The past was the past, and it should stay the past.

For Archer to think such a thing was the height of hypocrisy, but when hypocrisy was all you had left to your name, it became as valuable as love. He didn't want to see Taiga Fujimura. Being incorporeal didn't stop you from feeling, merciful as that might have been, and it didn't stop his chest from turning into lead at the sound of her voice.

How strange it was that of all the things he saw, unchanged, like ghosts in a faded photograph, Fuji-nee should be the one thing he couldn't bear. He didn't wait for her to enter. He didn't want to see her.

The aching sense of loss was too much.

He went to his old bedroom. It held no real meaning to him anymore, so it was a safe place to hide from the melancholy. It had always been a place to sleep, and nothing more. An empty room. An empty futon in the center of the empty floor. An old alarm clock, its wire trailing forlornly to the wall socket. Nothing the boy cared for. Nothing he wanted to remember. No passions or secrets or… anything. There was nothing.

It turned out this room did make him feel something. Resentment. Resentment for the stupid boy who had thought he could save the world without saving himself first.

When you resented a past that you couldn't change… What other word for it was better than regret?

Even in this phantom world, that hadn't changed. The emptiness. The illusion of personhood. There really was no other path for Shirou Emiya, was there? He was allowed no other end than to break against the uncaring stone of his ideal.

He didn't want to be here, either.

He went to the roof instead. That wasn't a place he'd ever spent much time, so it held no nostalgia for him. With a silent sigh, he sat upon the tile, leaning back on one hand, staring out at what of Fuyuki he could see. It wasn't much. The neighborhood, and the heights of the city proper in the distance. It was like a metaphor for looking back on his past; it was there, somewhere, but so much of it was obscured. Out of reach. Only the heights remained.

Time didn't mean anything to a Guardian, but somehow, it still meant everything.

"Thou art melancholy," an unwelcome voice said, surprisingly soft. It wouldn't carry down into the house.

"No shit, bones," he sighed. "You knew, didn't you? Right away?"

"I suspected."

"Is that why you haven't killed me?" he asked wryly. "Vicarious loyalty, or something?" The sun blazed overhead. He wished he could feel it, but to materialize wouldn't do him any good.

"Nothing so indirect," Assassin said. "We have entered into a truce, have we not? I will not kill an ally without provocation."

"Honor," he spat. "Like I told you that night. Honor's an excuse."

"Honor is all we have," Assassin said simply. "The code we live by. We do not own our possessions. We do not own our loved ones. We do not own our positions or our titles. When our time comes, our ideals are all we carry with us. We will be judged by how true to ourselves we were."

Archer grit his incorporeal teeth. "You sound like him already."

"Perhaps he merely sounds like me," Assassin replied, not without irony. "They say there is always a connection between Master and Servant, do they not? Shirou Emiya will follow the path he believes will lead to salvation for those around him until there is nothing left of him but the will to make that ideal reality."

Archer didn't respond.

"I know something of that, myself." Assassin almost sounded melancholic himself. "I was a man, once. I had a name, and a face, and a home. I do not regret what I have become. I will never regret the path I have taken. But even I wonder what might have become of me if I had been a weaker person."

"Is that what you think I am? A weak person?"

"I believe there is a wide gulf between the strength I needed to become what I am and weakness, Archer Emiya. Uncommon is the man who will not break, given sufficient time and pressure."

"And what's your ideal?" Archer asked dismissively. "What is it the great Assassin fights for above all else? A better tomorrow? You can't do that through killing. Believe me, I've tried."

"At the core of every lofty goal, every embattled ideal, there is a kernel of something simple," Assassin said distantly. "Shirou Emiya wishes to save everyone because he does not value himself, and even a creature such as he was saved from the flame. A desire for justice is his kernel. Your Master, Rin Tohsaka, wishes to win this Holy Grail War for the sake of nothing more than pride, and so her resolve is weak. She has no such kernel." He did not continue.

"And yours?"

"Atonement." Just one word.

"For what?" Archer couldn't help but ask. He was getting drawn into the other Servant's uncharacteristically thoughtful soliloquy, despite his best efforts.

"I no longer recall. That is a blessing, I think."

"You want to atone for something you can't even remember?" he asked incredulously.

"Dost thou remember the moment thy journey began? The precise thought or nexus of events that led thee to walk the path of the hero?"

Archer remembered heat. He remembered rain on his skin. He remembered rough arms, holding him tight. That was all that was left. "No."

"Ideals are not momentary flights of fancy. They are thine identity." He was silent. "It's strange. I feel more human now than I have in centuries. Perhaps a quirk of my summoning. I was never meant for such a form."

Not meant for such a form. You weren't meant to be at all. Archer sat in silence. Clouds touched the edges of the sky, but if there was to be a storm, it wouldn't be for a while. "You seem like a perceptive guy," he said finally.

"I did not become what I am by being unobservant," Assassin replied dryly.

"Have you ever lost something, Assassin?"

He didn't respond.

"That feeling of…" As if he were still that long-gone boy, he grasped for words. "You know something is wrong. Missing. And you can't stop poking the empty space where it used to be. Your fingers come away bloody. Everything you look at is wrong for its absence. But you still sense it. What should be, but isn't."

Assassin was silent long enough that Archer figured he might just be done talking. But when he did, Assassin's voice sounded bleak as he echoed the words Archer least wanted to hear. "So thou feel it as well."

Archer's mouth went dry, though he had no such thing at the moment. "What do you feel, Assassin?"

"A world that is sick. Air that chokes with every breath. We passed people on the street who should have been dead, and yet moved. We passed empty spaces where people should have been. Places that should have been vibrant and full of life, rendered grey and insubstantial. A drumbeat, pounding judgement on an existence that is impossible."

Himself. Caster. And now Assassin. Three times, three powerful beings who knew that something was desperately wrong. That was the kind of evidence you just couldn't ignore. "A drumbeat?" he asked slowly.

"Ripples in a pond," Assassin said quietly. "A disruption, sending echoes through time and space. Something that must not happen. If the source of the shockwaves can be identified, then all may become clear."

"Caster said something similar," Archer said. "She said something in the last few decades caused a… I don't know. A splitting off. A worldline that's… wrong."

"I am not surprised that she could sense what we do, but she thinks too linearly. There is a point where things diverged from what should have been possible, true, and this point lies in the past. Some trivial change from which the timeline was made unrecognizable. But when a stone is thrown into water, ripples travel in every direction, not in some arbitrary forward. From outside of time, past and future are meaningless."

"You're saying that whatever made this world wrong," Archer said slowly. "It might not have happened yet?"

"And there is nothing we can do to stop it," Assassin said in a neutral voice. "If we feel the effects of something cataclysmic, there must always be a cause. One cannot exist without the other. No matter the actions that we take, we will be unable to prevent it from taking place."

"So it's the same thing it always is," Archer said bitterly. "Summoned into a massacre that I can't fix, just so I can watch the horror."

"Thou art wrong on two counts," Assassin said. "A loss of life is not necessarily involved. We speak of one singular event, one moment that shakes everything. Such a thing may not be inherently a thing of death, though it is certainly something unnatural."

"And the second?" Archer said, resigned.

"The moment of cataclysm is fixed. Nothing that happens afterward is, and the circumstances that lead there are not either. The future is still mutable. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which a magus violates the rules of magic to perform a ritual to receive infinite power, and that this is what we feel the echoes of. Either he is allowed to wield it unopposed, or we prepare for such an eventuality, and stand ready to end his life before he can use it to kill or dominate. We cannot stop him from obtaining the power, but our actions may shape the consequences." Assassin's voice had grown hard. Unyielding. "If you choose to fight, you may ensure that it does not cascade into something truly horrific."

"If the cataclysm isn't just the whole world blowing up," Archer said, but the protest sounded weak even to him. This is more important than your grudge. But you knew that already, didn't you?

What was more important didn't matter. He'd given up on the greater good.

But this time you have a chance.

A meaningless chance. A chance to fuck up and watch a lot of people die. And besides, Assassin was sugarcoating it. They didn't know what it was. Something so powerful must surely include death as a matter of course.

But you don't know that.

Duty pulled him unwillingly forward as if he had an iron fishhook the size of his head imbedded in his ribcage. The old instincts flaring up. The ones he hadn't used in so, so long that he couldn't remember his father's face anymore. "Well, what the hell. I guess I've got nothing to lose. You think it's soon?"

"When I took part in the Fourth Holy Grail War-"

Archer's eyes widened. "You were in-"

"-I felt the ripples then, as well. They were slow, and they were weak, and they were intermittent. Distant. What I feel now is resounding. Rapid. Not distant thunder, but the sound of a marching army just over the dunes. If it has not yet happened, it will soon."

"How soon?" Archer asked, not wanting to know.

"Days. Perhaps a few weeks, at the outside edge. I do not believe it to be longer than that. They have intensified further even since I was summoned two days ago."

"It must have something to do with the Grail War, then, right?" A flock of birds danced and cartwheeled, getting lost in the sunlight.

"It seems a fair assumption to make. I am here for a reason."

"You really believe that things have meaning, don't you?" He shook his head. "I used to be the same, you know. When I died, I thought it meant something. What I saw after that… atrocity after butchering after massacre. How many of the people who perpetrated those things thought the same way I did?"

"Humanity has long been attuned to death," Assassin said. "The fact that such horrors exist are proof of our free will, and therefore have a kind of meaning all their own."

"That's bullshit. One killer to another? It's all senseless."

"Thou misunderstand me. Men killing one another for their own gain does not hold any particular meaning in a vacuum. What matters is the choice, and that choice is what is most meaningful of all. When violence is easy, when selfishness is always within one's grasp, how blessed is he that takes the path of kindness? The path of self-sacrifice? The path of empathy? If man was incapable of making the wrong choice, what would ever be learned from making the right one?"

"And what does that say about the people who made the wrong choice?" Archer muttered. "It's easy to be high and mighty about what's right until your hands are so stained with blood that you can't picture what they looked like clean."

"Do thou believe my hands are so spotless, Archer Emiya?"

"No. I don't. I don't know your deal, but I don't for a second think they are."

"What we are is not so dissimilar," Assassin said. "Thou art a guardian, art thou not?"

"What gave it away?"

"Thy kind almost inevitably falls into a particular kind of melancholy. The sort of nihilism that only comes from a betrayal of the self."

Anger and resentment flashed in his insubstantial eyes. I'm mad because he's right, he thought, but that only made him angrier. "It's not a betrayal if there was no true self to betray in the first place," Archer said.

"I do not believe that thee were so lacking. It is easier to believe such a fiction if it makes thy cynicism more palatable."

"But what do you mean that we're the same?"

"We are both agents in service to a higher power. Thou serve as a piece of humanity's collective immune system. Thou art summoned into infection, and must keep it from spreading. My primary purpose was to watch over the order I founded, but by the time generations had passed, the Hashashin were hunted and destroyed. I mourn them, but I do not regret. Nothing built by mortal hands resists the tests of time infinitely. I am Allah's blade. I make sure the world moves in the directions it should. I eliminate some who threaten the stability of Allah's kingdom before they can become a threat."

"So you're kept alive and made to kill, and you think you have free will." It was an accusation more than it was a question.

"I am what I am because I chose to be. Free will always has consequences. Though my crime is distant and forgotten, it was my choice, and still I carry the repercussions with me."

"It never gets any easier to carry, does it?" A stupid question. He'd been carrying his burden for an eternity, after all.

"No."

It still sucked to hear.

"Okay, Shirou, are you ready for this?"

Shirou sat cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, trying not to let his growing nervousness show on his face. Directly across from him, Rin sat facing him, and Sakura sat to his left in a silent show of support. Taiga had been gone for about an hour and a half, and he thought Sakura was starting to get sleepy; she'd hardly said a word since. "I guess I am, but Tohsaka, you still haven't—"

"Shush," Rin said. "It's easier this way. Now, you understand what we're trying to accomplish, right?"

Shirou nodded. "Open my switch so I can give Assassin more power. Not enough power, but he'll be able to fight, probably."

"Good. So you were listening," Rin said. "There are dangers to this. I'm as sure as I can be that I've prepared everything correctly, but there's no such thing as one hundred percent on this kind of thing."

"I know," Shirou replied. "It could kill me or burn me out, but the same thing will definitely happen if I can't fix this. I won't be any use to anyone that way." He didn't love the idea of getting killed, but sometimes you just had to take a risk.

"Okay," Rin said. "So basically, it's going to be like jumpstarting a car. We've got to give your circuits a kick in the ass to force your switch open, but once it is, you should be able to toggle it at will. I need you to do exactly what I say. Got that?"

Shirou nodded.

"Okay," Rin said, then pulled a tin out of her bag, the kind grandmas kept little hard candies in. He didn't recognize the brand, but the multicolored candies she shook out looked vibrant and appetizing. She picked out one that was a deep red color and held it out to him. "Swallow this."

Beside him, Sakura frowned, but as promised, he followed Rin's directions. The candy was strangely tasteless, and he was pretty sure that he'd break his teeth if he tried to chew it. A little salty, maybe? He supposed that might just be the magic messing with the taste.

Sakura rested a hand gently on his forearm. "Senpai, I think that's—"

Shirou swallowed. It hurt all the way down. "Ow. You could have given me some water or something, Tohsaka.

"—A rock," Sakura finished lamely.

Shirou choked, but it was far too late to stop it from being in his stomach. "Tohsaka?"

Rin was looking at him with wide eyes and a wider grin. "Wow, you just went for it, huh? No hesitation at all. I could have handed you literally anything, and you'd have eaten it."

"Don't feed a guy a rock, Tohsaka!"

Sakura looked disappointed, but whether it was with him or with Rin was not immediately clear. "Tohsaka-senpai…"

Rin laughed for a few moments, then sobered. "Anyway, get ready, Emiya. Once it starts to dissolve in there, it's going to feel really—"

Everything went red. Shirou began to melt.

No, wait. He wasn't melting. It just felt like he was. The feeling was not all that dissimilar from the one Assassin's presence caused. But strangely, as much as this hurt, it was nothing compared to that. Instead of losing control of his body and flopping onto the ground, he stiffened with a grunt.

"Senpai?" Sakura said, panicked, eyes darting back and forth from him to Rin. "What's happening to him? What did you do?" Her hands were both on his arm, and he could barely feel them. Two slightly cooler spots in the heat pounding through him.

Rin looked supremely unconcerned. "Like I said, it's a jumpstart. It's going to hurt for a while."

"I'm," Shirou choked out with a tremendous amount of effort, "okay, Sakura." It wasn't true, exactly, but it wasn't really untrue, either. "This, is, ngh, nothing..."

"I'm surprised you can talk already," Rin said, genuinely impressed. "You must be in a lot of pain."

Sakura's wide eyed, worried gaze turned back on him, and her hands tightened on his arm, and something that wasn't quite pain fluttered in his chest. Is this shutting my heart down? She studied him, her face barely a foot from his, and she gnawed furiously on her lower lip. He wanted to tell her he was okay again, and that she didn't have to look so concerned on his behalf, but those six words had taken a lot out of him. "Senpai…"

"Well, Emiya," Rin cut in heartlessly, "if you're feeling good enough to make doe eyes at Sakura, you must be feeling good enough to do some magic, right?"

"D-doe eyes?" Sakura stammered, as Shirou grunted "To do—", but Rin didn't let him protest.

"Good, good," she said, and compromised as he was, he couldn't tell whether she was being cruel on purpose or not. "Let's start out with some strengthening, alright?" She handed him a table leg, and Shirou didn't have it in him to ask where she'd gotten it. "Strengthen that."

It took him longer than it usually would, but he managed it; then she made him do it again. And again. And again. Each time, it got a little easier; each time, his body hurt just a little less. What was most impressive was that none of the attempts failed; even the bad ones still succeeded in doing something. Sweat ran down his brow and down his neck, and Sakura's hands were still on his arm. She wasn't speaking anymore, but the two or three times he overextended and his consciousness or balance began to waver, she was right there to grab him and keep him upright.

Time ticked agonizingly by. He'd never performed this much magic this quickly, and as miserable as he was, he was entranced. Have I been doing magic this wrong, this whole time? It was another hour later before Rin allowed him to stop.

But, of course, it wasn't over. There was still one more thing he had to do.

The part he'd been most dreading.

"Alright," Rin said finally. "Assassin, are you here?"

"I am," he said, and beside him, Sakura made a valiant effort to keep her cool.

He no longer burned, but he was exhausted. Nothing was more appealing than lying down right here and passing out would have been. He took a deep breath, preparing himself. "Alright," he said. "Just… give me a second to get ready."

"Senpai," Sakura said softly, "you don't have to do this now if you don't want to. You can rest up first. It might be easier if—"

Shirou shook his head. "No, it needs to be now," he said. "If I put it off, I won't ever want to do it."

Her lips twisted again, but she nodded. "Okay. If you're sure."

It's going to hurt. It's going to be worse. It'll destroy me and I won't be myself enough to tell him to stop. He inhaled again. Exhaled. His eyes met Sakura's once again, and the reassuring smile that spread across his face felt surprisingly genuine. "You're protecting me, right?"

Sakura's eyes widened slightly with a tiny gasp, and her cheeks tinged red. She nodded firmly.

Shirou closed his eyes, steadying himself, but he could still see her face. His pounding heart slowed, just enough to be noticeable. "Assassin," Shirou said. It's going to hurt, it's going to hurt, it's going to hurt, itsgoingto. "You can materialize."

In a coalescing swirl of dark motes of light, a shadowy form gathered, and for the first time since he'd fought Berserker, Assassin stood before him. Much as he had in the main room the night of his summoning, he stood with a hunch, shoulders pressed in to minimize his profile, to not break anything. Spikes bristled. Black armor gleamed. Blue fire burned, breaking on the ceiling, but nothing it touched burned. He didn't have his sword, but there was no doubt that Assassin could kill every single person in this room in moments, without breaking a sweat, And inset into a snow-white skull, two points of blue fire burned. There were nothing like pupils to show direction, but Shirou knew that Assassin was looking him directly in the eyes.

Sakura gasped again, this one an involuntary expression of fear, and he took her hand and squeezed it without thinking. She made no further noise.

"Wow," Shirou breathed, and so incredible was the sight that it took him this long to realize that… he didn't hurt. His body buzzed, an electric feeling like standing too close to a power line; not something pleasant, but not mind-numbing agony. It was a strange feeling, seeing his Servant like this. The sight of him had seemed so intertwined with some of the most abject misery he'd ever experienced in his life, but now…

"It is good to see thee with my true eyes," Assassin said, and nothing resembling a jaw moved with the words, "while thou art not convulsing in pain." In fact… nothing about him moved but the flames. Shirou had never seen any allegedly living thing so completely, impossibly still.

"Uh…" Shirou said, at a loss for words. "You too, big guy."

Rin had scooted back until her back was pressed up against the wall, but if it had been out of fear, she was doing a remarkably good job hiding it; all Shirou could see in the brief glance he gave her was a kind of awed fascination.

He'd expected Sakura to be terrified, but Shirou wondered if his initial assessment of her reaction had been wrong. She looked… serene. She looked more relaxed than she had since Shirou had found her the day before. She looked relieved. Her head tilted, and she smiled at him, and it was absolutely radiant.

He returned the smile out of sheer reflex, his chest rebelling once again, but he could feel the look of confusion on his face.

She giggled quietly, a sound deeply at odds with the skeleton knight standing just a few yards away. "I was so afraid for you, Senpai," she said softly. "But now I see. You do have a protector. Assassin will keep you safe, won't he?"

The confusion faded, and his smile was all that was left. "It's not really fair, huh? I've got two really strong people protecting me."

Sakura went red again, for some reason, but she didn't flinch away or startle this time. "I just want you to be okay. That's all." Her eyes slid away, and she looked embarrassed. "I'm being silly, I guess."

Shirou shook his head. "You're not!"

"So how's it feel for you?" Rin asked conversationally, clearly tuning the two of them out. "Are you feeling any side effects?"

Assassin still had yet to move a single time as he replied. "I am still weakened, but I believe that thee knew that the supply would still need bolstering. I should be as strong as I was when I fought thine Archer; stronger than I was when I fought Berserker. Should we meet again, I believe I will be able to do more than delay."

The buzzing was shifting into something else. It was slow — so slow, in fact, that he barely noticed from moment to moment — but by now the feeling was something more akin to a pins-and-needles sensation. More unpleasant, but not quite pain, yet.

"Yeah, that'll probably keep getting worse," Rin said when he told her this. "Your symptoms will get more and more unpleasant until he's dematerialized, and it'll take time for them to go away once he is."

"Don't push yourself, Senpai," Sakura said. "Do you want to put him away?"

Shirou shook his head. "Not yet. I need to know what to expect."

"Keep him out too long, and you'll probably end up right back where you started," Rin said, a note of warning in her voice. "What you're feeling will turn back to pain eventually. Remember, you have the same problem. It'll just happen slower. And having him exert himself will accelerate it."

"I know, I know," he said, though he'd hoped it wouldn't get that bad anymore. Nausea turned his stomach; it was subtle at first, but it grew more and more pronounced as time went on. A twinge in his forehead pricked at him as well. As each new symptom developed or worsened, he relayed it to them.

After about five minutes, the pins-and-needles has turned to genuine pain, though not as bad as it had been. Yet.

Six minutes or so, and his head pounded with every heartbeat, and the nausea was growing difficult to ignore.

Eight minutes was when things began to edge just a little too close to "unbearable," and once again he found himself drenched in sweat, gasping just a little for breath.

"Senpai…" Sakura whispered.

Giving her hand a short squeeze for reassurance and then releasing it, he stood, slightly unsteady.

"Be careful," Sakura said nervously, though she didn't immediately move to follow him. "You look really weak…"

Shirou walked (okay, staggered) until he stood just before Assassin, looking up at him. "Assassin."

"Yes, Contractor?"

"Thank you. I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for you." Then, as steadily as he could, he slowly held out his hand.

Assassin gazed down at him. Moving for the first time since he'd appeared in the room, his huge, armored hand gripped his. He was surprisingly gentle; apparently, he was very aware of his strength. Shirou believed he could accidentally crush his hand as easily as he could a paper cup.

There, with Rin and Sakura looking on as witnesses, Shirou and Assassin shook hands for the first time.

We're coming to the end of the beginning.

Next chapter: A Pale Horse