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Kariya dreams.
His life is a dream, an extended nightmare. He shambles through liminal corridors—visions of the past mixed with aims on the future, his days hazed and indistinct, his nights black and endless. His body swings between chewing misery and livewire agony. He feels forever observed by figures with scornful eyes—everyday Fuyuki crowds, yes, Zouken and that bastard Tokiomi. But sometimes stranger figures, too, armored men who whisper in a language Kariya knows is not Japanese, nor any language that’s been spoken outside of historical reenactment in centuries.
He dreams of madness, of Berserker’s teeth buried in his neck, hot breath and trembling weakness, of existence always on the verge of collapse. He dreams of grief, paralytic and enervating, of unshed tears as hot in his throat as fresh blood. He dreams of helplessness, of Sakura’s empty eyes and Aoi’s empty smile and his own empty hands.
He dreams (once, only once, and that perhaps worse than never at all) of a lake, placid and still, but with an edge of something other in the air that raises the hair on the back of his neck. In the gray half-light of dawn, it seems like a photograph he could only touch the surface of, or perhaps a projected image he could reach for only to fall through. Beautiful, but apart from him.
He sighs—feels the sigh in his chest, a chest far too broad to be his own, a tension in muscles that move with a poised, practiced grace completely foreign to Kariya’s stumbling infirmity. He looks down at the arms crossing over his chest and finds, rather than the sleeves of his stained and reeking hoodie, plate armor gauntlets that gleam the muted dove gray of clouds after a storm.
“Why did you dream me this way?” asks a voice. Not his voice, and not his language, either. It’s harsher, with more fricatives in the consonants, but intoned with a low resonance that belongs to the mist and the lakeshore as echoes belong to a sea cave. Not his voice, but the words roll off of Kariya’s tongue all the same.
When no one answers him—Kariya tries to take control of that stately murmur to as much effect as trying to climb sheet glass—the man sighs again. He moves towards the lake as within him Kariya fights back tears of purest envy for the man's even paces and sure movement, the sound of his armor a hushed, melodic rhythm. Dark hair slides over his shoulders in loose, finely-combed waves as he looks down at the misty surface of the water and the indistinct shape reflected there.
He blinks once, twice, slow and considered. Without even a sense of disorientation, Kariya is, suddenly, huddled beside him at the water’s edge, frail and bowed, and it takes only standing in the man’s presence to name him.
“Berserker.” The title twists his lips—twists the other’s lips, too, a mirroring bitterness.
“Not here,” his Servant answers, “though I would have preferred it so.” He lifts his head, exposing the white line of his throat, the noble line of his profile, and looks upon the lake with grief rippling somewhere deep beneath the surface of his eyes. His lips part again, then close. Purposefully, he turns away, as if he can’t bear to speak the words out over the waters.
“I came to you because you called me forth as a madman,” he says at last. “So I ask you again—why must you now dream of me thus?”
Kariya swallows, feeling shrunken and resentful beneath that hard, cool gaze. His own companions, the worms burrowing in his flesh and nesting in his sinew, feel distant here, but only that—a tugging at the far end of a tether that holds him bound and collared, though it has at present decided to let him wander afield.
“I can’t control what I dream about.” He answers in a voice of sand and grit to Berserker’s polished iron. “It’s just the Servant bond. Normally I dream about you attacking me.”
Berserker absorbs the words, unmoving, unmoved. “Your dreams are violent. As are your needs.”
“What do you know about my needs? All you do when we’re awake is try to murder whoever’s in front of you, including me!” The anger kindles—stupid, stupid, it’s just a dream, it won’t make a difference when I wake back up. But the remote, aloof sorrow in Berserker’s eyes reminds him too much of Sakura’s distant stare, of Tokiomi’s—of mage society’s—egotism that masquerades itself as wisdom.
“I know you seek vengeance,” the knight pronounces. “Salvation—for yourself and for another. I know your desire to tear down he whom you cannot be.”
“He who I,” Kariya stammers as the image looms behind his eyes, Tokiomi with his arm around Aoi’s shoulders, Aoi smiling up at him, serene and at peace. “Shut up—”
“You called me with a relic of mine, but it would not be enough if I did not see a likeness of myself in you. You—”
“Shut up!” Kariya snarls. “You’re not here to lecture me about my wish! Just—just concentrate on winning!”
“When I take the field, I think of nothing else,” Berserker responds, face solemn. “You would do better to go mad as well, my Master. You will find things much simpler.”
“I don’t need to be—to be divorced from reality like you!”
“We are happier in separation, reality and I.” The knight smiles, a rueful curve of his lips, though the melancholy still hangs on his eyes.
Without warning, he turns away on a wince. He sighs—the sound of it rattles at the end, a sword in a scabbard begging to be released. With a jolt of fear, Kariya sees the way his armor is darkening, ink spreading over the brushed silver, the cape pinned over his pauldrons aging and rotting and falling away. The knight of the lake is once more becoming the black knight, the Mad Enhancement of his summoning reasserting itself.
“You are waking,” he says. His teeth grit, discoloring and sharpening into a jagged, inhuman line even as Kariya staggers back from him. “Go.”
Pain winds back its grip on Kariya’s leash, choking him, driving him to his knees. Berserker looks down on him, his lips drawn back, breath shuddering in his chest. His violet eyes burn red, the flames within climbing higher by the second as the mist on the lake roils, smoke-dark.
“Go. Forget this,” he growls. He stoops down, wrapping his hand around the back of Kariya’s neck to draw him close. Terror swells in Kariya’s throat, croaking, keening, but Berserker only presses a whisper to his forehead, sour and hot. “I do not wish to be remembered.”
A beat, a thrumming silence, and Kariya’s heart hammers against his ribs as Berserker’s hair falls across him like a shroud. The knight’s breath pants against his throat. His teeth, his teeth—
“I am sorry for the ways I will hurt you,” he rasps, and then those hands coil taut in Kariya’s sleeves and hurl him sideways into the lake.
The waters close over him like a throat. Black and cold, they swallow him down, and there at the bottom of the lake’s gullet, he finds his pain waiting.