Work Text:
Suzaku kidnapped him one morning before the day could steal him away into endless meetings and mundane atrocities. It had been one of the rare nights when Lelouch actually slept in his bed, rather than buried in his books in the library or slumped over the chaise lounge in his study. Suzaku took this opportunity to rummage through Lelouch’s clothes.
He had combed through both armories and pulled out several cabinet drawers, frankly astonished by how many identical outfits someone who only had one standard dress apparently needed to own, before a groggy voice rose from the four-poster bed: “Suzaku, what on earth are you doing?”
“We’re going on a trip,” Suzaku said, not bothering to look up as he continued to paw through piles of neatly folded white and gold fabric in search of literally anything else. He was beginning to fear Lelouch no longer owned even a single T-shirt anymore.
A pause. “There are no external engagements in my itinerary for today.”
“Not official business. Just me and you.” Digging deep into the recesses of a dresser, Suzaku finally assembled enough articles of clothing to make a normal-person set of a red jacket, black turtleneck, and black slacks.
“Put these on.”
Lelouch took one look at the outfit Suzaku tossed on the bed and turned up his nose. “What? Where did you even get those?”
“Put these on, or I’ll haul you out of here right now half-naked.”
The emperor scoffed and rolled over decisively, curling deeper into the sheets.
Wordlessly, his knight tore the blanket from Lelouch’s grasp with one hand, grabbed his shoulder to force him on his back with the other hand, and promptly scooped him up and flung him over his shoulder.
Lelouch yelped and pummeled his captor’s back, but he might as well have been giving Suzaku a well-needed percussion massage with how much upper body strength he could actually muster. Lelouch was very light, and Suzaku could feel his rib cage writhing against his shoulder blades, bone to muscle, muscle to bone.
Suzaku had reached the foyer, the Emperor of the Holy Britannian Empire still thrashing like a fish on the deck of a boat and swearing like a sailor on one too, before Lelouch said, “Wait.”
Suzaku waited.
“Fine,” Lelouch spat, punctuated with one last spiteful smack. “Put me down, you brute.”
Suzaku set him down, and Lelouch threw him a withering glare, which turned into a frown when he saw what Suzaku was wearing for the day. He was in civvies: beige shirt, jeans, a long blue coat, a pair of sunglasses tucked into the breast pocket, and black combat boots. Suzaku had woken up bright and early—before the light of day and reason could convince him otherwise—to scrounge together this old outfit.
“Give me fifteen minutes,” Lelouch commanded, doing his best to storm off imposingly, barefoot and in his pajamas. He slammed the door to his private chambers shut, leaving Suzaku alone in the foyer. Suzaku waited until he heard the faint sound of a faucet running before sitting down on one of the velvet parlor chairs.
It had been almost two weeks since he had a proper conversation with Lelouch, and the exchange they had just now didn’t exactly count. Plus, Suzaku had ended their last pep talk by flinging him onto the ground and leaving C.C. to pick up the pieces. So maybe that didn’t count as a proper conversation either. But Lelouch had wavered, and Suzaku did what he had to do. He was Lelouch’s sword—in one fell swoop, his duty was to steel his emperor’s and his own resolve.
However, he was not here today, sitting in Lelouch’s drawing room at the crack of dawn, as the emperor’s sword.
In those past two weeks, Lelouch seemed to exist exclusively in the purgatory of his meetings, study, library, and war room. He pored over tomes upon tomes of political treatises, economic theories, military strategies, historical theses, social philosophies; rehearsed for every possible permutation and contingency left in the war; devised, revised, and re-revised his designs for the world to come; and ate and slept very little.
He pulled himself together properly whenever summoned to perform as the Demon Emperor, ordering the execution of political opponents with the tip of his chin or sending off former nobility, stripped of their lands and assets, to penal labor with a wave of his hand. But Lelouch would then slink away and otherwise haunted the palace like a wraith. Suzaku could never pin him down; he always had some excuse or ten prepared, would wave him away with an irritated remark about being busy with more important matters that, no, he did not trust Suzaku to help him with, and left his meals delivered from the kitchen out cold.
Lelouch had plunged himself into the short-term strategic planning for Schneizel’s defeat and the long-term reconstruction of the global political order—working and working and working so that he would not drown, or maybe so that he would. “Short term” and “long term” were both relative phrases wherein short term meant total triumph in mere weeks and long term meant Lelouch would be dead by autumn. Though with his feverish, unforgiving pace, he seemed committed to doing everything in his power to shorten even that timeline.
Suzaku dragged his hands down his face. He had spent the better part of a year nursing a wound that swallowed him whole and a hatred that calcified his heart. But something slimy and sentimental was now oozing through the cracks. He wasn’t sure how to feel about the queasy way it settled in his chest.
Was it bad that Suzaku was worried? Was it wrong? Was it a crime to care about him—his first enemy, his worst friend, and now, whatever they were to each other? It felt like some kind of betrayal. But wasn’t that all Suzaku was good for?
Fifteen minutes later on the dot, the man of the hour promptly emerged, showered and changed. He had even succeeded where Suzaku failed and found a pair of shoes that weren’t his gold-plated knee-high boots. Upon closer inspection, Suzaku realized they were probably his Ashford loafers from their coup d’état. Strange, as he had practically turned Lelouch’s room upside down and hadn’t seen his school uniform. Not that they could wear those black and gold jackets and play hooky as students ever again, but he had half-assumed Lelouch burned his set along with the imperial mausoleum, banishing just another ghost. Instead, he had kept the shoes, at the very least, stashed away somewhere for some reason.
Maybe the correct explanation was the simplest one—that Lelouch was, more times than not and if nothing else, a man of sentiment.
As Suzaku led them out of the emperor’s wing, “I’ve already told Jeremiah to reschedule all your events for today.”
Lelouch huffed. “Who died and put you in charge of all my affairs?”
“You,” Suzaku said.
No one dared to stop them as they made their way to the hangar where Suzaku unveiled a motorcycle and two helmets.
“Sorry there’s no sidecar like you’re used to,” Suzaku shrugged. “You’ll just have to share a seat with me, Your Majesty.”
“I still have no idea where you’re taking me,” Lelouch grumbled, but he accepted a helmet anyway.
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
Suzaku got on first, inserting the key into the ignition and flicking on the kill switch and starter button, the vehicle purring to life. The engine’s steady hum soothed him, so used to being half-machine.
Lelouch sat down behind him, the motorcycle dipping slightly with his weight. After a brief pause, he placed his hands on Suzaku’s waist—lightly, almost hovering. Suzaku jumped, just a little, at the way the contact zapped his skin and made something fizzle in his stomach. If Lelouch felt the ripple under his fingers, he mercifully made no comment of it.
They set off into the sleepy morning light. As Suzaku sped up, pulling back the throttle and feeling the wind rise, Lelouch tightened his hold and pressed closer to his back.
Somewhere along the way, after they sped past the walls of Emperor Lelouch’s heavily-guarded mobile compound, past the monorail lines that used to surgically divide settlement from ghetto, past the winding roads that curved along sloping green hills, where the dense thicket seemed to whisper a kind of magic that, if leaped into, would let someone escape this world for another, Suzaku realized neither of them ate breakfast.
The next available restaurant was a worn little roadside diner. Despite the tarp covering the old sign with new Japanese characters, the architecture was unmistakably Britannian, built during the occupation probably over the foundation and ruins of a building with generations of lived history. The original structure was likely replaced by some soulless, derivative fast food restaurant. Now reclaimed, but still its skeleton remained. Area 11 may be no more on paper, but years of being chewed up and spat back out in the image of the colonizer had left its teethmarks on the landscape. Scars take the shape of the wound.
Suzaku parked neatly beside the curb and placed their helmets in the underseat storage. He was not looking for a thanks nor did he receive one. Lelouch probably wouldn’t have said a word, even if he was starving. Suzaku knew a thing or two about his pride.
A proper knight would have held the door open and stepped aside for his liege lord. Suzaku, though, entered first, keeping his sunglasses on and propping the door open only long enough to hand it off to Lelouch.
They seated themselves in a corner booth, tucked away from potentially prying eyes. When the waitress came over, she gave the Britannian man seated before her a peculiar look. And then his Japanese companion on the opposite side of the table. Before she allowed herself to worry about something dangerously above her pay grade, Suzaku flashed his hopefully most disarming smile, thanked her for the menus, and asked for some tea.
When she returned a few minutes later, she set a pot of green tea in between the two diners and carefully angled her body away from the almost-certainly problematic Britannian man to give the potentially-less questionable Japanese man her full attention as she asked for his order. Not that Lelouch was paying any attention to her or the menu for that matter.
The breakfast set sounded appealing to Suzaku: steamed rice, miso soup, tamagoyaki, the catch of the day, and an assortment of side vegetables.
Lelouch stared out the window, fixed on something miles away.
“Hey,” Suzaku hissed in Japanese. “What do you want?” Most people didn’t know the Demon Emperor was fluent in the language. And their flimsy “disguises”, tasked with shielding the identities of the two most infamous eighteen year olds on the planet, needed all the reinforcements they could get.
“Coffee. Black,” said Lelouch. He didn’t spare a glance at either Suzaku or the woman.
“That’s it?” Suzaku pressed, flipping over the laminated menu to see if they even sold coffee. Lelouch certainly hadn’t checked.
“I’m not hungry.”
Suzaku sighed through his nose. “Two breakfast sets, please. Thank you very much.” He passed their menus to the waitress, who nodded and scurried away.
“Must have been a while since you had Japanese food, right?” Suzaku attempted small talk to fill the stifling silence as they waited for their orders.
“Sayoko used to prepare some for us when she could source the ingredients,” Lelouch replied before continuing, “You know, under the Britannian Area system, Area economies were limited to only a handful of monocultures or raw materials that would be sent to the imperial homeland, rendering Areas incapable of feeding or clothing their own people but more than capable of bloating its parasites. Japan’s extracted commodities were sakuradite and rice, obviously, but Britannian goods were subsidized to such an extent that imported rice was cheaper than even domestic rice. And after replacing the yen with the dollar, many goods were still inaccessible for Japanese workers who were paid fractions of fractions of the value they produced. Fishing and hunting were also outright banned for the Japanese, so all traditional means of self-sustenance were closed off. The Britannians technically had to apply for licenses because of some pearl-clutching viceroy’s conservationist agenda, but in reality Britannians could hunt anything Japanese for sport. Fish. Animals. People.” Lelouch talked almost absentmindedly, staring at the salt and pepper shakers.
“Ah. Right, of course.” Trust Lelouch to try lecturing him about his own country’s problems. But then again, it had been a long time since Suzaku had to worry about where his next meal was coming from. It was either the paltry, almost-inedible military rations thrown to Honorary Britannians or the first class service afforded to the Knights of the Round. Neither of which was exactly “culturally appropriate”. In almost a decade, his only chances to savor the taste of home-cooked Japanese meals came from...
As if Lelouch read his mind, “But when you were coming over, Nunnally would always ask Sayoko to make your favorites.”
Suzaku’s heart panged with his stomach.
Lelouch would invite Suzaku over, always with the insistence that the army was not feeding him enough and that Nunnally missed him. Only Nunnally?, Suzaku would ask good-naturedly, just to see the faces Lelouch made at being caught so effortlessly.
Lelouch courteously pulling out the dining table chair for their guest, Sayoko scooping generous spoonfuls onto his plate, Nunnally giggling as he regaled her with stories of Lloyd and Cécile’s antics. The warmth of a meal, a hearth, a family.
Suzaku had walked away from all that. Or maybe they were never his to have at all.
And now?
Now, they were the last two left. (Soon, zero.) They sat across from each other, separated by a sticky, coffee-ring stained table and a lifetime’s worth of mutually-inflicted sorrow. Lelouch still wasn’t making eye contact, and suddenly Suzaku found it hard to look at him too. The reminder of simpler times was somehow more difficult to swallow.
“It was good,” Suzaku managed. “Sayoko’s cooking. And spending that time with you and Nunnally.”
Lelouch’s hand on the table closed into a fist, and he said no more. Some part of Suzaku wished he could reach over and put one hand over his. The clatter of utensils and the chatter of other people about their normal lives and ordinary troubles filled the space between them. Suzaku kept his hands to himself.
When breakfast arrived, Lelouch picked at it, pushing his chopsticks around like a croupier’s rake, the dish his war room table and the food his pawn pieces. His brow was furrowed in concentration, absorbed in positioning his tamagoyaki slices and pickled radishes in seemingly calculated moves. Despite Suzaku’s best efforts to deliberately eat slower and not awkwardly outpace his dining partner, the latter showed no signs of doing anything more than playing with his food. Abandoning etiquette, Suzaku instead took advantage of the lull to take his first good look at Lelouch in weeks.
The elegant, flowing lines of the emperor’s robes usually hid his lanky figure and complemented his sweeping, grand gestures. But stripped of all that, running only on caffeine and a few grains of rice, Lelouch appeared painfully ordinary. Normal, almost. A teenage boy with bony fingers, too-pale skin, and faint rings under his eyes. His face was thin, drawing out regal cheekbones. A stray strand of white hair that he hadn’t plucked out rested on his crown.
He looked younger than he pretended. He looked older than he should. He looked tired.
“You should eat more,” Suzaku said, startled by his own impulsiveness.
Lelouch finally slid his gaze up to Suzaku’s. Cool, calculating, as if trying to decipher his motivations. Suzaku also wondered why he said that and who, exactly, had spoke. What did it matter to an executioner if his charge was all skin and bones? Less fat to cut through in the end.
But if that was all they were, there was no reason to share a pot of tea, to ache for old times, to urge a companion to eat his fill. There wouldn’t be such tender wounds. Lelouch did not reply but sacrificed one of his mackerel pawns and chewed.
The bill arrived, and Suzaku looked down at the slip of paper with a small jolt.
“Oh, shit. I didn’t bring any money.” He darted a furtive glance at Lelouch. “Did you?”
Lelouch arched an eyebrow at him, as if to say, of course Lelouch vi Britannia, 99th Emperor of the Holy Britannian Empire, did not bring any money with him. When was the last time the Demon Emperor and the White Reaper paid for an expense out of their own pockets, much less brunch at an anonymous diner on the side of the road?
Suzaku deflated. “Right. Dumb question.”
Lelouch shrugged, raising his hands in feigned helplessness. “If you had kindly informed me of our schedule for today prior to our departure, I would have brought my card. But of course I was manhandled out of the compound with nothing but the clothes on my back.”
Oh, how Suzaku hated that snotty tone of his. That tone told him Lelouch definitely considered bringing his card, and deliberately didn’t out of petty spite. But…
“Let’s just leave then,” he whispered conspiratorially.
Lelouch looked at him. Suzaku was serious, but there was also a hesitant smile playing on the edge of his lips and a glint of mischief twinkling in his eyes. Faint, but it made him look young. Suzaku hadn’t looked this young in a long time. The last time Lelouch saw him like this, they were ten and the summer felt endless. And Suzaku had dropped a frog down his shirt and Nunnally laughed so hard she cried.
“Let’s.”
They got up casually, Suzaku collecting his keys and Lelouch putting on his jacket. The pair was already outside, Suzaku passing Lelouch his helmet, by the time they heard the waitress yell.
They made a run for it, Suzaku revving his bike to full throttle, Lelouch wrapping his arms tight around Suzaku’s torso, and two dine-and-dash teenagers gunned down the highway. Reckless, irreverent—not unlike the children who once sped up a mountainside in a hijacked car, leaving elite security agents eating their dust, all to save one little bird.
Suzaku felt warm, the sun beaming down on the open road and Lelouch’s arms around him. His cheeks ached from laughter, so out of practice. The restaurant had disappeared behind them, and they returned to a comfortable cruise. Lelouch could have let go a long time ago, but he didn’t.
Glimpses of the world swept by.
Roadside fruit stalls.
Laundry billowing on clotheslines.
Farmers hunched over, sweat on their brows and mud caked on their boots.
Calves nudging at their mothers’ legs as they learned to savor lush grasses and days unhurried.
Rambunctious kids played on the street and would point and exclaim in wonder at the sleek vehicle flashing by in a glint of metal and sun, and their parents would come out and hold them close so they wouldn’t run into the road to chase down two travelers who couldn’t look back.
The occasional red shrine gate stood out against the green, stairs leading up to mountains where fickle gods watched over children who invented games and secret languages. (Or maybe those gods were all dead, and Lelouch had killed them while Suzaku stood by and watched.)
They passed by bombed-out villages, too, overgrown with weeds and rust, overtaken by the greed and cruelty of men. Towns where people once lived, but no one returned to, and where air raid sirens were the tallest structures left standing. Unexploded ordnance still lay in the fields, salting the earth so even tender hands that tried to nourish the soil could be blown to smithereens without notice or reason.
“This is the world we’re going to destroy,” Lelouch announced over the howling wind.
“All of it?” Suzaku thought of black cats that bit his hand, hide and seek among towering sunflowers, the folds and creases of a thousand delicate paper cranes. Even a world rotten to the core had things worth saving. If everything burned, and the scorched earth lay barren, nothing—not even a phoenix—could rise from the ashes.
Lelouch turned his head to look at the ravaged land seemingly holding its breath, waiting for its chance to heal. Blue skies. Drowsy clouds. Plants growing straight out of the rubble. “Maybe not all,” he conceded. “But most.”
Inevitably, the bike’s fuel ran low, and with still some distance before their destination, Suzaku stopped at the next station they saw. It only had gasoline—something long obsolete for Britannians in their comfortably segregated technopoles.
The Britannian occupation commandeered Japan’s pre-existing highway infrastructure primarily to facilitate the transport of raw materials from the countryside to main urban centers and coastal ports. Given that sakuradite energy density was several magnitudes greater than that of gasoline and that the peripheries served no purpose for the empire other than to be sucked dry, there was little reason to invest in bleeding-edge energy infrastructure so far out from places like Tokyo and Kyoto. Thus, the amount, distribution, density, and availability of processed sakuradite outside of the major settlements were the result of dispassionate calculations that factored how far colonial instruments could travel to loot, maim, and subjugate before needing to refuel. So it goes.
For such reasons, Suzaku drove a hybrid gasoline-sakuradite model—a relative privilege previously available only to Area 11’s most trusted and detested native informants. Just enough tech to appease shameless collaborators who demanded their share of the plunder but never enough to become a blade sharp against the colonizers’ throats. A reward for overseers who could sell out their people and barter away their dignity but who would always be one tier below the Britannians and their fully-automated, luxury, sakuradite-powered lifestyles.
Suzaku had always been good with machines. This one was no exception.
He rolled up to the pump and dismounted, his passenger also getting off to stretch his cramped, poorly-circulated legs. At the touch screen, however, Suzaku immediately encountered a terribly predictable issue: he had to pay first.
“I’ll pick up the tab,” Lelouch nonchalantly said, having anticipated a repeat of their previous predicament and already approaching the lone other customer at the gas stop—his helmet tucked under an arm, line of sight unobstructed.
“Wait, don’t—“ Suzaku moved to grab Lelouch’s shoulder, but it was too late. Lelouch glanced over, and his creepy as fuck, pupilless eyes bored into Suzaku. The unfortunate man had already passively proffered his wallet over to Lelouch, who plucked it from his hand and pulled out some crumpled bills.
Lelouch walked back and held out the contraband to Suzaku, who looked at it instead of having to look at him. Breakfast churned in his stomach. It never got easier to see the careless way Lelouch trampled other people underfoot in the name of his justice. It didn’t matter if he was ordering someone to do jumping jacks or to slaughter a stadium full of desperate people. It never got easier.
But, Suzaku was Lelouch’s final accomplice now. This was the bed he and Lelouch made together. Run all they wanted, this was the one they would return to lie in.
Fine, then. One more sin for the road. One more thing they would both atone for when the appointed time came.
Suzaku lifted his eyes, determined to meet the challenge of Lelouch’s gaze, and snatched the money. Lelouch, apparently satisfied with what he saw, broke away first to put back in his contacts.
They hit the road again.
The huddled houses, the jagged mountains, the open fields, the earth itself eventually fell away and gave way to the ocean. They drove on, chasing the setting sun, Japan on one side, the rest of the world on the other.
“We’re here.” Suzaku killed the engine, swinging his foot against the kickstand and disembarking in a practiced, fluid motion. He left his helmet hanging on a handlebar and did not wait for Lelouch.
Here was a small, private beach that he used to go during summer vacations two, maybe three, lifetimes ago. Suzaku went every year with Kaguya and his mother’s side of the family, Tohdoh, and—when the Japanese prime minister took his rare vacations—his father. He didn’t go the year Lelouch and Nunnally arrived on this strange shore for, well, obvious reasons. And then after that there were no more years left for barbecues and sandcastles and watermelon rind smiles.
Suzaku wondered, distantly, if the Britannian warships in his previous lifetime landed on this beach during the invasion. He wouldn’t know. If those massive metal husks lodged on the shore, digging into the sand like shrapnel wounds in flesh, the water washed away those scars a long time ago.
Now, in this lifetime, he headed towards the sea, picking his way down the rocks without looking back. Scraping shoes on the hill and knocks of gravel told him that Lelouch was trailing behind, emperor following his knight.
The sand beneath his shoes was clean, remarkably free of junk and plastic. The smell of saltwater drifted in on the breeze. By some stroke of luck, this little crescent hadn’t been cannibalized like so many of Japan’s beaches, doomed to overflowing trash bins and obnoxious tourists from all over the empire. The sands had shifted and every last drop in the basin had transformed thousands of times over and all the cells in their bodies had been replaced and everything had changed and nothing would ever really be the same, but the beach of Suzaku’s childhood memories was still here. Yesterday, a playground for the offspring of Japan’s elite. Today, a modest slice of paradise for a couple of fugitives. Tomorrow, who knows.
The ocean stretched out before them, vast and unfathomable—the maw of the earth, swallowing the whole horizon. The waves pushed and pulled, rolled and shuddered, a dance between the moon and the tides, an ancient breath and heartbeat. The sun slipped low and shattered on its surface, reemerging as shimmering ribbons.
Suzaku stopped. Turned around to face Lelouch. Lelouch stopped.
“We’re here,” he repeated to Lelouch, who stood a carefully-measured yard away, and to the wind.
Lelouch didn’t answer immediately, instead scanning the beach as if searching for something. Finding nothing, he returned his gaze to Suzaku. “And why, exactly, are we here?”
“I wanted you to have a day off,” Suzaku winced a little at how surely unacceptable Lelouch would find that. But it was the truth, one of his weaknesses. “And I used to come here as a kid. So I thought it would be nice.”
“You thought it would be nice,” Lelouch enunciated slowly so Suzaku could hear how foolish he sounded. “What made you think I wanted a day off?”
“Lelouch,” Suzaku sighed, pressing his eyes closed so he didn’t roll them. He opened them again and saw Lelouch, arms folded and chin raised, this argument already decided and won in his mind. Lelouch was closing the gates, with a finality that irked and maybe frightened Suzaku, so he jammed his foot in the door. “You work all the time. You don’t eat or sleep enough. And I hardly see you anymore.”
Lelouch tilted his head. “So?”
“It’s not good for you.”
“And why do you care?” Lelouch asked, uncooperative. “Weren’t you the one who threw me around and told me to keep my promises and carry out Zero Requiem? I’m doing that. Keeping my promises. I thought you would appreciate that.”
“You think I can’t tell what you’re really doing?” Suzaku grit out. “That you’re just looking for an excuse to work yourself to death?” He was angry at how his voice cracked at that. Angrier still at Lelouch for biting every kind hand offered to him—especially the ones he didn’t deserve. The half-eaten mackerel, the cold dismissals, they made Suzaku angry for trying, for wanting to bother at all, for being disappointed when failing.
“I thought you agreed I deserve to die.”
“You do. You deserve it as much as I do.”
“Then spare me the sentimentality,” Lelouch snapped. “You dragged me all the way out here for this? You think I have time for your pity or your hypocrisy? I’ve already forfeited my soul. This is the only path left.”
“So you’re just giving up?” Suzaku threw out his arms, as if to hold the sky. “You’re not going to fight for the world you promised me you’d create?” His arms dropped back to his sides, hands balled up into fists.
“I’m giving up? How do you come up with such absurd conclusions?” Lelouch sneered, mean and jagged. “Everything I’ve been doing is for the sake of that world. I’ve thrown away everything for this, I’m giving my damn life for it!”
“You act like your life doesn’t mean anything. Like you’re already dead.” Frustration and desperation sprang forth from some unknown well, some wretched part of Suzaku that never stopped caring about Lelouch, despite how much Lelouch had hurt him and how much Suzaku hurt him in return. The part that could strangle him within an inch of his life and let him sleep on shoulder afterwards. The part that solemnly swore to kill him but wished he could somehow live. Lelouch’s self-righteous martyrdom aggravated him (maybe it took one to know one), but more than that—“You may be dead in the world to come, but right now. You’re alive.” That had to mean something.
Suzaku’s knuckles were white as the bubbling foam. Where did this anguish and this grief come from? And where could all of it possibly go?
“My life right now is a means to an end—a tool to bring about Zero Requiem. Do not waste your misguided attachments on me.” Lelouch would rather crush Suzaku’s foot on the way to shutting him out, damn him.
“Don’t—don’t talk about yourself like that. Like I’m not supposed to give a shit about you.”
Lelouch was silent, for once in his short, miserable life.
“I’m carrying this burden too,” Suzaku clutched at his chest and talked as though talking could fill the hollowed-out shells of men. “This is my punishment too. I’m the one who has to live with it. I’m the one who has to carry on your name, so don’t just throw it away like it means nothing.” Suzaku will be Zero, but the world they’ll usher in won’t be Zero’s, the Demon Emperor’s, Lelouch vi Britannia’s, or even Lelouch Lamperouge’s. No, the future will be written in Lelouch’s name, as much as his blood. Lelouch who so loved his sister and his best friend that he’d destroy the world to a create a kinder, gentler one for them.
And who would be the last person to see that Lelouch? Who else but his first and last friend. The last person would will ever fully understand him. The last person who would ever see him as truly human, in all his monstrosity and mundanity. And Lelouch may be the last person to see Suzaku like this too.
But Suzaku hardly knew this Lelouch in front of him—back to the wall, plastered to his shadow. And maybe this was part of his punishment and maybe this was the life ahead of him that he deserved, but Suzaku could not subsist off the scraps and shells of somebody he once knew. (Even Euphy, even if it was a lie, even Euphy died believing in the world she envisioned. And for that, Suzaku had been willing to raze the earth to make it so.)
Suddenly the distance between them yawned, unbearably. He lurched forth to grab Lelouch’s scrawny frame by the shoulders. “If you’ve got nothing to live for, then what about me?” Suzaku shook him, searching his face, trying to rattle something out. “I’m supposed to live—I’ve accepted your curse—but what am I living for?”
Lelouch’s wide, violet eyes had no answer. The question hung heavy around their necks.
Suzaku dropped his head. His face burned. He was all raw and open, Lelouch cold and closed. Behind him the sun set, engulfed in flames, engulfed by the ocean. Behind him the waves thrashed and thundered. In front of him, Lelouch stood, stiff and proud as the rocks jutting out from the shore, cleaving the ocean apart, one day destined to return to sand and dust.
Lelouch closed his hand around Suzaku’s wrist to remove the offending limb clamped on his shoulder.
He didn’t get the chance before Suzaku, head still bowed, interrupted, “This is about Nunnally, isn’t it. Ever since—”
Ever since they found out Nunnally was still alive. That Suzaku hadn’t collected a horrible blood debt from Lelouch, a princess for a princess.
Lelouch sucked his teeth sharply as if Suzaku had knifed him, which perhaps in a way he did. He wrenched his shoulders out of the other boy’s grip. “You heard what Nunnally said. She’s my enemy now.” Nunnally, who came back from the dead as Lelouch’s enemy. Just as Suzaku had one year ago. “But our strategic objective has not changed like you said. What’s the point of Zero Requiem otherwise? What is the reason I’m doing all of this?”
Suzaku had heard what Nunnally said. But he hadn’t seen how hard Lelouch’s hands trembled when he taunted her, how his legs wobbled when he stood up after casting her aside, how his throat threatened to close when he lied to her.
But Suzaku could see now how hard Lelouch’s shoulders shook.
“Nunnally wouldn’t want to see you like this.” Miserable, baring his teeth, waiting to be put down like some rabid, pitiful animal.
Lelouch turned his head to the sand and scoffed. The ocean inhaled and exhaled several great breaths. The sun bled out on the waves, red and hot and wet.
“Nunnally was my proof,” a hoarse whisper, the tide receding. “I used to live an empty, meaningless life. Dying slowly. I was sick to death of a world that couldn’t be changed, but I thought, I thought if I could just save Nunnally, that could be the proof that I lived, but Nunnally,” a stutter, the tide surging. “She’s my enemy now. I can’t save her. I don’t have anything else left except this. And now you’re saying I can’t even have that? You get to be selfish but I can’t?”
Suzaku grabbed a fistful of Lelouch’s shirt. “Nunnally has grown up. And she’s doing the right thing. Isn’t that proof that you lived? Proof that you’re alive? And—” He was practically shouting against the sand-whipped wind until that last word when he hauled Lelouch towards him, knocking him off balance and wrestling him into a hug. “I’m still here, Lelouch. I’m still your friend.” Somehow. Miraculously. Perhaps against all better judgment. Definitely against the traitorous heart beating in his chest.
If Nunnally was the proof that Lelouch lived, then what was Suzaku’s proof? The Geass? Euphy in her grave? Lelouch one foot in his? The things he’d left behind? The misguided attachments he’ll keep?
Lelouch tentatively reached for the back of Suzaku’s jacket, as if completing the embrace would shatter them both.
“Live, damn it,” Suzaku choked into Lelouch’s neck. Live, begged Suzaku, death-seeker, death-bringer. “Don’t act like your life doesn’t have any meaning beyond just fucking dying. It does. It does for Nunnally. It does for—for me. And you still have me.”
Lelouch tightened his grip, and they clung onto each other like driftwood. If Lelouch blinked away hot, salty tears, Suzaku mercifully said nothing and held him.
When Lelouch finally spoke, it was half to Suzaku and half to himself. “Back then, I thought to myself, if I am to succeed, if my life was to mean anything, I needed someone I could rely on. Someone who would never betray me no matter what.” Suzaku felt Lelouch’s wry chuckle in his own chest. “And you know who the first person I thought of was?”
Suzaku knew. He knew in the same way he knew in his bones all along who was behind that mask.
“It was you, Suzaku.”
Above them, a lone seagull squawked into the cooling air. Once, twice. Suzaku crushed Lelouch closer.
“I’m afraid I might love you,” Suzaku confessed, small and tremendous all at once. “And I’m scared of losing you even before you’re gone.”
A tiny shake of his head. “I don’t deserve this much.” Mumbled into his shirt.
“Maybe not. But neither do I. So, please, for me.”
It was Lelouch’s turn to find solace in Suzaku’s collarbone. “Okay.”
At some point, the sun sank into the trenches, and the moon and stars winked onto the sky.
Their pants, even rolled up, were already drenched, and with every tug of the moon, the water threatened to drag them into the dark currents. But Suzaku held him close, and together they swayed with the ebb and flow of the tides.
The moon struck Lelouch’s hands, his hair, his eyelashes. Its pale light seemed to form a halo around his fringes. How Suzaku wished he could dust it away.
When Suzaku pressed his lips to the crook of Lelouch’s neck, he could taste the salt of the sea spray, and he breathed in the brine and Lelouch.
“What if we just stay here?” Suzaku’s voice, soft against the lapping waves, but Lelouch felt its rumble pressed against his back. “What if we walked into the ocean right now and never went back?” A selfish, childish little wish. But can’t they have that at the end of the world?
Lelouch found Suzaku’s hands wrapped around his waist and squeezed. “Then we’d drown, and your Geass would save us.”
“My Geass would save us, huh?”
“It’s not a curse. It’s a wish. It’s my wish for you.”
Suzaku recovered their discarded jackets and shook the sand off them, spreading his out chivalrously on the ground.
Lelouch accepted the unspoken invitation, and they squeezed together on Suzaku’s coat. Suzaku draped Lelouch’s jacket over the boy’s shoulders, and they looked out at where the ocean met the sky met the earth and where the boundaries between them were lost in the night.
They said nothing for a long while, just breathing in tune with the pulses of waves and with each other. Until Lelouch sneezed and broke them out of their reverie.
“Shit,” Suzaku swore, scrambling to his feet. “We should get back before you get sick.”
“Sure,” Lelouch gave a lazy roll of his head. “If we leave now we can make it back with just enough time to attend the seven hours of back to back meetings I had to postpone.”
Suzaku looked a bit sheepish, having been the one to insist on taking the long way and driving hours by motorcycle here. “We could hail your private helicopter?”
“No,” Lelouch grumbled, face sour, clearly annoyed he had to turn down this option. “Too flashy. The paparazzi have my flight records tracked. We’ll just have to go back the same way we came.”
”Okay. That won’t be too bad, right?” Suzaku held out a hand to help him up.
Lelouch took his hand. “It won’t be.”