Important Note: From this point forwards, please be advised that the story will include some if not all of the following: mass murder, kidnapping, enslavement, brainwashing, suicide, maiming, mania, abuse, obsession, and torture. If any of these are subjects that you are sensitive to, you may wish to stop reading.


Dying underwhelms Sakura. Most things in life bring pain, and Shirou brings comfort. Her Servant brings something, but the hero was to be Shinji's, so she expects him to bring pain; he does not, and so he must bring comfort, but he is not Shirou and therefore can not possibly comfort her. Death does not comfort her, it does not pain her, and it lacks even the spark of alien emotion that her Servant summons from her broken form. It is nothing, and then it is that unknown sensation, again.

She considers this carefully. Her heart beats, unencumbered and renewed.

She sleeps, and her mind skims the surface of this feeling she cannot describe. Even granted a thousand years, she would remain unable.

After all...how can one without hope even conceive of salvation?


~ The Fifth Cup: Interlude 1 ~


Archer is Shirou Emiya. It is an irrefutable truth, and Rin knows it to be so, for she has herself tried to refute it.

Intellectually, she knows that it is not impossible. The grail draws its combatants from the throne, and the throne exists in a metaphorical space adrift from time and other petty, mortal considerations. It is only natural that it might draw from the future, too. If her Servant were anyone other than him, were the tanned bowman any living being other than Kuoh's handyman, this would satisfy her.

It doesn't. Somehow the boy — the magus in her territory that she knew nothing of, and Lord above does that vex her — has been broken and forged anew, hammered in the eddies of this or another history. Her mind jolts to snatches of a beautiful girl with a fae-lit sword, memories of herself crying in his arms, visions of Sakura broken into some creature of transparent hair and deadened eyes. The sight of Illyasviel, neck snapped and body clutched in the exuberant hands of Kirei Kotomine. Flashes of a man smiling at a hollowed child, his tears trailing down ash-coated cheeks.

They are mere glimpses, nothing but glimmers in her dreams of crimson death. Blood, war, fear, and death. Battlefields awash in the entrails of stillborn revolutions. Buildings set ablaze with residents unevacuated, crackling flesh heating the chill of dusk. Family lines eradicated from ancestor to child, staring with wizened and innocent eyes as their butcher in red descends from the rooftop. Twisted abominations of wood, skin, and howling souls, weeping acid tears as they waltz with eternity in the form of a broken hero. Would-be messiahs left crushed into unrecognizable wards against the end of humanity, great scientists turned to maggot-writhing flesh as the bowman stares on, unable to change, unable to cease, unable to loathe himself any more than he already does.

She shivers.

How many people has her Servant slaughtered? How many lives has he taken? How many atrocities have come at his hand?

She cannot count and she does not want to; she has numbed herself to horror but this is a different thing entirely, a thing of brutality and terror and bloodstained swords that vanish and appear again, paired and broken and turned to the only friends he has.

He wanders between battle and a world of endless blades, and in this way has his dream been achieved. To be a hero; to sacrifice the few to save the many and the many to save the whole. He is a sword because he was always broken, but more because the rest of him has been destroyed and sanded down and sharpened to a point, tempered and quenched in endless battle and slaughter. He is nothing more than a weapon, and the agony he feels at this is beyond measure.

That the boy she is coming to care for, the boy whose quiet determination and unflinching resolve she envies so, can end like this...it is enough to make her question even the tenuous remnants of her faith in the divine. Rin knows of the Kaleidoscope, of the infinity of worlds accessible only to the man who defeated the crimson moon, and so she knows that all that can be, is; she knows and still she is horrified that Shirou Emiya could ever end up alone and broken, staring emptily at a sky of rust and grime.

Rin knows she should be panicking, and perhaps, waking in her servant's arms as she did, she is still in shock. Were it not for her classmate's skill with blades, Archer's arrival, and Gilgamesh's toying, she knows she would be dead.

She shivers again.

Everything was supposed to be simple. She would summon Servant Saber, and with her experience and knowledge of the Fuyuki terrain she and her Servant would crush the competition, proving her better than her father. Perhaps she would reconnect with Sakura, who, freed from her uncaring father, would be able to carry on the Matou line and enhance the reputation of the Tohsaka family. She would find a path to the root, and show the bigoted elite of the Clock Tower just how potent a Japanese magus could be.

She scoffs at herself, eyes trembling.

She was stupid. Naive. She was self-centered and ignorant and so proud of herself, so convinced that she would be special and great. But everything she wanted...it was nothing more than a fantasy. Sakura wasn't gifted with a better family; the younger girl was pawned off to be traumatized. Rin knows, deep down, what magi are — what she is. They are monsters, greedy, selfish monsters, and her little sister was abused to the point of placidity by the foulest among them.

She summoned Archer and not Saber, the shell of Shirou Emiya and not the knight she dreamed would lead her to victory. Her father's Servant from the prior war lives on, somehow, and the war itself is an anomaly, a terrifyingly unknown branch of the battle that ended in a rain of fire. She stares with unseeing eyes at the wall of her room, replaying the scene of Shirou's body, shattered, cradled by Saber as he appears in a whirlwind of flame.

Rin raises a hand to her cheek. It comes away slick with tears.

"Archer," she broadcasts to her Servant, a tremor coursing through her body, "I know who you were."

She thinks of Sakura, declaring her senior her only source of comfort in the world. She thinks of Shirou's arm around her shoulders.

She thinks of Archer, staring at a rusted sky.

"You are going to help me ensure that he never becomes you."


Shirou exhales from his position on the quilted mattress, wincing as he draws a shaky breath against his bludgeoned ribcage. He is no stranger to pain, not after his initial, disastrous forays into magecraft, but physical agony is not what causes the wind to catch in his throat. For all Gilgamesh's bluster, the golden king did not wound him all too greatly.

No, the true damage is slight, but it is to something Kiritsugu's son — his successor — thought impregnable. It is to his sense of self.

He hisses as he tries opening his eyes, clenching them shut before even a sliver of light can make its way through the gap.

Gilgamesh called me a forger. A not-magus. Why does that feel right? What does that mean?

Shirou cannot fail here. He will not fail here. The people he must protect, the mysteries he must unravel, the king whose dream he must bring to fruition – for them, he must not falter. For them, he must be the sword carving his way to a new dawn...but if he is not a magus, if he is not a blade, what is he?

His element is sword. His origin is sword. It is improbable and unnatural, but it is not at all impossible; Kiritsugu himself possessed an esoteric dual origin, even if severance and constriction are on the surface a good deal more abstract. A combination of lacking affinity, present origin, and working circuits molded the former to bladed end, and so, he believes, molded him as well.

Shirou Emiya has centered all of himself around this: the functions of a sword, the context of a sword, the image of a sword...

A sword is strong and unyielding. A sword is a partner. A sword is surgical but devastating, majestic but crude. A sword is a weapon, and a sword exists to be used. A sword is chivalry and knighthood and blood and war and fear and pain. A sword is a wound ungiven, a death undealt. A sword is mercy. A sword is the extension of another. A sword is—

...not what he is.

No, it is, but it is not all of what he is.

He clenches his right hand into a fist and then tightens it, trying and failing to ground himself. He should not understand this, not so quickly, but the flames took from him his soul and he knows well the spirit he has built anew from the embers left behind.

A sword is something that can carry on the dreams of its maker, its crafter, its smith, and that, he thinks-trusts-believes, is the secret. He is a forger. One who forges, yes: a fabricator. A faker and a creator in one. Genesis and duplication, mimicry and formation. He is not one of those — he is both. Shirou builds swords and divinity, and they combine to reforge him into something greater. A spirit of eld, bound with its weapon. User and tool. Cantor and prayer.

Superhero, he thinks back to Kiritsugu's dream, and superpower.

Deep within him, twisting and twining through the lines of fate and fire, wrapping over and into the world of blades, there is a shift. The sky flashes the color of dawn and the ocean echoes with peals of scarlet flame; wisps of color flare from the swords stabbed into the hill, shifting and spinning and shaping, incorporeal, indistinct, and subordinate. They form ranks as the blade atop the mountain burns, lighting a glow that cannot be perceived, a radiance that kills even to glimpse. There is a flash and then there is white and crimson and gamboge, a sea of roiling flame and molten steel, a pillar of unbreaking diamond.

He smiles, whole and somehow more, and consciousness slips away.


After death, she wakes in a place that she cannot perceive; she has walked with divinity, but even twisted she is mortal, and so it is beyond her. She remembers a feeling of non-pain, an assurance that morphs into a righteous, all-consuming fury at the world below. She knows it is not kind, but above all, it is good.

She flashes in fire, and they reappear. She tries to walk, and she manages it; he burns a path for her, and she changes from her garb of white into the familiar normality of her school uniform.

Rider's flames will devour her Grandfather, but only one thing is important and it is not the worm.

She heads for her beloved, and her soul unravels.


"I'm dismayed that it took my wonderful master so long to realize the person I used to be."

Archer's response is frustratingly smarmy. It isn't unexpected, Rin grumbles, but the man is just...ugh. She knows full well why the bowman is like this — a coping mechanism, a reflection of his internal bitterness and self-hatred. But understanding isn't the same as enjoying.

"I simply couldn't conceive of Shirou turning into someone like you."

She most emphatically does not shriek as her servant responds to her jab by materializing on the foot of her bed, a small smirk on his lips as he turns to face her.

"Alas, my poor master, unable to see the end of her would-be lover's path..."

Her eyes narrow at him.

"If you do that ever again, I will use a command seal to make you confess your love to Berserker."

"Unfortunately, my affinity for swords doesn't extend to the euphemistic, but it makes this humble archer glad to know his master cares so greatly for his romantic prospects."

She sighs, mourning for a second the shattered fragments of her patience. Of course. Well, best get on with it, she thinks, hesitating despite herself.

She stares unbidden at his face, transposing over it the auburn and amber of her classmate. Archer is weathered, his hair styled differently and his skin tanned, but there are similarities. The same cheekbones, the same shape to their eyes...

"Do you have a reason for calling me, or do you intend to spend the next hour admiring my features?"

The girl flinches, shaking her head.

"Admire you?" She scoffs. "Never."

"You wound me, master. You yourself declared that I was the boy you are infatuated with, no?"

"That's...!" Rin scrambles for a comeback, and, failing, lets out a huff. "Forget it. We need to talk about Shirou and you, and how to stop him from becoming you."

Archer shakes his head, smirk departing for the moment.

"Do we really need to? I threw away that name, and the boy, despite his dream, could never become me." He grimaces. "But to answer your unasked question, the idiot serves an inherently flawed ideal. He is not nearly as empty as I, but that damned need to save others, that twisted, egotistical wish to become a hero...it will drive him to ruin all the same."

She scowls at him.

"And how, exactly, do you know that he's safe from your destiny?"

"He is safe from nothing, and will inevitably drive himself to a meaningless early death, but I know I'm not this Shirou for a variety of reasons."

Rin rolls her eyes, motioning for him to get on with it. He smirks and acquiesces.

"First, King Arthur is the wrong gender. In my world, or what scattered remnants of it I can remember, her name was Arturia."

Really? she thinks. Her knowledge of English mythology is by no means perfect, but she is confident that many of the man's actions, notably siring a child, would not be achievable by a woman. Marrying another queen, too, in a kingdom claimed by Christendom?

"That stretches credulity."

Archer inclines his head, a glimmer of humor in his steel grey eyes. Longing, too, muted and worn and somehow not-quite dead.

"Incredible, maybe, but it's the truth. It's also irrelevant. She was my Servant and my lover."

Rin flinches internally, preparing to return serve...but she hesitates. Despite her reflexive mordancy, despite her tendency to trade barbs with her Servant, it is clear that this is important to him.

She is a bitter woman, tired and caustic and proud, but not cruel. Not to him. Even if he did just admit to sleeping with a woman in her mid-thirties as a teenager, and may therefore be open to — no. That is not a train of thought worth following to its conclusion.

"I'm...sorry for your loss?"

It is not a question, though she trails off as if it were. Archer shakes his head anyway.

"She isn't here, and she wouldn't recognize me even if she was. I'd rather speak about your version of the idiot that I was than dwell on my past, or, better yet, do neither of those things."

The magus nods, silent, and he continues.

"My misspent youth aside, the second reason has to do with the boy's powers."

"His divine fire?"

"If it were only an odd ability to conjure soul-scalding flames, that'd be one situation. My memory has gaps. I could have such an ability, myself, lost under the weight of my mistakes."

Rin doesn't sigh, but it's a close call.

"So what do you mean, then?"

"Master, he has continuously turned himself into a pseudoservant. The boy projected Excalibur, a sword capable of destroying much of the planet if unleashed in full. I trust you can see where I'm going with this?"

Where is he going with this? Rin thinks, mind churning furiously. Shirou is intensely, absurdly capable, she knows, but that makes sense for a magus whose sheer competence would attract the counter force itself. He can do things that should be impossible, but so can Archer; it can't be his abilities alone. What's special about her Shirou? What's she missing? What is it that she's forgotten when it comes to Shirou projecting...noble...

Oh.

Her thoughts screech to a halt as she understands. Shirou's abilities are impressive, nonsensical, and worthy of investigation, but, Rin realizes in horrified fascination, she has ignored a far more fundamental problem.

"How does he have the magical energy?" she gives voice to her realization, volume dropping to a whisper. "How can a no-name practitioner, adopted son of the magus killer or not, possibly manage the summoning of servants all on his own? He isn't being helped by the grail, he shouldn't be capable of..."

Her heart pounds, and blood rushes to her ears. She stares at Archer, wide-eyed.

"What is he?"

For a long moment, Archer says nothing. The silence is answer enough, but an interminable second later, he leans against the wall, head tilted, gaze boring into Rin's own. He waits an instant longer, then speaks.

"The counter force has summoned me to countless worlds and realities, and I remember almost none of them. Almost none. The universe where a girl caused the apocalypse for the favor of King Arthur, however? I don't think I could forget that world if I tried."

He quirks his lips. His smile is not pleasant.

"I don't remember most things about this reality," Archer continues, "but I do remember that the girl who caused the end of days was special in one very specific way. She possessed an unlimited connection to the Akashic Records."

Rin blinks. That is...she lacks the words to describe what that might mean, even within the confines of her own head. Shirou is already someone that any magus with fewer scruples than her would vivisect in an instant. But if he's connected to the Root directly, then...

He stands, looming over her seated form.

"Do I know that the boy also possesses a link to the infinite? No. But it's the best explanation I can think of for why he has not yet saved the world the trouble and drained himself to death."

Archer turns to leave the room.

"Wait." Rin speaks up before he can exit. "Shirou is...he has..."

She takes a breath to center herself, growling internally at her inability to form a coherent sentence. Shirou has power, yes, and a connection...but what changed? Why does he have this connection? Why was he born all-powerful in this world, but not in Archer's? It's a certainty that if all worlds exist, so must one where he has such power...but why? Why? Why? Why him? (Why not me, asks a small part of her, the child clinging to her father's leg in the time before the deluge of flame.)

She cannot say this, and so, instead, she asks the sister to her question.

"How?"

An indescribable emotion glimmers in her servant's gunmetal eyes. He answers softly.

"I don't know."


Shirou's dreams perch themselves in the unknowable.

They have nowhere near the clarity, the power of the dreams conferred by the grail, but his unwaking self catches glimpses of things he cannot explain, snatches of insight that graft themselves to the skin of his mind. Deep within himself something immaterial calls to the visions, discordant yet symphonic nonetheless. He sees himself, and he sees —

He kneels in a whirl of golden light, and around him his fellows prostrate themselves in the same.

To his right there are long, thin columns of flame with entrances and exits that swap places every second, both unused and still inviting, more template than complete form. Tips of violet light link the spires in a web of color and sensation, lilting songs and secrets into his skin and through his eyes. He can taste the glow of the place, the ether that distinguishes this world from the two and six below, and he can feel the expanse press on him in its gentle and overbearing warmth, a smile burned into a bonfire flame. To his left the world wraps and warps and stretches to a tangle of lights and blinking eyes, splitting and narrowing into filaments of a primeval web, formed of kindness and wheels turning under power not their own.

It should terrify him. This unreality should break him, should drive him insensate, but he is a part of it and in this light he welds what he was to what he will be. They say the darkness is where demons dwell, where the muck of sins and curses drags every soul to the infinite null, and they are errant and wrong and limited because the dark is only ever a reflection of the light; the names and powers that burn his eyes and light his ears are greater and more terrible than their counterparts can ever hope to be. They are wrong, unquestionably, for this is something no darkness can replicate.

He looks below, and sparkles and shimmers of crystal look up at him. He looks above, and he is there a second later, limbs moved to view the firmament and no memory of it written into recall. He looks without and the ringing of bells embraces him, and he looks within, and he is more than Shirou Emiya.

The glow of his eyes is as splendor'd lightning, his flesh as burning fire, his limbs as wings of ceaseless flame. He is the size of the world, with three dozen pinions on his left and on his right, and he is adorned with hundreds of eyes, each lit in a simulacrum of the sun entire. And there is no brilliance, no light, no radiance, no glory that is not fixed on him.

He is—

They are—

There is a flash of light, a pulse of power that escapes his dreams and sears the bedding beneath him. His body writhes in saffron and ochre, and though the fire blazes, a pyre of color casting vivid shadows on his wooden bed, the forger does not burn. Were he lucid, were he adapted better to what he is becoming, he could reach out, now, and grasp his transcendent destiny. Instead, because he is not yet ready and he is not yet him, the fire flickers away, embers of the intangible cast as sparks in an unreal wind. From far away he hears Arthur's voice, indistinct as the majesty ebbs, the tide of supernality withdrawing and diminishing, pulling itself back into the ever-twisting realm of the oneiroi. The flare trickles away and mundanity returns in the key of a grieving king.

The faint echoes of a broken-hearted Camelot peter out, an insight into his servant lost to something far greater. He shudders and silver fire leaks from his mouth.

He bears hopes unending, unbound by fate nor bound to time.

He does not dream again.


Her reunion is heartfelt, and she struggles with the breadth of human emotion. Joy. Disbelief. Concern. Love. Terror.

Everything is new to her and so she cherishes every minor sense, every iota of feeling. Even misery and sadness are precious to her, because not even they could survive the pit of worms. She feels as though she were born again.

She could indulge in it forever: her boundless, ceaseless love for Shirou Emiya, her quiet understanding of the sister who abandoned her.

For this, she will forever thank Rider. With this alone, she has gained far more than she ever believed possible.

But she has a debt to repay and a vengeance to enact on a creature that can no longer be called a man. On the thing that calls itself Zouken Matou.

She stands before the house that was her incubator, and Rider follows behind.

Her arm falls.

His eyes gleam.

The world becomes light.


"...but you have a third option."

The girl looks up, tears trickling down her face.

"You can have presence and spite and fairness and you can finally make them understand."

He vanishes, reappearing on her other side, whispering softly into her ear.

"Do you think any of them can hide from me?"

His words echo all around her.

"Alone, you have nothing left. You will waste away, hated and ignored. You know that everyone will think they are better off without you. They tell you it by their exclusion, by their pity, by the way they ignore you and scoff at you. Behind your back, they talk about you as if you weren't another human being, as if you weren't worthy of respect. You know what I speak of. You know their cruelty and their mockery. You know how alone you really are, lost in a world that will not make meaning of itself no matter how hard you press."

Her pupils dilate as the words laced in magic strike true at her insecurities, her fears. He reappears, shrouded, in the corner.

"You are educated in law, but you cannot find a position as a lawyer. You see your debts climbing, your tether unraveling as it burns on its other end. How long ago was it that you last spoke to your family? How many people do you speak to, still, from when you were young? How much of yourself do you place in your ever-shrinking communities, full of misfits and the broken, scattered outcasts of a society that hates you? Can you trust that they will not abandon you, as everyone else has? Can you trust that you yourself will not prompt such abandonment?"

She clutches at herself, looking away.

"You are too foul for them, and still, you play desperately at kindness, simply yearning for companionship that will never arrive. They should see it, and the truth is, they do. They know how hard you are trying. They see the way you struggle to connect with them and they laugh at you behind closed doors, when they are not crying from your cruelties. They will not mourn you, and they will feel no grief when you are gone. You have nothing, and you are no one, but you are blessed. Because now?"

He appears in front of her, kneeling, head bowed, arms outstretched above him as if presenting a gift to a queen.

"I will be your voice. I will be your sword and your blade and your justice in this world that you are lost within. I will do the things you wish you could, impart unto them the regret and fear and self-loathing that haunt your every waking moment. I will make them understand. I will make them care."

She reaches forwards, sobbing. Her palm grasps at the air above his hands, curling around a sword that appears in ash and red sand.

"You may die, but through me, you will live forever."

The man known as Assassin watches impassively as the girl stabs herself through the heart. He feels the influx of power.

Anything, he thinks, turning from her cooling body, for freedom.


There is an old saying in Welsh: hir yw pob ymaros — all waiting is long.

If Morgan le Fay were a wordsmith, rather than the most famous witch to have ever lived, she would counter thusly: better a wait than a failure.

She has waited a long time to claim her beloved.

From the first moment she laid eyes on him, resplendent even amidst the titans of her brother's court, her love was his. She is an epoch and a world away, gifted form for a shattered hourglass' dribbling span...and still for her knight, for her Lancelot, her heart does beat.

Watching his seduction by the bitch that wedded her brother is and remains a roaring flame in her breast, a clarion call to the darkness and hate ascribed late to her by the scribes of France and England. It consumes her, this yearning, this wish for the queen to burn.

Guinevere's bones sink now in the peatlands, dragged there on the order of the High Priestess of Avalon, and still Morgan wishes them set alight again for what she did to her knight, to her brother, to her world. The adultress, the harlot queen, the whore that invited in the greatest knight of Camelot and turned him out a chaste and broken monk; yes, thinks the Lady le Fay, that woman deserves worse than condemnation and death alone.

Servant Caster absentmindedly traces a finger over the spine of her latest assistant, drawing a simple circle in his blood on the wall of her hotel room. She gently pats what's left of the man's head, careful not to get excess viscera on her gown.

Oh, Arthur... she thinks, carefully completing the repeating Úath and Luis runes. Finding her brother here, of all times, is certainly inconvenient. It is unlikely that the noble fool will work with her, hampered as he is by his chivalry.

A drop of blood lands on her glove. She pays it no mind.

Arthur will not see the truth as she does. He will not see how his own ruin was brought about by his jezebel and her jealous wiles. He will not see that what she does, what she desires, is best for both of them.

But my brother's master is quite intriguing...

Morgan smiles to herself, contemplating the boy's near-incarnation of Sir Lancelot. It is fortunate, she thinks, that she was watching the skirmish between the self-aggrandizing king of Babylon and the magus in question, sending only an illusory duplicate to the Einzbern castle. Fortunate indeed.

I wonder, Shirou Emiya, what it will take to break you? To deliver my lost love to me, once again?

The wall flares viridian, an ethereal echo of the stone bending and twisting and flowing into the palm of her hand. Her skin flashes sea blue, then autumn red, then, with a captured sob, returns to ethereal pale.

She cranes her head upwards, tilting her head at the flesh fused to the wood in a spiral pattern. A drop of black blood congeals from the center of the meat, dripping from the repurposed hotel staff onto her outstretched palm, fading into her skin with a small whine.

Morgan laughs, and she laughs, and she laughs, and she laughs.


There is a crater where her tormentor once writhed, and she feels free, if for a moment.

But it isn't enough.

It isn't enough because Shirou is in the war and now that she has tasted fear she dwells in it, bathes in it. Anxiety coats her skin, sinking doubt and worry into every pore on her porcelain form.

She is saved, but now...now she has a goal. She has a goal and a dream and even freed from her prison she is twisted and devout, for she has lain in peace but not in rebirth. And thus, to her, to the girl that may no longer be human, this dream is everything.

She will save her beloved, Sakura Matou resolves, hair staining brunette at its roots and ivory at its edge, or the world will burn.


~ End of Interlude 1 ~


AN: Hi! I actually have a rough outline of the rest of the story now! That doesn't mean it's likely to be written on any semblance of a schedule, but I have plans, which is more than I could say before.

To make things clear, Archer's from something close to the canon universe, even if I'm...adding a bit (why hello there, hypothetical bad-end Fate Prototype). And yeah, I'm having him still holding a torch for Saber because come on. I may personally think she's a waste of a good concept, and I can't say I approve of a 35-year-old dating a teenager, but Archer's the best or second best character in the entire franchise, and she's a non-negligible part of that.

I considered stretching this interlude further, but I don't think there's much more to be said. I also wanted to just get it out there already.

Enjoy the show when I finish the next chapter in 3 years or the like!