distracted him. "This is becoming really, really stupid."

The door slid open as Kiritsugu rushed in, looking frantically around the room only to find Shirou recovering in a sweaty heap.

"What was that? Are you alright?"

"Great." Shirou replied in a tired but sarcastic monotone. "I'm doing absolutely fantastic."

"What happened?" Kiritsugu asked again.

Slowly getting up from the deck, Shirou lay sitting and breathing heavily as he responded, "Me failing happened. This process is taking too long. What's the point of being able to do magecraft if I have to rebuild my magic circuit every time?"

"Rebuild what?" Kiritsugu cut in sharply. Shirou looked up in confusion at the tone of voice. "My magic circuit. I mean, I understand that I have no magical potential on my own, but rebuilding my magic circuit every day is taking too long. We need to find a better proce…"

Shirou trailed off as Kiritsugu looked at him like he'd just suggested that worms enjoyed tap dancing under the full moon to Sinatra (Zouken sneezed as his greatest secret was almost revealed).

"..I've been doing something incredibly stupid, haven't I?" Shirou asked rhetorically. Kiritsugu put his palm to his face as he sighed at the insane little boy before him.

After an illuminating lesson on how not to almost kill yourself, Kiritsugu stopped the reluctant, hands-off training he'd been parceling out to the little-boy who seemed hell bent on becoming a Magus, as he understood that Shirou would continue, with or without his permission or tutelage, and most likely kill or cripple himself in the process.

And so began the still reluctant but now very hands-on tutelage of Emiya Shirou, in the abstract and dangerous art of magecraft.

If only the magus killer knew of the terror he was unleashing on the world.

/

Shirou knew his Origin the second Kiritsugu first explained the concept to him. It didn't come as some vague premonition or deep insight into his true self.

No. It was like finally learning the name of something he'd always known but never articulated, that some deep-seated part of himself was keenly, intuitively aware of, that his conscious mind could now put a name to.

Time.

In his mind, ever present for as long as he could remember, there sounded an insesent, forever ringing ticking sound. Asleep or awake, reading or learning or watching TV, in the back of his mind was always that rhythmic ticking, like the sound of some internal clock he couldn't escape.

Driving him forward. For as long as he'd existed, it seemed. Ever since the fire, he knew. He had a theory, that losing all his memories in the fire, that this stripping of his conscious mind had brought his unconscious mind to the surface, shallower and more deeply connected than in a regular human being, who buried the unconscious mind, that from which the origin spiraled, under the constraints of society and emotional attachments and memory.

The other theory, which was scary in a much deeper, all-pervasive way, was that the ticking had existed even before the fire, and that it always had existed and he'd never been a normal person in the first place.

Suffice to say that either way, Shirou was much more connected to his origin and innate nature than most human beings. More connected than was healthy, many would say.

Because finding your origine was tricky business. Even if you were unaware of it, it was still an innate, defining part of you. But once you knew it, once you became aware of it, its prominence rose immensely, and it became written in stone, an immutable fate from which you could never escape. An obsession.

Kiritsugu would only ever sever and bind. That was all he could do, one way or another. He would never heal, and all that he touched would invariably change. Like a string, severed and then bound back together, he changed everything he touched in this matter. It was what he excelled at. It was that on which he based his only true mystery, the Origin bullet. It was his destiny, written in stone since the words first left his mentor's cursed lips.

The origin is the starting point that defines one's existence and directs one's actions, more akin to an inherent impulse than a conscious choice, a unique instinct different in every creature, human or not.

Time. Shirou tested the word on his tongue. It seemed incomplete somehow. Yes, he could see now. Not time as in the passage of one moment to the next in its natural, primordial form. Time as humans saw it. Time as it was measured and divided by humans, time as humans tried to control it, to slow it, to stop the inevitable. Shirou could taste the true nature of his impulsion. Time, "To attempt to control time". To control the past, the present and the future.

To control the world.