"When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

Lily stood, left of centerstage, watching as Kiritsugu Emiya, with pistol and trench coat and command seals on one hand, walked quietly into the theater, eyes slipping from her to his wife's body that Kirei had so nicely laid out for his viewing pleasure.

She looked… Not quite peaceful, no, but rather empty, lying there drained of all color yet dressed in such vibrant red, as if she had known she was a colorless thing and attempted to make up for it in the only way she could.

Of course, Kirei Kotomine had snapped her neck and now Irisviel von Einzburn wouldn't be doing anything.

More, the grail, a large dark glowing thing which hardly resembled a grail at all, overshadowed her utterly.

"Not my stage, of course," Lily commented as Kiritsugu's dull gray eyes lifted to her once again, "All of this, this pitifully overdramatic confrontation we have here, belongs to the late Kirei Kotomine."

The man kept walking forward, his gun held quite professionally in his hand, and Lily kept her eye constantly on him, "Are you familiar with tragedy, Mr. Emiya, of the Shakespeare variety, I mean?"

Kiritsugu didn't answer, but Lily didn't particularly need him to.

"A tragedy, a classic Shakespeare tragedy, typically occurs over a very short period of time, you get a prelude of sorts, a building of tension, but when it goes to hell, it only takes a matter of days to get there. And there's some tarnished nobility in the protagonist, usually, Romeo and Juliet is one of those weird exceptions, but Hamlet you initially have a prince who takes a noble and perhaps just course of action… Except he goes slowly mad and ends up stabbing his would be father in law through a curtain, among other shenanigans," Lily waved this thought away even as the man lifted his gun towards her, aiming at her head, "But I'm getting off topic, the point being, well, that we all have our roles to play, and mine is to prevent you from wishing on this giant floating ominous cup over our heads."

He shot, the bullet ricocheted off of her shield, and Lily offered him a grim smile, "If it was that easy, Kiritsugu Emiya, don't you think someone would have managed it by now?"

She examined him, looking at him you'd never guess that world peace was his ultimate goal, he had a certain familiarity with death and violence that typically didn't come from a pacifist. Of course, that was her taking Kirei Kotomine at his word, but he had been so disappointed, that Lily couldn't help but think that it was the truth.

"Kotomine said you wanted world peace," Lily finally said, "It's admirable, in theory, but just wishing on this cup for it… Even if it really was an omnipotent wish granting device, a peace won by that would be cheap at best. As it is though, I don't think the grail can give you what you really want."

For a moment, he simply stared at her and her back at him, his gun still aimed at her head, and in this silent eye of the storm she offered him his last way out, "Give up, Kiritsugu, and you can walk back out those doors and leave me to destroy the grail."

And even though he didn't say a word, and all he offered her was a wry shadow of a smile, Lily knew that his answer was a clear and non-negotiable, "No."

Although, to be honest, with the body count being what it was already, the fate of the world on the line, and an omnipotent wish hanging in the air above their heads, Lily couldn't exactly say she was surprised.

She had no doubt hundreds of bodies had paved his path to the holy grail, when you walked on a road like that, you didn't have the option of turning back around.

And he was… fast. Faster than she had expected, than she believed possible, time itself seemed twist and slow within him and sweat ran down his face as he moved, and with a bullet from his gun, shattered through her shield. Lily fell back, erecting another shield around herself and teleporting behind him, but god he was fast.

Not quite like he was distorting time itself, but time on a smaller scale, his own time so that Lily could never really keep him in her line of sight, or concentrate enough on him to send any sort of overpowered lethal glitch his way.

There he was, right in front of her, breathing too heavily now but with enough presence that… He brought up the gun, no, a different gun, and without hesitation or warning shot a bullet, ripping through her shields, and straight into her forehead.

She imagined, in the seconds where she fell, where Lily left this plane of reality entirely to a train station and a man that did not exist in this world, that he looked down at her body for a few critical seconds, and that perhaps there was a deep, smothered, regret in his eyes.

As it was, after only offering the bewildered Death a somewhat sad smile and the promise to visit later, he had already stepped over Eleanor Lily Potter's body and towards that great dark beacon that floated overhead, not even once glancing back at her.

Which, of course, was how she managed to gut him with the sword.

For a moment, he was perfectly and utterly still, blood dribbling out of his lips and down his chin, eyes empty, and then, staggering, fingers shaking, he pitched forward with his hand reaching out for his wife.

And just like that, just like that, Kiritsugu Emiya, Kirei Kotomine's greatest threat, and a man that Lily would have liked to have known better under less bleak circumstances, was dead.

"Oh, what fools these mortals be," Lily whispered to herself, the stage, and of course, to the holy grail. It glowed ominously above her, dark red light pulsing out of it in short bursts which grew progressively shorter, as if it was reaching some dread climax which Lily didn't know the name of.

All of this, for a wish, a wish that no one had ever seen or heard from but just had the knowledge that it somewhere, somehow, must exist. For a moment, a split second, Kiritsugu Emiya had had some Lenin-like qualities about him, but there was a desperation in him that Lenin never allowed himself.

Lenin would never have sacrificed reality itself, even the remote possibility of ending reality, for the sake of any wish, let alone one which would fundamentally alter the human race in such a grotesque manner.

"We are our wars just as much as we are our joys," Lenin might have said, if someone had asked, "And I see no reason to argue with that."

Of course, no one ever had, or would, not with his reputation. Still, as she looked down at Kiritsugu Emiya, moving his hand so that it was inside of his wife's, perhaps someone should have.

From behind her there was a great cry as lightning crashed, oxen bellowed, Alexander the Great apparently made his way into the theater. With a very irate Wizard Lenin in tow, apparently, "Could you make this thing any less obtrusive?"

And Rider perfectly oblivious to the source of Wizard Lenin's irritation, "The Gordius Wheel was built for speed, my friend, not subtlety."

"I realize that, but surely, it doesn't have to spit out lightning every single time, does it? We've just melted the entire back row…"

"Well, to be fair, I don't think this theater is going to have much use after all of this anyway…"

From the corner of her eye, at the end of the room, she caught a flash of gold. And Lily found it hard to repress a smile, well, the gang was all here then. Without looking at any of them directly, she lifted a hand forward and breathed out, focusing on the grail, and then with a thought, cleaving it in two.

Time seemed to halt, the grail half together and half not, for a moment, it seemed as if she'd shredded reality itself instead, but then, all at once, with a blink, they were back, the grail collapsing in on itself as black hole edged in purple and red light.

Then, without warning, it burst outwards in a flood of black ooze, covering Lily completely.

One moment she had been standing there, back facing him, standing before the grail with a hand uplifted, and the next she was gone, engulfed by a swiftly moving river of black sludge which seemed to originate from the ceiling itself, a great fire extending from its tar like surface as it swiftly raged through the theater, eating at the foundations and seats and melting to the floor as it eagerly sought the streets of Fuyuki.

He himself was perched, moving from seat to melting seat, creeping closer to where Rider and Lenin stood in the Gordius Wheel, floating above the black raging flood with a look of equal dismay upon their faces.

However, his eyes, his eyes kept moving desperately to the front of the theater, because she had been standing there until the wave had crashed overhead, and now there was only the river where she had once stood so proudly only a few seconds before.

Then, without a word of shock, dismay, or even warning, when only a second must have passed, Gilgamesh watched as Lenin dove head first from Rider's oxen cart and into the burning river, eyes squeezed shut even as Rider himself called out to him and reached ineffectively for the edge of his tunic.

And then he too, without a word, was simply gone.

Leaving Rider and Gilgamesh, standing there, in shock and horror trying to process… Enkidu's death, as quick as it was, had been slow, there had been that illness, that incurable illness, he had not simply disappeared, his body itself vanishing into the night.

And what would eternity be now, him standing dumbly in the shadow of her existence, waiting for her to reappear every time he closed his eyes and opened them again?

However, the more he stared at the river, standing there on a melting gold and red chair, the more his shock, dismay, and building grief gave way to anger as a single realization stole upon him.

"I have been outdone by a mongrel."

That man, that mortal common upstart, had jumped in without a moment of hesitation, while Gilgamesh, king of heroes, in golden armor, was still standing upon this precarious seat cushion, debating his own mortality and a future without his wife.

Feeling his dismayed rage grow, he chose, instead of the many curses he knew to summarize this situation, to utter one of Lily's favored slurs, "That brazen motherfucker!"

"Archer?" Rider called out to him, but Gilgamesh did not have time for mongrels, not as he stripped himself of his armor, leaving only his bare and naked skin. This must have alarmed Rider for he called out more desperately, "Archer, surely you don't mean to…"

But whatever Rider thought Gilgamesh meant or meant not to do, an opinion that was not worthy of his status of a mongrel pretender king, Gilgamesh did not hear the rest of it for, without allowing himself another moment of hesitation (and thus another moment of humiliation for hesitating that much longer than Lenin), threw himself into the burning river.

Only, it was not burning, it was neither hot nor cold as he sunk into its depths, and while, for a moment, he was pulled swiftly under the tides as he would be a normal flooding river, this quickly ebbed and soon he found himself slowly floating towards the earth, the edge of gravity lightened ever so slightly.

And, opening his eyes, he found himself standing in Babylon as it once was, on the balcony of his palace overlooking the high walls, the ziggurats, and the temples… Except, except that the very air was tinted a dusky red and purple, as if the sky had been lit on fire long ago and was now curling into ash, in the street there were no people, and in the sky there were no birds, and in the air there was the overpowering scent of something burning out of sight.

"This is your legacy, Gilgamesh, does it displease you?"

Gilgamesh turned too slowly, he found himself staring at Enkidu, Enkidu once again, but this was not a drunken haze of Enkidu this was… This was not Enkidu, the form, the face, the curling ragged beard of a beggar, those were all familiar, but it was not Enkidu's soul which burned from those dark and cruel eyes, and that edge to his smile…

As this place was not his Babylon, the land beyond the walled cities not his Uruk, this could not possibly be Enkidu.

Enkidu, the thing wearing Enkidu's face like a clay mask, continued to speak, "Remember, how, when you crawled back to Uruk after that long journey, empty handed and denied immortality, you looked upon the high walls of Babylon, built by wretched mongrel slaves in your own grief and terror, and you wept at the very sight of them? And you thought to yourself, that this, this would be your enduring legacy upon this land, and the greatest thing to which you could possibly have aspired."

Gilgamesh sneered, his face flushed, and the gate of Babylon opening even here in this nether world as he drew forth a sword from it to place it against this cheap imposter's neck, "Do not disrespect the dead, cur. I do not need to hear such things from a foul creature such as yourself."

Enkidu seemed unconcerned by this, perhaps even a trace amused, instead he asked another question, in the sort of voice that Enkidu had used when he thought he was being slyly humorous (but such subtle humor had always been hopelessly beyond the man, and that, in itself, had been far more hilarious), "Your legacy though, the written word of what you are, lasted far longer than your city, did you know that, Gilgamesh?"

Without hesitation, for this man was not and could not be Enkidu, Gilgamesh severed the man's neck. Then, without a word, he turned from Babylon and Uruk beyond, into the palace itself, and began to search for curling red hair and those jewel like green eyes.

"So impatient."

Gilgamesh stopped, for there against a pillar was a copy of himself, a younger version, sneering down upon him, ruby red eyes gleaming, flowers of lilies stripped from their stems and gathered at his sandaled feet.

"What's the rush, mongrel? Only a fool believes he can outrun himself," the other Gilgamesh said with a sly smile.

"Why would you think that?" Gilgamesh asked.

"Why would I not? You willingly turn your back on your greatest works, your great treasure horde, all that encompasses Gilgamesh the king of all kings, and divest yourself of your own armor, for a little girl," the other Gilgamesh sighed, almost in disappointment, "I blame Enkidu, we were never the same when that mongrel arrived and barred our path to the pleasures of the flesh, he brought out the mortal third of our soul, and when he died we twisted even more so. The girl, though, in the course of a few days she has managed more devastation than even that."

Gilgamesh could only grit his teeth and oh, how he felt it, the twisting of that verbal knife that he had always been so very good at. And how it tore at his proverbial flesh, inch by dreaded inch…

The other Gilgamesh, the Gilgamesh that once was, motioned towards him, from his head to his toes with a single hand, "Look at you, naked as the day you were born, only your pride keeping you clothed now. Diving into your own damnation for the sake of a girl who you married in a karaoke bar. They've almost turned you into a mongrel just like all the rest."

He whispered then, leaning close to Gilgamesh's ear, "We were untouchable, once, our subjects trembled at the very whisper of our names upon the wind. Gilgamesh, they'd hear, and their daughters and wives would lament, for we were all but a god in mortal flesh."

"If you were truly a king of kings, then you would have taken Ea, and destroyed her where she stood. For the last enemy to be defeated is Death."

And upon those words, Gilgamesh offered his former self, coated in cruelty and gold and jewels, a thin smile, and pushed him to the side.

"You still search for her?!" the Gilgamesh that once was, cried out to him, utterly misunderstanding. But of course, he would have misunderstood then, women were temporary pleasurable distractions then, and men were even less than that.

Enkidu had interrupted that, had as his former self said, corrupted that Gilgamesh, but only slightly, because even in the beginning he had looked down upon Lily and seen her for a mongrel when she was anything but.

"She is the destroyer of us all, Gilgamesh! To suffer her existence is to deny everything you once believed in! For one day, one day she will turn her back on this universe and all who suffer in its indifferent grasp, and you will be no different!"

A sword from the gate, the sound of blood splattering against the marble, then silence, "I have had enough of your worthless drivel, specter."

Gilgamesh walked forward through the empty halls of his great palace, numbly past the sculptures and vases, the pelts of exotic animals lining the stonework of the floor, and down the great staircases until he was at the great carved doors to the steps of the palace.

And as he walked the building seemed to melt away under his indifference, Babylon melting beneath him in his memory, leaving nothing but thin transparent walls built of his own nostalgia until only the great gates into Babylon itself remained golden and gleaming in this twilight world.

However, as he put his hand upon them, a third, unfamiliar, specter appeared. This one took the form of a mortal boy, strangely beautiful with dark lashes and pale white hair almost made from starlight, his eyes black pits which almost appeared to lack irises, and, dressed in a male counterpart to Lily's own battle school girl garb, the boy offered him a thin, polite, and utterly empty smile.

"And who, exactly, are you supposed to be, mongrel?" Gilgamesh asked, this time impatience and exasperation leaking through him.

The boy's expression did not change in the slightest and he did not even blink, finally, after too long of a pause, he responded, "I am not."

That had to be the least satisfying answer that any mongrel had ever bestowed upon him.

At the sight of Gilgamesh's patently unamused expression, the boy, unhelpfully, clarified, "I am everything that is not Lily."

Well, at least this one was slightly more useful, "You know Lily then, boy?"

It just kept smiling, worse somehow than even the visions of himself and Enkidu, which at least had been a parody of everything human and not human, whereas this boy seemed to be nothing at all which had somehow taken the shape of a boy.

A boy who was anything but a boy.

"We were one, once," the boy said, and was it just Gilgamesh, or was there a touch of some almost human emotion in his eyes, but it was gone swiftly enough, "Now, however, we are quite different. All beings know Lily, some just don't realize it."

"Have you seen her pass through here?" Gilgamesh, and then, eyes narrowed, "And quickly, boy, my patience has been severely tried already by mongrels and visions alike."

"Of course, it's her grail, after all," the boy said before leaning closer, peering into Gilgamesh's eyes without the slightest hint of fear upon his face, "You were wrong, you humans often are I find, even you one third humans. The grail was never yours, just as this world you claim to rule was never yours, it has always been hers."

"You think I care for the opinion of some abomination that cannot even manage the charade of a human boy?" Gilgamesh asked, and then, then it grinned at Gilgamesh and barked out a single empty laugh.

The boy then motioned to their surroundings, melting and twisting by the minute, unheard voices screaming in agony and clawing at the walls, "This, Gilgamesh of Uruk, is the agony of creation, mankind's unwavering despair, and all the curses that they have cast upon themselves since the very beginning…"

Then, dark eyes burning, he turned to Gilgamesh again, inspecting him, dissecting him piece by piece, "Utnapishtim lied to you, when you met him beyond the waters of death, through the darkened tunnels beneath the twin-peaks of Mashu and past the garden by the sea, he said that he had been granted immortality so that while men would die, humankind would always remain. But the universe itself is finite, the sun will expand, and entropy will someday claim all that is left… And this experiment you so lovingly and loathingly call life, will shudder to a close."

Their surroundings changed, melted into that garden by the sea, after he had crawled through the mountains, and he had felt, upon seeing the sea and the light, that the world was filled with such possibility…

Only, as with all things in the waters of the grail, it had taken a hellish cast, so that even while Gilgamesh stood where he had once stood three thousand years ago, everything looked as if it had long since died.

And, as Gilgamesh looked out at the landscape before him, the boy whispered with his bell-like unworldly voice into his ear, "For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting."

All glory is fleeting…

He closed his eyes, saw Babylon, himself upon its throne, and his legend through the ages…

Then, however, he saw Lily in the moonlight, covered in blood and maggots, smiling across at him, and he remembered what she'd told him as he'd stared at her and had tried to comprehend what he was feeling.

So, with Lily's smile now, he looked at whatever this boy that wasn't a boy at all was, and said, "If it is my lot in life that my tale, and that all tales of the world which are descended from mine, has no meaning… If I am no more than a senseless player in Lily's play, that the epic of Gilgamesh is simple prelude, then I am more than fine with that."

And as he spoke his own divinity returned to him, his skin glowing even in this darkened place, so that when he placed his palm against the door of the palace it was as if the sun were beating down upon it.

And just like that, he pushed through the doorway, and out into the light.

Lily stared out at the edge of oblivion inside of the darkened contents of the destroyed grail, except, she knew exactly what she was looking at as she looked over the grail… She had been wrong, the grail wasn't a false god, but the byproduct of one.

And of course, as with all horrible things in the world, without warning Rabbit was standing right there beside her.

"Rabbit, what an unpleasant and unsurprising surprise," Lily said without looking at him, still staring into the void, and then asked, "Luna let you come all the way unsupervised to Fuyuki?"

If so, then Luna was officially fired as Rabbit-watcher, even for emergency situations like this one.

He offered her his most Rabbity smile, and admitted, in surprisingly eloquent and wordy English, "In some domains, outside of time and mind, where reality slips away, I can travel faster and easier than in yours. The grail, in many ways, belongs to us both."

Then, with an empty, polite, Rabbity grin, he added, "I have more power here."

Lily turned, forced herself to turn from the heart of darkness, so she could glare at him, "Are you sure you didn't eat it?"

"No," Rabbit said, looking, well not quite because Rabbit never looked anything, but at the very least seeming more amused than neutral, "It's far too human."

"You know what it is Lily, don't pretend as if you don't, it belongs to you."

Despair, anger, hatred, agony… The ill-wishes of all of mankind, their cries of desperation at the futility and agony of life, all condensed into this single dimension in the seemingly benign form of a holy grail.

Then leaning forward and brushing a tendril of hair behind her ear, he said, "It is a side effect of sentience and life, that once rocked all that wasn't, splitting it into fragments of what it once was. It is that which, like entropy, was not solved in the beginning and isn't solved now. And one day, perhaps thousands of years from this moment, or perhaps in only ten, it will destroy mankind. Just as you yourself have always prophesized, Destroyer of Worlds."

"Go back to Scotland," Lily commanded, and just looking at him without an ounce of human pity or feeling seemed to be enough, because all he did was offer her a slight bow, and then disappear, like he had never been standing there in the first place.

Lily turned her attention back to the edge of existence, looking into the pit of madness, and trying to find some semblance of meaning inside it. She wasn't sure why, except that, to not try seemed…

Had Death once looked out onto the void of space, at the end of all mankind, and had he seen this staring back at him?

A hand fell on her shoulder, she looked up, and there was Wizard Lenin looking more than a little worse for wear, "You wouldn't believe what I just had to walk through to get here."

Lily couldn't help but smile back, even though she had felt like doing anything but, "Rabbit?"

"…Yes, he showed up too," Wizard Lenin added reluctantly.

"Did he tell you?" Lily asked, then, looking back over the edge, "I don't remember how, or why, but I think I'm responsible for this… For everything that's…"

For a moment, he almost seemed to hesitate, then, with one of his rarer soft smiles that seemed so foreign on his face, he said, "Would you believe that Alexander the Great gave me some, perhaps warranted, advice today? He told me, that I should tell you how I feel… Which is admittedly very difficult but…"

He trailed off and pulled her close, and she tried to remember if he'd ever done something like this willingly, all the same she stayed perfectly still as he continued, "Whatever monstrosity of a god you are, I don't particularly care. I, at least, know who you are, even if they all state that you are become Death, Destroyer of Worlds. I know that you will do everything in your power to save mankind, even when we are long past being worth any sort of effort at all."

And, drawing back and still smiling at her, brushing the stray tears that had gathered at the corners of her eyes, "That, Lily, is more than enough for me, more than enough to follow you into whatever pit of hell you tumble into and drag you back out again."

And there they stood, her hand in his, at the very end of the world.

"Hey, it's Gilgamesh!"

Gilgmaesh turned and found Lenin and Lily walking hand in hand, through the labyrinth of twilight towards him, Lily looking overjoyed at the sight of him while his mongrel brother in law looked more than a little irritated.

Ah, that Lenin had found her first, perhaps it was a given as Gilgamesh had allowed himself to be so thoroughly distracted, but all the same he had hoped that he would be the one to find her.

Gilgamesh, however, on seeing her alive and well enough could not quite bring himself to care. Even in a place like this she glowed, her hair a living fire and her eyes so bright, his memory of her had done her injustice.

Even the thought of fleeting glory and empty promises of immortality could not haunt him.

"What are you doing here?" Lenin asked, and then, glancing down at his body and back up again, "And without any clothes?"

"You would have had me soil my armor with that black hell-water?" Gilgamesh balked.

"You could have stayed out of the black hell-water," the man commented tersely, "No one asked you to jump."

"And been outdone by you, brother?" Gilgamesh sneered, "Hardly."

Lenin seemed displeased by this but let it go, or at least, attempted to, "So, Gilgamesh, what haunting images of your past did you have to walk through to get here?"

Gilgamesh, however, was in "Oh, Enkidu, myself, and a strangely attractive boy who I was less familiar with…"

"White hair and a polite smile?" Lily interjected.

"Yes," Gilgamesh responded, blinking, but Lily continued right over his answer.

"That was Rabbit he's… A reality devouring abomination who is supposed to be getting babysat by Luna right now but apparently has, 'more power than usual', inside the grail dimension." Lily said, "One must always keep an eye on him, lest he eat Scotland."

"Eat Scotland?" Gilgamesh repeated, not sure he quite understood the concept of devouring a nation-state.

"Well, he once ate all the ghosts in the castle, and some girl named Sally-Anne Perkins," Lily said, "The trouble with Rabbit eating things is, well, when he eats them they stop ever having existed, so it's hard to see what he has eaten and what he hasn't."

"At any rate, brother, what did you have to pass through?"

"A different rabbit, oddly enough, hanging from the rafters," Lenin said with a strange smile on his face, "As well as a more youthful version of myself."

"I imagine he was grossly embarrassed and disappointed by you," Gilgamesh responded, his words seeming to strike a nerve with the man, "You seem like the type to have dreamed of something other than being a mongrel."

"And was your past-self happy to see how you turned out?" Lenin responded, voice as harsh as the crack of a whip.

"Of course not, but then, he had yet to meet Enkidu," Gilgamesh responded, because this in and of itself, provided all the information either of them would need to know.

"You've changed," Lenin remarked, a strange look in his eyes as he surveyed Gilgamesh, or rather, the altered Gilgamesh from the one he had been so very familiar with.

But then, with a strange smile, one not laced with cruelty of any sort but instead a foreign optimism, he said, "Yes, I do believe I have, of course, only in the ways that truly matter."

They all emerged at once, each grasping onto the other, rising out of the fading black flood waters even as they reached out towards Iskander, who had been watching the water for what had felt like hours.

Then, as he pulled them into the Gordius Wheel, each of them gasping and plastered with the strange tar like water, it oozing down their clothes (or in Archer's case, his pale naked flesh), Assassin said, "I feel… I feel like the end of Ghostbusters."

Then, at seeing everyone's confusion, she elaborated, "You know, when they kill the giant marshmallow demon sent by the Sumerian god… Not you, Gilgamesh, some other god, Gozer the Gozerian, and I mean Zuul and Vinz Clothro also famously show up, or Zuul more famously but… You know, and they cross the streams and everyone expects the world to explode and they end up covered in marshmallow innards… I feel like that."

"Lily," Lenin calmly interjected, wiping black ooze away from his face, "Only you feel like that."

Assassin then caught sight of their demolished surroundings, the theater gone and only rubble where it once stood, and beyond that the city of Fuyuki on fire.

"The flood… It lit everything in its path," Iskander commented, and indeed it had, and watching it, there had been nothing he could do to stem it, only wait, sit, and pray for his friends to emerge from the black liquid.

"I think you all should know…" Assassin started, before stopping and starting again, "I couldn't destroy it, only send it into hibernation for a little while… It belongs, it is too intertwined with mankind to completely destroy."

"Well, hopefully next time, that will be some other bastard's problem," Lenin remarked, rather blithely for the somber situation at hand, but perhaps not wrongly either. It was more of a hope that next time, this grail war would be someone else's problem.

"Also, before we leave, I promised to go pick up Rin Tosaka, you know, since her entire family was slaughtered," Assassin quickly said, grinning at the glare sent to her by Iskander's former master, but he relented with a sigh quickly enough, with a sigh, and his own pained admission, "It's just as well, I made an unbreakable oath to break into the Einzburn castle and kidnap Kiritsugu Emiya's daughter, Ilyasviel von Einzburn."

"Well then," Iskander stated, "I suppose we'd best be off, you coming too, Goldie?"

"But of course," Archer responded, seeming completely unconcerned for the black ooze dripping off him or his own lack of clothing, "I must see my wife's homeland for myself before I claim kingship over it and if we're claiming our enemies' virgin daughters as hostages I can hardly say no to such a venture."

"Hostage is such a strong word," Assassin said, "I prefer… some other word that makes it sound like we're not kidnapping them for ransom."

"At least with a ransom we'd get paid," Lenin mumbled under his breath, "I'm going to be stuck with these brats for at least ten years."

And with that, they were off, leaving the rubble of the city behind them as they rode west, into the early sunset, and towards whichever local schoolhouse Tokiomi Tosaka had left his daughter in.

Author's Note: AND IT'S OVER! HOORAY. I'm pleased... I was going to say something more than this, I thought, but then... No, I think I shall leave it at that. Oh, but wait, someone asked me what team I myself was on. And obviously, I am on team, "Really vague pairings that probably aren't even legitimate pairings by a normal person's standards but can go anywhere from here", so I guess that makes me Team Lily.

Thanks to readers and reviewers, reviews are much appreciated on your way out.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Fate/Zero