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“So, are you done chatting?” the girl asks, and Saber’s not that much of a fool, nor does she have the blessing of being able to forget. The eyes, the hair, the face, down to every last detail that Saber had spent those few weeks memorising—even the outfit, for God’s sake, though they’ve changed the colours. It’s not as if she wouldn’t notice the similarities.
Her first instinct is to be offended. Ten years have passed, and they’ve already recycled the face of the woman she loved, pasted it onto another replica and thrust the replica into the war. The Einzberns are nothing if not practically minded, and she feels sudden, all-consuming anger like she hasn’t felt in ages.
It doesn’t last long, because the girl asks “If I make it Illyasviel von Einzbern, will you understand?” and Saber does understand, and wishes she hadn’t.
—
Later, back at the house, she retreats into the room Shirou gave her and closes the door without a word.
The girl looks just like Irisviel, but even she can remember that this girl had a father, and that father had a wife. An enclosed, domestic bliss which she never really understood, even when she witnessed it. Never understood, but she knows who Irisviel thought of before her death. She knows the sudden and unsuitable tenderness in Kiritsugu’s eyes as he regarded his wife; knows the dull shine of a wedding ring on Irisviel’s hand. A bitter taste wells up in her mouth. She sees double, then triple; Illyasviel, her mother, and behind them, another woman entirely, another wife. A woman from centuries past.
Saber recalls the blatant killing intent in the young girl’s eyes, and shivers.
It’s not the look of a girl who inherited the coldness of her father, who could pull a trigger regardless of his own feelings. It’s not even the look of some non-human creature. It’s the Grail, the wars that have done this—and once again, she feels the heavy weight of timeline after timeline, failure after failure, pressing softly down on her from all sides.
Irisviel told her something, once. A conversation she’d had with Kiritsugu, at the beginning of it all.
He told me he wanted to run away, Irisviel had said, smiling slightly. To run away with us. To choose his wife and daughter.
Were you surprised? Saber had asked, feeling the soft brush of the other woman’s hair against her face, the sudden coldness of another hand against her own.
Irisviel had considered it for a little while, and Saber had listened to the soft sound of her breathing in and out.
No, Irisviel said finally, but I was happy.
—
It’s the Grail that took Irisviel away; the Grail which turned that child who searched for walnuts with her father into the girl she saw before her this evening. The same fate repeating and tangling in on itself like a bundle of snarled thread. Some sort of cruel joke that it likes to play. She should hate it for what it’s done. And yet—
She wants the Grail, like lungs want air. Kiritsugu wanted it, thought he wanted it, but he had only a fraction of a lifetime and she has had lives and lives and lives. He turned it down. Would she? Could she?
—
Saber sleeps that night, and dreams not of the red hill or the burning blade of a sword, but of Lancelot, as he was, once. Of Guenever. The young boy who idolised her; the young girl who loved her innocently, hopefully, naively; the idealistic child-king. She wonders—does anyone remember these young, unhurt versions of them, anymore?
But these aren’t their child-selves; it’s Lancelot before his brand of madness and Guenever before hers, but with the same look in their eyes. Betrayal, an open wound.
“You were always like this,” her queen tells her with eyes accusing and dangerous as an open flame. “You’re selfish even after death,” her best knight tells her, and any words she could possibly hope to reply with stick in her throat like flies on a flypaper.
She wakes, shaking, but her eyes are dry. There’s no need for crying; it’s useless, and besides, when you’ve dreamt the same thing for centuries, heard it repeated from the lips of Servant after Servant, it starts to affect you less; why should this time be any different?