However, when he locked eyes with himself, he suddenly felt quite out of place. Small amber eyes stared at him with unflinching curiosity, and recognizing his own face, he paused.

He felt a momentary surge of anger, and his hands clenched on handles of the plastic bags in his hands.

The child didn't have his parents with him—both of whom were alive—and was merely sitting on bench nearby, seemingly without a purpose. The little boy's head cocked to the side slightly as he stared at someone who looked very strange compared to everyone else he had seen before.

Simple curiosity, that was all that was in the boy's eyes, nothing else. No determination. No goal. No borrowed dream.

He had no wish to become an ally of justice. He might have some fanciful, childish dream, but he would never have that same all consuming ideal within himself. The boy wasn't broken. He was not Emiya Shirou.

Shirou knew that before, of course. When Kiritsugu died—when the area of Fuyuki that he had lived in before it was destroyed was not destroyed, he knew that he wouldn't be able to satisfy his grudge against himself.

But actually meeting himself as he would have been was jarring in a way that he hadn't expected. He wasn't envious or angry, all he felt was—pity.

The Shirou in front of him would live an ordinary life and die an ordinary one. The circumstances that caused Shirou to grow up an Emiya were so unique that it was probably the only way he would have ever had any effect on people. It was the one path where—in terms of having influence on the world—he would have amounted to anything.

But—that was a contradiction. Didn't he, Emiya Shirou, hate that same person? The Shirou that took up that foolish and hypocritical ideal, the one that tried to save people, the 'ally of justice', it was something so foolish he wanted to punch that Emiya Shirou's face in. To make him realize how utterly stupid he was.

And yet—looking at what he would have been without that ideal, he felt most certainly that, "I wouldn't want to live that way."

His staring contest broke when he said it out loud, and the child on the bench frowned at him. Shirou blinked, and started to head back to the household he shared with Irisviel and Illyasviel, but his mind was still conflicted.

Certainly, there wasn't anything wrong with living an ordinary life. On the contrary, he fought so people could live just like that.

But the price of being ordinary was being powerless. As foolish as Emiya Shirou thought he was, as sickening as the thought was, if he had to choose between an ordinary life and the life he had after the fire, he would choose the latter.