Chapter Eleven

Ilya

Even with how busy all of this kept Kiritsugu, he scarcely minded it. He was used to working prolonged hours, oftentimes with little to no rest for vast stretches of time, and what little rest he would get would more than not would be the self-hypnosis method, which though it would put his body in a vulnerable state, would give him the equivalent of a night's rest in the space of about an hour. And even in the case of say waiting out an enemy, he had a method of engaging his brain in a state akin to R.E.M. sleep that kept him alert but still allowed him a measure of rest. He had plans to use these abilities in this respect to his advantage for the coming War, counting on the other Masters to get their rest based on normal sleeping and waking hours, meaning he could work hours they could not and gain precious ground in the quest for the Grail.

In addition, his ability to compartmentalize was as sharp as ever, not just when it mattered, like when Irisviel had fallen ill. For example, it was particularly useful when speaking over the phone for long hours with Maiya, since Maiya represented a kind of life that needed to be kept separate from what he was building with his wife.

Except when someone like Maiya, of all people, threw him for a loop.

With her usual dry, humorlessness that could easily be mistaken for intentional sarcasm, she mentioned one afternoon in February as an aide-de-camp might mention to her superior officer as a gracious and simple act of common humanity, "And I apologize for being overdue in this, but I wanted to offer you my congratulations."

Kiritsugu blinked. "Congratulations?"

"Well, you were married some months ago, yes? To the homunculus?"

"I—"

"Which, incidentally, I find to be a curious strategy. It's just that it's very old-world for someone like you. Nevertheless, I do see the potential in it. But as a human being, I felt obligated to offer some kind of congratulations."

"Ah…well."

Kiritusgu pinched the bridge of his nose, and when he didn't speak for a long moment, Maiya spoke up again.

"Kiritsugu? What is it?"

"Nothing. Sorry."

The apology was indeed warranted. Usually when it came to the two of them, a longer-than-normal pause over a communication device meant trouble.

Still…it had become clear to Kiritsugu just in that moment, more so than before, that an outsider looking in on his situation as if through a window, just seeing the surface, would probably wonder why someone like him wouldn't have continued his way of life, sleeping off and on with Maiya, his assistant, the soldier girl he had tried and failed to save completely, and instead fall for someone like Irisviel, who shared no bloodstained past with him as Maiya did.

Moreover, he also realized that he was somehow disturbed at Maiya's reaction to all of this. She said nothing of what they had shared before in the physical sense, which could only mean that to her, that part of their relationship was only for her a necessary quenching of a natural drive in her mechanism, nothing more or less. Admittedly, Kiritsugu had come to see it that way too when all of his encouragements were for naught, when Maiya remained resolved to live a soldier's life, the life of a cold and mechanical sniper.

Then there was the clear fact that Maiya didn't even believe that Kiritsugu would marry for love, and in truth, there was a time when he wouldn't have. But he did fall in love and the Einzberns, in their traditional way, simply made it a requisite for his and Irisviel's bearing a child. As long as he could have shared what little time Irisviel had left raising the child she promised him with her, that would have been more than enough. But to Maiya, she, without hesitation, drew the conclusion that he had done what many political powers had done across the ages, and married merely for the purpose of giving him another tactical advantage in the War.

Is your pain really so much colder than mine, Maiya? he wondered to himself, and sadly at that.

He heaved a sigh, sinking into the chair behind his desk, withdrawn from the wintry window bathed in white sunlight. "How did you find out about my marriage to Irisviel? I don't believe I mentioned it."

"I came across the information during one of my investigations of Tokiomi Tohsaka," Maiya replied at once. "You should know he's been doing his own digging. It would appear he has a particular disdain for the Einzberns as well as the Matous. The Matous more so, but the Einzberns too."

"Well that isn't surprising, the Three First Families have had it in for each other since the very first summoning of the Grail, when it claimed that it would only grant one family's supplications."

As far as whatever the Tohsakas and the Matous were doing for their own preparations, he had already anticipated that one of or both of them would do snooping of their own, especially into the Einzberns. They were probably already aware that he had been chosen as the Einzbern Master, rather than the traditional homunculus Vessel they always provided for these Wars, which in this case would have been Irisviel alone if not for him. Still, he would have to work out how best to keep his enemies from using Irisviel against him, depending on how much they actually knew about all of this.

Maiya went on. "With that in mind, shall I observe further to see just how much knowledge Tohsaka has gained on this matter?"

As if reading his mind. Really, any outsider would indeed be baffled at his not having kept things as they were with Maiya in bed. But he could never—

"Yes," he told her at once. "I want to know everything concerning that."

"Understood. I should have a full report when I rendezvous with you. Is there anything else?"

"No, that should about cover it for today. Thanks for checking in as usual, Maiya."

"Of course."

The line clicked and then went dead. Kiritsugu hung up his receiver in the cradle rather slowly, pondering. And he wondered, as the white light outside turned to subtle gold: did this news not really affect his assistant even a little? Was she really so far gone? Was he, to have not even given it a second thought? Or maybe her asking to investigate further had been her way of confirming that he…?

Maybe he'd know for sure when she arrived at the Einzbern Castle in two weeks' time for an exchange of physical information too important and precious to have handled by the common postal service or a phone line.

This lingering reflection caused him a measure of uneasiness when he returned to Irisviel that evening, where he found her by the fire in the library reading a new book to add to the growing stack of those she had already read, which seemed to be in constant flux with balancing out the growing stack of books she had yet to read. The one she was reading now was by the famous British nineteenth-century author Charles Dickens, taking place during the French Revolution. Irisviel seemed to have developed a voracious appetite for reading almost anything, from quirky comedies to dramatic tragedies to adventurous tales of love and war. With each book she read, everything she expressed somehow seemed more and more lively and warmly vivacious, the signs of someone who fully embraced her life as it was.

"Did you have a good conversation with Maiya?" Irisviel asked him with her usual fervor as she closed the book and set it aside, her free hand caressing the curve of her belly.

"Oh, as good as ever," he replied tiredly as he dropped in his usual chair across from her, but he did manage to give her a sincere smile.

"She's very important to you, isn't she?"

"Hm?"

"Maiya."

Kiritsugu hesitated before answering. "Ah, yes, but not quite in the way you might think."

Irisviel giggled, truly amused. "What way should I think?"

Of course this only served to complicate things further.

"Well...she and I have a shared history with her as my assistant, but between the two of us, I think I'm the more human."

"Oh?"

"She was a broken little thing when I first picked her up, much like you were in that snowstorm, but unlike you...I couldn't...well, I realized soon enough she would do better as my assistant, as a tool."

"Is it the kind of life she wanted?"

"I think it was—is—the only life she knows how to want. I really don't know any other way to explain it."

"But where did you find her then?"

Kiritsugu turned to the crackling flames of the fireplace instead. "In a war zone. She'd been…drafted as a soldier from since she was a child."

Irisviel's caressing hand paused, and she seemed to consider again the small life growing inside her. "A solider? As a child?"

There was a sober silence between them, and Irisviel seemed to accept that it really wasn't Kiritusugu's place to expound further. In fact, she appeared to be trying to forget, to shake off the unbidden idea of their future child Ilyasviel fighting in a war.

The truth of it was, that would be precisely the case if Irisviel and Kiritsugu failed to obtain the Grail…if Kiritsugu failed to save Ilyasviel…..

Kiritsugu impulsively closed his free hand into a fist as his chin rested on the knuckles of his other one. He frowned again in that way he always would when he worked full-time as an assassin, not as an expression of the anger that drove him, but merely a measure of the intensity of his focus on the goal before him.

Then Irisviel spoke up, withdrawing her husband from his dark thoughts. "Ah, you know I was looking at some of those photos of Olympic ice-skaters in that athletics magazine earlier." She stretched out both her arms, her fingers interlaced, palms outward, giving her knuckles a loosening little crack.

Her tone had become overly enthusiastic, as though she was trying to think positive for the both of them.

Kiritsugu warmed to her effort at once. "I think I see where this is going. You want to know if I can teach you how to ice-skate?"

Though her eyes shined ruby starlight, Irisviel had became adept at playing innocent. "Well if you're insisting…."

Kiritsugu shook his head, chuckling. "I'm certain I can teach you as well as I taught you how to dance, but we'll have to put that on hold until after you've given birth. It's not a good idea for someone inexperienced to try it while pregnant."

Irisviel's playful smile disappeared a little to replace her expression with forlorn disappointment.

It became clear to Kiritsugu that his wife might be experiencing a touch of cabin fever. Which he only found all the more endearing, though at the same time he did empathize with her. He still remembered days on end, spent alone and cooped up in Natalia's fortress of a hidden, underground house, forced to entertain himself while he waited for her to come back from another mission he wasn't allowed to help her out with because he'd just get in the way. And he still remembered being that helpless, that inept and inexperienced, how unsatisfying that had been to him to have been so weak and useless.

Irisviel still possessed her own uncertainties, but she seemed to look to him for strength whenever her own was lacking. That was new for him, but at the same time he couldn't help but feel fulfilled by that, in the same way he did when he performed what tasks he could in caring for her.

"What is it?" she asked him, noticing the way he was looking at her.

"Nothing," he lied, unable to find the proper words to say the truth otherwise.

But for a moment he could see a delighted insight flicker in her red eyes, and she shared his smile briefly before she suddenly winced in pain as she had done that day months ago when they'd been walking in the snow.

Kiritsugu sprang up automatically to her side. "Iri? What's wrong?"

Her face became pale and broke out in a sweat like when she collapsed, as she frowned in response to this new pain that had come upon her.

"I think…maybe it's—maybe it's the baby…" she gasped.

And then Kiritsugu, for a split-second, didn't know what to do. He'd never had anything to do with birthing newborns before. All he could do was croak, "Isn't it a little early, though?"

"Grandpapa said its growth might have been accelerated a bit from normal babies, because of all of the adjustments done…."

She reached out for him, and Kiritsugu gripped her hand while at the same time his thoughts raced, his neurons firing rapidly as he reverted to his old instincts of thinking under pressure. At once he regained his calm mindset, even as Irisviel squeezed his hand tighter, gritting her teeth against the pain that now wracked her entire body.

Yet just as he was about to break free of her grasp to summon one of the maids, she relaxed and her grip on his hand slackened. As her breathing eased, she wiped away the sweat at her brow, and she managed a smile when she looked up at her husband.

"It's okay…a what you call a…false alarm…."

It was only then Kiritsugu realized that he'd sunk to the floor beside her chair. In truth, he had been rooted to that spot from the start, unable to abandon her even to summon help. What a weak idiot he could be sometimes.

He held fast to her hand, clutching it now in both of his. "I guess that's good. I don't know if I was entirely ready for that."

"Hey, who's the one having the baby here?" Irisviel teased, giving him a bold and playful nudge. Though there was still a tremor in her laugh, it was enough for him to know she would be all right. "Though I will admit, I don't think I've ever seen such a frozen look on your face. It was like those wonderful wheels in your head stopped working altogether."

"Yeah…." Kiritsugu massaged the back of his neck apologetically. "Not one of my more shining moments, eh?"

Irisviel laughed again, stronger, like her usual self. And so Kiritsugu found at last that he could laugh along with her.

The day Maiya arrived for a reconnaissance with Kiritsugu, he was reminded all the more of how much more of a machine his assistant was in the near-lack-of-reaction he observed in her when she saw Irisviel and how obviously pregnant she was.

And then when it came time for Kiritsugu and Maiya to withdraw to his office to exchange information, Irisviel naturally made to follow. But Kiritsugu stopped her.

"No, Irisviel. Stay in the library. You have your appointment with Acht, in any case."

Irisviel furrowed her brow, confused and certainly a little hurt at being excluded. "But—"

Kiritsugu sighed. He couldn't let Irisviel be a part of this. What he and Maiya had to discuss had much to do with his old way of life, and he didn't want Irisviel to know that. She didn't need to. Her light was too pure for that, too kind. Kinder than he could ever be, the sort of kind he wished he could be. But she was the only one who could ever see him as kind, and he wanted that at least to remain so, not in hiding it from her but rather in keeping from being relentlessly reminded of it. That light was too precious to him.

As Maiya stood at attention, observing all of this with the cold indifference of a cat, Kiritsugu pressed his hand in Irisviel's, leaning in close, touching his lips softly to her cheek, whispering in her ear:

"Please, Iri. For me."

Irisviel considered him a moment, her eyes flicking between him and Maiya, and then she pressed his hand back in both of hers. "Okay. I'll wait for you."

Perhaps she remembered the vow he made her the day they found the rose growing in the snow, that no matter what he did with his body or his mind, in his heart he would always love her. Because in remembering that, she could keep her faith in him that everything he did concerning her was for her sake, for the fact that he cared so deeply for her, more than he had ever allowed himself to really care in so very long a time.

And it was because of this that he could part from her this way, leaving her alone in the library and returning upstairs to his office with Maiya.

Then at first, everything was as it usually was between him and his assistant, as if no time had passed between the last time they had worked together.

Until Maiya spoke up, with a rather strange, keen voice.

"So…it seems I was wrong. And that I have yet another reason to offer you some congratulations."

Kiritsugu looked around. "Hm?"

"You weren't making a tactical decision," said Maiya, wearing her same mechanical expression as she kept in stride beside him. "You were thinking with your heart when you married her. And now she's bearing your child. Which brings me to the part where I congratulate you again."

Kiritsugu stopped.

So did Maiya.

They looked at each other a moment.

Maiya's cool demeanor remained unchanged. Kiritsugu kept his own sense of being taken aback well-hidden behind his mask.

"Is that what you think?"

"It's what I observed. And if you'll recall, you've always praised me on my ability to observe well."

Kiritsugu closed his eyes. And then he admitted, very quietly, "I had no intention of marrying her but…the child…our child…will be…is…living proof of…." He swallowed, opening his eyes, projecting all of his old coldness onto Maiya, even as he said, "Living proof of what you've clearly already figured out."

He turned from her before she could respond, his way of telling her their discussion on the matter was ended. But he thought he saw in her face the flicker of something that might have been just a touch of feeling, but he couldn't be sure what.

Hours later, when they had finished all that needed discussing, darkness had fallen outside in the world of ice. Maiya returned to her own quarters within the castle, and Kiritsugu gathered up their paperwork and returned to the library, only to find it empty. Upstairs in their rooms, he found his wife had fallen asleep on the bed, waiting for him like she promised.

Having lost the option of sleeping on her stomach, she was curled up on her side, slumbering so sweetly that when Kiritsugu discovered her, he kept as quiet as possible. Having divested himself of the paperwork in his office, he slid off his jacket and draped it over a chair, and then removed his shoes, before he padded across the carpet and knelt beside the bed.

In watching her sleep, he again felt that certainty that she was the only woman that could love him, and the only woman that he could love back, just as it was for her with him.

Being careful not to wake her, he reached over and very lightly brushed her silver hair with the tips of his fingers, watching her with piercing tenderness how she breathed so lightly and softly as she slept. Yet the furrow in her brow suggested she might be troubled, despite his reassurances earlier.

And then she stirred at the continual stroke of the pad of his thumb against her soft skin. And as always, he couldn't help the leap of his heart as she opened those strange, lovely eyes of hers, and even if she was troubled, she still had a smile for him that for all he did to maintain his cold facade in the world beyond this palace of ice, did not cease in this moment to fill him with a warmth he couldn't have dreamed of knowing over a year ago.

Had such time really passed since the day he and Irisviel first met?

"Ah, you've come back," she sighed sleepily, all trouble disappearing from her face.

"I'm sorry that took so long." Kirtisugu pressed a kiss to the hand he was stroking with his thumb, but he didn't take his eyes from hers. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." Irisviel's smile widened as she grew more awake, but then the trouble crept back into her brow.

Despite Kiritsugu's limited experience with women in actual relationships, he did have an inkling then that Irisviel might've just experienced her first real taste of envy. Though it really wasn't something to celebrate, Kiritsugu couldn't help a twinge of amusement, however he very expertly and wisely kept it hidden.

But then Irisviel wanted to sit up, and with her belly the size that it was, she had to struggle a bit.

"Iri, you don't have to…" Kiritsugu started to say, while at the same time reaching out to help her.

"It's fine," Irisviel insisted as she worked to prop herself up against the pillows on the bed.

It reminded Kiritsugu of what little he could really do for his wife as her husband, and he did his best not to let his melancholy show, even as he could feel his expression turn pensive.

Something of his thoughts showed on his face anyway, as Irisviel gave his hand a squeeze of what felt like encouragement.

"You know," she told him, "I am a little nervous. I mean of course I'm glad that Grandpapa's said it's too close to the baby's due date to do any more adjustments—"

Kiritsugu perked up at this.

"—but after all I've read up on as far as actually giving birth goes, I just hope I can hold my own…since it is going to be so painful…I wonder…."

Though Irisviel's thought tailed away, Kiritsugu could tell that she was questioning whether she could handle the unknown pain of childbirth, even after what she'd experienced thus far as a side-effect of being the Grail Vessel.

Decisively, he gave her hand an encouraging squeeze back. "Don't worry. I'll be with you."

Irisviel's eyes flicked up to his face in a curious way, and he realized that she had something to ask of him that she knew he wouldn't feel right about.

And then she said: "I don't want you…to be there."

Kiritsugu made a small noise of surprise, his frown of concern deepening. "But…Iri…are you sure?"

Irisviel avoided his gaze all the more. "I don't want you to see me in that kind of pain." She managed a watery laugh, a reflection of what she truly felt inside now, her desire to keep her husband away from more scenes of her in agony. "You have enough to deal with without me troubling you."

Kiritsugu felt that awful pressure in his chest, and that rising lump in his throat. Looking over the lovely woman that was his wife bearing his child, she had grown so willing in her own right to do what it took to spare him of as much suffering as possible. Now, more than ever, he wanted desperately to make her happier beyond anything she could have conceived of, but all he could do was close his eyes in resignation against the threatening prickle of tears.

"If that is your wish, then as your husband, I will honor that." He leaned over and kissed her soft, white knuckles before he felt himself crumble inward and pressed his forehead against the back of her hand as he clutched it in his. As he trembled and let out slow, deep, shaky breaths to steady himself, she managed to bring him the true peace he desired as she ran her fingers through his dark hair. But it became too much and the tears fell amid tiny gasps as he wept, overwhelmed by a passionate mixture of happiness and sorrow.

Then Irisviel whispered his name and drew him close, enveloping him in her iris scent, and he thought again of all they planned to accomplish together, and that was enough to give him back his strength. He blinked away the tears Irisviel failed to catch, and smiled for her, squeezing her hand tight.

"Of course. Ah, you are stronger than me. How could I expect anything else of you?"

Irisviel returned his smile. "But all that I hold dear inside me is thanks to you. I could never thank you enough for that."

Kiritsugu's smile widened, humbled as he was. "No thanks needed."

His wife chuckled and then patted the spot beside her. Kiritsugu accepted the invitation and joined her on the bed, enfolding the warmth of her in his arms as the two of them sat together propped up against the pillows. For a little while they remained this way in this quiet peace, and Kiritsugu was happy enough, as was Irisviel, as he stroked her hair and she linked her hand with his free one, her head tucked under his chin.

And then they both felt little Ilya moving around inside her again, as though clamoring for their attention.

"She probably won't give us a moment's peace," Kiritsugu teased as Irisviel drew his hand up so he could feel their child's insistent kicks. "Of course I won't help matters, because I'll simply dote on her until she's spoiled rotten."

"I think that unfortunately you're right." Irisviel raised her eyebrows playfully at her husband. "You can be far too soft."

"Ah—" Kiritsugu couldn't help the rise of color in his cheeks. "Come on now," he muttered. "Don't look at me like that, don't you know I'm helpless when you do that?" But he eased back into a smile when Irisviel laughed.

"Honestly, I don't know what all the fuss is supposed to be about you, according to what you've told me. In the end you weren't that hard to figure out after all. Deep down you're just a mischievous boy who only gets flustered and loses his cool when confronted with a pretty girl he likes. The way you've put it, you were quite the—ah, yes, the rapscallion when you were younger."

"You've been reading too many novels lately."

"And who's fault is that? You told me to read as many as I like."

"You're right, I did," Kiritsugu conceded, and he offered a kiss as a means of atonement, which Irisviel was more than happy to accept.

Even when they broke apart, Kiritsugu kept close, touching his nose to Irisviel's, and the two of them laughed again when Ilyasviel made another bid for their attention with more lively kicks. For Kiritsugu though, every movement he felt inside his wife he cherished, and for a time he managed to look forward to his coming fatherhood without a shred of shame.

As it happened, the day of Ilyasviel's birth heralded one of the harshest snowstorms Kiritsugu had yet observed here, even after over a year of living within the Einzbern Castle. Something in the way Irisviel collapsed this time shortly after she and Kiritsugu had gotten up that morning when she felt the oncoming pain gave the air of a dark curtain rising.

Having been called upon, the Einzbern maids arrived to find Kiritsugu helping Irisviel to her feet, struggling with himself as she insisted that he leave her like they'd agreed on. Now that help had come, there were no more protests he could make, and with a painful resignation he had grown all too used to, he at last allowed the maids to usher him out. But he didn't take his eyes off his wife even for a moment even as she was bent double in pain and clutching the bedpost for support, until the doors closed her off from him.

The waiting was no less painful, but he wouldn't tell Irisviel that. He would fight to spare her of as much pain as she did for him. So he assumed a vigil of rigid patience that betrayed nothing of his tangled heart, as he waited in the summoning chamber, the only place where he wouldn't be able to hear a whisper of Irisviel's screams in the throes of childbirth. It was something he had learned to do through years of discipline, countless nights on the battlefield rattled with horror that threatened to engulf and drive lesser men to embrace insanity. He waited and waited in this way, and even though he couldn't hear his wife's cries, he could still imagine them.

Just the same, the battlefield had taught him unshakeable resoluteness, so despite everything, looking at him no one would have guessed that inside his heart roiled with fear and pain. He did his best to keep his thoughts distracted when it became too much, sitting with his elbows propped on his knees on the steps before the altar, clenching and unclenching his hands together, still able to feel the clamminess of his palms. And when he did search for something other than the present moment to think on, he kept coming back somehow to those dead birds Irisviel had found in the snow, and the way he had likened her to a caged bird when he'd spied her in the window the morning after he'd rescued her from the snowstorm, and did nothing but cause himself more pain for how it all portended to the fate he would help seal for her, even as he loved her so much. Yet simultaneously, this all served to give him an utterly stony and stoic appearance, because in the end it left him with nothing but empty despair on which to contemplate, which was enough to practically sap him of his strength so that he was too tired even to weep over it, as he might've done otherwise.

By the time the long vigil crawled over the course of the day, through the stormy night, all the way into the gray of the next morning, the storm raging outside and the candles flickering solemnly as they burned down to stubs, the maid Aloisia arrived in the chamber to inform him that his child had been born. Kiritsugu could only respond with a wordless nod, feeling the full weight of his exhaustion, that long process of his despair sucking the life out of him.

That, and all of this time he really could have killed for a cigarette.

When he returned to his and Irisviel's bedchamber, he couldn't find words to speak. For a woman who had just given birth, Irisviel hardly showed the signs of it. And she was more radiant than he had ever seen her before as she cradled a tiny baby in her arms that despite everything, Kiritsugu suddenly remembered he still wasn't prepared to see.

"Ah, Kiritsugu," she said with an elated sigh. "Come look. Come see how beautiful she is."

The child was indeed beautiful. Kiritsugu could see that from the first, just as he had done when he first saw Irisviel in the cultivating tank. Ilyasviel looked precisely like what Irisviel would have looked like had she herself been born as an infant. And as for Irisviel, she was so light with utter happiness as she hugged that child to her. Kiritsugu could hardly bear it, scarcely able to breathe either when she eagerly handed their Ilyasviel to him to hold.

This is my child. Mine.

He couldn't wrap his head around it.

"You see she has your eyes," Irisviel pointed out, her own scarlet eyes shining with joy. "The shape of them, anyway."

"My eyes," Kiritsugu murmured, looking upon that sleeping face, ruddy with life and breathing so lightly that he trembled for fear of breaking her tiny body with the slightest movement. So sweet and so innocent, so dependent on both him and her mother to watch over her.

Indeed, for all of his self-doubt and self-loathing over this, he also still couldn't help being partially happy and proud that he could hold this child, Ilyasviel, whom he had named, who had been born because of something so simple as he and Irisviel loving each other. But at the same time, the full weight of what he must one day do to this child's mother hit him harder than ever before now. No matter his efforts, he crumbled under that weight, because he suddenly realized that there was something he wanted even more than the wish he longed to offer the Holy Grail. Yet he knew that for himself there could be no other choice than the bloody path he had chosen to walk so long ago. So here now was his punishment for that: an ephemeral and precious happiness that would eventually in part be taken from him, and entirely so if he failed his last endeavor to bring peace to the world.

Yet Irisviel, as she took some rest propped up against the pillows on their bed, was beyond incandescently euphoric that she could give birth to his child, that she had become more complete and fulfilled as a woman in becoming a mother as well as a beloved wife. Every word she spoke burned bright with love for Ilya, this child she had carried inside her and who shared both her and Kiritsugu's blood, a being that truly sealed the bond of love between them.

Still….

Kiritsugu reminded her that one day, one day he would be the one to bring her to death, and was unable to keep at bay the despair that had been following him from the moment she had first started having her birthing pains, pains that reflected his own as he could only come to the awful conclusion that he had no right to hold his own child. And he gave in, sinking to his knees, and even in light of his conclusion, he hugged Ilya closer to his beating, breaking heart as he let those tears fall after so many hours of holding them back, a riot of joy and grief battling inside of him.

Irisviel's soft touch as she came from off of the bed and knelt beside him to wipe away his tears broke his heart all the more, cradling the tiny weight of his precious Ilya to him as close as he could, with all the desperate desire to protect her with his life.

How was it he could give way to such feelings for a life he had just met? He could hardly fathom it, and yet he knew at the same time that this was what it meant to be a father.

This made it far more painful, when he considered against his will what his own father might have been thinking when he'd first held Kiritsugu. Certainly not that one day his own son would turn right around and kill him.

"How can I be anything but a shadow over her life?" he asked pitifully of his wife. "I have no right to call myself her father…not especially when one day…I'll be the one to kill her mother…."

Irisviel heaved a sigh that expressed her sorrow for him, and bespoke of the pain in her own heart at seeing him so torn. "Kiritsugu…I've told you, you mustn't think of it that way…and that you're far kinder than you give yourself credit for…."

"But…aren't you afraid even…? How can you not be afraid—repulsed even—with the idea of someone like me as your child's father…when I've killed my own father…and the woman I loved as a mother…without hesitation? If faced with that same choice again, I can't possibly—"

He couldn't bring himself to finish, particularly when Irisviel withdrew her kind touch and went very quiet as she let his words sink in, contemplating tiny Ilyasviel in his arms.

But then she reached over, the pensive shadows lifting from her expression, and she smiled tenderly and brightly for him again as she laid her hand over Ilya's small brow. "I will be the last. I promise you, you won't have to make such an ugly choice after me. And Ilya is very lucky to have you for her father. I can already see you've fallen for her at first sight too, that you love her very much. It almost hurts, but in a good way."

And with that, Kiritsugu felt some of the weight of holding his child lift, and he swallowed, unspeaking, before he steeled himself and, with tears still flowing down his face, gave the soft, white head a small kiss, almost reverent. Feverishly, he gulped again, managing a smile at last.

"She's strong," he finally croaked. "I can see it. Strong…like her mother."

He looked up at Irisviel, his wife and the mother of his child, and though he still felt the pain of his heart drowning in so much happiness, the loving gazes the two of them exchanged were enough for him to believe again in the future she was giving him. Because of Ilya, Irisviel would always be with them both, and he resolved to live to see the day when he and his daughter would leave this place, hand-in-hand, and live out their lives together in her mother's honor.

In that way, their little family could still endure through anything.

Kiritsugu peered down at his small daughter in his arms again, and touched his forehead to her tiny one the way he would do with Irisviel. "I can promise you that much, little one. One way or another, you're the one person close to me…I won't fail this time. No matter what."

Ilya's small red eyes opened a bit at this, as if she'd heard and understood him, and Kiritsugu, breathless with true wonder at the small and sweet round face, at last felt himself fill entirely with pride and happiness in she that was his only daughter.

His own beloved little Ilya.