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(She’ll remember drinking tea in a dead man’s home. She’ll remember that the air reeked of piss — Senpai, did you know that your bladder releases when you die? — and shit, where her boot had smeared in someone’s intestines. She will not remember the stars: the infinite heavens, the sky Uruk’s people had taken as evidence of the gods, Ishtar’s glittering crown. But she will remember Ishtar. She’ll remember the city walls, studded with rusty dingirs and discarded weapons, and the buzz of fruit flies serenading the carcass of what had been the vegetable market. She'll—)
* * *
“We’re set to collide with the Temple of Time in thirty-six hours,” Dr. Roman tells her. “You won’t be able to rely on Chaldea so much for mana—Da Vinci developed a mystic code to help you summon, but it’ll still be harsh on your circuits. I’d recommend doing something to top up your stores.” Ritsuka allows herself a single, private moment of resentment—more for the euphemism than the request itself. She’s done similar things in the field, after all, transferring mana to someone, but with Servants it doesn’t work the other way around.
She wonders, briefly, what the good Doctor intends for her to do. Maybe she’s meant to pick her favorite staff member, or ask Mash for a favor she’d never refuse. But it’s better, Ritsuka thinks, to find someone she can’t hurt.
* * *
The first lesson of the Grand Order: she’ll get to rest when she’s dead. She isn’t lying when she says Ereshkigal’s presence is a comfort—she can ignore the creeping malaise that seeps from Ereshkigal’s feet, the smell of grave dirt that clings to her skin, the instinctive drop of her own stomach when Ereshkigal enters the room. I’m not trying to patronize you, she’ll say, until Ereshkigal believes it. This is the most important truth she knows how to tell.
* * *
She trudges out of the command room, to the kitchens, and edges around Emiya to go hunting in the pantry. He side-eyes her as she ducks inside, but doesn’t say anything. The “pantry” is really more of a small warehouse, shelved with night-infinite rows of colorful cereal cartons and mayonnaise jars. She checks the back corner behind the flour sacks, where Drake keeps her stash, and plucks an expensive-looking bottle of mezcal from the cluster. She can be a little selfish if it’s for a good cause, right.
She ducks back out the door. Boudica, chopping carrots next to the sink, notices immediately. “ Ritsuka, ” she says sharply, but Emiya shakes his head at her, so she turns back to her carrots with a huff. As Ritsuka prances out of the kitchen, she catches the tail end of their conversation. Come on, let her have this one, Boudica, she might not even live to see her twentieth—
She makes sure to close the door behind her.
* * *
She showers and changes her clothes, but she still shows up at Merlin’s door feeling like utter shit. To his credit, he doesn’t sour it by pretending to look surprised—just affable and half-distracted, like she’s a delivery driver dropping takeout off at his door and he’s already thinking about eating it. “To what do I owe the pleasure,” he says, all prim and proper. “Although I should say—you ought to be resting right now, right? Babylonia was a lot,” Merlin tells her, saccharinely sympathetic, like she’s a little girl who came home crying after a scary movie. Ritsuka doesn’t even have the energy to roll her eyes.
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to,” she says. He’s clairvoyant. It’s a foregone conclusion. If somebody told Ritsuka she didn’t have to, it wouldn’t mean anything—she’d go ahead and do it anyway. That’s why nobody ever does.
But it’s true that she should be resting, she thinks. Merlin gestures her in, smiles charitably when she holds up the mezcal, beckons her to the floor. She should be in her bed crying herself to sleep, or playing backgammon with Mash. Instead she’s here to fuck a man who eats nightmares for sustenance. Because it’s her job. Just like everything else is.
* * *
The second lesson of the Grand Order: she is very, very good at forcing herself to do disgusting things. That is why she is still alive.
* * *
They sit there by the kotatsu— the doctor bought himself one of these, says it’s the best invention of the twenty-first century, thought I’d try it out myself. It’s—warm. Ritsuka can let herself relax into it a little, and the drink he pours out for her warms her further, takes the edge off her apprehension.
And he’s handsome. It’s gross. That’s the worst part of all of this, honestly—even if Merlin is shady, even if he’s patronizing, even if he’s full of shit. She can’t ignore the base, mindless way she likes the full curve of his mouth, the strong line of his nose, even that hard, bright look in his eye when he knows something she doesn’t. He pours himself a small glass; she tries her best not to think about the way the tendons in his forearm flex, and notices his eyes crinkling when he catches her staring. His face is placid and sweet, the picture of innocence.
She’s done this in the field. She’s done this in the field. Dantés, who tried to be harsh, and Bedivere, who tried to be gentle. Mordred, who stayed with her after it was done, and Nightingale, who kept muttering under her breath about she was so young, so young, too young. She isn’t crossing a line. She isn’t making a very bad mistake. It’s just a regular mana transfer; nothing more, nothing less.
Ritsuka thinks about the Servant information recorded in Chaldea’s databases. Independent Manifestation, A-rank, and the mana reactors in the summoning room that seem to mysteriously feed themselves. “This will work the way I think it will,” she says, phrasing her question as a statement.
“What do you mean by thi —“ he starts, but then he catches the look on her face and snorts. “Yeah, yeah. It’s going to work. You can rest easy about that part, Master. It’s not like I wasn’t hoping for something like this,” he adds, without a trace of guile. It’s almost scarier when she knows he’s not lying—like it is with Artoria, who is terrifying precisely because she’s the real thing. “I just have bad luck with women.”
She wants to laugh. That's how he, and the other men of the Round Table, would always phrase it: bad luck. “I’ve heard that it’s women who have bad luck with you,” she blurts, before she can think of anything else to say. She doesn’t even know who it is that she’s talking about, but when he tilts his head at her like a toddler, she thinks that it doesn’t matter.
Ritsuka takes another sip. When she swallows her drink down, Merlin’s eyes scrape over her throat.
“Maybe you’re right,” Merlin says. He’s still smiling. “But this isn’t going to be like that. It’s just a contract. I’ll help you out. You’ll help me, too.”
* * *
(She’ll remember finding the maggot-ridden body of a young woman in the pantry, but she won’t remember the dead children, or finding the mottled blue carcasses of infants people had tried to hide. She’ll remember that they hadn’t been able to scrounge up any real food for their last meal; she’ll remember laughing and saying she would’ve puked it anyway. She’ll remember having nothing to fill her stomach but hot water and bile. She’ll remember the scald of tea in the back of her throat, the comfort of it. She’ll remember white teeth and purple rubber skin, but she’ll never quite be able to recall Siduri’s smile, and—)
* * *
—and for a few brief, shining moments, Ritsuka Fujimaru forgets who she is.
Maybe Merlin’s consumed that part of her, too. If she’s going to die anyway, she’d rather die like this. Swallowed whole, gone without a trace. She opens her mouth to ask him for that, and it comes out as a stupid, pathetic whine. His fingers rub against her clit again, scrape against her rough and raw, and—she’s coming, all that wound-up tension in her body unraveling in spasms. It only really occurs to her when it’s already happening, when it’s already too far gone for her to spin it out and savor it. It’s almost perfunctory, the way he fucks her through it, like he’s just going through the motions. Her fingernails dig into his wrist.
He finishes his meal.
* * *
After a long moment, Ritsuka’s muscles stop twitching. Merlin’s face is completely empty, bleached clean of all affect. He looks at Ritsuka with eyes like black holes. She feels a deep chill in the pit of her stomach, but—it’s the closest she’s ever come to getting through to him, isn’t it. So she doesn’t look away, and she watches the ego bleed back into his skin like ink. Her heavy breaths echo in the air until he presses his cheek to hers. She can feel the energy sink into her circuits, as promised. She’s relieved, though perhaps not as relieved as she should be.
“That was fun,” he says. His hair slides over her chest. She doesn’t say anything. The details of the room are coming back into focus. She’s coming down from a high, the sweat cooling on her skin. Her iron grip on his hand goes slack.
She gestures weakly at the liquor stains on the fabric of the kotatsu. “Clean up the puddles,” she rasps. “People are gonna think we...” She trails off. Her shoulders slump.
She feels more than hears his laugh. “Did what,” he teases, but he does it anyway with the crook of a finger. Maybe it’s an illusion, but she isn’t thinking that far ahead. She lies there, feverish; she isn’t overly conscious of Merlin looking at her body. It’s the same way she’d feel about being looked at by—a—a squirrel. Like she’s changing in the woods, or some shit, and there’s a blue jay looking at her, or a deer. A wild animal. Something with its own problems, with no innate sense of societal taboo. A squirrel wouldn’t give a shit about her ratty ponytail, the hair on her arms, the mottled scars on her legs. It’s a comfort, almost as good as being alone.
“Woodland creatures? That’s a new one, Master,” Merlin says. He’s laughing. It’s like they’re back in Uruk, cracking jokes about the ziggurat and nunneries. This is the part where Ana tells him to shove his staff up his own ass.
But nobody says anything, so it falls to Ritsuka to fill the silence. She fumbles for a better name to call him. "Piece of shit," she says, intending it as a joke. But she means it, she realizes, with a lurch. She means it very, very much.
“That’s me,” he agrees. There isn’t really much else to say. When he wipes her face with a soft towel, she can almost ignore the bone-deep sense of wrongness in the pit of her stomach.
Her clothing is piled on the floor, like a piece of roadkill. She picks it up. Merlin watches her. When she’s about to leave, he finally speaks up.
“It’ll all be over soon,” he says, softly. “I promise.” It’s far kinder than anything else he’s said to her, so Ritsuka instantly knows it’s a lie.