Fanfic / A Kaiserin's Post-Living Arrangements

Tanya learns that death is most certainly not the end.

A Kaiserin's Post-Living Arrangements is a Fate/stay night crossover with A Young Woman's Political Record by jacobk, operating with the assumption that the Fate Series is the world that Tanya had shaped in life.

Also available on Fanfiction.net as well as AO3

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A Kaiserin's Post-Living Arrangements provides examples of:

• Age Lift: Kirei is noticeably older-looking in this fic, with Tanya considering him to be "unnaturally old", having withered hands, pale, wrinkled skin, and non-balding white hair. When Tanya blows of one of his legs, he doesn't flinch and there is the sound of insects afterwards, revealing that Kirei has implemented Zouken's magecraft methods into his body and transformed himself into a body of insects in the guise of a human.
• Alternate History: Obviously, because this fic has Tanya's life take place in the same universe as the Fate Series, along with this being another fanfiction's version of Tanya that lived a different life to her canon counterpart.
  • However, it goes it bit further that that, since Shirou somehow summoned Saber Alter. Whether this is just a random, as-of-yet unexplained chance, or because the Fourth Holy Grail War ended differently, is unknown.
  • There is also the note that Kirei Kotomine is vastly older physically than he was in canon, which raises the question of what the reason behind that is. His Major Injury Underreaction and the sound of insects suggest that it has something to do with Zouken Matou.
  • Another detail revealed is the revelation that Shirou actually has been trained in Magecraft. First by Kirei, then by Caren Ortensia. What is the extent of his training is unknown, but it appears that Kirei and Caren did not deem to teach him about the greater world of Magecraft beyond the need for secrecy, leading him to still be ignorant about numerous aspects of the world of Magi and Servants. Furthermore, Shirou's idea of magic before this training was of the use of Computation Orbs, like many people who first enter the world of Magi's Magecraft. However, the titbit raises the question of what constituted Kiritsugu's teachings to Shirou; was Kiritsugu's training so bare-boned that Shirou researched and found out about Computation Orbs, which formed his view of Magecraft, or did Kiritsugu use Computation Orbs in his profession as the Magus Killer?
  • Rider for the War is Alexander, Iskandar's child Servant form. His Master is still Sakura, and she's still a Matou, but she has apparently been away at the Clock Tower training as one of Waver's students.
    • To expand on this, Sakura and Shinji are the only surviving members of the Matou: Zouken is apparently dead and gone, killed during the Fourth War. Waver was made Sakura's legal guardian at the war's end by some unknown individual for unknown reasons.
  • Kirei sent Rin to be fostered with the Edelfelts for a short while and she developed her adversarial relationship with Luvia much earlier, before she engineered an accident specifically so she'd be sent back.
  • Darnic Prestone, after the Third War, did not return to the Clock Tower and instead became a Mage and joined the Ministry of Applied Paraphysics, with him and his family resulting in several breakthroughs in Computation Orb advancement.
  • Details of the Fourth War show that things went differently, and though Iskandar was still the Rider and was Waver's Servant, and Tokomi's Servant was also Gilgamesh, it is subtly implied that the rest of the War's Servants were different (or at least had different Masters):
    • The Berserker went on a rampage and killed countless civilians, not Caster Gilles like canon.
    • The Einzbern Master was brutally killed by the War's Archer, Devil of the Rhine Tanya, and done so severely that the Grail ritual was put in danger with the damage to the Lesser Grail.
    • The Tohsaka Master, Tokomi, was killed by the Saber storming his house and murdering him in his study.
    • The winner of the War was "a bright eyed priest", revealed to be Kirei, who had let Waver live after Rider was defeated.
    • Although Gilgamesh was Tokomi's Servant, he was not summoned as Archer.
    • A version of Tanya was summoned in the War. Not as we know her, but as the "Devil of the Rhine" that was still fighting in the trenches during the First Great War, who was much more violent and cruelly pragmatic than the Caster version of her. Her Class was Archer according to Kirei, and was Kirei's Servant instead of Hundred-Faced Hassan.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Saber Alter cuts off her one of her own hands in her fight against Tanya.
  • Tanya blows off one of Kirei's legs when he reveals that he met a version of her in the previous Grail War.
• Beyond the Impossible: Computation Orbs should not have come into existence, as not only were the scientists who invented them trying to reverse engineer dangerous and complex Mystic Codes, and were trying to study them as a science instead of like Magecraft, which is a literal Wrong Context Magic, but the Computation Orbs do not need Mystery to function and to have potency, which Magecraft requires and is an important Lore note in the Nasuverse that Magecraft is slowly decaying due to the waning of Mystery with the advance of science. However, despite the odds, the scientists did just that, turning it into a science that was accepted by the general consciousness of mankind and thus immune to the decay of Mystery.
• Blood Knight: Despite Tanya's preference to solve things diplomatically, she has a secret love for combat. Lancer notes, when she went from a chaste, embarrassed girl to calculating, controlled ball of excitement upon the mention of them sparring together, that Tanya most likely isn't interested in sex whatsoever and is more drawn to fighting.
• Break Them by Talking: Kirei, just like his canon!counterpart. His knowledge of Tanya from the version summoned in the Fourth War, as well as the secrets she told him like the existence of Being X, allow him to casually and repeatedly break current!Tanya when he reveals them, utterly shocking, disturbing, and infuriating her.
• Canon Immigrant: Caren Ortensia is present as Kirei's aide as Moderator in this timeline. And also as Shirou's teacher.
• Cassandra Truth: Rider straight-up admits to Tanya that he's Alexander the Great. However, because Tanya finds revealing their true identity to an enemy Servant to be so phenomenally stupid that no actual Heroic Spirit, let alone a tactical genius like Alexander, would do so, and that Rider is just a young, energetic, slightly idiotic boy instead of an capable adult that she doesn't treat what he said as true. It takes him fighting seriously and calling down divine lightning for her to believe him.
• Child Soldiers: To hide from Archer her plan to replace him as Rin's Servant, Tanya monologues about her disgust of the use of child soldiers, having been one herself, and the reason why she didn't kill Rin because she's a teenager being forced into a death-match by her elders.
  Tanya: "I expected to come across skilled combatants and ruthless magi, I expected that I would have to bury more than a few of them before the war was over. I didn’t expect for those combatants to not even be old enough to drink yet."
• Clingy Jealous Girl: When Sakura confronts Rin about what happened to Shirou, she projects a cheerful and teasing persona. However, when Rin is deliberately avoiding saying what happened to Shirou, Sakura abruptly lashes out at her in a cruel tone and briefly takes on a manic sense of urgency. She then attacks her with her Servant Rider.
  Sakura: "Don’t play games with me, Rin! Not with him!"
• Conspiracy Theorist: Isabel is apparently a bit of one. She doesn't believe the one where Germanian biotech companies are working on cloning Tanya, nor the one about the 203rd and their families plotting in the shadows, but she does believe that an underground council of Albish mages are making moves to reduce Germanian influence on the world stage because, well, Perfidious Albion.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Tanya plans to dump Galliasta at the earliest opportunity, being very uncomfortable with his callous Magus conduct.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Tanya's Territory Creation Skill is this. Derived from two parts of her legend^note First, that she had never been defeated in battle and that the land she took had remained hers for the rest of her days. Second, that the land and its people grew so divergent from the common sense of the world's current era, so intertwined with her will and vision, that her dominance over her territory grew to be taken as absolute and unyielding., it allows her to have absolute control over any area claimed as Hers. By "absolute", this means that she can instantly control certain phenomena, such as prohibiting magical, divine lightning strikes and any movement that isn't hers, or to tell a few dozen non-magical blades to spontaneously explode. She can also use it to both heal herself. She can also magically boost Lancer's speed and vision so that's he's can basically teleport in flashes of crimson lightning within her Domain, while also commanding that nothing should strain his path, leading to glass, rocks and debris literally moving themselves out the way of his footsteps. If sufficiently set up, her Domain would be able to literally "reject reality", such that if an powerful explosion was dropped right on top of her in her Domain, then everything in the Domain would remain intact. However, the problem is that what counts as her Domain is subject to a number of preconditions, with it becoming stronger and less mana-consuming the more conditions are fulfilled. These conditions being having her blood spilt on the land, having the land taken by force, and having the land given by submission or agreement. In addition, the larger the active Domain and the more people within it, the higher the mana cost. As such, Tanya finds the spell to have such narrow usage that she refrains from using it.
• Embarrassing Old Photo: A few photos exist of Rin dyeing her hair blonde and cosplaying as Tanya when she was younger. Archer teases her about revealing these to her idol.
• Fangirl: Rin, Illya, and Isabel are all total Tanya fans. Illya still cosplays as her, and Rin used to when she was a child, the latter having extensively studied all the stories about Tanya and even had a small hope of summoning her that she hides away by her Tsundere personality when Tanya teases her.
• Fanservice Pack: Tanya notes that her Servant form has larger breasts than she did in life, as well as being taller and generally healthy and less muscular. She complains to Illya about the Einzbern "perverting them" when Illya notes Tanya not looking like she thought she did while looking at her chest. This causes Illya to become incredibly embarrassed briefly.
• Fantastic Nuke: Kirei believes that the living!Tanya blowing up an entire mountain when killing her rival, Mary, was what ascended her to the Throne of Heroes. It was the damaged and now hate-filled barrel of her overloaded machine-gun that was used as the catalyst to summon her for the Fourth War.
• Hate at First Sight: Saber Alter holds a great deal of disdain and hate for Tanya for an currently unknown reason, to the point where she constantly discourages Shirou from trusting her or forming an alliance with her to a greater degree than she does with Archer and Tohsaka, citing that she is a "menace" that is "built only to to destroy and corrupt and deceive for her own benefit." She also goes behind his back in secret to try and kill Tanya, using Loophole Abuse to get around his orders, even when Tanya points out that she is currently in the company of rescued children. Also, she makes it clear that she won't go kill every Servant that comes to Shirou on friendly terms; just Tanya. Even further, during her second fight with Tanya, not only did she look at Tanya with absolute hate and rage when her visor was broken, but every comment Tanya made that even entertained the idea of diplomacy between the two of them or suggested any similarity between themselves or their relationship with their Masters kept making Saber lose her composure more and more and try a bit harder to kill Tanya. Keep in mind, Saber Alter was using a minimum amount of power so as to not tip Shirou off that she was fighting Tanya behind his back, so her hatred for these comments and Tanya eventually overthrew her reason and drove her to kill her regardless of whether she got caught. Even further, when they were both in a stalemate and Tanya commented that all this commotion could eventually draw in another Servant to kill them both while distracted, Saber Alter didn't care; she was completely fine with dying, so long as the other Servant killed Tanya first.
  • Her hatred might have something to do with a much more violent aspect of Tanya being summoned in the Fourth War.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Being X's deal with Tanya was that if Tanya did not accept and worship Being X as God, and she died from anything other than old age, then Being X would not reincarnate her. However, her actions during her life in order to survive until old age led her to being treated as a Saint and holy figure, increasing public worship in God, and also becoming a famous enough figure to be recorded on the Throne of Heroes, which takes Tanya out of the cycle of reincarnation anyway as a separate unrelated power to Being X. Now she can never be free, forevermore just a tool in servitude to the commands of whoever or whatever summons her, all to a system she had no possible way of knowing about.
  Being X: "Consider this a reward. A gift to my most reliable, bloodthirsty, apostle."
• The Heavy: After he summons Tanya, Galliasta is basically hands-off and leaves the Grail War entirely in her hands.
• Hero Worship: Akitsushima (Japan in this timeline) has a very sizeable portion of their population that idolizes Tanya, with their grandparents having cried when she sent the first care packages to the country, while about a 20% to a third of all women nowadays dye their hair blonde and cosplay as her, regardless of whether they're teenagers or elderly grandmothers. Rin also notes that Europe basically worships the ground Tanya walks on, and her real-life tomb is considered a popular site of pilgrimage.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Tanya wrongly assumes that the Magus Association will eventually come down on Galliasta for his unethical behavior, not knowing that this group is an entirely amoral bunch separate from the magical traditions and institutions that she's familiar with.
• In Love with Your Carnage: While not in love or anything like that, Lancer does mention that he finds Tanya's secret excitement towards violence makes her even more attractive to him.
• Innocent Innuendo: In chapter 2.2, Isabel has no idea about the Grail War and, explanation pending, can only Squee in girlish delight when Tanya von Degurechaff calls her Master.
• Internal Reveal: Rin outs Tanya's identity in front of Shirou and Isabel. As the latter had been clandestinely employed for a few chapters already, the revelation leaves her doing her best impression of a gaping fish and unable to address Tanya as anything other than 'Your Majesty' or 'Your Excellency'.
• Item Amplifier: Tanya has a rather low rank in the Item Creation Class Skill, such that she can't construct any weapons or items. However, her Skill is more geared towards enhancing and changing existing devices, with it being even more effective on things that are considered machines of war. She uses this ability to enhance the weapons and Computation Orbs of her Tresillo mercenaries. She also reveals that she can use this Skill at a distance, as well as use it as a weapon against enemy Mages by purposely misusing it, manipulating their Computation Orbs such that they explode and to do so in a way that doesn't harm their hostages.
• Just the First Citizen: Despite her modest status as Chancellor of Germania, the influence Tanya possesses both within the OZEV polity and outside it far exceeds what she could theoretically be capable of. It is telling that, despite Tanya's insistence on being called Chancellor, both followers and enemies have collected a vast array of titles for her: From the titular Kaiserin, to the much more fearsome Devil of the Rhine from the First Great War.
• Kiss of Distraction: To win her first fight against Rider, Tanya gives him a quick kiss. Due to Rider having some form of feelings for Tanya, and due to being an adolescent boy, this causes him to freeze up and allowing her to get out of his grip and let him crash down into a building.
• Luminescent Blush: Tanya gets this when Lancer straight proposes them having sex.
• Magical Incantation: Tanya has one that seems to increase her magical power and allows her to summoned various war armaments and ghostly visages of her old unit, growing more powerful with each line chanted. Only three lines have been revealed so far. She has described it as "exerting her will upon the world", which, combined with her mention that her Domain can "reject reality" if sufficiently set-up^note and the part of her legend about her Domain that says 'that the land and its people grew so divergent from the common sense of the world's current era, so intertwined with her will and vision, that her dominance over her territory grew to be taken as absolute and unyielding'., all heavily implies that Tanya has a Reality Marble.
  "Only the Chosen may enter my Garden."
  "A Reward fitting for your Loyalty, your Obedience."
  "For the Wonders are mine, an Age of Reason built upon the Art of the Possible."
• Magic Knight: Tanya, in contrast to most Casters is well-accustomed to the practice of killing things that were trying to kill her back, and no stranger to close quarters combat, something that takes both Archer, and to a lesser degree, Lancer by surprise.
  Tanya (Internal Monologue): I was more than a scholar. I had been a soldier, a statesman, a ruler. But more than that? I'd mastered the art of using modern magecraft to kill people when I was thirteen years old.
• Mistaken Identity:
  • Lancer kept calling Tanya "Witch" whenever they talked, and when confronted about it, he explains that Galliasta had told Bazett he was going to summon Medea, the Witch of Betrayal, and so Lancer and Bazett thought Tanya was Medea. Tanya isn't sure if this was a issue of accidental miscommunication or an issue of deliberate misinformation.
  • Sakura believes Tanya is Rin's Servant when she confronts her for battle.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Tanya uses Mary Sioux's name when dealing with people who don't already know her identity.
  • Galliasta told Bazett that he was planning to summon Medea, who would have been his Servant in canon.
• Nice to the Waiter: Tanya is a believer in the benefits of tipping in a service-based society, and thinks a person should be rewarded for a job well-done. As such she's a very generous tipper to the comparatively modest Akinese people, giving a hefty amount to the taxi driver that took her to Kotomine Church and threatening Shirou with coming back to tip him more money when he refused her the first time.
• Oh, Crap!: Tanya has a moment when she realizes that the girl confronting her and Rin is the Matou Master for the War.
• Older Is Better: The various groups of the Magus Association dismiss the magic of Computation Orbs, despite its revolutionary potential in circumventing Mystery, because of how new it is, and thus it must be inferior to Magecraft with older, more powerful Mysteries. They also dismiss it as derivative of older, greater works that have been degraded into a science, along with it being made by regular non-magi, who they consider inferior.
• Old Master: Kirei may be physically older than canon, but he is no less dangerous; he may even be more so, considering his body is now made of insects like Zouken. When Tanya tried to shoot him in the head, he dodge a magical-enhanced bullet at point-blank from behind him, then quickly grabbed the rifle and broke it in half with a single punch. Tanya notes that his speed and strength would be utterly improbable for someone with a Computation Orb, and utterly impossible for a normal Human. Kirei neither has an Orb, nor is he human.
• One-Steve Limit: To differentiate the two groups of magic-users, people who use Nasuverse-style magecraft like Rin are known as Magus/Magi, while those who use Computation Orbs-style magecraft are known as Mage/Mages. This results in the slight name change of the Mage's Association to the Magus Association.
• Power Copying: Tanya's Third Noble Phantasm, The Art of the Possible, is this. Taken influence from two facets of Tanya's Legend; her subversion of systems and organizations, and her seemingly total knowledge of anything and everything relevant in the modern age (based on her not-public known future knowledge from her very first life). This allows her to subvert the magic and systems of others to a yet unknown degree, most notably that of Heroic Spirits. For the Servant example, Tanya was able to subvert the power of Saber's Noble Phantasm, Excalibur Morgan, taking it from her weapon and using a degraded version on one of her knives in conjunction with her own magic. Although the exact specifics and limitations are not fully revealed yet, there are a couple that are known: it has a high mana cost, she can only take abilities of Servants she's in physical contact with, and her taking of them isn't permanent. She can use it on an item relating to them instead, but it increases the degradtion of the stolen ability and allows the Servant the chance to resist her theft.
• Resurgent Empire: Not long after her victory in the Second Great War, the Pope declared OZEV as the successor of the Sacrum Imperium and Tanya as its Kaiserin.
• Rule of Cool: Tanya doesn't understand why her magical blasts are blue-colored, since that coloration existed in the original Elenium-95 Computation Orb as a design inefficiency that bled energy. As she no longer has that issue, she is confused by why she has it as a Servant, before jokingly thinking there's some weird symbolism to it.
• Ship Tease:
  • Archer recognizes that Rin has a very obvious crush on Tanya from her Hero Worship of her, including all the research she did on her long before the Grail War (and completely separate to preparing for the Grail War), the sheer confidence that she'd easily be able to win the War if Tanya was on her side, the pictures she has of her cosplaying as Tanya (which she vehemently orders Archer to never tell Tanya about), all the embarrassed blushes and Tsundere attitude she gets when Tanya catches her off-guard (which is something that was really only done with Shirou in canon), and with her self-loathing and comedic despair about the idea that she made a fool of herself in front of Tanya and that she thinks Rin's an idiot.
  • Rider has such admiration for Tanya that, near the climax of a great fight with her, he asks her to marry him. She declines, stating she's already married, but she soon after uses his feelings against him with a kiss to win. But even knocked out, Rider had a big smile on his face.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Bazett is still alive here, as Bazett was ambushed earlier, causing Lancer to go into over-protective mode and watch her like a hawk, meaning Kirei isn't able to separate them and steal her Command Seals.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Computation Orbs are this in this setting, having originated from various Mystic Codes that were being held by the Church that fell into the hands of modernists, scientists, and Church Hunter defectors. This lead to the creation of "The Magic of the Spheres", a brand of magic combined with numerology and mathematics and analyzed into a science that was accepted by the collective consciousness of mankind, making it un-reliant on Mystery.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: Tanya does not enjoy the imperial titles bestowed upon her in life and vehemently insists to not be called by any of them.
• The Worm That Walks: Zouken, like canon. However, he is fully dead as of the time of the story. But a new person has used his magecraft to become one himself: Kirei Kotomine.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Tanya, while still rather cruel, calculating, and pragmatic, is notably less so than she was in life as evidenced by her hesitance to either use methods like Galliasta's or to kill children and teenagers like most of the Masters in the War are. Kirei reveals that this because of her Class: As Caster, she was summoned as the part of Tanya remembered as peacemaker and bringer of stability, where she had sought and achieved victory not by destroying the opposition, but from mutual benefit and peaceful collaboration. As such, though she can certainly imagine the horrendous acts of War that her living self could and would do, her Caster self refrains herself from taking those same steps. However, a version of her summoned in a different class, one which was contain an aspect of Tanya that was still a soldier and "never left those bloody trenches", would show much less hesitation in the murder of children for her success.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Alluded to. Tanya mentions having an extensive list of titles when she was proclaimed Kaiserin but she only ever gives the audience a snippet: 'By the Grace of God, the Holy Kaiserin, ever Augustus' etc.
• Tsundere: Tanya assumes that Ispagna is this on a national level. When she was still alive, she thought they were playing hardball in the negotiations for their entry into OZEV to gain greater benefits. Between the country's immediate widespread adoption of the OZEV standard and Isabel's reaction to finding out her true identity, it turns out that the populace was in the grips of Germania-fever and were only trying to play things cool.
• Villain Respect: While not really a villain and more just an opponent, Rider has immense respect for Tanya after researching her history and what she's accomplished and gone through, and even more so after their first close-quarters clash and seeing how she fights. He even asks her to marry him.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Sakura finds out that Servants destroyed Shirou's house and almost killed him. When Rider asks what to do about the Servants who destroyed the house, she acts surprised and questions if it wasn't obvious, before she casually answers that she and Rider are going to kill them.
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: At the climax of Rider and Tanya's fight, falling out of the sky at terminal velocity on a collision course with the ground, Rider, bruised, blooded and burnt, declares his admiration for Tanya and asks her to marry him.
• Wham Line: From a conversation between Kirei and Tanya in 4.4.
  Kirei: "But in this war, there can be no mutual collaboration, only butchery and violence. You had understood it immediately back then you know, though I suppose making that comparison would be somewhat unfair. That version of you had never truly left those bloody trenches, what else could she offer in that form, except for an unsurpassed appetite for violence?"

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