Rin ground her nails so fiercely into her palms that she drew blood in the throes of her white-knuckled horror.
She had always suspected that there was something amiss in the Matou household. Shinji had no oversight, and that could not possibly bode well for a young woman like Sakura so close at hand. Where was the clan patriarch? Did he even care about his nominal descendants? How could Sakura revive the faltering line if he took nary an interest in her?
But he had taken an interest. Oh, yes, he had taken an interest indeed, the darkest, blackest kind.
"I can't believe someone would do something like this," she whispered to herself, to God, to anyone who could right this horrible wrong. "What would possess Zouken to go so far as to use..." she bit back a sob, barely capable of thinking of the suffering Sakura had endured. "...why would anyone torture a poor girl with those puns?"
Jokin' Zouken
A Story of No Literary, Spiritual or Intellectual Value
Shirou Emiya distantly realized the idiocy of accepting Assassin's invitation to parlay with his Master. There were a dozen things that could go wrong, but he hadn't expected this.
"Oh, you must forgive me," Zouken chuckled from the spacious armchair to which he seemed glued. "I had planned a sort of thought exercise for us to do today, but it didn't work out."
Shirou's mind reeled.
"Would you like something to drink?" The old man said. "Ah, yes, I can tell just from looking at your face. I have you down to a tea."
"Why...How..."
"How am I still alive after that girl's Archer cut me in half? He only cut off my left side. Now I'm all right."
"No, I—"
"Ah, you must wondering how I made Caster my Servant, then? I am a worm master, after all. All I had to do was bug her into it."
"No, damn it!" Shirou swore in spite of the good, Christian upbringing he didn't have. "I'm here to talk about Sakura."
"Ah, Sakura! Yes! What a sweet couple you two make. Sour the two of you doing these days?"
"Did..." Shirou fought back the rising bile in his throat, which was only natural in the face of such a dark realization. "Did she have to go through this day in and day out?"
"But of course! She's quite the apt pupil. You could say she's the apple of my eye."
"That was one a bit of a stretch," Shirou muttered carelessly.
The old magus darkened. Shirou's eyes widened as the full blunder of his mistake hit him.
"Oh, my boy, I have not yet begun to pun!"
Shirou wept.
Sakura slept fitfully, but even in that hitching sleep she dreamed.
She dreamed of the basement and the worms. Dreams of each and every night spent in the pit came to her, but on this night, it was the first night that visited her the most vividly.
She was screaming, screaming, screaming herself hoarse. Somehow, through the haze of pain and delusions, she noticed her "grandfather" creeping closer. She whimpered, drawing herself up into a ball in the far corner of the pit that had once been the basement a comedy club.
Zouken stood over her, and the slugs seethed expectantly. All at once, the old man stabbed a finger toward her. And then he grinned a most terrible grin.
"Pull my finger."
"But...but that isn't a pun..."
"Oh, my girl, do you think that is the only school of magecraft available to you? The pun is the purest, strongest art handed down through the Matou Laugh Shack, but there are entire seas we have not yet traveled. Allow me to teach you."
And then the worms were surging forward in a hellish chorus of distorted vocal chords.
"Pull my finger! Pull my finger! Pull my finger..."
"You know, Assassin," Zouken said apropos of nothing, spooking even the spookiest Servant. "Oh, I'm sorry, did I almost give you a heart attack? That is your specialty."
Assassin winced.
It was days like these that made him wish he had stayed on the Throne. Only the winning of the Grail and wishing to have an unlimited supply of hashish and Doritos would soothe his poor, abused funny bone. And if it didn't work out like that...
"Those skinny little twerps back at the Throne better have a monster blunt waiting for me when I get back."
Sakura looked at the warm, sticky red covering her hands. It was the same warm, sticky red splattered across her brother's face, his neck, his hair, his clothes.
It was just the sort of thing her grandfather would do.
The epiphany hit her like a freight train.
"AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!"
She half-ran, half-stumbled from that room where her brother lay. How could she face Shirou now? Her sister? Taiga? And all of the others in Shirou's totally-not-a-harem? She was every bit as bad as her grandfather now.
Meanwhile, Shinji stood up, took the bucket off of his head and licked up some of the red stuff on his face.
"Peanut butter with ketchup and food coloring?" He muttered to no one in particular. "Ah, man, this is going to stain!"
Just before he could rush toward the laundry room, he noticed it out of the corner of his eye—the unassuming diagram sitting on the edge of Sakura's nightstand. The formula for stage blood. The ad for buckets, ultra cheap. The precise geometry for balancing the bucket over the slightly ajar door so it would spill across the next person to enter the room.
It was simple. It was ingenious.
It was everything he had ever wanted to be but couldn't have because he was born without the Matou family's trademark cluster of Magic Circuits in his funny bone.
"She...she pranked me. She pranked me hard. Right in the FACE! She took my pranking virginity! I...I...I'm unfit for marriage now!"
Shinji sank to the floor and wept.
"No." Shirou's face went stony and still. "No, no, no. There is no way in hell I'm going back into that mess."
"You misunderstand me, Emiya," Assassin murmured. "I am not here on my...Master's behalf. In fact, he will not be my Master for much longer if I have my way."
"What are you getting at?"
"I find my Master...disagreeable. I believe it would be in any party's best interest if I were to break my contract with him and look elsewhere for partnership. You are without your Saber..."
"As tempting as it is to let a guy dressed like bootleg Skeletor into my house on a permanent basis, I think I'll have to pass. I don't even know how to get around a Servant contract. Isn't that against the rules?"
"Ah, but are rules not meant to be broken?"
"...I guess so. And with a Master like yours I can see why you would want to be free. But how could I break the Grail's rules? It's like I would need...some sort of thing that makes rules broken and stuff."
"Yes, a breaker of rules would suffice."
"Hmmmmm, no, I can't think of anything like that. No rule breakers here. Sorry, Assassin."
As Shirou watched Assassin regretfully slink back to Zouken's supervillain lair, Archer's arm suddenly came to life to slap him in the face.
"Hey, what are you...Wait, did you just bitch slap knowledge of an arcane dagger into my brain?"
"So..." Kirei let the word hang in the air, pregnant with obvious confusion and not—oh, let's say, hypothetically, for sake of argument—a little shrieking hellspawn that would force him to act like a real adult for the next eighteen years. Thank the Heavenly Father he had had the foresight to dump Caren on the in-laws. Why would he want to act like a real adult when he could stalk a bunch of teenagers? Especially when one was teen pregnant with Rosemary's Baby
"Wha?" Assassin looked up, dimly aware of Kirei's presence and not at all aware of his fundamentally broken inner monologue. But it was hard to care about much of anything else when his little raid on the Einzbern compound had yielded such thick, beautiful kush. How could Berserker be such a hard ass all the time with that at his fingertips?
MEANWHILE
"Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck," Shirou continued cursing like the good little Jewish boy he wasn't as he ran through the Einzbern forest with a black and crispy Berserker on his heels. He couldn't make out exactly what the giant was saying, but it sounded suspiciously like...
"THIS IS YOUR MIND ON GRAIL DRUGS! ANY QUESTIONS?"
MEANWHILE(R)
Kirei wasn't about to be robbed of his totally bad ass kung fu priest moment.
"Is this the part where we engage in mortal combat and I, against all odds, defeat you and pin you to a tree long enough to exorcise your Master?"
"Uh...about that...look, man, real talk. I'm not really feeling this whole Grail thing anymore. My Master's harshing my buzz all the time, and I didn't even want to be an Assassin when I grew up, became infamous and died. I'm not even really named Hassan. I just, like, started using that name 'cause my dealer was a really cool dude who thought I could, y'know, be a really cool dude when he retired, right?"
"...Then, what, pray tell is your real name?"
"Yusuf."
"Oh, like Cat Stevens?"
"Yeah, man! I mean, I'm more of a Deadhead myself, but he's pretty cool, too."
Kirei smiled in spite of himself as he sauntered up to the incredibly stoned Assassin. "Let me take a hit off of that and tell you why Terrapin Station is the most underrated album they ever released."
"Goin' up to the spirit in the sky,
That's where I'm gonna go when I die"
"I can't believe it," Zouken chortled to himself in spite of the holy power surging through him in accordance with Kirei's... prayer. "To think he would use folk music as an aria against a vampire like me. Oh, the humanity!"
"When I die and they lay me to rest,
Gonna go to the place that's the best
Prepare yourself, you know it's a must
Gotta have a friend in Jesus"
"How do you know you've chosen right with Christianity if you're looking for the faith that will always back you up? Jesus saves!"
"Never been a sinner,
I never sinned"
"Oh, come on, man. I don't even have a pun for that. How can you sing this with a straight face? You're like Satan with better hair."
"What's the matter, Rin?"
The Tohsaka heir looked up from her pensive pensiveness (with a side of pensivosity) to blink away her thoughts as Illya cajoled her.
"What was that?"
"Rin, you look like you have something on your mind."
"It's just...I'm not sure if the Jeweled Sword is really the right way to go."
The homunuclus girl's eyes bugged out.
"What are you saying, Rin? Berserker is dead! Saber is evil! Archer is stapled onto your sister's boyfriend like a lump of fat taken from Archer's ass and injected into his face to give him fuller, poutier, dick sucking lips!"
"...You lost me."
"I'm just saying that if I had a Merlin, I would make Shirou my Guinevere."
"Let's just get back on topic."
"Right...why are you being so indecisive about this sword?"
"It's just...I'm starting to wonder...about Zelretch and Zouken. They both enjoy making life miserable for others in ways that only they find funny. What if...What if Zelretch somehow senses his sword has been completed and comes over to this dimension and, God forbid, decides to help Zouken pun us all into oblivion?"
Illya bristled at the thought of a Z & Z alliance.
"Shut yo' mouth."
"What? I'm only talkin' 'bout Zelretch."
"I can dig it."
Rin hefted the Jeweled Sword, ready to take the fight to her sister for the last time.
"Do you have any idea of the things I endured!? The things I went through!? Whoopy cushions every time we went out to a restaurant! My hands in warm water every time I went to sleep! And all of the awful comedians...Oh, God, there was George Lopez and Carrot Top and Larry the Cable Guy...and, oh, Lord...THEY MADE ME WATCH EVERY STAND UP SPECIAL DANE COOK HAS EVER PRODUCED!"
"Eh, at least he's better than Carlos Mencia."
"Oh, go climb a wall of dicks, Rin! EVERYONE is better than Carlos Mencia! They could have at least broken it up with some genuinely good comedians like George Carlin or Louis C. K., but no! They wanted m to suffer through Dane Cook, King of the Douche Canoes! DANE FUCKING COOK! WHAT PART OF THAT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND!?"
"I can't get through to you when you're like this. It looks like we'll have to settle this like men."
"Yes, that's right. Like men. No eye contact, and if balls touch, it's over."
And so the Tohsaka sisters rushed toward their final battle, elder against younger, the favorite against the shunned, Jeweled Sword against rubber chicken.
Zouken's wish was at hand. The impossible, blinding beauty of his homunculus waifu was before him.
"Ah, Justeaze," Zouken burbled from his wormy form.
"Oh? Zouken?" The lady in white didn't miss a beat. "You look great! Have you lost weight?"
"I'm surprised I did, what with my diet of the suffering of innocents. But what of you, my dear? How's it hanging?"
"Low and to the left."
Had he tear ducts as a penisworm, Zouken might have wept with joy.
"Oh, how I've missed you. You are the only one to truly understand my trials and tribulations, to grasp the true nature of my art."
Then the homunculus beeped.
"I'm sorry, Justeaze isn't in right now. If you'd like to leave a message, then IILLYASVIEL VON EINZBERN LAUGHS IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION!"
"What!? What is the meaning of this!?"
"It's elementary, my dear Mattson. I troll you."
Shirou stood before the towering obelisk that was the Greater Grail.
Though perhaps "stood" was not strictly the right word. His body was made of swords. His steel-flesh was full of wounds. His mind was filled with the last gasps of memory that were being obliterated in the name of the power he would need to smite this accursed thing and return Fuyuki to the peace of waiting for the next cabal of reckless magi to screw their city like a frat boy on Spring Break.
Fast, sloppy and leaving everyone unhappy.
But Shirou wasn't about to have sex with a bro, not if Illya could help it. No, she needed to save his sweet, supple skin so Sakura could keep tapping that.
As Shirou's soul was remade by the power of the Third Magic, Illya decided to impart one last message to him.
"And, hey, when this is all over...give Rin a message for me?"
"Of course"
"Tell her...tell her I know the truth. I know that if she had it her way, she would go balls deep in you, too."
"WHAT!?"
"Ssssssh, go to sleep, Guinevere."
"I'm not going to wake up with a sore rear end, am I?"
"Only if you wish it to be true."
"Nah, I'll pass. I'd rather keep shagging Sakura the old-fashioned way."
"You're a terrible Muslim."