Love Sprung from Words

Dream

Irisviel von Einzbern, despite her being a homunculus, emerged from dreams whenever she slept. She was the first in the Einzbern line of homunculi from the progenitor, Lord Justeaze, to achieve this practice.

And it was the human man lying beside her who had taught her this. The man she learned love from, in learning to love him. The man who had become her husband.

She blinked open her eyes to the sight of him wrapped up in the blankets on the bed in their bedroom, and smiled to see him sleeping so peacefully. His dark shirt was unbuttoned at the top enough that she saw a hint of his bare chest beneath, and the sound of his breathing beside her had a calming rhythm, for he himself was at ease for the moment. Irisviel was glad for it, as there had been many a night where he hadn't been so at ease in his slumber.

Kiritsugu.

Irisviel carefully reached over and threaded her one index finger, light as a breath, through his dark hair. She didn't want to wake him just yet, for she did like watching him sleep. But she was also eager to share with him the dream she'd had, for it had been quite wonderful. Though it was a dream that could never be in this life, she did hope it was a dream that she could have in another life.

After she ran a finger through his dark hair, she touched the side of his face in the same way, feeling the faint emergence of stubble there. Then she inched closer to him in bed, catching his leathery scent, and just a whisper that still remained of that cigarette smell that still clung to him even after he'd quit smoking over a year ago, admiring the sweep of the fringe of his eyelashes, as he slept on with his mouth just slightly open. Her thoughts touched briefly on memories of him touching that mouth to hers, brushing his lips against hers in a caressing kiss, and she felt a pleasurable shiver run through her at the memory.

Then Kiritsugu stirred, and blinked open those eyes of his, those dark eyes that only took on light when he looked at Irisviel, or their beloved daughter, Ilyasviel. They stayed in that cold darkness at first as he woke now, but then they focused and found Irisviel's face, and there was that light again as he smiled.

"Hello," he murmured, and without breaking his gaze from hers, he found her caressing hand and touched his lips to it.

"Hello," Irisviel murmured back, and responded in kind by touching her forehead to his. "Good morning."

Kiritsugu gave a little groan and closed his eyes, before he leaned over and touched his lips to the hollow of her neck instead. "Not yet. Just a little longer."

"Now, now…it's growing late, you know," Irisviel chided affectionately. "And Ilya will be awake soon anyway."

Her husband gave another low sound of resistance, stroking the length of her bare arm with his free hand. "Iri…please…couldn't I have…just a little more time…alone with you…?" he pled with her in between tracing kisses along her own smooth, soft, gentle jaw.

Irisviel sighed, and rather forlornly, for she knew that Kiritsugu wanted to make the most out of every morning he woke beside her. After all, there would come a day where he would no longer be able to, and it would be his doing.

Or at least, he was inclined to see it as his doing. To her, it was a choice she had made for herself.

The choice that she would sacrifice her life as the Vessel of the Holy Grail. She had been the Einzbern homunculus groomed for the task, but Kiritsugu…he had given the moment that would be her death far more meaning than anything the Einzberns desired. With her death, she would make his dream—now their dream—of creating a world of peace, where no one cried, where all of humanity was saved and no one ever had to suffer, not from war, not from hate, not from senseless death…she would make that a reality. She took immense pride in that, and by extension, that dream, though admittedly…all of that in and of itself was nothing more than a string of words made beautiful by the sound of her husband's voice as he'd spoken to her of it. In truth, she didn't actually understand it, fundamentally speaking. She had had no experience with the world beyond Einzbern Castle whatsoever, after all.

Still…she believed in that dream, because she had learned of love from and fallen in love with the man who had told her of it.

"Oh Kiritsugu." She sighed again, this time more like a mother dealing with a resisting, incorrigible, precocious child, and she withdrew to look her husband in the eye. "Explain to me again then, the whole science behind why I feel happy when you touch me the way you do, like you are right now."

Kiritsugu's rather distressed expression returned to one of quiet happiness. In fact, there was even a spark of something more, a smoldering spark, as he smiled once more. "Gladly." He withdrew his questing hand from her arm and used it to invite her to touch one of her hands' fingertips to his. When she accepted his invitation and the sensitive pads of their fingers make contact with each other, he said, "For many creatures, not just humans, it's a means of communication. Non-verbal, that is. Of course, not all creatures are verbal to begin with, but for humans (who are), communication through touch then has come to possess a deeper meaning. That expressing one's feelings through touch, and being able to understand what that feeling is through touch alone, comes with having bonded with that person enough (including through touch) that there is an understanding between those two people that…doesn't have to be explained by any kind of…logic. It's like…learning to have faith in someone, I suppose," he added, musingly.

"I see," said Irisviel, and she did. Kiritsugu always explained things in a way that she could understand with her limited knowledge of how the world worked.

Kiritsugu proceeded to intertwine his fingers with Irisviel's, and she, following suit, understood without words just as he had said, that he wanted to link hands with her.

And so they did, clasping each other this way, palm to palm, fingers woven together at least at tightly as their hearts had become in the time they had spent together thus far. Irisviel reveled in this feeling too that she already knew what she would find in his eyes, and sure enough, she found it there when she looked up at him and met those eyes with her own crimson homunculus ones.

"So…is it because I know I have this connection, this understanding, this bond…with you…that it makes me happy because…humans are innately fulfilled by sharing these things with other humans?" she asked.

"Yes," said Kiritsugu with a noticeable catch in his throat, which was enough to express that he certainly was fulfilled by sharing what the two of them had achieved and would achieve in the future…that love that had grown between them.

This, in and of itself, was a happy dream.

"Ah. Then let me share with you…these words: I had a wonderful dream before waking up today. Do you want to hear about it?"

The eagerness in Kiritsugu's renewed smile was answer enough, but even so, he said, "Of course. Tell me everything."

Irisviel hesitated a moment, for though the dream was happy, the fact that it was something that could not be for them would make him sad. But still. She wanted to share it with him.

"I dreamed…that you and I…were walking hand-in-hand, in the paradise of that world you've been hoping for…that world without tears…and our sweet Ilya ran ahead of us, as we made our way home…."

And there it was. That sadness emerging from his dark eyes. But even so, he went on smiling. That smile that told her even when he was happy, he was still somehow in pain.

Even so, he listened to her words, how she described that happy dream of a life where the two of them and their little daughter could live somewhere hidden from the world, in peace away from the Einzberns, from the battle that was the Holy Grail War…the War that would begin seven years from now. Irisviel would meet the end of her life so she could become the Vessel to summon the Grail, the required sacrifice, and Kiritsugu would lead her there by his gentle hand, even as he grieved doing so.

Because he had a beautiful dream that he wanted the entire world to share in. What could be nobler than that, that simple dream of a world where no one had a reason to cry? Certainly she couldn't ask for anything better for the future of her daughter, who would take her place as the sacrifice should there be another war to follow this coming one…and Irisviel found…as a mother…she could not bear something so awful as a fate like that falling upon her only child. Nor could Kiritsugu. In this, wife and husband were unspokenly united.

And when she finished telling him about this little dream she'd had in sleep, he said, very softly, "Ah…what a lovely dream." Then he leaned over and touched his lips to her brow, and in it, Irisviel felt something she might describe as…sacred.

When the two of them withdrew to look into each other's eyes, Irisviel held her breath, and she knew Kiritsugu did the same.

The moment was broken—though happily, oddly enough—by the soft little vocal sounds of their one-year old baby daughter Ilyasviel—Ilya for short—waking up in the little bassinet beside their bed. Irisviel couldn't help a swell of delighted excitement inside her, and she gave an eager gasp and sat up. Kiritsugu chuckled in his reserved way and sat up too.

Beaming as she leaned over the bassinet, Irisviel's smile only grew wider as her baby daughter blinked up at her with crimson eyes that were just like hers. What a precious jewel of a child she was, heartbreakingly cute in her tininess, in the way she jerkily lifted up her arms and reached up for her mother, her mouth working into the smile she had just learned to communicate to her parents for herself.

Ilya gave a kind of squeal as she did this, and Irisviel was all the more delighted. She could almost feel her insides fizzle…like…stardust, maybe? Or something like that. There was really no other way to describe it, even after all she had learned about feeling the way a human being does.

Kiritsugu came up behind her as she bent down and happily scooped her daughter up into her arms and held her gently against her, against her beating heart…a beating heart created artificially by the hands of her "grandfather", Jubstacheit—or Acht—von Einzbern, and constructed solely for the purpose of acting as the core Vessel of the Holy Grail…yet gifted by the man she came to love with something more than that. It was wonderful, really, and a miracle.

That, in and of itself, was all a happy dream worth living, if even for a short while.

Kiritsugu put the kimono he'd bought for her as a wedding present around her shoulders and pressed his lips to her cheek as he looked over at their daughter in his wife's arms. Irisviel felt him smile softly against her skin.

"She looks a little bigger today, doesn't she?" he murmured.

"Mmmm, maybe a little," said Irisviel, still trying to fathom even after a year of motherhood how this tiny life that she had carried inside her and birthed—not without a lot of pain and difficulty she couldn't bear to share with her husband, who had enough to deal with already—still affected her like this, how she still filled her with such wonder.

In technical terms she was a miracle in that she was the crossing of blood between a homunculus and a human, something entirely new, and already considered a part of Grandfather Acht's dream of obtaining the Grail. But Irisviel didn't care about that anymore. She only felt the compulsion to fight for a happy future for she that was her very own child, that dream which no Einzbern homunculus before her had known. Yet in some way, she could feel all of her predecessors share in this joy with her, which might not be so far off, as they had all born a connection to their progenitor, Lord Justeaze, their cells taken from this original in the Einzbern line of homunculi.

This child that was a reflection of both herself and the man she adored.

A strange dream indeed, but no less wonderful.

"She gets even cuter every day, that's for certain," Kiritsugu went on. "And she was impossibly cute to begin with."

Irisviel threw a grin over her shoulder at him. "Look at you…gushing," she teased.

Kiritsugu became slightly sheepish, and in his usual, subdued fashion, made no comment. His dark eyes said everything, more than enough.

Except to say, "Ah…Iri," and in the way he said it, it encompassed all the depth of love that he felt for her, a love that was honestly too profound for words, for anything more than that.

Was it because he was going to lose her? Perhaps. Irisviel couldn't be sure, as he was the first and only human she had ever spent time like this with, the first man she had come to know and had decided to love. Maybe some would call that pathetic, but Irisviel was more than happy to have been given this wonderful thing called love with this man, this man who had told her that his own experiences with love had been broken and cut tragically short, both in romantic love, and in filial love too, both for his father and for the woman who had raised him into a cold, mercenary assassin like a foster mother. She had this sense that that was why his love for her was so deep and precious, because he just couldn't seem to have what he'd described to her as anything normal in love, so finding something like that with her, he wasn't going to…what was the term? Oh yes: take it for granted.

Indeed, though it hurt him to be this happy, because it was a happiness he would cruelly be forced to undo for the sake of his ideals and his dreams of acting as the hero of justice he had always wanted to be—a segi no mikata, as it was in the language of his native Japan—he was happy nonetheless, and Irisviel found she was happy for that.

And it wasn't without its bright spot, and that was their daughter Ilya. Certainly, Kiritsugu would be left with having to raise her on his own after he had saved the world and Irisviel had served her purpose as the Vessel of the Grail, but even so…there was beauty too in how happy their daughter and her being born made them both, and if that could be enough to carry their broken little love through, despite its flaws, despite what some might call its futility…

…then that dream too was more than enough for Irisviel.

She gave a soft laugh when she felt the tickle of her daughter's tiny fingers tugging at the neck of her nightgown, seeking to be nursed and fed, speaking volumes through those wide, bright crimson eyes.

"All right, little one," she said, "here we go." And she sank down on the edge of her and Kiritsugu's bed and gave her child what she needed from her in her hunger, for unlike her mother, who could subsist purely on mana, Ilyasviel did have a taste for food like a human would.

Kiritsugu sat beside the two of them, and as he watched them, fixedly and intently for a moment, the pride he felt for them both was more than clear in that quiet smile of his.

Irisviel glanced at him sidelong before looking down at her suckling daughter in her arms again, and for the moment, despite her limited knowledge of the world beyond Einzbern Castle, she knew somehow that she was one of the most fulfilled women in the whole world, wrapped up in such a simple, wonderful, fleeting dream of happiness.

All because of the dear and wonderful man beside her.

Looking back on it, despite its shakiness, it was quite beautiful how it had all come to be up until now, and no doubt that despite what tragedies lay ahead for them, it would go on being so, no matter what.