Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Taylor

He hadn't slept since Leviathan. Not since the death of his best friend.

They'd gone out before the battle to set up cameras. To try and get some recordings for research or stock footage on the Leet and Uber show. And then the wave surged forward earlier than expected. By some ironic twist, he was spared, but Uber, the more fit of them, was washed headfirst into a brick wall. Dead on impact.

It was all that Leet could do to bring Uber's body back to their base where it would safe before the fighting had gotten on in earnest. And that's when it happened: The burst of inspiration, and ideas, and the need to tinker.

He didn't even think about it. He just built. By the time of Leviathan's record-breaking retreat, Uber's body was safe in a cryogenic chamber. And then, not knowing what else to do, he kept building.

At first, Leet thought that his power was finally helping him. Finally working with him. Finally letting him do what he wanted... But nothing he could think to build could bring back his friend.

He'd gotten close, the experiment with synthesized organics had seemed promising, but... Well, he didn't know what he'd done wrong but what had started as an attempt to repair Uber's body had ended with him somehow making an exact copy of his own. Not a clone though. Lights on, no one's home. He hadn't even bothered to take it out of the synthesizer.

And then... Then he still kept building. He ate and drank enough to stay alive, but otherwise, all he did was build. Well, that and smoke. Really expensive brand, he used to only do one or two a day, for his health and becuase, again, his brand was expensive, but now he was going through two packs a day, at least, and rapidly depleting his hoard. He just didn't care anymore. He wasn't even sure why he kept tinkering anymore. And that's just how it'd been until he'd been interrupted by the glass on Uber's cryopod suddenly shattering.

He sighed. Of course. He should have expected that it'd all go wrong sooner or later. He couldn't even feel bad at the final loss of the remnants of his friend, becuase he'd stopped feeling a while ago.

He carefully took off his tinkering glasses, a little something to help him make out small details in the circuits and such, turned to go clean up the glass when he noticed that he wasn't alone. A woman in a dress covered in shards of stained glass was standing there, on the patch of concrete from where he'd had to bury a failed experiment in the building's foundation. Looking annoyed that he hadn't noticed her sooner.

"...Hello," he said. There really wasn't anything else you could say to finding that an infamous serial killer was in the room but not attacking you.

Shatterbird didn't answer. "Look," Leet continued, "if this is a recruitment offer just kill me now. You don't want me and we both know I can't fight you people off."

"You're a destroyer," Shatterbird began. "Everything you create ends up causing harm and death. You were meant to destroy. The Nine can bring out your true potential."

"Yeah, I don't really care about that anymore," was Leet's reply. Honestly, he didn't care about much of anything anymore. "It was never about fame or money or living up to some ideal. We were just in it for our art." He flexed his hand. He'd been working on a gauntlet when she came in, something to throw a harder punch, but the knuckle joints kept sticking.

"The Nine are all about art," the woman replied. She gestured at her own dress. "An art far greater than what you made... Though, honestly, you came close a few times. Like with the prostitutes."

God, everyone obsessed over the prostitutes. If they didn't want to be assaulted then they shouldn't have been out in that time of night in that part of town. Honestly, they were lucky it'd been them on a filming run and not Lung or Oni Lee showing up to stop them from cutting into their racket. They lived through what he and Uber did.

"Haven't you ever wanted to do something meaningful, Leet?" The woman finished. "Ever wondered what it'd be like to embrace your destiny?"

Something meaningful... "You know what, fuck it. I'm in. Just let me grab something."

He turned back around to his work station and picked up what looked to be an electronic carlock. When he clicked it, however, it vibrated and a clear blue sphere crackling with white lightning expanded out from it and merged with the walls of the hideout.

"See," he said, "I've never done anything meaningful in my life. Never done anything productive... No one left alive gives a damn about me. I've got nothing to show for my life!" he announced while waving his arms around and wiggling his fingers like the old villain from a very weird RT combat JRPG he'd gotten in a bundle of black market Aleph imports. Honestly, he had no idea what the hell it was about other than it used licensed characters to fill out the roster. "I have nothing to live for and nothing to lose, so..."

He ran for the wall, then ran up the wall using the gravity boots he'd built just the previous evening. "No one gets in or out of this building until at least one of us is dead!"

"Do you really think you're the first person to ever try this?" Shatterbird replied casually as she made the shards from Uber's broken Cryopod fly up after Leet. "I've killed everyone who's ever refused my invitation with a childish game like this. Some of them were far better men than you."

"Then why do you want me!?" Leet loudly deadpanned back.

"My first choice was dead when we got here," Shattbird replied honestly. At this point Leet was running across the ceiling in a seemingly random pattern.

"Well sucks to be you!" Leet shouted back, "because you picked me as your runner up and that means," he was somehow able to clear his throat before imitating someone with a much deeper voice than himself. "Going to hell together is a fate that you and I shall both share!"

He was standing directly above Shatterbird at this point, with shards of glass coming at him at both sides. "I don't know what that means and I don't care."

"It means that you're standing right above where I buried a malfunctioning tinker-tech generator in concrete a year and a half ago," Leet said with no emotion. And then he turned off the Anti-Gravity boots and began to fall for Shatterbird.

And then... and then he turned on the gauntlet. "Falcon..." The gauntlet worked by combining a number of principals. Manipulation of gravity and inertia to hit harder and more substantially. Miniature rockets to compensate for the greater weight, and of course just fucking catching fire(a feature this time, not a bug.) It burned the hell out of his arm and hand, but it also made him fall fast enough that Shatterbird couldn't dodge or fly out of the way.

"PUNCH!" He finished as the fall drove him fist first into Shatterbird. Then, through Shatterbird. Then through the concrete floor, she'd been standing on, finally stopping as his gauntleted fist landed in that old generator which, like many of his tools did when they broke, proceeded to explode catastrophically. As he and Shatterbird were engulfed in a bright light, he felt content that for once in his life he'd done something meaningful.

Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Taylor

His eyes snapped open. Of course. He blinked to fully wake up as what he'd just experienced came back to him. Of course, it'd been a dream. Nobly sacrificing himself to take out a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine would never happen in real life.

And then he realized a few things. One: Half of his and Uber's lair was just fucking gone. Two: The parts that were left were collapsed and on fire. Three: He hadn't gone to sleep naked in the machine he'd accidentally printed out a copy of his body with.

He looked around and took in the devastation while feeling overwhelmed by the confusion... Somehow. Someway. After he died, his memories at the exact moment of death had been transferred to his copy. He... He hadn't built anything that would allow for that. The philosophical ramifications were...

The smell of burning flesh drew his attention to the remains of the Crypod he'd put Uber's body in. With Shatterbird having broken it to get his attention, there was nothing to protect Uber's body from the explosion, but...

But as Leet began to comprehend just what had happened, endless possibilities began to open up within his mind's eye. "Sorry, my friend," he said while trying to sound cool. "It's gonna be a bit longer before we see each other again... But you'll be back before you know it."

He wasn't going to let the flaws of his power stop him from bringing his best friend back to life now that he knew it could be done. He held that thought in his mind even as he fled the scene before anyone would come to investigate the explosion.