White Ink

12

"Wake up Master Inke," the voice comes from somewhere in the room. The voice has a distinctly inhuman quality and it both sounds inhumanly beautiful and a quite dangerous. "You are going to be late for school," the voice continues. "Kiritsugu has instructed me quite clearly that I mustn't let that happen."
"

Damnit Nine," Shirou said rolling out of his bed. He blinked trying to get his eyes used to the sunlight streaming through his window. Focusing he took in the smiling visage of his butler. His butler had been "acquired" months ago and one of the first things that had changed was that he subsequently took it upon himself to wake Shirou up every day finally retiring Shirou's very battered and abused alarm clock. The problem was that even though Shirou was his master he obeyed Kiritsugu so that Shirou would not get into trouble. It both made Shirou happy and pissed him off that his butler was so considerate of him.

Nine stood six feet tall and looked to be in his twenties. He had black hair and eyes. He wore a stunning butler suit. You could say he was dressed to the nines, Shirou silently chuckled to himself. While he looked very ordinary, for a butler in Japan that is. Any magus would feel distinctly off guard with him due to the higher sensitivity to shifts in the ambient mana. Looking at him now even Shirou felt like nothing looked extraordinary about him. Until he flickered.
It was a thing he did whenever Shirou started seeing him as a too human. For a brief second his mask would drop and his human visage would disappear to be replaced by the image of Chaos that was his true origin. He only ever did it around Shirou and not even Kiritsugu ever saw his true visage.
"You're supposed to listen to me Nine," Shirou said grumbling.
"I'm only doing this for your own good, Master," Nine replied. "You need to go to school and keep Kiritsugu happy. A happy Kiritsugu means more magic time."
Shirou reluctantly conceded the point and quickly changed into the clothes provided for him by Nine. He quickly headed to the bathroom to do his morning ablutions knowing that Nine would be cooking for him today. While Shirou liked cooking he didn't do it during the morning anymore as he was often waking up late due to too much magic practice. Heading downstairs he passed Kiritsugu and greeted him inquiring about any further updates in the Einzbern plan.

Kiritsugu replied in the negative and stated that there was a visitor downstairs for him. Walking into the kitchen he came across a bikini clad Satsuki who was savouring the food. In the corner of the kitchen was Len who had likewise shown up for breakfast and was munching into the deluxe cat food with modest glee.
"Hey," Shirou initiated the conversation. "Haven't seen you for a while Satsuki." He stared into her hazel eyes and watched as she finished up her current dish.
"Yeah," she said wiping her mouth. "Things were a bit rough at home. It's nothing terminal but I had to get away. So I told my parent's I'm staying over here."
Shirou winced at that. When he had convinced Satsuki's parents that she was going to the hospital it had apparently torn into a lot of old family drama. Satsuki didn't blame him saying that he merely set off the powder keg that was their family and he more than made up for it by helping her afterwards.
"I bet they weren't expecting the friend to be over in another city were they," Shirou said to Satsuki with a wry smile.

"Yup," Satsuki replied with a toothy smile. "Benefits of being the favoured sibling."
Satsuki was referencing the fact that barely a month after their initial meeting Sumire had taught Satsuki her teleportation technique. Despite mostly being human by that point Satsuki had both acquired enough goodwill from the vampires and had enough magical ability and aptitude to learn it and it pissed Shirou the hell off. In fact it annoyed him to such an extent that not even a month later Shirou had learned how to use his magic to alter the coordinates of his existence and teleport anywhere for which he knew the coordinates.
In fact it was both a point of irritation and admiration from his entire circle that he had manged to partially unvampire Satsuki. Vampirism was an infection of the soul something that he as a person who was not knowledgeable about the third could only affect tangentially. Therefore instead of reversing the vampire treatment he was only able to help Satsuki symptomatically. Therefore technically Satsuki was a vampire albeit one that has no craving for blood or desire to kill and whose body does not periodically break down. As a trade-off she lost a huge chunk of her speed and strength but her time reversal stayed. Shirou had currently neither the knowledge nor the desire to unbind the curse of restoration. As a side effect Satsuki had also started gaining mystery at an even greater rate than a normal vampire, probably due to Shirou's bodily manipulations.
Arcueid, Sumire and Kiritsugu had promptly forbidden him from making another one or revealing he could do it, although he was currently working on a project with Arcueid to reduce her bloodlust. That project was kind of an annoyance as fixing something of Arcueid's status was a bit harder than a newly born vampire.
Speaking of the vampire Shirou had yet to see her. "Satsuki have you seen Arcueid recently."
Satsuki didn't reply but another voice did. "I do believe she had left to go hunting down a particularly nasty Dead Apostle in Russia," Nine said as he walked into the room carrying Shirou's breakfast. "Now I believe you have about twenty minutes to finish breakfast and get to school.
Hearing that Shirou wolfed down the remains of his breakfast, and using the fourth he quickly grabbed his bags and teleported to an alleyway near the school that was always unoccupied at that time. "Almost always unoccupied," he corrected in his head, "but that's what hypnosis is for."