Love Sprung from Winter

by adoranymph

Two broken hearts, one turned cold by the cruelties of the world, one built by human hands, meet in the depths of an eternal winter. They fell in love, neither having a choice in the matter. Kiritsugu/Irisviel. Based off of the Drama CDs by Gen Urobuchi, set during the time before the Fourth Grail War and sometime afterward.

1. Prologue

He supposed that, given the general pattern of his life, he oughtn't be so shocked that it had come to yet another loss of one he loved so dearly. Still, she had been the hope he had been fighting for since the beginning of this War, and to have things turn out this way, after all he'd been through to get to this point, it felt like the cruelest pain of all, only because it was a joy that had been twisted into a betrayal to his already exhausted heart. And the fact that he had failed one of the last people on Earth who cared what happened to him.

All the same, he swore in that freezing, snow-storming wood that this would be the last pain he would feel.

"Ilya…please forgive me," he whispered underneath the tirade of the wind.

And then, much to Kiritsugu Emiya's surprise, he thought of Saber, and the last he heard of her, screaming for him to take back his order to her to destroy the Holy Grail, before the blinding light of Excalibur swallowed her away. That scream had echoed the same one his own heart had made twice in his life, both preceding the pull of a gun trigger—once before killing his father, and once before killing his foster-mother, Nathalia Kiminsky. A scream he'd been able to ignore from the first.

And now….

With nothing else left, he could only utter a mirthless, bitter laugh. "Oh Saber. You fool."

Even now, even though his Command Seals were long gone, Kiritsugu could sense that Saber—that King Arturia Pendragon—still desired the Grail, somewhere in Time, that she still longed for it, corrupted as it was.

But then she would probably desire it even if he'd had time to tell her such. She would only believe in its corruption if she were to witness it for herself, as he did.

In truth, he was just as big of a fool as she was, because a part of what she had stood for had once burned so desperately inside him. Perhaps it was the reason he'd paused to watch on the grassy bank, just for a moment, when she had taken up Excalibur in all of its golden splendor during the Mion River Battle.

At the core though, his greatest suffering sprung from the fact that he had fallen in love with someone he shouldn't have.