White Ink

15

Shirou
Shirou

hirou hated funerals. Unfortunately upon recovering Kiritsugu's body he had been forced to help arrange one. Luckily his dad's body had sustained miraculously little damage aside from being dead, most likely from the reinforced room he had died in. Fortuitously Taiga's grandfather took over most of the duties so Shirou didn't have to. Shirou had asked for as small a funeral as possible. Kiritsugu was immensely practical and he could care less about what Japanese culture had to say about the proper way to prepare somebody for the afterlife. Shirou despite deeply loving his father saw no reason to attend. It wasn't as if the priest was going to go and tell everyone about the various things that Kiritsugu did in his life.
He actually quirked a smile at the thought of the priest reciting Kiritsugu's life story. In fact now that he thought about it maybe he could write out an altered version of Kiritsugu's life story as a work of fiction. He could imagine his dad's response to that. He would most likely give Shirou the deadpan stare he did whenever Shirou did something that went against the common sense of man or spat on a normal person's sense of logic. Then he would smile showing that he never did regret taking care of Shirou.

Shirou had attended the standard cremation of course. He also made sure to take every single bone not even allowing Taiga or her family to take a single one. He got into a minor skirmish with Arcueid over one of the bones and it was only an expert suckerpunch and the assistance of Sumire that helped him momentarily fend off the White Princess and retrieve the final bone. Then he got home and made sure to completely and without fail destroy every single one of the bones till not even scraps remained. He also destroyed the rest of the origin bullets as Shirou wasn't going to use them because they went against his fighting style so he would rather they not exist at all. He could probably survive them as conceptual weapons were not very effective against him but he didn't want to risk the destruction of his magic circuits.
Besides the funeral the past two weeks was spent getting Illya settled. The girl was quite depressed for a few days after Kiritsugu's death. But it seemed she bounced back a few days later with the help of Shirou. The one thing that brightened up Shirou's day was seeing her constantly overwhelmed by the new people she was meeting. First it was the young sort of but not really dead apostle Satsuki, then the Dead Apostle Ancestor Sumire, then the True Ancestor Arcueid. Each time had led to a look of shock on his sister's face. He momentarily regretted the fact that he had already informed his sister that he was a magician and that he couldn't suddenly spring that on her.

Shirou himself was also recovering from the death of his father. Even though he was mentally prepared for Kiritsugu dying on this mission it had still hurt him. It hurt far more than he had ever been hurt before. The deaths of his parents when he finally remembered them were muted by time and the foggy haze that surrounds a child's brain. The death of all the Tohno's hurt mainly because it was a sign of his failure. That good people could die and that potential could be snuffed short. His dad dying was an acknowledgement that he would never greet his father in the morning, never cook for him, never sit down with him and hear his stories, never see his reaction when he went out and did something stupid. He shook himself out of that.
Truthfully he had also been busy during that time trying to decipher the Einzberns' research. Many nights he had stayed up late trying to understand the Einzbern's analysis so he could find out what was wrong with his sister. Unfortunately the results from the research weren't good. Illya had been tampered with in order to bring out the fullest potential of her body giving her even more magic circuits than himself.
This advantage came at a cost however. Her body was continuously breaking down and within four or five years it would break down completely. After sifting through the Einzbern's research he had found a log of the changes that were made to her. Unfortunately that was where the good news ended. The Einzbern were apparently disinterested in how to fix their alterations. Their method seemed to be that if the alteration didn't work to build another homunculus. He immediately ceased thinking about those scum.