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Servants do not dream.
Arturia is not a Servant.
Not in the common understanding – it is more complex than that. She has yet to fully reveal to Irisviel (less to Kiritsugu – much he cares) why she remains in corporeal form. Irisviel is quick to reassure her, waves it off and teases her. “Who would I count on to drive me around?” she asks with a smile. “Whoever would be gentlemanly enough to carry in all the grocery bags?”
Irisviel has lost nearly all of her sense of touch. In the brief moments they clasp hands, her fingers are stiff and ice-cold, sliding against the skin of Saber’s palm like an arctic whisper. Saber keeps the rooms as warm as she can in this rickety shed her Master sees fit to call headquarters. She knows it isn’t heat Irisviel needs, but she still finds herself stoking the miserable fire long after Irisviel has gone to sleep.
She wonders if homunculi dream. She considers it a blessing, if they don’t.
When Saber does “fall asleep,” it is like watching red syrup slowly overtaking everything, oozing down, over, and through. It is a memory more than a dream, and the redness she is experiencing is the blood in her eyes, spreading over her field of vision when she blinks, burning and turning the world dark and scarlet. She reaches up to swipe at her face, and her arm is armor-clad and heavy. Her whole body feels heavy, except for the hole in her side that sparks pain like electric frost. She can feel little spurts of blood gushing out when she moves. To raise her head is to see it again – the hill and the land below – and she already knows what she’ll find there. So she looks to the sky instead.
In the “dream,” the sky is burnt umber and gold. Dark clouds curl in on themselves and shred apart, stalking their way as thunderheads that cast shadows on the corpses below. Blearily watching their progress across the sky, she wonders what it would have been like if she had let the blood puddle in her lap and run down the sides of her thighs. If she had bled out on that hill and submitted to the tug of insistent sleep, had fallen into that warm pool of dark mental water instead of fighting against it with the last shreds of her mangled belief. Then she would return to this accursed hill one last time, and could end it all with her fists clenched in the grass.
She opens her artificial eyes. Irisviel is resting in the magic sigil on the floor, still too weak to move from when she had fainted. The glow of it makes her skin all the more pallid, and her hair shine faintly blue. Saber shifts her position, stretches out the stiffening in her calves. Something small and black scuttles away from her shoe and into a pile of crates.
There is a reason I am here, she thinks, tracing the path the insect has left in the dust with her finger. There is no room for second guessing. A King must walk forthrightly, confident in every decision made, and this is one she has given up quite literally everything to achieve.
Irisviel sighs, shifts. The blue light makes her look almost peaceful, and the skin tugs at the left side of Saber’s lips.
Yes, she thinks again, resettles herself for the night. There is a reason I am here.