A sudden wave of disorientation washed over Rin. She felt as if she were looking at herself in a hall of mirrors, her reflections staring at each other and marching into infinity. She felt the coarse tar of the roof beneath her but she also felt herself adrift in a vast and endless void. She watched herself watching herself.
Around her chaotic battle raged. Below in the street Berserker and Alpha clashed like twin hurricanes of raw power. In front of her Shirou and Kotomine struggled against each other. A sudden and frighteningly intense wave of deja vu washed over her. She felt with a grim clarity that she knew what was about to happen. Shirou and Kotomine would fight. She would dash towards the console. Kotomine would shout...
"Alpha! Quit toying with Berserker!"
His words snapped her out of a momentary reverie. Her sense of foreboding suddenly escalated into an inexplicable terror. She whirled and saw Alpha raise his odd sword to strike one final blow.
And then time shattered around her. Alpha stood suspended in midair, his arm poised in a sweeping down stroke. Shirou was frozen, his hands scrabbling at Kotomine's. Arcing bolts of power were caught in freeze frame.
Slowly at first, but mounting to a tsunami force a wave of temporal and grail energy began to sweep over the battlefield. It was focused on a single point, a rift that was rapidly drawing all the available magical energy into it. Rin felt as if her soul were being pried away from her as all the mana in her body was forcibly ripped away and drained into the vortex. She could see without seeing the hideously powerful dual Grail. Its immense power only made it a denser target, drawn like a magnet into the rift. She couldn't believe that such an unlimited source of power could simply be drained away through a crack in reality, but she watched with her own eyes as it was siphoned away.
There were changes elsewhere too. Alpha's form was caught in the temporal eddies and sucked away like a bad dream. Rin expected some curse, some final struggle, some final attempt at vengeance. But the stream was too powerful, and the flow of time was not working correctly, and all he could do was howl in wordless rage as he spiraled downwards into the abyss.
Rin's frantic gaze immediately turned to Berzerker. The same process was taking place but with a subtle difference. Because he had a body and existed physically in the realm of the living the vortex had a different effect on him. Like it had with Rin it pulled all vestiges of mana from his body. But more than that, it pulled away all evidence of the Grail. It stripped away from him the nature of a Servant. Rin felt a shooting pain in her arm as her command seals became dull and inert. When Berserker fell to his knees he was a Servant no longer, he was simply human.
Hope and confusion warred in her mind. What was happening? Had Kotomine's experiment backfired? Had the raw Grail energy cracked the wall between realms and sucked itself out of existence? That was the only explanation she could think of. Or was it something else? Some hidden machination by parties unknown? The sense of deja vu hit Rin again and she felt as if she were looking down into the magical rift, staring into an endless abyss. She though for an instant that she saw herself reflected there, her cheeks streaked with tears of despair and joy, her face the picture of sorrow and relief and acceptance.
Whatever the cause, whatever the reason, Rin could feel the most freeing sense of calm fall over her. Whether by her own actions or by the ineffable hand of fate Kotomine had been stopped. Everything was going to be okay.
That calm lasted for half an instant.
The sucking vortex of magical power shifted its focus. The temporal tide began to pull once more. This time it wasn't focused on the Grail, or the dueling servants, or even the ambient mana in the area. It was focused on...
"Shirou!" Rin screamed as she realized what was happening.
She struggled forward like a madwoman, reaching with all her might to take his hand. He tried to break free of the tendrils of power sucking him downward. He took a step towards her. And then another. Hope surged in Rin's breast and she reached out. Their fingers hoovered inches apart. If she could just touch him, just hold him, even if it was one last time...
But the temporal pull was too strong. Shirou was ripped from his feet and jerked backwards into the spiraling abyss. Rin screamed her soul out as she tried to reach him, unable to accept what was happening. But Shirou's face held an expression of peace. He knew that the Grail was gone, that Alpha was defeated and that the world was safe. His eyes held regret and sorrow, but the look on his face wasn't anger or denial or fear. It looked like redemption.
And then, like some horrific nightmare ripped away by the light of day, it was over.
Debris picked up by the vortex began crashing back down. Rin fell to her knees. She felt empty inside, like a piece of her had been cauterized. Shirou was gone, ripped through an inexplicable portal in the fabric of reality. Yes, the world was safe. Yes, Kotomine had been defeated. But without him, without Shirou it felt like a meaningless victory.
Tears rolled down her cheeks making tracks in the ash and grime plastered there. She was too numb to think, too numb to move. She stared uncomprehendingly ahead of her, heedless of the dark figure pushing himself to his feet.
"No...NO!" Kotomine raged. He dashed towards his broken device and began punching at the control panel, frantically pulling levers and turning dials.
"Everything was perfect. Perfect! What went wrong? I accounted for every possibility! There's no way that...You! You did this!" A crazed fury danced in his eyes as he whirled on Rin.
She couldn't summon the will power to rise as he rounded on her. Although her magic had been depleted and she couldn't see him with her third eye she knew that no magical attack was coming. His magic had been depleted as well. No, her death would be a purely physical affair.
Evidently Kotomine retained his massive strength even without his mana. He bent and hoisted a shattered girder as he advanced, dragging the heavy bludgeon behind him as he bore down on Rin. She watched him dully as he walked towards her and stared with glassy eyes as he raised it high above his head. She watched it descend towards her in slow motion, a lazy arc that would terminate in her skull.
Berserker caught it just before it dashed her skull out.
He leaped forwards from behind her and seized Kotomine by the wrist, wrenching it sideways to break his grip and then hurling him backwards. Kotomine's face filled with new rage and he advanced like a man possessed.
"It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter! I'll send you both to hell!" He roared.
Berserker shut him up with a massive punch to the face.
"Don't cuss in front of a lady." He said through gritted teeth.
Their fight was not a glorious duel. It wasn't the high speed impact of two magically enhanced behemoths. It was the deadly simple, horrifically brutal, terrifyingly silent battle of two men with no resources, no tricks, and no alternatives. They grappled and gouged, ripped and tore at each other. The only sound was panting and grunts of exertion punctuated by the wet, meaty packing sounds of fist impacting with flesh. Blood was ground through grime into frothy smears. Improvised weapons changed hands and went clattering across the rooftop. Skull was bashed against stone again and again until the tide turned.
When it was all over Berserker lifted his fingers away from Kotomine's throat and let the corpse fall back onto the roof with a dull thud. His face was a bruised, bloodied mask of relief. His bone showed through his knuckles where the skin had been scrapped off. Blood oozed from too many places to count. He was barely able to stay on his feet.
He approached Rin and wavered before her on the verge of collapse before he was able to master himself. He held out his hand and for the first time her eyes swung into focus, traveling up his arm to his face. His eyes were tired, so tired. His mouth hung in the haggard grimace of a man who is exhausted to his very soul. But as she watched the edges of his mouth twitched, and then pulled themselves into a grin so familiar that it nearly broke her heart all over again.
"C'mon Rin." He said.
"Let's go home."
…
The following weeks passed in a blur. Thankfully a Tohsaka family recovery team had arrived at the site of the battle before the civilian police did, or the agents of any of the other magical families. Ilya regained consciousness in the family hospital and proved so big a handful that she was released the following day. Sakura was still unconscious and the Tohsaka's expert magical theorists were still puzzling out what had been done to her, both by Kotomine and by the Matou family.
Berserker was released from the hospital as well, or rather he simply walked out once he had been stitched and bandaged and refused any attempt at a medical followup. Rin had surreptitiously asked her doctors to try and determine what had happened to him and what the lingering effects of the Grail might be. She also nervously asked them to try and determine how much lifespan he had left. On all counts they found no answers.
Being around him was difficult. He was the perfect mirror of Shirou. Every word, every action, his appearance and his voice, the way that he held his head when he listened to her, everything reminded her of Shirou so sharply that she felt the pain in the base of her soul. Every hour of every day she missed him more and more. It seemed so unfair. So arbitrary that he would be taken from her.
She knew that it wasn't easy for Berserker either. He never said a word, never pushed her or made her feel uncomfortable, but she could see in his eyes that his feelings for her hadn't changed. She could also tell that his self image had changed. He didn't think of himself as Berserker, the servant. He thought of himself as Shirou now. And each time she called him Berserker it cut him a little bit deeper.
They had spoken at length after the war, trying to puzzle out what had happened. Berserker's memories of being Shirou stopped the instant he was sucked into the magical vortex and started again the moment he was summed by Rin on the first day. For him no time had passed. He remembered everything he had done as Berserker before his memory returned and he remembered watching Rin and his younger self together.
After the battle tension had stretched between them like an intangible wall until things came to a head late one night. She was helping him with something inconsequential, repairing the broken motorcycle in Ilya's garage. They were trying to work through what had happened during the war when Rin offhandedly called him Berserker. His eyes fell and Rin took his face in her hands.
"Look, would you just talk to me?" She urged.
"We've been dancing around this for days. I...I need to know. Are you him? Are you Shirou?" She asked, her heart in her throat.
Berserker/Shirou's gaze lingered on hers for a long moment and then dropped.
"I don't know. For me I am Shirou. I never stopped being Shirou, even when I lost my memory. To me everything is the same, I've just lived the past couple of weeks twice through, once as...him and once as me. My memories, my feelings for you, nothing has changed. But for you, for you it might be different. I don't know. I know you were in love with him and I know that you don't think of me as him. I just...I wish...I don't know. There aren't any easy answers." He said, letting the conversation trail off into silence.
She began calling him Shirou after that. But still the unease remained. Rin felt trapped by her feelings. She knew she wasn't thinking clearly, her emotions twisted by grief. She felt that she couldn't take it any more, that something would have to give. And then, all at once, everything changed.
...
It was a grey pre-dawn morning when Rin was awoken by a deep rumbling sound. She blinked groggily as she tried to place it. It sounded like...the motorcycle!
In a flash she jumped out of bed and pulled on her clothes. In the hallway she bumped into Ilya. They stared at each other frantically and rushed down the stairs and out into the dim morning.
Shirou was backing out of the driveway. He was wearing what Rin had come to think of as his trademark outfit, simple jeans and a long sleeved shirt with light blue sleeves. His eyes were filled with sadness and something else, something unreadable as he looked at them.
Ilya threw herself forward, blinking back tears as she threw her self into Shirou's arms.
"You...you...you were gonna leave without saying good buh-buh-bye!" She bawled, burying her face in his chest.
He chuckled and patted the back of her head affectionately.
"I thought it'd be easier this way." He said with a sad smile.
"'Guess I didn't get away after all, huh?"
Ilya pulled back and scrubbed the sleeve of her pajamas across her face, sniffling.
"Like we'd let you go without a proper farewell. Where will you go?" She asked.
"I don't know. Kotomine's operation is still out there. He has more bases, more clones of me waiting to be awakened. I'll track them down and put a stop to it for good. For now though I'll just...go." He said, his eyes distant.
"You could...you could stay." Ilya said shyly.
Shirou smiled sadly and planted a kiss on her forehead. His eyes met Rin's for a moment and then slid away.
"No. I can't. I have work to do, and I can't set my responsibilities aside." He said, resolution firm in his voice.
Ilya took a step back and Shirou revved the engine again. Rin searched for something, anything that she could say. Even though things between them were awkward, even though Rin didn't know where their relationship stood, even though she didn't know her own feelings, she only knew one thing. A horrible weight settled in her chest like the jerking, falling feeling when you reach the top of the stairs and take one more step.
Shirou held her gaze again, this time for much longer. He opened his mouth as if to speak. Rin's heart jumped. But he closed his mouth again and faced forward. The motorcycle roared to life underneath him.
Rin couldn't breath as she watched him ride out of her life.