#for the curious. this is bc i was reading the soulmates (derogatory) fic that has been updating in the ao3 tag recently.

[handdrawnfantasma]

making another Extremely Niche AU under the readmore bc the concept just exploded into my brain and if i do not put it out somewhere in the ether my head will EXPLODE but afaik none of my usual AU criminal crowd (tm) have seen the pink shark movie yet

okay but seriously i’ve accidentally tripped into DESPERATELY needing a holy grail war AU lmao like. the building blocks are all already there. the master-servant pairups and pre-requisite parallels between those pairups are all already baked in, this is all low-hanging fruit thematically speaking, both canons even have knights and playing with the concepts of heroes and monsters as a major flavour, i dont even have to REACH here

i havent decided if this is just straight-up the nasuverse or if this is just nasuverse-flavoured nimonamovieverse but ANYWAY Ambrosius is a ridiculously perfect fit as the master from a redonkulously old-ass mage family who has been preparing his entire life for this but similarly to Rin cannot actually turn himself into enough of a machine to be a truly “great” mage. obviously summons the Saber class and just to add another layer of delicious fucked-up-ness to the fucked-up souffle i am creating and really hammer home the parallels HGW AUs excel at OF COURSE it’s Gloreth he’s summoning, like let’s make this even more uncomfortable for everyone by summoning your literal fucking old as balls ancestor

meanwhile Bal is absolutely from outside all this secret mage nonsense world but for this to work he needs to have enough magic circuits to make him a viable candidate for the grail to dump Command Seals onto and since i have the keys to the AU im saying that he has an ASTONISHING amount for someone from the outside. idk exactly what his Deal is yet im still cooking but i think Valerin is kind of vaguely a Waver-esque figure in this AU, from an ancient and powerful mage family herself but has made enemies bc she wants to reform a whole lot of This Bullshit, actually, and she idk saved Bal’s life when he was a kid and he had Some kind of brush with the world of magic that he legitimately should Not have survived?? and so idk maybe they have a vaguely Kiritusugu-Shirou situation going on, again, not entirely sure, still cooking. EITHER WAY THO Valerin still gets murdered on the first night of the HGW and Bal still happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, accidentally summons Nimona (who doesn’t seem to know or care WHAT Servant class she is if any and also like arturia pendragon my beloved can’t go into spirit form (bc shes not a spirit huehuehue)), chaos and shenanigans ensue as these two try to survive the HGW and find out who actually murdered Bal’s kind-of-sort-of foster mother in cold blood and also Nimona is totally out to BREAK the HGW right from the outset im just saying

for extra Drama(tm) Bal and Ambrosius still know each other and are still dating before the HGW kicks off but are both completely oblivious to the other’s involvement in the world of magic and so they both get the absolute shock of their lives the first time they inevitably see each other with their Servants (and then yet another shock when both of their Servants go NUTS as soon as they lock eyes on one another, kill bill sirens blaring) and so this is entirely detrimental to any possibilities of working together at least at first (Gloreth v Nimona cage fight, terrible attempts at solving centuries-old issues with the power of incredible violence)

a running thing is everyone trying to figure out What Class nimona is and not being able to get anywhere bc she seems to have features of all of them and that’s BEFORE getting into the shapeshifting??? eventually people figure she must be either Archer or Berserker via process of elimination after seeing everyone else’s Servants but spoiler alert they are still Wrong, she is an outside-context problem

Ambrosius probably still ends up being responsible for Bal losing an arm at some point, sorry guys this is a Canon Event(tm) (EDITED BECAUSE I JUST REALISED I AM VERY DENSE TODAY bc after posting this and going to make dinner i realised that ur command seals show up on ur dominant hand. it happens bc of Bal’s command seals. like Ambrosius did not go into it INTENDING to cut the entire fucking arm off or even part of the arm off but that is what ends up happening when things somehow Escalate Quickly. (his actual intent was probs to get Bal to just give up his command seals bc then he’d be out of the war, what he did not count on was a) that Bal is still determined to find out who actually killed Valerin and bring them to justice bc by this point he is probably a legit suspect and has been dodging arrest for days and he KNOWS he is not going to find out who killed her unless he sticks around in this stupid mage world for a bit longer, and b) that by this point Bal has already bonded with Nimona and giving up his command seals would feel a lot like betraying her, which?? no??? (this of course has a heaping of delicious irony added on top of it when it transpires that actually Nimona can get by quite well without any Command Seals holding her anywhere, ut-oh))

the Director is pretty much literally Kirei Kotomine here by which i mean she’s supposedly the neutral Overseer for the HGW but is actually breaking so many rules bc she has her own Servant (Assassin just to be REALLY on the nose), and ALSO Valerin’s Lancer-class Servant that she stole from her on the same night she murdered her and took her Command Seals. is Worryingly invested in Ambrosius winning the HGW

idk who the other Masters are, Todd maybe??? (with a Rider-class Servant???) and maybe Meredith from the comic (with a Caster-class???) to round things out??? who knows who the mysterious 7th Master is

anyway this fic is absolutely also an excuse for a Gloreth redemption arc, nothing like being summoned to a time a full millenium after you’re dead and seeing the full ramifications of just HOW MUCH the legacy that came out of something you did as a scared kid turning on your friend fucked literally everything up not least the descendant that summoned you

im finally running out of steam now thank the lord but im also now turning over and over the conviction i have that nimona would absolutely DESPISE the very CONCEPT of the Command Seals and how this could be an in for some spicy Drama... i am Considering...

if you actually read all this then thank you for getting through the Mess of me exorcising this from my brain, that was extremely lush of you :’)