--Micheals PoV--
Micheal pushed off and rolled to the right as the 2nd remaining bicorn charged him braying in rage, clearly pissed off. He completed the roll, pushed off, and sighted down the rifle as the sound of cicadas filled the air. A crack was heard and the bearing glanced off one of the rear horn of the demonic beast as it reared on its hind legs clearly trying to pulverize Micheal into the ground. Micheal clicked his tongue and flooded his legs with mana to shoot out and to the left when he heard yelling and then the Bicorn was turned into a pincushion of dark lances. He stood up and looked back to see Jeanne stalking towards him her anger rolling off her in visible waves. She grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him down to look her in the eyes as she yelled,
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?!?!? YOU COULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING KILLED."
"Its training. Not sure where-"
"Training?" Jeanne hissed from between clenched teeth as she pushed Micheal to the floor, letting go of his shirt. He fell to the floor and stared up at her as she yelled, "I'm wandering the house trying to figure out as much as I can when I feel a sharp uptick of mana-YOUR MANA- from somewhere nearby. I try to find you so you can direct me because I think we're under attack, except I can't fucking find you, so I follow the mana down here, and I see YOU fighting a demonic beast IN HAND TO HAND COMBAT. YOU. A NORMAL DAMN HUMAN."
Micheal just laid there staring at her mouth agape as she continued to tear into him. His eyes flicked behind her and widened as the final monster he had set up rose out of the floor slowly gaining more and more definition by the second,
"erm- Jeanne? Look I know you're mad but-"
"I AM BEYOND MAD. WHEN I MADE THAT PROMISE TO YOU I THOUGHT WERE MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THIS. LITTLE DID I KNOW THAT MY MASTER IS A FUCKING RETARDED DUMBASS."
"Jeanne, MOVE!" Micheal yelled as the chimera lunged forward. He dodged to the right flying several meters and activating his eyes watching in slow motion as Jeanne turned around to face the Chimera and punched a hole clean through it from nose to tail turning the back half into loose sand. Deactivating his eyes he watched as the front half of the chimera fell to the floor cleanly split in two as it slowly turned to sand and dissolved into the floor as Jeanne breathed heavily staring at it, red sparks flying off of her gauntlet. Micheal moved a bit and her head snapped to him as his boot crunched some sand. She glared at him with a level of hatred he didn't think it was possible for a human face to hold. He held up his hands in surrender as Jeanne took a deep breath, closing her eyes, and Micheal watched as the sparks slowly stopped emitting from her clenched fist. She then stalked over to him and lifted him up by his shirt before he could get up, She held him inches away from her face as he swore he saw flames behind her eyes,
"Do not. Ever. Do this again without letting me know. Am I understood."
Micheal nodded silently not trusting himself to speak. She stared at him for a few seconds before letting her grip on his shirt go causing him to fall back to the floor. She turned away walked to the exit of the training room pausing long enough to slam her first into the wall creating a wide spiderweb of cracks from the point of impact. He watched her leave and swallowed as he tried to calm his racing heart. He honestly thought she was going to kill him. He stared at the cracks in the wall as it slowly repaired itself using the power of the leylines that ran under the mansion. Clearly he had misunderstood something between them that was crucial because that….
That was different.
He laid there for a few minutes as he heartbeat slowly went back to its normal rhythm after which he stood up and left the training room. He needed to talk to Jeanne but once again he couldn't find her. He stopped in one of the hallways and folded his arms wondering where the hell she could be when he heard a thump from one of the rooms the floor above this one. Going upstairs he noticed that every door was fully closed….except the third down on the left which was slightly ajar. He walked over to the partially open door and read the sign on it. It was one of the guestrooms that they had for visitors but this one….
This was the one that Arnehearte had been living in.
Taking a deep breath and shunting his emotions into the darkest corner of his mind, Micheal knocked on the door and let himself into the one room in the house he hadn't had the courage to go into since his Uncle had died. He looked around the room and noticed that Arnehearte had clearly made it even more of his own in the brief time he was here. There were vials of bubbling liquid sitting on a table with a magic circle engraved onto it in what was clearly an alchemy table. The bed had been shoved to one of the walls of the bedroom as though the person using it considered sleep optional. Against another wall was a bookshelf filled to the brim with books of varying types and thicknesses while to the right of the door was a half empty suitcase sitting in front of a partially full wardrobe.
Standing in front of the bookshelf leaning over to pick up some books that had fallen was Jeanne. She had looked up when she heard the door open but froze, looking guilty upon seeing Micheal standing there. Micheal barely noticed her as he walked into the room and made his way over to the alchemy table. He ran a finger over the circle and frowned remembering how the church had killed Arnehearte.
How he hadn't been able to save him.
How the Church had tried to kill him.
He heard the soft thumps of metal heels as Jeanne moved over next to him. They stood there in silence for a few seconds,
"I considered him my surrogate father you know...since I don't remember my biological one." Micheal said quietly as he watched the liquids bubble, "He was always there to help me if I needed it. Always willing to lend an ear, always willing to help…..and then those fucking cunts killed him."
Micheal clenched the hand on the table into a fist as he felt his mana boil in response to his anger. He realized that Jeanne was still standing next to him and forcibly calmed himself down before glancing over at her as she stared at him with a look he didn't quite understand. She sighed and folded her arms staring at the table.
"I was created by the single slimiest fuck on the face of the planet with the entire purpose of burning France to the ground-" She started and then stopped, sighing. Micheal watched as she gripped her the upper part of her gauntlet with a hand hard enough to make the metal warp and creak under the strain, "I'm not...good at this...stuff. You deserve a better Servant for this war than me."
Micheal turned to her incredulous,
"I wanted to summon you. Specifically the you that I met when I dreamwalked. I wouldn't have gone for anything or anyone else. As for not being good at processing grief or helping someone process it…" Micheal turned back to look at the table his emotions still raw, "It takes a while to process it even at the best of times. I thought...I had but I guess I didn't."
He chuckled darkly to himself and looked back at Jeanne who was watching him,
"Sorry."
"What are you apologizing for?"
"For...training without letting you know. I didn't even occur to me to let you know in the first place."
"...Oh."
They stood there awkwardly neither sure of what to say next when the clock in the room rung the top of the hour making them both jump. Micheal laughed a bit and rubbed the back of his neck, "Now that I think about it. I don't know your wish for the grail. What is it?"
"I….," Jeanne stared through the wall as her gaze unfocused, "I want to….vanish. I shouldn't have existed in the first place and nothing good comes of knowing me. So I figure the world would be better off with me having never been created in the first place."
Micheal stared at her unsure he heard her correctly.
That...didn't make sense. Why would she…
Jeanne turned and began to leave the room pausing with a hand on the doorframe and turning to look back at him,
"If you're going to train from now on let me know so I can watch. I get the feeling you won't just sit back and let me fight on my own so if you're going to insist on fighting then I need to know your habits so I don't burn you by accident."
And with that she left, leaving Micheal with more questions than answers.
--Jeannes PoV--
Jeanne walked down the hall unsure of what to feel at that moment as all her emotions screamed at her. She hadn't expected to see her master so soon after she had yelled at him and she briefly thought he had come to yell at her or punish her for how she acted only for him to do what he did. Clearly the room belonged to someone he had cared about, He even admitted as much, and yet…. She frowned as she remembered the mana that had briefly surged off of him when he spoke of his surrogate father dying. His mana from when she had been dying in her own world had been pure, powerful, and clear. It had felt like the water her original self had craved as she had burned alive. Jeanne stopped in the hallway as she glanced over her shoulder back at the room that Micheal had not left yet.
When she had felt his mana….it reminded her of her own. Filled with bottomless rage, hatred, and a desire to kill whatever might briefly quench the rage that flowed through her at all times. She held out her right hand remembering this morning when she had eaten the bread he had made her. How...everything felt bright. Happy even. She remembered seeing his small smile as she had unconsciously gasped at how good the bread was.
She looked forward and kept walking down the hallway feeling a certainty in her gut. What she had told him was her wish wasn't what she wished for. It was more of her voicing her thoughts on her existence and how it affected those around her. As she turned the corner she realized that she didn't know what her wish would be causing her to pause in the hallway, fold her arms, tilt her head to the side, and think.
As a servant she had to have a wish. That was the entire point of a servants existence was that they fought in order to use the grail to rectify a regret or fulfill a wish. The problem was that she had so many things she wished hadn't happened either to her or the people around her as well as so many wishes or desires for things to get better for her. As for regrets…..
Jeanne closed her eyes and inhaled slowly as she thought to herself but no matter what she couldn't think of what her wish would be. She exhaled with a huff, "Of course I would turn into a servant with no clearly defined wish….makes perfect sense since I shouldn't have a wish big enough to warrant being a servant in the first place…" She muttered to herself as she opened her eyes and continued walking down the hallway. As she turned another corner she went down some stairs passing by a table in the hallway. When she did so a ringing sound started from it and she jumped a bit still mostly in her own thoughts. She heard running footsteps from upstairs and stood there frozen debating to leave or not for a second too long as Micheal came down the stairs and rounded the corner. He saw her, opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it looking away from her and shaking his head a bit. He walked over to the table and took the top part off of the part that was ringing and spoke into it,
"Lafaire residence. May I ask who is-Mom!"
Jeanne suddenly cursed her armor and the sound it made as she tried to move away from the conversation. Micheal saw her and silently made a motion telling her it was fine to go as he tapped a brief rhythm on the table and Jeanne felt a bounded field envelope him. She noticed that this field had muted any sound so his mother couldn't hear anything she did over the phone line. She stopped moving slowly and debated going back to one of the rooms she had found earlier that had that comfy bed. She started to leave waiting for Micheal to do anything or try to get her to stay and when he didn't she turned another corner and went back to a room she had found earlier that day.
A few minutes later she was in the room sitting on the bed looking around the space again. It was clearly a guest room of sorts with an adjoining bathroom. The room itself was mostly bare barring a small bedside table, a wardrobe, and some cabinets. All of which were empty. Jeanne dispelled her armor and laid down fully on the bed as she thought through everything that had happened so far. She didn't regret yelling at her Master for not telling her he was going to be training. If anything she felt he deserved to be yelled at for it as she didn't have a full grasp on what his mana felt like yet so she took it as an attack from an enemy. She frowned and turned onto her side on the bed. No what she regretted was being completely inept at being any kind of comfort to her master when he had talked about his surrogate father. She shook her head a few times and let her head rest more fully into the pillow,
"Why do I care anyway. I told that damn Saint what I expected out of him yesterday anyway. I'm a tool to be used to win the grail war. When tools have served their purpose they're tossed away… I don't….need ...anything.....else...."
Jeanne opened her eyes and saw she was looking down at a cobbled street with her hands and ankles in chains. She was roughly shoved forward by someone behind her and when she turned her head to glare at him she was yanked forward by the person holding a length of chain that led to the restraints on her wrists. She ground her teeth and knew she would just have to let the dream play itself out as it always did. So she went along with it. She did everything her original self did. As her arms were bound behind her and around the stake she decided she'd do one thing different. She looked at the bastard overseeing the entire thing and she glared at him,
"Crawl up your own ass and die you rotten fuck."
She was quickly gagged with a length of rope that was tied around the stake preventing her from even moving her head. She stared at the sky above and closed her eyes willing the dream to end faster. To just get it over with.
As if in response to this she began to smell smoke and soon after that she screamed.
Jeanne groggily opened her eyes and looked around expecting to see her room at her castle from the France Singularity. Instead she was met with dark green painted walls, some furniture, and realized quickly that she had fallen asleep. She sat up suddenly briefly panicking until she remembered what had happened. She had been summoned by the man she had met as she was dying. She was going to fight in a grail war as a servant. She pulled up her legs and hugged them as she buried her face into her knees trying to forget the feeling of being burned alive. A few minutes later she had reequipped her armor and left the room.
As she walked towards the main hall she was once again struck by how big the Lafaire Estate was, to say nothing of the subfloors she had crashed her way through to get to where Micheal had been training. Jeanne frowned remembering how that had gone down but shook her head clear of those thoughts as she walked into the main hall. She craned her neck up to stare up at the icicles floating around the ceiling which kept the room in a nice gentle blue glow and then looked around putting a hand on her hip and briefly wondered where she should explore next when she smelled something good coming from the direction of the kitchen.
She knew she didn't have to eat but she let her stomach lead her as she entered into the kitchen to find it was empty. She frowned and wondered if her nose was playing tricks on her when something dinged on the countertop making her jump a little. Her eyes locked onto a small metal chicken sitting beside the stovetop and she walked over to pick it up and look at it. It was split in half and was clearly meant to rotate. She pursed her lips and twisted the metal chicken causing it to break in half in her hands. She stared at it and tried to put it back together feeling panicked as the doors opened behind her. She whirled around and held the broken chicken in her hands behind her as Micheal walked in,
"...Everything okay?"
"Yes. Why wouldn't it be okay."
Micheal arched an eyebrow at her but said nothing as he walked up to the stove while at the same time Jeanne maneuvered her way around the central island not turning around. Micheal eyed her out of the corner of his eye but thankfully continued to not say anything as Jeanne backed through the door and out of the kitchen. She fastwalked back to the room she had slept in earlier and almost slammed the door closed behind her as her face burned with embarrassment. She sank down onto the floor her back fully against the door as she held the two halves of the metal chicken in either hand. She groaned and slammed her head back into the door with a dull thud.
"Of course I have to break it….It could be a mystic code or a keystone or some other mage crap and I just ripped it in half."
Jeanne closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm herself down. After she had calmed down she looked more critically at the chicken noticing that the part she had broken seemed to be a metal pole around which more metal was coiled. As she examined it she heard Micheal yelling and ignored him standing up and walking over to the bedside cabinet. She opened a drawer and placed the two halves of the metal chicken inside carefully making sure to not make it worse. It was too complex for her to fix herself which meant she had to go and get it fixed...which posed its own problems.
She sat down on the bed and looked into the open drawer thinking out loud to herself,
"So I'll need to get it fixed….since its metal...a Blacksmith? ...no its too intricate for that. Add the fact that it might be magical and I can't just take it to some normal civilian business either…. Actually how does money even work in the modern age…."
Knocking sounded on the door and Jeanne snapped her head up to look at it. Hurriedly she closed the drawer and tried to walk normally to the door. She opened it and saw Micheal about to knock again. He froze and shook his head a bit,
"I finished making lunch if you want some."
"I told you before I don't need to eat."
"You seemed to like the toast this morning though. Come on, I promise its good."
Micheal smiled at her and began to walk away as Jeanne tried to speak,
"Master-"
"Micheal is fine when its just the two of us." He turned around and looked at her as she swallowed nervously,
"If...somethings broken-...Let say-," Jeanne shook her head and focused back on Micheal who just arched an eyebrow at her, "...Its nothing. Show me this meal you made."
Jeanne motioned with her hand for him to lead and he turned away to lead the way into the kitchen but not before she caught his smile. She frowned briefly tempted to go back into the room but sighed and followed him down the hall.
9 Months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 15 hours, 42 minutes until the Grail War.