There was, he perceived, an emptiness.
An emptiness of purpose, of meaning, of something more tangible than stirred words and emotional states. A profound and almost painful absence of something... concrete.
Why had he survived, when others did not? Was it the grand design of Fate, in the interactions and myriad ways he had pushed through... or mere luck? The idiot dance of dice upon a broken field of random results, with no more deeper meaning or purpose than the static on a TV screen.
Kiritsugu had always spoken of a loss—of sacrificing one to save another, of never being capable of saving everyone, and of trying to deal with moving past that, to focus on the good one had achieved. It left a bitter, ugly taste in his mouth, a shadow over every act.
You could never save everyone, no matter how hard you tore yourself apart. And who was saved was not some matter of destiny, or striving. It was the blind and idiot chance that determined who bled out alone and who was wrapped in supportive arms.
Sakura had already shown him that clinging to any ideal without looking at the real life ramifications would either lead you to a road as bleak and ugly as Kiritsugu's... or worse, make your ideals and your beliefs nothing more than words, spat out to comfort the gnawing feeling of failure at the base of the spine, of the realization that you are no hero.
You are just another random collection of atoms, striving for a meaning in a land where meaning has no meaning.
Saber... Rin... Sakura... Issei...
His fist clenched.
Learning the truth about people like Zouken had opened his eyes to the fact that humans were not always humane. That some people had no redeeming qualities. That sometimes lives needed to be... removed from the larger world. And yet that somehow rang hollow, as if he was admitting that some things could not be changed.
If Fate did not exist... if destiny was a blind man's bluff conducted on the altar of ignoring reality for sanity, then there was no reason why such evil could not be turned to good instead of merely destroyed.
If Fate did exist, then that meant that meaningless, pointless suffering and evil were not only unavoidable but somehow necessary.
And either way meant his ideals, what was left of them... were merely a way to convince himself that he was not, ultimately, at fault. Be it some higher game of the Grail or merely the toothless smile of chaos, selflessness and sacrifice to do the Right Thing...
...meant nothing if it was not reciprocated. To face evil and cling to one's ideals regardless of the cost was not selfless. It was as evil as anything Zouken had done, because it presupposed that the reward and the righteousness of such outweighed the cost.
As he gazed at the shattered and tormented form of Sakura, and then back to the sky, he wondered how he had ever thought such a thing could be true.
This chapter was written by my friend LogicalPremise. He picked the ending theme, which is Ain't No Sunshine by Bill Withers. My Loresingers, as always, have my gratitude for their work.
Thanks for reading.
