A/N: Written for the

Magical Big Bang
Epic Masterclass Challenge, #1 – canon goodness
Diversity Writing Challenge, k24 – a multichapter that contains time or dimension-travelling

that unanswerable question
Prologue

It might have been a fleeting thought.

Why Dad..? Why…

And then it became a possibility. His reality. Or a dream that didn't seem to end and he couldn't seem to escape from, either. A time that gripped him so tightly they left marks on his skin he couldn't see but hummed, like the phantom pain of wounds since the Fifth Grail War had begun, like the phantom pain of those burns from ten years ago…

Except it wasn't ten years ago any more. Not now. Not here. Not when the ashes of his childhood had risen up into a replica hazy but so perfect, it had propelled him away when a shock of yellow and red flashed behind the open windows.

He'd run and, panting, he'd reached the main shopping district before he'd realised it. He'd circled when there were far too many shops he didn't recognise, and others that he did. He'd circled when he'd realised some of those people looked like they'd aged backwards, and others were completely unrecognisable and others still looked like they hadn't changed at all and maybe that was the fuzziness at the edge of his vision or simply how everybody felt when time leapt away from them like on horses' hooves…

Aah… There is a horse.

Hooves in the middle of Fuyuki City. Maybe he shouldn't have been too surprised, after all the magic he'd seen tossed around. But when he looked, he saw nothing but people moving in waves, and the sky with its sun dipping towards the skyline. Vaguely familiar, but far too unsettling and not what he needed nor wanted. Not at all.

He stumbled away. Home. He wanted home. And even if, at the back of his mind, he registered his childhood home standing despite the flames, he went towards Miyama instead.

I wonder… if Fuji-nee is here already…

Did the Fujimoras always live there? He couldn't remember. Maybe they'd been forced to move as well, when the city had been torn apart. Torn apart and then refashioned… Enough so that even the streets were both familiar and not. Did his father always live there? He didn't know that either. He just went anyway. Was he just projecting onto this dream world? Remoulding it into a way that made sense but didn't? Maybe it was because he wanted it suddenly so much more, and for an entirely different reason, than he'd wanted it before.

Why Dad..? Why…

Round the corner. Down the street. There should be a supermarket there (and he knows, because he visits it every other day) but it's a gaming store instead, and there should be Copenhagen at where he's been missing far too many shifts of late (and far too much school as well) but instead is a restaurant of an entirely different flavour but the newsagency is still there with the same withered old man at the counter. And the houses. Some changed. Some looked the same. Some were classmates but his feet and his head and his heart were all singing homehomehome and he couldn't stop to check. Wouldn't stop to check.

And none of them conveniently wandered out of their homes to prove him right or wrong. None of them burst the bubble of his childhood home standing on two feet again and yet he was still going home to somewhere else… and for a moment he stopped and thought: didn't he yearn for that old life of his back at all?

But then he started walking again and the thought was swallowed up. It was all swallowed up. The unanswered questions from the previous war… except that one.

Why Dad..? Why…

It was like there was a fever burning under his skin and driving him on.

And finally, finally, he stumbled there. Down one last final road and there was his house, their house. It looked frayed and worn, as though he'd jumped ten years into the future instead of the past and maybe he had. Where was his proof, after all, that time in this hazy dream world had rewound?

And then he stood on the threshold and stopped, wondering what he'd find.

Hooves. Hooves again and he looked up and down the street and found nothing except a shadow. And so he looked up and this time he saw it: a chariot and a red-haired man and a white-haired woman slung over his shoulder. Long white hair like Illya's and maybe that meant something, or maybe that was a coincidence. Maybe the red hair meant something in relation to Shirou himself or maybe that was also a coincidence. Maybe, when the doors of the Emiya home flew open and someone rushed out and 'Saber!' slipped from his lips before his brain had quite caught up, it was just another blonde woman (or man) rushing past and not the Saber-class servant who'd become so ingrained in his life. And maybe, because he'd turned away from the house to stare after the figure and the smoke and odd cacophony of sounds that followed like a car screeching, he saw someone new approaching and maybe, maybe, he wasn't Kiritsugu Emiya running up: frantic but cold, young but old, catching his arm in a vice grip before even slowing down or stopping and pinning him to the gate even though his eyes flickered towards something else, beyond. 'Who are you?'

He'd been thinking of his father almost every step of the way, but now, laughably, it was Saber who consumed his thoughts again. It was the shock of blond hair rushing past: he was sure of it. That was why 'Saber' tumbled from his lips again, so foolishly (or maybe not so foolishly because he'd introduced her as Saber to Fuji-nee and Sakura too, and maybe that wasn't such a smart idea because anyone familiar with the Grail wars would know, even if it was all a well-guarded secret. Saber hadn't even mentioned she'd served in the previous war until that golden-clad Archer-class had shown up – and besides, the world still held that fuzzy dream-like quality to it…). Ten years ago he didn't know about the Grail wars. Ten years, he didn't know about Saber.

Depending on when ten years ago, he did not even know Kiritsugu Emiya.

So when he thought about it later, maybe he couldn't blame the other's knee-jerk reaction of knocking him clean out.

Maybe he should have just been relieved it wasn't a bullet or a blade instead.