Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Lelouch had never joined Ashford's drama club. This was not because he lacked dramatics or because he lacked talent, but was instead because he took issue with their set design. The head of the drama club was a portly middle-aged woman, a kind teacher who told all of her students to address her as Denise. She brought homemade cupcakes into the school on a regular basis, and had attempted to use baked goods to bribe Lelouch into joining her club more than once. He had rebuffed her at every turn until Milly let the story slip to Nunnally, who immediately confronted her brother and demanded he make amends with the poor woman.

Like a scolded puppy, he had gone to the school's theater, offering the teacher his own batch of cupcakes as an apology for his rude behavior. Denise had been delighted to finally get the handsome boy with the remarkable hand movements into her abode, and she gave him the grand tour of the place. Milly, accompanied by Rivalz and a camera, had documented the entire affair, ostensibly for a school project.

Suzaku had watched the resulting footage only after his first stint at Ashford had ended. The Emperor's agents had sorted through the school's archival footage, destroying anything that depicted or mentioned Nunnally. The videos showing Lelouch but not his sister were analyzed by the intelligence agents; by Suzaku's own request, they were then submitted to him, available at his leisure if he wished to search them for clues, hints, anything to make sense of the way his world had fallen apart so completely.

The OSI had been looking for slip-ups, telltale signs that someone was under the sway of Lelouch's geass. It was beyond dispute that he'd used it on some of the students, often in seemingly petty ways; besides Suzaku himself, there was the girl with an obsessive need to mark the courtyard wall, whose parents insisted that the strange affliction had surfaced only in the past three months.

Here is what Suzaku saw in the video of Lelouch's happy tour through the drama club, watching it from his temporary quarters in the palace as the Emperor put his final touches on his Julius project: Denise cheerfully pointing out the cardboard props, spooky trees and rainclouds equipped with real dripping features for their upcoming production of Macbeth. Lelouch squinting at the trees and lightly remarking that Lebanese cedars did not grow in Scotland, but that was fine, he was all for artistic license. Denise proudly displaying the backdrops, hand-painted by the art club in dark and muddled hues that the camera barely picked up, Lelouch unable to find a better compliment for them than "accurate to British weather". The teacher escorting him to the costume racks, his fake smile collapsing completely. Not only were the costumes not historically accurate, he complained, they weren't even attractive. They were bland, shoddily-made—were these ordered from some cheap online retailer? This is theater. It's meant to be enjoyed. Where is the color? Where is the drama? Where is the excitement to stimulate the audience? If you're going to sacrifice a sense of immersion for the sake of art, fine, but make it good art. And why is Macduff wearing a black velcro jacket?

Milly snorted behind the camera as Lelouch stole a notebook and pen from a bewildered underclassman, sketching improved designs on the spot and explaining his superior costuming decisions to a deeply-displeased Denise. He had not been invited back for an audition.

Becoming the dictator of the world came with certain opportunities, though. Freed of Ashford and Denise and Macduff's polyester jacket, Lelouch was now in charge of his own production, the stage manager of the most important play he'd ever star in.

Well. Co-star, at least. Zero was the protagonist of this story. Lelouch was just the dragon he slayed at the end.

The two of them were eating breakfast when Lelouch handed him the itinerary for the day, DRESS REHEARSAL SCHEDULE blaring at him, bolded and underlined and in 72-point font. Lelouch said nothing as he did this, because it was six in the morning and Lelouch was always irritable before his natural waking hour of noon. Even as a child he had flat-out refused to speak before seven o'clock, and Suzaku had enjoyed making a game of provoking him into talking, screaming, or sputtering. He had at least consented to join Suzaku for a meal despite his typical lack of appetite at this hour, and he picked at his plain Belgian waffles as Suzaku poured maple syrup and powdered sugar over his own. CC never joined them for breakfast, a late sleeper like Lelouch but without the deep-rooted need to keep a schedule, but she would have been absent even if she were awake. She was quietly miserable these days, and had already packed her belongings and given Lelouch notice that she'd be gone within a week. No need to stick around and see the fireworks, she'd said, and both of them supposed that was fair.

So here they sat, alone with the spellbound waitstaff, two plates of waffles, and the dress rehearsal schedule. Suzaku knew what the rehearsal was for and refused to let it spoil his breakfast, so he left the stack of papers alone and focused on his meal. He didn't have to look up to know that Lelouch was glaring at him for daring to neglect his lovingly-prepared paperwork. Every second that Suzaku spent savoring his waffles was a moment that may have thrown off the meticulous timetable that was no doubt contained within its pages.

They had no schedule going into this mutual suicide. They had multiple schedules, rather; Lelouch had conjured up no less than ten of them, the shortest one covering three weeks and the longest covering ten years, with the rest in between the two depending upon various factors. Lelouch had assigned each factor a variable and created math equations out of them, printing out the results in a mixture of blue and red ink from their hotel's ancient printer, which had no black cartridge. He had convened a meeting in which he explained each one to Suzaku via PowerPoint, and if Lelouch had bullshitted every word he'd said, Suzaku would have no idea. Math had never been his favorite class. The would-be king ended his slideshow by announcing that the two likeliest schedules were the ones labeled "Approx. 3-5 months: Schneizel bombs world.pptx" and "Approx. 10-14 months: Previously-unknown geass user challenges for throne [REVISED].pptx".

Victory conditions were the one constant in each scenario: the nobility of Britannia dismantled. Stable, sane, and reformist leaders found for each of the world's superpowers, vested with power and loved by their people. Bloodthirsty civilians recognizing the horror of war and, jaded, lowering their pitchforks and spears. The UFN taking the stage as a better way, a mess of mutual ties that could not be cut without mutual pain. Lelouch, utterly despised and reviled, dead and taking imperial authority down with him. Suzaku's hands stained with blood for the last time, not because he would never kill again but because he would never bear his name again. The path to the future was paved with the remains of the faceless dead. It was only fitting that the two of them would be the last bricks in the road, one way or another.

Three months had seemed much too soon to accomplish those goals at the time, but here they were, three months later and at the end of their road. It still seemed too soon, victory conditions aside—he and Lelouch had only just started to reconcile, the fragile newborn bridges between them only just tied in place. They'd had two months of rocky reconciliation and another two of something closer, wounded hearts and bloodied palms joined together. It was not as though Suzaku had enjoyed the executions and surprise attacks and assassinations of the past three months, and he had no real desire to endure any of it for another decade. But he'd thought—he'd hoped—that maybe there would be more time to salvage something between them while tearing the world down around them. What he'd been expecting was unclear even to him, really. Something more, something else, something final. Closure, he guessed.

But there wasn't any. They weren't able to save each other, and there was no story to end, only a long list of mistakes written in blood by both of their hands. Lelouch would die, Suzaku would kill him, and all they'd have left of each other was a pile of regrets and a mutual understanding that this wasn't what either of them wanted.

8:00 - Arrive at warehouse (allow plus or minus 15 mins for security purposes and scouting)

8:15 - Inspect floats. Ensure dimensions, materials, etc are appropriate. Measuring instruments will already be present on-site along with approx. 50 "extras" to serve as stand-ins for crowds, prisoners, etc in test runs

8:30 - Table read. Roles: Lelouch as Narrator and The Demon Emperor. Jeremiah as himself. Amelia as Important Prisoner (various) and Soldier (various). Winston as Unimportant Prisoner (various) and Announcer. Morrigan as disgruntled civilian chorus and elated civilian chorus. CC (if present) as shocked civilian chorus. Suzaku as Zero.

9:30 - Discussion and suggestions for improvement

Suzaku didn't bother to wipe the maple syrup off his fingers as he flipped through the itinerary, the sugar making its pages stick together, testing Lelouch's insistence upon the silent treatment. His Majesty tapped his fingers unhappily against his plate, his half-eaten waffle looking sad and dry. Ever the loyal knight, Suzaku reached over and drowned the thing in syrup, nodding up at his liege as though he'd just performed a valuable service for him. Lelouch took a bite, mostly out of spite, and looked as though he immediately regretted it. Still, he remained silent, he and Suzaku locked in one of their pointless and time-tested battles to outdo each other's stubbornness. Suzaku knew he wanted to complain, you're meant to kill me with a sword, not pancreatic insufficiency or something stupid like that, but Lelouch forced himself to finish the drenched waffle anyway.

The rest of the schedule was the same as the first page, every hour until five at night being devoted to this play of a play, this rehearsal for the day he'd end Lelouch's life. The main event was scheduled three times, first at the table read, then without costuming around noon, and finally a "lifelike pre-enactment" at three. Outfits, weapons, and miscellaneous necessary items would be wheeled in to the warehouse in advance of their arrival, Suzaku was informed by the papers. While there would be refreshments and appetizers served at the venue, the final note of the packet instructed participants to adjourn for dinner at the end of the day. Somehow, Suzaku doubted he'd have much of an appetite by then.

He was about to flip the packet shut and return his attention to the waffles when he caught a glimpse of the fourth page. 2:15, it read, beheading practice (ballistics gel dummy). NOTE: No one is to touch dummies except Suzaku. Each costs approx. $3000 of YOUR tax dollars.

Across from him, Lelouch was downing the rest of his coffee, taking bites of the waffles in between sips so their sugary taste was diminished by the flavor of espresso. Suzaku watched the movements of his neck as he chewed, swallowed, breathed.

"You can get a refund for those dummies," he said, and it was a statement of fact, not an argument. "I don't need beheading practice."

Lelouch dabbed at his mouth with his napkin before folding it back up, ever the proper little prince. "If you think your abilities are sharp enough without the practice, then I will trust your judgement." His voice was a little rougher and a little quieter from his sleepiness, but he sure knew how to make it as grating as possible. "I merely thought you might be slightly rusty with this particular activity. I know you've engaged in decapitation via knightmare, but to my knowledge, you have never done it with your own hand."

Suzaku would not be baited into stabbing him with a fork. He shoved his last piece of waffle into his mouth and chewed it violently, enacting the anger he felt towards his king upon it. "I don't need beheading practice because I'm not beheading you. We never agreed on that."

"You accepted the sword," Lelouch pointed out, pretending to take another sip of coffee even though Suzaku knew damn well the cup was empty.

"Yeah, to stab you. Not to cut off your head."

"I fail to see the distinction." He swirled his non-existent espresso around in its cup, refusing to meet Suzaku's eyes. "And I would prefer it this way. It would, I think, make for a more fitting conclusion."

It didn't matter what Lelouch preferred, because Lelouch wouldn't be the one holding the sword, Lelouch wouldn't be able to complain once he was dead, and Suzaku would rip the walls of Lelouch's heart open so quickly that he'd bleed to death before he could process the fact that his head was still on his shoulders. Without a further word, Suzaku rose, bowed in half-formality and half-mockery, and went to make preparations for the rehearsal.

He never dreamt about the moment it would finally be over. It was more accurate to say that he never dreamt about anything these days, really; if his mind tormented itself with nightmares, they were blissfully wiped from his awareness the moment his eyes opened. There was enough misery in the waking world, he guessed. No need for additional self-pity.

But he couldn't keep it out of his imagination, the image of Lelouch on his knees, half-dead and waiting for the end to come. The sight of the blade revealing the bone in Lelouch's neck, his headless corpse remaining upright for a startling moment before toppling over. Someone in the crowd reaching for his head as it rolled and thumped, claiming it as a prize, the frenzied and elated people of Free Britannia clawing out his eyes and stomping them with a sickening squish upon the concrete. Suzaku—Zero, by then—walking over and extending his hand to the mob, the grateful masses handing him back the mutilated head so that he could hold it aloft and enjoy the well-earned cheers. The sword still in his other hand, coated in blood and dotted with strands of black hair. Turning back and towering over a trembling Nunnally. Her staring up at him as though he were a stranger, her eyes briefly fixating upon her brother's frozen expression before they shut again, this time for good. One of Lelouch's pre-recorded Zero speeches blaring from the speakers, Suzaku forced to make his dumbass hand movements while swinging around his friend's decapitated head like a tennis racquet.

Suzaku had watched beheadings before, and the viscerally revolting sight of a dead man in pieces never left his mind. He had seen it first when he was a child, young and with a romantic notion of violence. Japan in the days of his father's rule had been a chaotic mixture of two impulses, neither of which could survive the other. There was the modernizing strand, the desire for validation and approval, the need to gain Britannia's respect by proving that Japan, too, was technologically advanced and its people were intelligent and sophisticated. Pushed against that was the frantic need to reject the culture of the fleet that menaced their waters, the retreat into tradition and nationalist myth lest the history of Japan be left to die by its own people.

It was a confused state of affairs, and as a young boy, Suzaku had not fully understood the politics or the symbolism behind his father's choices. All he knew was that his father had re-instituted an ancient and noble form of capital punishment, one that the old emperor had ended in his much-hated purge of Japanese tradition. Suzaku's father had led the coup that ended the imperial era—the emperor had been a puppet, Suzaku had always been told, a Britannian plant ready to sell the country for money and mistresses—and to keep Kururugi Genbu's supporters happy, this had been one of the reforms of the new, better, more Japanese Japan. Suzaku knew what the method entailed and had been fascinated by old tales about it. Fallen heroes, out of disgrace or a need to make themselves a bridge towards peace, took their swords and shoved them into their guts. Their faithful companions, not wanting their friends to suffer, would lop off their heads before the agonizing pain of disembowelment could register.

At the age of eight Suzaku had begged his father to allow him to watch the execution of a field marshal found guilty of espionage, wanting in on the excitement. Todo had told Suzaku to leave; it was, he said, wrong to think of executions as spectacles. But the Prime Minister supposed that war would soon come to Japan's shores. Better, he said, if the boy learns what death is now. He'll be seeing plenty of it soon enough. And so he watched.

Suzaku never asked to see it again.

He did see it again, though. Not in Area 11 or the Empire's homeland—it was not one of Britannia's preferred methods of execution. Electrocutions were less bloody and more painful, both traits more appropriate for crowds of genteel civilians gathered to watch moments of death for entertainment. The fatal shock collars tended to smoke once it was all over, the dead man's head lolling forward, eyes open and empty, his corpse halted from hitting the floor by the chains that held him even in death. Brutal but not gory, that's how Britannians liked it.

In Europe, though, they were quite fond of the old-fashioned way. The dukes of Britannia's European territories had condemned every traitor and turncoat to death by beheading, from subversive journalists to deserting soldiers. Suzaku and Julius had been made to watch a mass execution of collaborators days after their arrival in Romania, their hosts supposing that the grim display would prove intimidating and impressive. It was neither. The executors had axes, not swords, and their prisoners did not die in a single blow. Three, four, ten strikes to the throat were needed to separate the head from the shoulders, the victims' screams emerging through the wounds in their necks all the while.

Julius had not looked at the men as they died. He preferred watching the next prisoners in line, studying their hands as they trembled in their bindings, their mouths open in horror as they listened to the last moments of their fellow collaborators. But Suzaku had forced himself to stare at the whole bloody scene, engraving it into his mind. The European dukes were his allies. They all served the same master, whether their motives were pure or power-hungry. He was not an executioner that day, but standing in silence as the killings took place was perhaps just as bad and twice as cowardly. You are part of this, Lelouch snarled in his memory.

It was the truth. He watched as the axe broke the final strands of tissue connecting the last prisoner's head to her corpse, her unvoiced scream frozen on her face.

Suzaku dressed and returned to the grand hall, preferring to wait alone instead of joining the Emperor as he readied himself. He and Lelouch had been spending more time together as of late, not as king and ghost-knight but as friends. For one last summer, for one last moment, they could manage the terrifying thrill of open hearts. Back when they were boys, neither of them had been able to acknowledge summer's slow fade into fall, the inevitable decay that awaited their happiness. They knew better now, the world having turned all their leaves to shades of red, but still they allowed themselves to reach for each other's hands, sharing fears and memories and heartaches and what little joy they still had.

But it was a bit hard to make friendly banter with someone while envisioning their head falling off their shoulders. Stabbing had been easier to digest, somehow. Maybe he was just desensitized to it, having inflicted his first fatal wound as a boy and inflicting many more in the years since.

He was mildly surprised to find CC waiting for him. She was clutching her stuffed toy, looking dead-eyed and distant as always, demonstrating no enthusiasm whatsoever for playing the role of the shocked civilian chorus. But she was here anyway, out of some sense of obligation to see things through or some hopeless love for someone who could never return it. The two of them weren't so different, really, and so he collapsed onto the chaise lounge beside her. CC was the last person who would ever ask him are you alright, Suzaku? and force him to put on a happy face in reply. She knew he would never be alright. There was little sympathy between them, but there was a sense of understanding, and Suzaku had always found the latter more palatable than the former.

"Lelouch wants me to behead him," he said by way of greeting, CC refusing to shift her plushie to allow him more leg room. "He says it'll make for a better ending."

A scoff accompanied by a mirthless smile was her only response for a long moment, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room seeming too loud and too literal. "He's probably afraid," she finally added, tightening her hold on Cheese-kun, squeezing the thing so tightly that its head seemed to burst at the seams. Suzaku looked away, his waffles sitting uneasily in his stomach. "Stupid child. He thinks he's the only one clever enough to come up with these ideas."

"Afraid of what?"

She said nothing in return, handing over Cheese-kun and placing it on Suzaku's lap. He wrapped his arms around it without further thought, letting CC run her fingers through his hair as he shut his eyes and begged his nausea to subside.

Chapter Text

The table read for The Zero Requiem took place at two conference tables pushed together, artisan mini donuts and sourdough bread arranged in baskets at regular intervals for the actors to enjoy at their leisure. A tablecloth with tasteful geometric swirls protected the wood from crumbs.

Satisfied with the dimensions, materials, and lighting of the floats, Lelouch happily took his seat at the head of the table, distributing scripts to those present. Jeremiah sat at his left hand, Suzaku at his right. CC, accompanied again by Cheese-kun, pointedly refused to open her script and flatly stated that her role called for improvisation. Lelouch narrowed his eyes but allowed it, instructing everyone else to turn to page one.

UNIMPORTANT PRISONER 1 ("TAMAKI"):

A sunny day for executions. 
It seems the gods themselves mock our fate
As they shine down upon this tyrant,
Blessing him with skies of blue, and we
Are made to gaze upon his splendor.

IMPORTANT PRISONER 1 ("TODO"):

Never is the favor of the gods 
So clear, nor can man predict his fate
By leaves of tea or entrails or the 
Shape of clouds in the sky. Courage, now!
I hold onto hope until the end.
See how I still draw breath in my chains—
The King has not defeated us yet.

"The meter is bad," CC complained, folding her script into a lumpy flower. "Isn't it meant to rhyme?"

Amelia, the geassed maid playing the role of Important Prisoner (various), stared vacantly at CC and waited for the Emperor to allow her to resume the reading. Lelouch had chosen her for this exercise because she had a background as an actress, Suzaku guessed. Lelouch had read Amelia's biography to him one night, gleefully discussing her scandalous love life, her arguments with costars, her propensity for pouring drinks over the heads of her enemies. Ordinarily Lelouch could not bear losing the title of the most-dramatic person in the room, but Amelia's current brainwashed state rendered her a permanent second place in the melodrama contest. Her voice was fine, if unsuited for the role of Todo, who neither spoke in English poetic verse nor knew what tea leaf divination was. Also, he was not a thirty-year-old blonde woman.

Lelouch squinted up at his witch with evident displeasure. "The meter is quite fine, in my opinion. And blank verse has been well-known for at least four centuries, though it may have been a novelty in your youth." He straightened his back, trying to regain his dignity. "Now, I would ask for all participants to be silent unless they are voicing their lines or improvisations. List all complaints in the notes section of your script, and we will discuss them at the end of the reading. Continue, Amelia and Winston."

Winston, Lelouch's similarly-brainwashed butler, had an elegant and stately voice. Suzaku supposed he must have possessed a theater background, too, because he gesticulated and inflected his tone as he went along. Lelouch followed, putting on his booming Emperor voice and leaping out of his chair to more properly accommodate his hand movements. Jeremiah matched his liege's enthusiasm and timbre, so fully losing himself in his role that he clambered atop the table while giving a monologue. CC and Suzaku stared at each other from across the table in mutual silent misery. Zero did not appear until two-thirds of the way through the script, and the civilian chorus had no reason to be shocked until their savior's arrival.

Suzaku grabbed a mini donut and ripped it in half, then in quarters, then in eighths. CC took issue with Morrigan's weak portrayal of the disgruntled civilian chorus and decided to take on the role herself, flicking breadcrumbs towards Lelouch as he desperately tried to ignore her. By the forty-minute mark, they'd reached the point where Lelouch had given his evil speech about world domination and the list of the prisoners' names and crimes had been read by Jeremiah.

[Trumpets blare, heralding the anthem of Britannia. Before the orchestra can play, a mysterious figure appears on the horizon.]

ANNOUNCER:

And now the end arrives. Hail, all hail!
Lelouch the King has said his part, now
Those more brave than wise must face their fates.
Illuminate the spotlights! Cameras,
At the ready! History is here!
                                —But what is this?

VIRTUOUS SOLDIER:

Who is this creature who is so bold
As to stand against the King of All?
Steady, men! Wait, and hold your fire,
Lest we strike down the Hope of Nations.

BLOODTHIRSTY SOLDIER:

This is no messenger of the Lord!
As for me and mine, we serve the throne,
And whatever man sits himself there.
For Britannia and her glory—
Unleash hell upon this challenger!

[Cameras focus upon the mysterious figure, who is revealed to be ZERO, thought long-dead. Dodging the fire of the BLOODTHIRSTY SOLDIER's men, he moves so quickly and elegantly that he seems inhuman. He runs towards THE DEMON EMPEROR, indomitable and unstoppable, pursued by bullets.]

JEREMIAH:

Cease your fire! I will claim his blood!

[In an incredible display of athleticism, ZERO pushes past JEREMIAH, coming to stand before THE DEMON EMPEROR in a few quick leaps. The king attempts to shoot the hero, but his gun is batted aside. The two face each other as the world watches with bated breath.]

"Before the demon can utter a word of protest," Lelouch continued in his narrator voice, "Zero unsheathes his jeweled sword, the very one that has come to represent the excess and cruelty of the throne. The crowd watches in silence, half of them praying for Zero's success and the other half too stunned to feel either hope or fear. With a single fluid motion, Zero lunges forward, impaling the king through his heart. He withdraws the sword and the Emperor collapses onto his knees, with—the shocked civilian chorus is meant to speak here, CC."

"We are too shocked to speak." At least a dozen torn pieces of bread now speckled the table, with one decorating Lelouch's hair. Suzaku would have reached out and retrieved it, but that would have required looking at Lelouch while he was fantasizing about his own death at Suzaku's hands. So Suzaku focused on his mini-donuts instead, mashing them into sad chocolate-flavored piles.

With a deep-chested clearing of the throat, Lelouch continued: "He withdraws the sword and the Emperor collapses onto his knees, with Zero standing before him. The bloodied sword is readied in the air, the crowd watching its motion as the world seems to stand still. Finally, the hands of time move forward, and Zero—"

"I'm not beheading you," Suzaku interjected, grabbing Lelouch's script from his hand. He clicked open his pen, scribbling out the next lines before his mind could fully absorb the horrific imagery dressed up in flowery language, replacing them with the straightforward Zero watches him die.

Wasn't that enough? Wouldn't it haunt him as it was? Why did he need to remember Lelouch only as a butchered corpse?

Lelouch examined the changes in silence, a frown developing on his face. "Watches him die? A hero does not watch. A hero acts."

"I'll act by stabbing you to death," he tried again, the futility of it all raising his blood pressure. He crumpled up his script, its paper tearing at the center. "I'll be doing all the acting after you leave your problems behind, Your Majesty."

A long-suffering sigh was Lelouch's only response. He crossed his legs beneath the table, fixing Suzaku with his most insufferable imperial gaze, nose raised and lips pressed together. "I believe you agreed to this plan, beheading notwithstanding, and found my role in the play satisfactory. Why are you being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian at such a late hour?"

Suzaku's script was now a dense ball of paper scraps, which he laid on the table so as to prevent himself from shoving it down Lelouch's throat. My role in the play, like this was a game, like this wasn't the end of his life. Like Suzaku wouldn't have to stare at that bloodied sword every fucking day, Lelouch's fine hair still stuck to it, as it was proudly displayed as a symbol of divine justice. "You weren't open to any other options, Lelouch. The moment we started this, you decided that you had to die." And maybe it was fair, certainly it was just, but it had not been a choice freely offered. There was no alternative to death in the king's eyes, no atonement other than blood given in return for blood spilled. Suzaku, as always, merely found himself following the path laid out for him—because who else would do this, if not him? Who else could Lelouch trust with his life, his death, his legacy?

Who else was left? Who else had been there in the first place, really?

Distressed by the notion of listening to his lord's private affairs, Jeremiah grabbed a donut and began munching on it loudly, expounding upon its virtues to a dispassionate Winston.

"I thought we were past this by now." Lelouch looked away from him, towards his script, then decided to drive in the knife. "You know you could never have endured my continued existence after everything that I've done."

"I could have tried," he said, hating the choked sound in his voice. "You never gave me the chance."

"This would pair well with milk, though lactose has been upsetting my stomach as of late. What are your feelings on dairy alternatives? Almond milk is a bit sweet for my taste," Jeremiah confided to Winston, "and oat milk also has a strange flavor to my tongue. Cashew milk, now! That is the drink of kings! Very expensive, but smooth and creamy. Pairs well with savory meals and desserts."

Lelouch went silent then, pretending to re-read the script. He'd spent a lot of time on it, typing out thousands of words per hour whenever a fit of inspiration struck him. Suzaku had watched this with a sort of detached curiosity at first, supposing that this was one of his strange coping mechanisms—this was, after all, the little boy who walked through the outskirts of a bombed-out village, past piles of corpses and dismembered limbs, and said hey, Suzaku, did I ever tell you about orcs? Everything in Lelouch's life had to be a drama, a play, something that had a meaning. Some story that had an ending that made it all worth it.

But now Suzaku wished that he'd thrown the damn thing in the trash before Lelouch had lost himself to his own tragedy, or sat him down and forced him to write a different final act. Maybe he would have listened if Suzaku had said the ending doesn't have to be happy, but I think it can be better than this.

"I'll do my part," he whispered, staring down at his destroyed script. "I'll end it. Don't ask any more of me than that."

The brainwashed servants stared blankly at their king, waiting for him to command them to resume, but still he said nothing. In desperation Jeremiah turned to CC, waving his donut in the air. "My good lady! I have heard it said that our peasant ancestors had excellent dental strength due to a lack of sugar in their diet. Pray tell, is it true? If sugar is so detrimental to a healthy smile, I must eliminate it from my meals at once!"

CC rose from her seat, walked over to Suzaku, and plopped Cheese-kun into his lap. Too exhausted to use it as a stress toy, he leaned his forehead into it instead, closing his eyes and counting his breaths. With a pat of his head, CC returned to her seat, where she resumed her attempts to decorate Lelouch with baked goods.

10:00 - Technical rehearsals of crucial scenes (Act I, scene iii; Act II, scenes i and iv; Act III, scenes iii and v; Acts IV and V, scenes iv and v). Determine actor positions, ideal lighting, etc

10:30 - Review cues, actor entrances and exits, framing. Use cameras to test different compositions. Take notes and implement suggestions

11:00 - Determine ideal setups for each scene from notes. Note: may be changed upon later review of footage, necessitating second round of rehearsals for some scenes

11:30 - Break

It was meant to be an X, a simple stage indicator made of blue painter's tape, but the shape resembled more of a cross.

Standing together in the spotlight like two dancers in a ballroom, Suzaku and Lelouch stared down at the spot beneath them. By this time next week, it would be covered in Lelouch's blood. It would probably remain like that, bloodstained and never cleaned, moved into a museum or a memorial somewhere.

If Lelouch got his way, that bloodstain would be the last known trace of his existence, the final proof that he'd ever been a human made of mortal stuff. The other remains of his body, bones and skin and blood and sinew and what little fat was left in him, were all to be destroyed. A public cremation was the plan, his funeral pyre arranged before an enraptured and cheering audience as they prayed for his permanent descent into hell. The ash and shards of bone that remained were to be ground up, poured into a hundred separate bottles, and deposited in a hundred undisclosed locations, all but one of them appropriately dramatic places to seal a demon's restless spirit. An underwater vent, a volcano, the Mariana Trench, and a hole bored into a glacier were among the resting spots chosen by the king himself. Suzaku found him slumped over his planing notebook two nights ago, and he had been unable to resist a glance at the page as he carried Lelouch's mumbling body into bed. Flower fields in Oshino village (take care to avoid disturbing the sunflower roots), the final entry read, and at that Suzaku had felt so numb that he'd sat beside Lelouch on the bed, sleepless and shivering in the cold above the blankets.

Suzaku watched passively as Lelouch fiddled with the lighting, making sure that the spotlights were arranged precisely on the cross he intended to die on. "So, let's take it from where we left off. I will fall to my knees before you," he said, getting into the proper position, prompting inappropriate comments from CC, "or I'll try to, at least. If I'm not able to stay upright, you'll need to pull me up by the hair. And then you will strike off my head with a single swipe of the blade."

"I'm not beheading you," Suzaku said again, trying to keep his voice flat. It still wasn't worth arguing about—Lelouch would be too dead to complain about his method of execution, and if Suzaku lied to him here, said yeah, fine, but I'll need a different sword to do it, this one is for stabbing and not for slashing, moron, then the matter could be dropped and he wouldn't have to spend another moment imagining Lelouch's headless corpse, his eyeless face. But they'd promised to have no more lies between them, and Suzaku was not going to break that promise so close to the end. "Why are you so set on this?"

"It will prove to the people that I am in fact dead. There can be no doubt about it. We cannot have conspiracies that this is all just a stage play." Morrigan, a froglike guard with a background in photography, removed a wooden panel on the float behind them so as to capture a cleaner picture of the scene.

"Lelouch, I'm going to tear open your heart. You'll bleed to death within a minute. Your corpse will prove that you're dead."

"Ah, my corpse. That reminds me—Winston!" Lelouch hollered, drawing his obedient servant's immediate attention. "Fetch your laptop. Research how quickly a fresh corpse burns when doused in oil, when doused in gasoline, and when raw."

"Raw, Your Majesty?"

"When undoused."

CC pushed Morrigan away from his camera, using the opportunity to take glamor shots of Cheese-kun on the Emperor's plush seat.

Suzaku noted several issues with the scene composition for the climax of The Zero Requiem, aside from the beheading itself. 

It was the kneeling that bothered him more than anything. The thought of Lelouch dying at his feet felt wrong, mostly because Suzaku knew that somewhere in Lelouch's strange, dramatic mind he meant it as a form of penance for the harms he'd inflicted upon his friend. You've won, Lelouch would think, collapsed at Suzaku's feet. You slayed the dragon. You got your revenge.

It was an argument they'd had many times before. None of the late-night promises or the slow reconciliations or the open conversations had shaken Lelouch's firm belief that Suzaku wanted him dead, ideally in a public and painful way. Even as he and Suzaku shared a bed or a joke or an oath, that thought was lodged somewhere in the king's brain. Suzaku had come close to throttling him over it once, in the early days of their partnership. He'd grabbed Lelouch by the collar, shouting at him, why can't you understand that it's more complicated than that? Why can't you believe me?, and the Emperor sneering in reply, who are you trying to convince, Suzaku? Yourself?

The fight was a futile one. There was no getting through the wall of Lelouch's self-loathing: as long as he believed that death was the only atonement left to him, he would believe that Suzaku thought the same. Suzaku supposed that he should have understood that more than anyone, and it was at least true that Lelouch had done plenty to deserve the grave. But Lelouch had rejected the same argument born of Suzaku's self-pity long ago, denying his friend his chosen death, and that was a debt that needed to be repaid. Maybe he couldn't change the script's conclusion, but he could make sure that it ended as it had begun, the two of them side-by-side, equal and opposite, heart to bleeding heart. Not with one bowing his head to the other in apology like a condemned martyr.

Twice he'd had Lelouch on his knees before him in defeat. The second time, mere months and millions of deaths ago, had been more of the same. Suzaku had called Lelouch to the shrine to force him to surrender the truth, not surrender his dignity. But Lelouch could not bring himself to give up the former and so he offered up the latter, supposing that Suzaku would be satisfied by the humiliation of his enemy. And if kneeling on the ground made it easier for him to avoid meeting Suzaku's eyes, then that had been a happy bonus.

The first had come a year before that, in the ruins of their friendship, and this time it had not been voluntary. Even as he was pinned to the floor, his limbs being violently tied together with Suzaku's full body weight pressing into his ribs, Lelouch refused to acknowledge that he'd lost. His eyes were impotent against Suzaku, his gun and his red queen long gone, and so words were his only remaining weapon. "Your comrades gunned down hundreds of civilians after a single order from a crazed woman. Those idiots in the stadium trusted your brothers-in-arms to be the security for their little segregated ghetto, and they turned on their charges in seconds. And even now, you're fighting beside them." Suzaku said nothing in response, tightening the bindings, Lelouch's hands going bone-white as their blood circulation was restricted. "You think you're the good guy here? You are part of this. You've already decided that every one of those deaths was acceptable, and now you've decided that my sister's life—"

"I'm taking you to your father," Suzaku had said, unwilling to let Lelouch force him into an argument. His head had been clearer then, the rage slowly leaving his mind, something colder and more rational remaining in its wake. Lelouch's mouth snapped shut as he realized that he no longer had any hold over Suzaku's heart. Neither friendship nor hatred could move him now. Now, Suzaku was the same as any other Britannian soldier, the same as any of the Emperor's other loyal servants, choosing the powerful king over his exiled son, one the representation of godly power on earth and the other a pawn to be used and discarded.

All that stood between Suzaku and a faceless man wearing Britannia's colors was Lelouch's curse festering in his blood. Were Suzaku anyone else, Lelouch would have ordered him to remove his restraints, to free him, to join him as a slave. But in dooming Suzaku he had freed him, and it was too late for either of them to fix that mistake.

Suzaku pulled Lelouch onto his knees, clasping the final straps in place. Lelouch's eyes flashed hurt and then rage and then went blank in defeat, and he said nothing more until he was laid before the throne.

1:00 - Finalize logistics and any changes to script, scene composition, etc. Document ideal positions of lighting, props, etc. Bring in crowd of extras and assign them to their appropriate areas

2:00 - Set up stage for rehearsal with full scenery. Change into costumes, prepare hair and makeup (if applicable). Note: hair and makeup may be more complicated on day of performance; simplified versions of some styles e.g. for Amelia's braided bun, will be used today for expediency

3:00 - Dress rehearsal

By some miracle or by means of Suzaku's persistent and increasingly-violent refusal to abide by the script, Lelouch agreed to put the beheading matter aside for the moment, acknowledging that the kneeling at least was ill-fitting. He returned to the conference tables, collecting everyone's note sections and amending the script to incorporate their feedback. Morrigan and Winston put the final touches on the stage setup as Jeremiah barked orders at the geassed extras; Amelia sat in a salon chair as CC conducted strange experiments with hairspray and barrettes.

Suzaku had shut himself in the dressing room, staring at Zero's suit and helmet, unable to bring himself to put it on his body. He had already done it twice, both times during fittings; Lelouch had sewn the entire suit himself, meticulously taking Suzaku's measurements and swapping out the shiny material of the original for something more natural and fit for physical exercise. Even then it had felt unsettling, like he had flayed Lelouch open and stepped into his skin. But Suzaku needed to believe the world could be saved, and Lelouch needed to believe he could save Suzaku, and this was the mutually-miserable intersection of those goals.

Dressing himself in the suit now was claustrophobic and stomach-churning, the inevitable becoming real much too quickly. Zero's helmet was the same one that Lelouch had first worn to save Suzaku from his execution, and now Lelouch would stare at its blank mask as he met his end. No amount of cleaning had managed to rid its interior of the faint smell of grapeseed, the scent of Lelouch's shampoo, the air that Suzaku had breathed in nearly every night for the past month and a half, his face pressed to the crown of the king's head.

Well. Time to get it over with.

He felt like an idiot as he walked out of the room, everyone's eyes turning to watch Zero stride across the room. Their attention made him self-conscious of his posture, the distance between his steps, the line of his shoulders. No one would ever believe that he was the man who had riled Japan to resistance. But Lelouch said that it didn't matter. Zero had only ever been an idea, and ideas were shapeless and changeable by nature.

Lelouch was making last-minute changes to the scene before the dress rehearsal began, ordering his underlings to carry this prop and to adjust that light, brimming with far too much energy for someone planning his own public assassination. He always performed his role as the Demon Emperor admirably, presenting himself as the cold, unflinching, unfeeling despot every day. As his execution date drew nearer, though, his behavior around the subject was starting to seem a bit like…

"Mania," CC supplied, coming to stand beside him. "Marianne had a touch of it herself. More than a touch, I suppose, but she was at least funny about it. This is too pathetic for me to find humor in it." Suzaku could say nothing in reply, because it was true, but the alternative—Lelouch falling into depression, unable to lose himself in work, silently waiting for the blade to free him from life—seemed worse. "That silly list he made of his bottles of ash," she continued, "do you know where it is?"

It was in the secret drawer in Lelouch's dresser, the one where he hid anything that contained information regarding his plans or emotions or past, lest someone break in and uncover evidence of his humanity. Suzaku gave a curt nod, refusing to speak; he hated the sound of the tone-adjusting mechanism, the way it made him seem as though he'd stolen Lelouch's voice along with his life.

"Good. Write the location down for me so I can find it. I'll put it back before he knows it's gone, but I want to make a copy as a souvenir."

The ballistic gel dummies were wheeled back into storage, unharmed and unused, and the dress rehearsal began. Suzaku sat offstage, waiting for his cue and trying to ignore the actors' lines as they extolled the Emperor's cruelty, as they prayed for his death, as they hoped for a hero to save them.

Lelouch's voice boomed, prisoners were condemned, the trumpet blared. Zero emerged. Blank rounds were fired at his feet, but he pressed onwards and upwards, towards his prey. Leaping over the blank-faced shocked civilian chorus and the group of extras, Zero reached the cross on the ground, shoving the gun aside, staring at his friend face-to-face with a mask between them.

Zero aimed his blunt wooden blade at Lelouch's heart, holding it there for a long moment. A red spot bloomed around it on the Emperor's robes, pasta sauce standing in for the blood that would be shed. Lelouch collapsed against him in a lover's embrace, quiet and heavy, intimately romantic despite the gathered onlookers and the smell of tomato and onion.

"Aren't you supposed to say something," Suzaku whispered, the voice modulator distorting his tone, "or are you going to go without any final words?"

"I just wrote out some lines, but they're not quite right," he admitted, still refusing to pull away. "Too much pathos, and CC was not entirely wrong about the meter being off. I'll work on it until it's perfect."

Then he stumbled forward, looking beneath him to ensure he wasn't about to trip, and slid down the wall of the float.

THE DEMON EMPEROR quietly, to ZERO:

I will burden you with one last wish,
If that geass you will accept. Live,
Old foe, remain upon this cruel earth
Where you have endured such pain
At my hands and at the hands of fate.
For beneath the hate, the tears, the grim
Sadness and the death, there are fields of
Flowers, and grins of children, and in
The sky, a sun that shines above all
Darkness. Now, my part has ended, and
I will never see such sights again.
So you must survive, for the both of 
Us, and watch over the world in my
Stead, my sword, my knight—my truest friend.

[THE DEMON EMPEROR slides down the wall, leaving a trail of blood across the flag of Britannia in his wake. The murmurs of the crowd rise as they realize what they've just witnessed. Chants and shouts of joy begin as the king takes his final breaths. He lies collapsed beside his sister, NUNNALLY, who is on the float beneath the main stage.]

THE DEMON EMPEROR dying, to NUNNALLY:

The last grain of sand falls. Dear sister,
You need not forgive my harm and hurt,
But I ask that you remember me
As I was, by your bedside, by your
Heart, for nowhere else did I call home.
Demon may I have been, but I was
Your brother first, and at the very end.

Yes, I destroy worlds—and create them
Anew—

                                             [He dies.]

Chapter Text

Satisfied by the flow and the setup of the most important scene of his life and death, Lelouch adjourned the dress rehearsal, thanking Jeremiah and his spellbound helpers for their service. He did not thank CC or Suzaku, but it was their company he left in.

CC wandered into the palace with her plushie, which had endured such squeezing at Suzaku's hands that it was now fraying at the seams. She complained of fatigue and irritation and Lelouch had accepted this without an argument, leaving her free to make photocopies or plans or whatever chaos she was up to. Suzaku refused to lose himself to guesswork, tried to shield his heart from hope. He knew about the spot near Lelouch's clavicle, the one that felt oddly cool to the touch, indistinct from the rest of his skin but undeniably strange all the same. Lelouch swore he had no answer for it, and Suzaku believed him. But maybe there was a chance for—something more. Something that made the story worth reading.

Hell, he was starting to think like Lelouch. There were inevitable side effects when it came to wearing his alter ego's skin for two hours, he guessed. Hopefully Zero's helmet would let Suzaku absorb his intelligence along with his insanity and preference for convoluted metaphors.

Suzaku had shed that skin for the time being, putting Zero's costume back on its hangar until it was time for the final performance. He now played the role of only himself, a teenage boy in sweatpants and a syrup-stained shirt, lounging in the gardens on a wool blanket that Arthur had halfway destroyed. The grass beneath him was soft enough to act as a blanket on its own; it was lovingly tended-to by the devoted palace gardeners despite their king's loud protests against irresponsible water usage and the very concept of lawns. But Lelouch feared ticks and ants and crawling things in general, and so it was Suzaku's duty, as a knight or a friend, to protect him.

"Well. It's just the two of us now," Lelouch said, collapsing beside Suzaku on the blanket. He had also disposed of his costume in favor of simpler attire, sending the pristine white robes into laundry service to rid them of their blood-sauce. The sun had nearly set, dinner an unappetizing prospect for the both of them. The gardens were walled and manned with guards, robotic and human, but it afforded them a rare look at the unclouded sky. They had taken to stargazing as of late, allowing themselves these small, temporary moments in which something tender could survive.

"Same as ever."

They sat in silence for a while, Lelouch closing his eyes, his knight remaining alert but allowing the tension to drain from his shoulders. Just for a moment. And then Lelouch said into the stillness: "Do you remember the last time we had such a romantic evening under the stars before we got separated? I told you about the Lord of the Rings, and you looked at me like I had three heads."

...he did. Romantic was an odd way of putting it, but there had been love in that night, at least.

When they were boys, Lelouch had obsessively listened to the radio, checking the nationalist talk stations for rumors and general sentiment. The Britannian companies that had moved into Tokyo a few decades ago were already frequent targets of protests and acts of sabotage in those days, with some of their employees being met by outright attacks or kidnappings. Wealthy Britannian landowners who owned summer homes along Japan's coast were the next targets on the list, their vacation spots being perceived as laying claim to a future corner of the Empire—correctly, as it turned out.

As the drumbeats of war grew louder, ordinary Britannian expats and travelers found themselves shunned or worse. The people of Japan could no longer afford to extend kindness to their future colonizers, not when Britannian settlements were built over the ruins of well-behaved and peaceful populations. For those Japanese civilians wise enough to understand that any war between their nation and the imperial machine would not end in their favor, making the country inhospitable for Britannians was the best pre-emptive strike they could think of. And so they allowed the radio hosts to whip them into a frenzy with their talk of Britannian men taking Japanese wives, of integration and language-erasure, of the secret plans to turn Izumo-taisha into a church. They traveled as a mob, their numbers growing every week. Fifteen Britannians had been stabbed to death the week before the invasion alone, ten men, three women, and two children.

There were plenty of whispers in town about the true identities of the two kids who had been holed up at the Kururugi Shrine for a few months. The government had given no official notice of their existence, no acknowledgement of their parentage or status. If the people knew that the Prime Minister was hosting two of the Emperor's young children at his family's ancestral home, more than a few of them would have staged an invasion, grabbing the kids in a last-ditch attempt at hostage negotiation, laboring under the delusion that the king cared about his exiled son and crippled daughter. Suzaku had been tormented by nightmares and anxiety dreams about the two siblings being kept in a cold cellar, a gun to Lelouch's head, Nunnally trembling in the corner. The Britannian embassy on the phone, the kidnappers making their demands, turn your fleet around or we will stake their hearts to your door. The message being transmitted to the Emperor with a bland detachment, the king saying: kill them, then, the sound of gunshots. Suzaku standing there, unbound but unable to move, staring down at their corpses as the walls closed in.

He'd slept with a knife under his pillow in those days. A gun was hidden in one of the terra cotta pots in the storage shed, concealed by a layer of fake grass. Suzaku had stolen it from Todo's collection and had taken Lelouch into the forest for target practice. Just in case, he'd said. Just in case he wasn't there when the mob inevitably came for them. Lelouch would need to ward them off, just long enough for Suzaku to save them. And he would come running, no matter what. He'd promised that no harm would come to them.

Lelouch had believed him.

After Suzaku's patricide and the riotous week that followed, the country seething in the unexplained absence of its leader as Kururugi Genbu lay dying in a hospital bed, the inevitable happened. The shrine itself, the main house, had been guarded. By incompetence or malice, the small shed hosting the property's most precious gifts had only Suzaku and a small gun for security.

Suzaku had been in the shed that night, unable to bring himself to enter his home with its bloodstained floor and its servants with pained expressions and his father's colleagues who knew but said nothing. He'd heard them coming, their voices distant but audible from a mile away, heard what they were saying as they got closer: a boy and a girl, they say that the girl is paralyzed, it will be easy, just grab her and carry her off—

He'd gone to rouse Lelouch, bile rising in his throat, but Lelouch had already been awake. He'd heard the voices, too. They stood there in the darkness, adrenaline flowing through their joined hands.

Neither of them had trusted the staff of the shrine to keep them safe. The members of Parliament holed up inside its walls argued constantly, none of them sure what to do in the wake of their leader's death, a third of them arguing for a continuation of his demand to fight until the last man dropped, another third demanding an immediate surrender to the forces they could not beat, the final third looking for some miraculous leverage and negotiation to halt the invasion. The maids and clerks and interns followed roughly the same proportions, though more of them tended towards the latter option, their hungry eyes glancing towards the derelict shack that stood a few feet away.

So they'd fled, Suzaku carrying a sleepy Nunnally on his shoulders, Lelouch carrying a gun and a sack of supplies, the three children making their way into the dark woods. They heard the men approach the shed, their voices harsh and their whispers overly-loud, cursing as they were ensnared in Lelouch's traps and found no hostages waiting for them. Suzaku had never been religious, had never prayed to the gods his family's shrine was devoted to, but in that night, huddled together with his two reasons for living, he begged for a higher power to listen. They'd made their way two miles into the woods, walking at an incline up the mountain's slope, Suzaku leading them to the old abandoned weather station there. The place had fallen out of use before Suzaku had been born, and now existed mostly for mischievous teenagers looking for a hidden place to drink and smoke. Before the war, Suzaku had taken Lelouch there, secretly hoping it would impress his new friend. But Lelouch had only glanced around the property, making a face at the smell of urine and the sight of shattered beer bottles, and said it would serve as a decent hiding spot in desperate times.

And this was the most desperate time of all. So they entered through the broken door, Lelouch holding one of his hands, Nunnally the other. The metal roof had rusted and cracked open in places, the stars peeking at them through the gaps. To soothe himself or Suzaku or all three of them, Lelouch had started talking nonsense, whispering about the Lord of the Rings and Frodo and Sam and many other things that Suzaku would not understand until much later. He had not realized, at the time, that Lelouch was trying to say goodbye.

The men left, unwilling to risk a confrontation if they tried to break into the main house; Suzaku had gone on a scouting mission in the dawn hours to ensure they were gone. But he returned to the weather station and counseled against heading back so soon, the three children remaining on the lam, fearful of the men's return. They again walked through the woods, aiming for the small village a mile further uphill, hoping that a kind older woman who often gave Suzaku candy would offer them a meal and the use of her phone. As long as they stuck to the outskirts, they convinced themselves, few people would pay them any mind. Lelouch limped, unaccustomed to so much movement, but he said nothing and soldiered on.

Two hours before noon planes screamed overhead and bombed the lookout post two miles to the northeast, setting the forest on fire. The flames spread quickly with the wind, fall's rain absent when it was needed most. They had to run to keep ahead of the smoke, praying that someone in the village would have a car, a truck, something to take them to safety; Lelouch hurriedly spoke of the arrival of his mother's patrons, swearing that all three of them would soon find shelter and peace. It was only when they came across a blackened body, curled in a boxer's stance and missing an arm, that they realized Britannia's jets had dropped a cluster bomb, its submunitions landing in the village's outskirts. The bombs had taken out the network of powerlines across the whole eastern face of the mountain, the windows in the village gone dark and silent.

More corpses and soon-to-be-corpses followed the first, the worst of the carnage surrounding a bombed-out group of old interconnected houses. Some of the villagers had run outside to help, to stare at the sky in shock, to sit with the dying as they passed on. But most of them huddled in their homes, waiting for another bomb to drop, knowing that there was nowhere to run and preferring to die on their own land.

The children walked on, Suzaku too numb to speak, face covered in ash and mind charred by the sight and smell of the burnt dead. Somehow Lelouch had summoned strength from somewhere deep inside of him, lifting Nunnally off of Suzaku's back and carrying her over his aching feet, knowing that Suzaku's burdens were already weighing him down enough. Lelouch kept talking about the damn book as they made their way through the shadows of the village outskirts, like he was expecting the end to come at any moment.

They had survived, then. But now they had reached the final pages, and there would be nothing left after the last goodbye.

"I remember, but not much of it. As Your Majesty often reminds me," Suzaku said, staring at the emerging stars, "I'm too stupid to understand books with more than three words per page."

"Alas, it is so. Perhaps you recall what it's about, at least?"

"A lord who has rings."

Lelouch gave him a rare smile, soft and fond. "The lord who has rings is this fallen angel of sorts, Sauron. The rings he makes are devices of corruption. He gives them to all the kings he can find, and they grant them great power. But inevitably they fall victim to the rings, coming to covet them, unable to part from them. So they become wraiths, servants of Sauron, who made one master ring that is linked to all the others. As long as he has that ring, he is, in essence, in control of the world. And so he rules Middle Earth until the ring is cut right off of him. That didn't kill Sauron, since he's immortal, but it did reduce him to an angry, vengeful spirit, deprived of his greatest source of power.

But all of that happened thousands of years before the story. The story is actually about this tiny man, a hobbit, named Frodo. One day, Frodo's uncle gives him this ring that he found in a pile of treasure long ago. A wizard named Gandalf comes to visit. He's also an angel—not a fallen one—but Frodo doesn't know that. He just thinks he's a cantankerous old man who makes very nice fireworks. Gandalf is the one who tells him that this ring is a terrible object, and the wraiths of Sauron are searching for it. He tells Frodo that they must leave for Rivendell, the elf city, where they'll determine what should be done with the ring. You see, it can't just be melted down. There's only one way to destroy it, and that's by throwing it into Mount Doom, the volcano where it was forged. Which is, of course, very far away and surrounded by Sauron's monsters, the orcs.

So Frodo goes to Rivendell. He's joined by his friends, including his gardener, Sam. In Rivendell they put together a team to head to Mount Doom. It includes all the warriors you'd expect, including Gandalf, but someone has to actually carry the ring. And this is a problem, because even if it's just on a chain around your neck, it will corrupt you. It's inevitable; the best man alive couldn't resist it. So Frodo is the one who carries it. It makes sense when you think about it. After all, if Gandalf got corrupted, it would be a disaster. But Frodo? What's a corrupted hobbit going to do?"

Suzaku glanced sideways at Lelouch, at the moon catching in his eyes, the dark bangs falling in his face. He did remember this part of the story—most of it, at least. Much of that ash-filled day seemed unreal and distant to him now, his memories half-formed and distorted by guilt and shock. He had wandered the ruins of the village uselessly as a shambling corpse, matching Lelouch's footsteps, his mind blank and unresponsive in the face of so much misery. Only the gentle touch of Nunnally's hand and the steady sound of Lelouch's voice had seemed real, and only that he remembered.

But there were so few words that Lelouch had left, and Nunnally would not want to wipe away the tears of her brother's killer. So Suzaku would listen to him ramble on about the book, the weather, the merits of halogen lights. Anything to prove that he was still alive. "Angrily garden?"

"Maybe build a garden of giant venus fly traps. Anyway, since Frodo's going, the other hobbits decide to go with him, and they head off on their adventure. Things go wrong almost immediately, and Frodo and Sam get separated from the rest. You'd expect them all to reunite at some point, but they never do. It's just Frodo and Sam, alone with the horrible ring, trying to make it to Mount Doom before they get killed or Frodo gets too corrupted to be saved. It's a terrible journey. They only know the direction to go in, not the exact way, and they have to go through territory swarming with orcs and other monsters. Later on, they're joined by this demented thing called Gollum, who was once a fisherman who found the ring long ago. He had been corrupted by it, and now he's barely even human, and he's lived far too long for his sanity to remain intact. He tags along with the two of them because, on his end, he wants the ring, and on their end, he knows the way to Mount Doom. As they journey on, Frodo's state worsens. He snaps at Sam. He stops smiling. He listens more and more to Gollum. The temptation to put the ring on and just disappear with it grows stronger every day.

Somehow, though, they make it there. Frodo is so pitiful on the last leg of their journey that he can't even stand anymore. He collapses while they're in sight of their goal. Sam is nearly as exhausted, but he promised to stay with Frodo to the end, and it's not the end yet. He knows that the ring has sapped Frodo of all his strength, and that Frodo can't make it any further while under its awful spell. But he can. So he says, I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you. And he slings him over his shoulder and drags him the rest of the way." Lelouch paused there for a long moment, and Suzaku said nothing about the shine of tears in his moonlit eyes. "They get to the volcano. Frodo stands over it, ready to drop the ring into the lava. But he is so weak. Physically, mentally. He can't bring himself to destroy it, and Sam can only watch as he dooms mankind. Tolkien, the author—he said that Frodo bore that burden as long as anyone could have. He got the ring as far as it was possible to go. And the hand of fate does the rest of the work, as Gollum shoots out of the darkness, trying to grab the ring. He bites off Frodo's finger, victorious... and then Gollum and the ring tumble into the lava together, and it's all over.

The furious remnants of Sauron's spirit scream and Mount Doom begins to erupt. And Sam and Frodo are still there, watching it happen, huddled beneath a rock overhang. There's nothing they can do. But they completed their task, and they are at peace with that. Sam looks into Frodo's eyes and sees that they're clear, like he's finally free of his burdens. All the things Frodo had done or said to him, even mere minutes ago, they don't matter to him at all. He's just glad he finally has his friend back. And they huddle there under the rock as the lava flows all around them, and Frodo turns to Sam and says, I'm glad you're here with me, here at the end of all things."

There was nothing Suzaku could say to that without risking his voice breaking. They looked up at the stars together, the chirps of crickets lulling them to rest. He inched closer to Lelouch, reaching for the head still attached to his body, pushing his hair out of his face, removing the stray breadcrumbs that still nestled there. Those red eyes of his may have been a burden, but Suzaku still saw the vulnerable boy that bore them, the child who desperately wanted the power to right every wrong in his world. For now, for a hundred or so hours more, he could protect that boy. "So," Suzaku finally added, because he wanted Lelouch to know that he'd listened and understood, "which one is CC? Gollum?"

Lelouch closed his eyes, softening as Suzaku's body heat warmed him. "Gollum is just a metaphor. Although it's true that she would fit the stretched-beyond-mortality-and-sense part. I would paint her as more elven, though. One of those who never left Middle Earth, slowly fading, reduced to spirits glimpsed in the woods, playing tricks on passersby, hoping in their old hearts that one might choose to stay." His voice tapered off, the drowsiness claiming him.

And at that Suzaku made to lift Lelouch up, judging him asleep by the rhythm of his breathing and the gentleness of his face, but then Lelouch spoke again. "They survived, you know. Another miracle. Giant eagles—more angels—they come and save them. But save is a relative term. Frodo, and this part I have memorized, Frodo heads to the Grey Havens, the elvish port. Sam is with him, but their journey together is over. Frodo is heading to the West, to the Blessed Lands, and there is no passage back. Sam is staying home. And Sam doesn't understand, because they had endured so much, and now there is this pain of separation after all they'd done to survive. Frodo tells him, I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. As long as Sam's part in the story goes on, he says, their journey will continue."

"God," Suzaku marveled, staring down at him, no longer caring about the tears on his face or in his words, "you love the sound of your own voice. Wasn't writing your own tragedy enough for you? You still haven't gotten the monologuing out of your system?"

"Quiet. I'm making a point, and it's this. There's a note in the appendix that Sam, once he had raised his family and lived a good long life, made the same journey West. It doesn't say what happened when he got there, but I'd like to think that they stayed together. I'd like to think that they got to be happy, after all that they'd been through."

And finally he went silent, curling onto his side.

This epilogue was not one that Suzaku remembered. Maybe Lelouch had whispered it to him as they trudged through the field of corpses, or before that, under the stars; maybe Suzaku's mind had been too grief-stricken to process the idea of an after. Or maybe Lelouch had never told him about it at all, and his premature goodbye had concluded with Sam and Frodo parting, never to see each other again. Suzaku knew that his goodbye then, as now, was never intended to be a predictor of their doom, but his own. Any outcome that led to Nunnally or Suzaku dying was unacceptable and impossible in his mind, something fundamentally at odds with the laws of reality. But Lelouch himself was expendable, if the need arose. His sister would have a protector, Suzaku would have a supporter, and the two of them could go on even if he fell behind. Even as a child, Lelouch had seen a future in which Suzaku and Nunnally walked away from his grave.

And so Suzaku supposed that the epilogue was an improvement, a concession, something offered in the hopes of meeting again. Lelouch's way of saying the book has to end, but maybe the story can go on.

Where was their version of the Blessed Lands, in Lelouch's mind? Another life? Heaven, or hell, or somewhere in between? At the very least they would meet each other again there; however souls were measured, Lelouch's weighed the same as his own, their sins and virtues equal on the karmic scale. If they suffered in the flames of hell, he supposed that was fair, so long as they were together. But maybe the West could be somewhere else, somewhere closer, some miracle at the very end, once the story was over and only notes and appendices remained. Maybe, he dared to hope, there would be an elvish boat to unite them once more, and the story would go on.

Lelouch had truly fallen asleep this time, wearied by long-winded goodbyes, dreaming of narrow roads over deep waters and the home that he'd given up. Quietly, steadily, Suzaku lifted him up and carried him to bed.