'Pavlov's Dog', part deux. God, Homer was an ass.
......................
What am I doing? he thinks one hot summer's night, staring at the sketches of Lelouch he's scattered across the floor like carpet, hand paused halfway down the waistband of his pants. He wonders what's he's doing, for sure, but once a stone starts falling, it's almost impossible to stop.
Euphie, his mind screams in vain, later, clothes thrown haphazardly to all corners of the room and his hips jerking up into cold, empty air; but what good is a memory fueled by grief when all that he's ever desired was brought about by hate?
He comes all over himself under the gentle, airbrushed gaze of Lelouch's hundred eyes.
***
Lelouch backs away from the crack in the wall, and is nearly sick by what he's just seen.
This hadn't been his intention at all. True, like in the manner of courting, he had given Suzaku things in the hopes that he would be happy with him. True, he had holed him up, kept him prisoner, and denied him every basic social necessity in the hopes that he would come to rely on him. And true, like Pavlov's dog, he had hoped to ingrain within Suzaku a series of conditioned responses based on the occurence of several stimuli, but...
No, he is just a dog, now. An average, ordinary, unremarkable dog: loyal, adorable, and dumb.
***
He's wrong, of course, and he knows that he's wrong, but Lelouch is, if nothing else, amazingly capable of forgoing all sensible thought and procedure when it comes to attaining that which he desires most.
He reflects, self-depreciatingly, that it's taken him seven years to realize that one of those things is Suzaku.
***
Something lands with a muted thump near his face, from where he had been sleeping in a fetal position on the floor. Suzaku opens his eyes, blearily.
"I'll take you for a walk outside, if you promise to be good," says Lelouch, smugly, from over the ring of an old-fashioned leather collar, the kind originally meant for dogs.
Suzaku ignores him, and goes back to sleep.
***
But it's horrible, truly horrible. He hasn't seen the sun in over eighty days. He hasn't felt anything under his feet other than the straw roughness of the storage room floor. He misses the sound of flowing water, and the sensation of tree bark lying flat against his palms. He presses his nose to one of the cracks in the wall and attempts to breathe in the clean sweetness of the spring air. He comes away with a throat full of dust, instead. When it storms, he plunges his tongue through a hole in the wall and tries to catch a taste of the rain. He gets a splinter, instead. (Which he agonizes over for the next two days until eventually, embarrassingly, he has to get C.C.'s help to pry it out with her long, slim fingernails.)
When Lelouch comes to see him again, without bothering to think of any purpose or pretense for his visit like he usually does, Suzaku is already sitting there waiting for him, glaring defiantly despite the collar around his throat and the leash in his hand.
***
They go at night, because it's the only time they won't be seen. Nonetheless, Suzaku stumbles down the steps, half-falling, and goes on his knees with his arms over his head because of the brightness of the moon.
"You're...blind?" Lelouch asks, haltingly, and Suzaku shakes his head. He tries opening his eyes a crack, but even that is painful. Cover. If they can just get out of the light, he can see fantastically in the dark. He won't ask, though. Won't beg for it, because he is still a man, no matter how collared or bound.
The world goes blissfully warm and dark. Lelouch has thrown his cloak over his cringing, cowering form. He can stand again. If he stares at the ground, he can even see; the ground, at least. He's led along to god-knows-where, but he isn't dragged by the neck - rather, Lelouch guides him, confidently, by the tether of his hand, fingers warm and bare, without the superficial distance of gloves. Something burns in Suzaku's stomach that he has no choice but to write off as anger.
"How are your eyes?" Lelouch asks quietly, after they've walked for quite a while; his face suddenly bursts into Suzaku's line of sight in a way that's disturbing. He smells like fresh, fragrant tea; Suzaku swallows. He hasn't had tea in ages.
"Better, I suppose, no thanks to you," he answers resentfully, remembering how much he used to love standing with his face to the sun. They slow to a stop, and he starts lifting his gaze up, slowly; if he goes slow enough, it doesn't sting all that bad. He catches himself mirrored in Lelouch's gaze on the way up and is alarmed at how far his pupils have shrank - they're slits, practically, small black dots in the green of his eyes. After a while, he can look around at their surroundings without flinching.
They're under the copse of trees that sits atop a small ledge, the one that overlooks the sunflower field bustling with cicadas during the day and fireflies at night; tonight, however, there are no flies, discouraged perhaps by the intimidating light of the moon. It's a little cold out, for a summer's night - no, Suzaku realizes that he has no idea what season it is at all. He does a fast calculation; it's still only spring. Then it's warm, even, for a night in March. There are no fireflies because it's not yet their season. His legs ache, because he hasn't exercised in ages. Though it's probably been obvious for some time now, he tries to hide the fact that his knees are buckling. One gives beneath him, and he goes down on a knee, hacking ungracefully when he's unwillingly reminded of the collar around his neck. Lelouch teeters for a second, off-balance, but manages to recover, and lower himself to the ground on his own power; he's always been a show-off.
It doesn't matter. The sounds of frogs calling from some stream or marsh is a sound he hasn't heard since he was a child, even. Nor the smell of sunflowers wafting through the air. He takes a deep breath; is that what it is, mercy? A mercy beyond that of simple, painless death? Lelouch jerks the leash once, lightly, and no, it's not either. It's an exercise in dominance, a demonstration of control. He leans away, testing. It's one of those terrible choke collars, not the kind he can simply go slack against. It cuts into his windpipe, making it hard to breathe. He has no choice but to scurry, squirrel-like, to the other end of that leash. He glares, brought up short, and low on breath.
"How scary," Lelouch laughs, in that mocking way he has that others often mistake for being good-natured. "I didn't know you were capable of making a face like that, Suzaku."
"Oh, but you remember, don't you, Lelouch?" The brunette smiles, hard. "I made one just like this at you from down the other end of a gun."
For an instant, Lelouch's expression crumbles, turns ugly, but he closes his eyes and presses his lips together in a thin smile; "It's been a long time since someone other than C.C. has called me by that name." His jaw relaxes, and he drops the fake courtesy. "Yes...it has."
Suzaku puts his back to him and shrugs, coldly. "Didn't I tell you, Lelouch? That nothing good comes of power."
A wry, half-startled laugh. "You did; I remember." Suzaku jumps as the taller boy's forehead comes to land on his shoulder, unexpectedly. He tries to pull away, only to discover that Lelouch has cut all the slack; nearly all of the leash save a few squandary inches or so are wrapped tightly around his left hand; stretched back over his shoulder, pulled taut.
"But something good did come from this power of mine, you know." He pulls the leash even tighter, down the line of Suzaku's spine, and when the brunette reaches his hands behind his back in an attempt to wrestle for some relief, Lelouch catches his wrists, both of them, in his other hand, and handcuffs them. Suzaku struggles, briefly, in a battle he knows is pointless, jerking his wrists and his shoulders and thrashing his head around from side to side before choking himself again, inadvertantly, and subconsciously going limp, trying to get some air down his aching windpipe. He slumps over, breathing hard. He can't even turn his head around to see the expression on Lelouch's face; the collar's too tight, and the leather chafes his neck. It's disconcerting.
Something flits in his hair, and he jerks, instinctively. Lelouch lets out a strange, almost grunting sort of noise. "Don't jerk around like that," he says patronizingly, and there's that sensation in Suzaku's hair again. "You feel like losing an ear?"
Snip, snip, snip. It's the sound of scissors, of shears, and Suzaku watches in morbid fascination as locks of stringy, straggly brown hair drift to the ground near his hips, like little worms the color of brown earth. A bullfrog croaks from an alarmingly close distance. He's getting a haircut?
"And you thought it was necessary to choke me and chain me up for this?" Suzaku asks aloud then, angrily, turning a bit and feeling the scissors pinch against his scalp. Lelouch pauses a moment to whap him across the head with them, before continuing, more confidently than before.
"It's more fun this way," he says evasively, which means he has something else planned, too. Suzaku sits placidly and starts to think of a counterattack.
Lelouch, he knows, cuts his own hair, and Nunnally's as well, which is something he once made fun of but now is rather grateful for, considering. Not that it really mattered what his hair looked like now, or even really that he cared about it, before, but... Well, at least he might be able to scavenge some of his dignity. Unless, of course, the other boy was planning on shaving him bald, or giving him something horrible like...say, a crew cut.
"Why?" he asks sullenly, because he knows Lelouch won't do something like that; it's not in his nature to kick others while they're down. So...why?
"I wanted you to look like Suzaku again," Lelouch answers, shrugging, and it's not really the easiness of his answer, or the way he says it, but instead -
I wanted. Everything with him up until this point had always been a mantra of I needed or had to. Or, failing that, I will, with no reason or excuse, only intention. What is it, truly, that Lelouch has ever wanted?
Euphie, then. Had Euphie needed to die, or was required to die, or was...simply...wanted to...?
Suzaku's shoulders start to shake, and there's a sudden intake of breath; a sharp pain and a warmth trickling down his neck as the scissors catch on the lobe of his ear. Lelouch lets out a breath, as though about to take a unexpected plunge, and there is the sound of the scissors being tossed away; stuck down in the dirt.
Choked again, from front and back. Lelouch pulls him into a feverish embrace, ignorant of how it hurts. C.C's words come back to him; why is it that you're alive? and he laughs, and laughs, and just sits there and laughs, until Lelouch finally starts to laugh with him; shakily, at first, then stronger and stronger until they laugh together, and go numb together, and go crazy together.
***
How best to accurately recount the feeling of delerium? To start from the beginning, it seems.
His ear was still bleeding. Lelouch stares at it, still trembling, like a sailor cast out at sea, before leaning forward in a swift, impulsive movement, and taking the lobe of it into his mouth.
Suzaku squawks, ungracefully, which turns into a terrible hack when he tries to pull away in alarm; in danger of being suffocated, he instinctively goes limp, though his toes start to curl deeply into the ground.
Pavlov's dog, Lelouch thinks, wryly, somewhat ashamed of himself for not even realizing he had never given Suzaku any shoes, and they had walked for nearly a quarter of a mile. He tastes blood in his mouth, Suzaku's blood, and pulls the brunette against him even more, hearing one of the joints in his shoulder pop as he does so. A sign of malnutrition. Why was he so negligent? In a subsconcious attempt to be dominant? To have someone he once regarded as far more powerful than himself to be completely at his mercy? If he was so negligent because of some pathetic desire to be needed; well, then, he might as well say that he had left Nunnally alone with his mother that day on purpose, so that she too could never leave him. It was all nonsense.
He laps at the blood with his tongue, nibbles a little bit on Suzaku's ear; Suzaku, who wriggles a bit, uncharacteristically, and tries to hunch his shoulders up to his cheeks as though he were a turtle, and not a bird. For Lelouch, also, it has been a long time since he's ever been as close to someone as he was like this. Since he was ten, really, and the same person he used to curl up with at night back then is the same one he's clinging to pathetically to now. He unfurls his legs like a spider; entwines them around Suzaku's knees, hooks them behind his calves. The brunette is practically sitting on his lap, now. Since he can't move his arms or his legs anymore, he moves his hips, instead; side to side, as though trying to dig himself a hole to escape through with only his butt.
The image is so ludicrous that Lelouch has to stifle a snort of laughter, poorly, and thinks that's he laughed more tonight than he has in the past three months.
"Let me up," Suzaku mutters, half-angry, half-embarrassed. It's an exhilarating combination; his cheeks are stained red. Lelouch puts his face against one, and sure enough, they're on fire. He traces his nose down the curve of Suzaku's jaw. When the brunette tries to pull away, stretched beyond the point of comfort - if there ever was such a point to begin with - Lelouch jerks at his collar, robs him of his air, and steals his lips with a kiss.
The angle is poor, and probably hurts him quite a bit, but Lelouch doesn't care. He wants. He'll accept penitence for it later. He breathes heavily out of his nose, and Suzaku nearly unhinges his jaw in an attempt to open his mouth wider, to feed his starving lungs. It's fantastic. No book Lelouch has read on the subject is nearly as accurate the reality. No better tutor is there than instinct. It isn't until Suzaku reels, looking alarmingly dizzy, that Lelouch finally lets him go. He appeases the sensation of loss with the acquisition of others; he buries his nose in the nape of Suzaku's neck and slips just the tips of his fingers under the line of the brunette's shirt, testing the waters, seeing what he can get away with. Everything, it seems, from the way there is only the barest twitch in response. He moves his fingers upward.
"You're too skinny," he murmurs, but cherishing the feel of protruding ribs against his skin nonetheless. "I'll tell the two of them to feed you more from now on."
"Even if you did," Suzaku replies, painfully hoarse, "I wouldn't eat it." He hollows his stomach in an attempt to flee from Lelouch's intrusive hands; his skin is cold, ice cold, or maybe it's Lelouch who's fever-bright.
"Oh?" When he shrinks in upon himself like that, he looks even more like prey. Revenge for all of the senseless tickling and fistfights and tears from their childhood; fitting that he should be the one attempting to hide from onslaught. It's no good. Lelouch grinds his hips forward, unable to ignore the instinct of the predator. He's used to erections - it's safe to say that C.C. gives them to him all the time, infuriating woman - but this one hurts. Some fluttering feeling from below his stomach screams to be fed; refuses to be ignored. He drops his fingers lower, lower, until they reach the waistband of cheap cotton prisoner's pants.
Suzaku goes very, very still. "You can't mean - ?" he says after a moment, breathlessly, and bangs his knees together in a hurry. It doesn't matter; they're still bent, up in the air. Lelouch just reaches under his legs, and starts from the bottom up. Suzaku freezes again, and this time, he doesn't even breathe. He just seizes his lip in his teeth, very hard, when Lelouch scrapes the edges of his fingernails against the line of his thigh.
"You were the one who started it, you know," Lelouch realizes, voice a muted hum. More than the sexual desire, it seems, he craved the intimacy. How very escapist of him. "You, and your unending obsession with my face."
There; a fine tremor, or maybe it's just because he's moved his hands up, a bit, treading too close to the killswitch that will shatter the moment, hasten the end.
The idiot won't even let go with his teeth in order to speak. Suzaku, Lelouch notices now, has very fine, sharp teeth - he's an impressive biter. A small trickle of blood escapes his mouth to slide down his chin. For some reason, such a ridiculous display of barely-contained self-restraint truly bothers Lelouch. He takes his hand and pinches Suzaku's nostrils shut.
"Stop that," he says. After a few seconds, the brunette unwillingly opens his mouth. Lelouch kisses him again.
Weeks, months, in captivity have made Suzaku weak, like a once-wild animal fooled into being domesticated. Physically, Lelouch has the upper hand now. He presses his advantage; tangles his fingers into Suzaku's curly, half-cut hair and gains the right leverage to pry his knees apart, feverishly, with only the strength of his own. There is a moan in his mouth that is either desire or despair; either suits him just fine, frankly, and it reverbates down his throat. Blood in his mouth, hips against his, and the feeble kicking of feet in the dirt.
"Well?" he says after he draws back, and Suzaku's struggling has caused pants that were originally quite too large for him to flap down over the ends of his toes, caused the waistband to dip far below that which is acceptable, and ultimately, exposed the only affirmation that Lelouch would need in order to carry on.
But, the words. As Zero, he's learned that words have power. As Lelouch Lamperouge, he's learned that words are all it takes to bring everything around him to ruin. Either or both are probably fitting for what they're about to do. "Well?" he asks again, hearing his own voice echo back at him from the shell of Suzaku's ear. The real thing, he supposed, would be better, but he can't bear to break the contact they have at this moment, can't bear to go without the feel of ribs under his palms or shoulders shaking in his arms for a second longer than he has to. And why should he? For the two of them, anything would suffice.
"I really don't have anything to say to you, anymore," Suzaku answers, quietly, but doesn't struggle when he's touched, or laughed at, or pinned down on the ground, his wrists crushed beneath his back.
It's far more overwhelming than Lelouch had ever calculated, and he thinks that he won't feel the same sort of euphoria again until Britannia crumbles at his feet. He toys with his food before eating it, licking slow lines up Suzaku's torso, his stomach, his thighs. He bites the brunette's hip, roughly, before placating the area with a sloppy, lazy kiss. Once, he nearly falls prey to the attempt to manuever him in a specific direction with a subtle use of legs, but he manages to slither his way out of the trap with only the barest of breaths against the skin of a stiff, straining erection.
"Almost," he admits, and Suzaku thumps his head back on the grass in despair.
He's always had good instincts, but he's not very smart. There's only one thing that Lelouch wants, and it's to make this go on for as long as possible. His body both echoes and retaliates against that sentiment, but he's not the type to be indecisive. He traces out the symbol of the Geass from bone to bone across Suzaku's hips, and the shiver that follows sends a ripple through his body in reply. Contact, no matter how indirect, nearly makes him lose his head, and that's the one thing he doesn't want to lose until he's ready. He moves a subtle inch away.
"Sit up," he commands, lowly, because somehow they've wound up on the ground; the cold, damp ground that robs them of their breath and warmth. Suzaku, dazed, takes a moment or two to follow the order, but he does, struggling valiantly without the ability to use his hands. He's tense, leaning forward with his chest against his knees and his thighs slammed shut, rubbing against each other in the way Lelouch imagines that crickets do, when they make their call to mate. He's trying very hard to hide it, so Lelouch acts as though he doesn't notice. He retrieves his cloak from where it had been rolled into the ground, and wraps himself in it, protectively, both he and Suzaku. He pushes the brunette back down onto the grass again.
It's not really pushing, it's more like falling, and the two of them land together with twin 'oof!'s, breath mixing in midair and noses tapping, lightly. Lelouch looks cross-eyed down into Suzaku's wary, waiting face, and can't quite suppress the smile he knows he doesn't deserve to make. Touching noses...the most intimate and vulnerable act of any wild animal, more so than even copulation, and he leans forward, and forward, and touching lips is the most intimate and vulnerable act of any human being, so he does that, too.
Again, again, again. It turns into something bruising and wet, and it occurs to Lelouch that perhaps kissing is something neither intimate nor vulnerable after all. Perhaps it all depends on the manner in which it's done; the sentiment with which it is done. Perhaps, more accuarately, it doesn't really matter at all. In the typical human instinct to invade, he splits Suzaku's teeth with his tongue and presses it hungrily inside, earning himself a vaguely defeated little sigh and shoulders shaking against his hands. He thinks for a moment of those impressive, biting teeth, but the brunette only opens his mouth wider, permitting the invasion. He's trembling with the fine-precision art of holding himself back; how admirable, how adorable.
Lelouch moves his mouth only when there's a need to breathe; he takes it lower, breathing hard through his nose in an attempt to inhale everything, cutting a hard, bruising swathe along the line of Suzaku's jaw, back to his ear, down his neck, and over to his Adam's apple, where he pauses, brushing gently with his lips as though speaking aloud. When he nips it, suddenly, it jumps high in Suzaku's throat as the brunette swallows, audibly.
He drags his lips downward, across a sharp and angled collarbone, which he nibbles on so hard that it actually leaves marks, over to a thin and slightly marred right shoulder. He forgoes hard, fast pleasure for a moment to let his nose, his lips, linger over the paint-splatter scar that lies there, regretfully. Subconsciously, he slips his fingers down, to an older scar on Suzaku's back right side, to one made also by the bullet of a gun.
Sorry, Lelouch thinks painfully, far too late to do any of them any good.
He rolls his head to the side with a sigh, and lets it come to rest there, his dark hair a sharp contrast to the stark, pale way Suzaku's skin is whitewashed in the light of the moon. In his ear is the thump, thump, thump of Suzaku's heart, and that there is the value of his idle life. Lelouch moves his hand, with the long, brittle fingers and the callous on the trigger finger, and dips it down the line of the brunette's abdomen, towards his navel. He scratches his nails down Suzaku's belly, pauses them just above the head of his stiff, throbbing cock. There is a keening, dog-like whimper that Lelouch has difficulty believing is real, and a powerful, impressive spasm. He pulls his hand away, agonizingly slow.
"Quiet," he orders lazily, eyes at half-mast. Beneath his ear, he can almost hear the blood roaring through his victim's heart. He palms his own erection through the front of his clothes, and the spike of pleasure that slithers up his spine is better than he thought. It was like rubbing salve on an old, burning wound, or finally managing to reach an itch that had been begging to be scratched. He lets his eyes sink closed; moves two of his fingers and rubs them against his shaft, letting out a breath that comes out white in the coldness of the air. It's hot, and wet, and Suzaku squirms a bit when it hits his chest. Lelouch shifts imperceptively to bite him, chastizingly, on a rib.
"Stop fidgeting," he murmurs, voice gone rather low and husky. "Keep still."
The brunette has always been a good soldier; he does as he's told, heart beating erratically out of the right side of his chest and his ribcage rising and falling in a frantic rhythm. He's no good at self-restraint; Lelouch, who had been taught to restrain himself from the moment he was born, takes his time and goes slowly, stoking his desire into an even, tempered flame. He truly wants this to go on forever, but if it carries on any further, Suzaku, he knows, will continue burning from both ends until he burns himself out, and he may choose never to come back to life.
"Quietly, now," he reminds aloud, wrapping long, gentle fingers around Suzaku's erection and keeping his voice steady, his gaze low; "but not without feeling, and it doesn't matter much to me whether you want to move now or not. Understand?" He looks up through lidded violet eyes, and curls his fingers once, flexingly. Suzaku licks his lips once, giving away his trepidation, but says nor does nothing.
He understands, then, and understanding is happiness. Lelouch laughs, bitterly. "Fine, then," he says, lowering his head, throwing the leash in his hand away, "do as you like."
A cacophony of howls, and threats, and curses; accurate accusations of suffering and betrayal, of a hatred buried more deeply than words could ever hope to bare; the bitter dismissal of over a thousand childhood promises, and Lelouch, shoulders shaking from the silent knowing laughter of it all, buried down to his throat with a hard, eager cock that is neither unable nor unwilling at all.
His victory is a pillar of salt, and he's laughing so hard that it bubbles out of the corners of his mouth to drip, messily, onto the blades of grass below. Suzaku's vendetta of hatred is ultimately overridden by a series of helpless, inescapeable moans. He goes taut like a wire, trembling and high-strung, before inhaling sharply, once, and slowly allowing his muscles to relax; minutely, in a series of degrees. Lelouch, though far from satiated himself, merely rolls away and pillows his head against Suzaku's thigh, deciding that he prefers it this way.
"If...I..." the brunette starts, thickly, voice rough from all of the abuse, "...if I was the one who...started it, then...?" He shuts his eyes abruptly from the stars above. "Then what did you ever do with all of those pictures I gave you, anyway?"
Lelouch flows to a sitting position gracefully, and waits for Suzaku to meet his gaze, angrily, before answering.
"Burned them, of course," he says, rummaging around in his pockets and pulling on his gloves. "It's dangerous to hold on to any evidence that might give away the identity of my face."
Suzaku looks angrier than ever. "Why, then?" he asks, voice deadly and low. Lelouch brushes the dirt off of his clothes, and is very careful to conceal his prominent erection, and is very careful not to give an answer.
Why, indeed?
Of course, the fulfillment of sexual desire: the conditioned response of those very same human beings who came up with such a ridiculous term as 'Pavlov's dog'.
***
"Fine, then," Suzaku says later, pants pulled back up and his shirt rearranged into a semblance of order, legs gone as numb as his arms from sitting too long on the ground; "it's only what I deserve."
Snip, snip, snip, and more of his hair falls to the ground. So like Lelouch to finish what he's started. "And what exactly is that?"
"Punishment," he clarifies dully, head hung low, "that I should be used by you, because I've left nothing of her in me - not her words, or her voice, or even her face. So it's fine. In whatever capacity you feel you have to use me...it's fine."
There's only the barest of pause in the scissors to let Suzaku know he's even been heard in the first place. When Lelouch stands, at last, he jerks him to his feet by the collar and his eyes are hard.
***
He's angry, Suzaku realizes sometime later, back in his room, when his feet are knocked out from under him and a hand pushes down in his hair; the other goes over his eyes.
By then, of course, it's already too late.
***
He can't sit or speak for three days after that.
***
On the fourth day, Lelouch returns with a sheaf of papers that he throws, unceremoniously, at Suzaku's feet.
"I thought you'd want something to remember her by," he says, bitterly, uncharacteristically petulant. When he leaves, Suzaku leans over the papers with mild interest.
The entry on Euphemia li Britannia from the Grolier's Standard Encyclopedia, Japan United edition.
He starts to read it anyway, but of course, there's no pictures.
***
He gets to the phrase 'beguiling over a quarter of a million Japanese with her sweet words and innocent smile' before he closes it, crying.
***
He stops drawing Lelouch and starts drawing Karen. Though she protests, at first, wrapping her arms around her shoulders or throwing her hands over her face, she eventually opens up for him, showing him expressions that are neither cruel nor particularly memorable.
He'll find another reason for why it is that he's alive.
***
There's commotion outside, and the Order of the Black Knights are on the move. Karen moves most of the contents of the food that was in storage into his room, and doesn't ridicule him, defiantly, when he moves to help. It takes up a lot of space, and he likes it. There's still nothing to eat it on, or cook it with, but at least it's food.
He doesn't ask, though, until Karen leaps at him, suddenly, enfolding him in a frantic hug and muttering into his ear, "I'm sorry you won't be able to draw me anymore; I'm sorry."
Outside, there is the noise of marching boots and loading guns. Karen grabs her own rifle where she had leaned it against the wall, and slams the door in his face, never bothering to answer.
Lelouch does, however, on the last day he comes to visit him, his left eye a burning red.
The Order, it seemed, was finally making its move on the soil of Britannia.
***
There's nothing to do, and no one to draw. There's a bomb on his door that will activate the second he opens it. Probably. Maybe. At least, that's what he's been told, and it's not as though he can just open it to find out if it were true. Even C.C. is gone, and Suzaku sometimes wonders if she had ever really been there to begin with.
He eats, and sleeps, and runs circles around his room, thoroughly mad.
***
About six months after he's been brought under Zero's captivity, the Order returns, and the world ends.
"Britannia is finished," Lelouch announces haughtily from his door, violet eyes merciless and proud. "Beaten down, broke apart." There is a fine tremble to his voice that Suzaku has to strain his ears to catch. "Aries Imperial Villa has sank into the sea; the old man went with it, and so did everyone else." His eyes waver, and his voice starts to crack. "The...the one who killed my mother was..." His breath hitches, and he hiccups; actually hiccups, as though he were once again ten, and sways in the door, before falling to his knees and starting to sob.
Suzaku doesn't bother to take a guess on his own. There is blood on his hands and the Geass is gone.
***
"The war is over, and with it, my life," Lelouch says after he's recovered, sounding more weary in these five seconds than he has ever sounded in his entire life. "Nunnally...no, there will always be plenty of people to look after Nunnally, won't there? The one who never had anyone was me." He barks out a half-cough, half-laugh. His eyes are watery and red.
"The ones who loved me the most were the ones I wound up hurting the most, in the end," he continues, standing unsteadily and limping across the room, his gun lying flat on the palm of his hand, and his hand stretched out in front of him, regally. "And the ones I wound up hurting the most in the end are now all dead. Except for you."
Suzaku wonders for a moment, worriedly, about Karen, until he realizes that Lelouch probably never cared about Karen at all, and that really, she is probably just fine. Happy, even, with her friends and loved ones in Japan.
"So I decided," Lelouch concludes, and true, there's that hard, determined edge to his voice that he gets when he's decided something, "that the one who should decide where my life will go from here is you." He thrusts the hand with the gun in it forward, impatiently. "Shoot me, if you would, make me suffer. Suffer, and suffer, until you've had your fill, until I'm finally dead. I should have never existed in the first place, wasn't it?" The petty, childish hurt of an old grudge. Suzaku blinks. Had he ever really sounded that terrible?
"Naive," he says, coldly, and Lelouch shakes like he's about to cry again.
"Naive. The dead don't raise the dead."
***
But in the end, he does make Lelouch suffer, because that's what he's wanted, truly, all along. He's yearned to betray, in the same manner that he has been betrayed. He's craved the ability to hurt, the ability to wound, the ability to destroy far beyond the point of ever being salvageable again.
So in the end, he does make Lelouch suffer.
He makes him live.
***
No one visits the Kururugi Shrine these days, and the small, run-down storehouse in the far eastern corner even less so. Suzaku is glad for it. It makes it easier to concentrate, easier to find inspiration in the trees rustling in the breeze or the birds taking flight. He places his cheek on his fist and starts sketching, idly, without really paying attention to what it is he's doing.
No one is surprised more than he when he realizes, upon finishing, that he has finally remembered the face of Euphemia.
***
Lelouch Lamperouge stares down the barrel of a gun and realizes, I have shot more people than I can count in my entire life.
"So," he says aloud, tapping the metal against the roof of his mouth. So.
What meaning is there, then, in a death that does nothing to even the score?
Smiling ruefully, he throws the gun away.
Ending AN?: Uh, I AM REALLY SORRY THAT THIS IS SO LONG. O.o 'Scuse me while I go dunk my head in a bucket of cold water right about now. There was seriously this one part in which I whooped aloud at 2 AM, "Finally! The porn is starting here!" and my brother who was dicking around on the computer outside my room actually came in because he thought I was watching a porno.
This is also...not very good. There was just a point where I struggled with finishing it and I think that point is pretty clear. Also, I'm rusty; I haven't written fic in over six months. I know that's no excuse, but...eh. I just...really don't like this. Maybe I'll read it again when I'm less tired from WRITING it and realize that it's not that bad, but, uh, today is not that day.
[EDIT]: Reread it, and decided it was acceptable enough to cross-post. Thanks for letting me know I did an okay job, Hope.
What am I doing? he thinks one hot summer's night, staring at the sketches of Lelouch he's scattered across the floor like carpet, hand paused halfway down the waistband of his pants. He wonders what's he's doing, for sure, but once a stone starts falling, it's almost impossible to stop.
Euphie, his mind screams in vain, later, clothes thrown haphazardly to all corners of the room and his hips jerking up into cold, empty air; but what good is a memory fueled by grief when all that he's ever desired was brought about by hate?
He comes all over himself under the gentle, airbrushed gaze of Lelouch's hundred eyes.
***
Lelouch backs away from the crack in the wall, and is nearly sick by what he's just seen.
This hadn't been his intention at all. True, like in the manner of courting, he had given Suzaku things in the hopes that he would be happy with him. True, he had holed him up, kept him prisoner, and denied him every basic social necessity in the hopes that he would come to rely on him. And true, like Pavlov's dog, he had hoped to ingrain within Suzaku a series of conditioned responses based on the occurence of several stimuli, but...
No, he is just a dog, now. An average, ordinary, unremarkable dog: loyal, adorable, and dumb.
***
He's wrong, of course, and he knows that he's wrong, but Lelouch is, if nothing else, amazingly capable of forgoing all sensible thought and procedure when it comes to attaining that which he desires most.
He reflects, self-depreciatingly, that it's taken him seven years to realize that one of those things is Suzaku.
***
Something lands with a muted thump near his face, from where he had been sleeping in a fetal position on the floor. Suzaku opens his eyes, blearily.
"I'll take you for a walk outside, if you promise to be good," says Lelouch, smugly, from over the ring of an old-fashioned leather collar, the kind originally meant for dogs.
Suzaku ignores him, and goes back to sleep.
***
But it's horrible, truly horrible. He hasn't seen the sun in over eighty days. He hasn't felt anything under his feet other than the straw roughness of the storage room floor. He misses the sound of flowing water, and the sensation of tree bark lying flat against his palms. He presses his nose to one of the cracks in the wall and attempts to breathe in the clean sweetness of the spring air. He comes away with a throat full of dust, instead. When it storms, he plunges his tongue through a hole in the wall and tries to catch a taste of the rain. He gets a splinter, instead. (Which he agonizes over for the next two days until eventually, embarrassingly, he has to get C.C.'s help to pry it out with her long, slim fingernails.)
When Lelouch comes to see him again, without bothering to think of any purpose or pretense for his visit like he usually does, Suzaku is already sitting there waiting for him, glaring defiantly despite the collar around his throat and the leash in his hand.
***
They go at night, because it's the only time they won't be seen. Nonetheless, Suzaku stumbles down the steps, half-falling, and goes on his knees with his arms over his head because of the brightness of the moon.
"You're...blind?" Lelouch asks, haltingly, and Suzaku shakes his head. He tries opening his eyes a crack, but even that is painful. Cover. If they can just get out of the light, he can see fantastically in the dark. He won't ask, though. Won't beg for it, because he is still a man, no matter how collared or bound.
The world goes blissfully warm and dark. Lelouch has thrown his cloak over his cringing, cowering form. He can stand again. If he stares at the ground, he can even see; the ground, at least. He's led along to god-knows-where, but he isn't dragged by the neck - rather, Lelouch guides him, confidently, by the tether of his hand, fingers warm and bare, without the superficial distance of gloves. Something burns in Suzaku's stomach that he has no choice but to write off as anger.
"How are your eyes?" Lelouch asks quietly, after they've walked for quite a while; his face suddenly bursts into Suzaku's line of sight in a way that's disturbing. He smells like fresh, fragrant tea; Suzaku swallows. He hasn't had tea in ages.
"Better, I suppose, no thanks to you," he answers resentfully, remembering how much he used to love standing with his face to the sun. They slow to a stop, and he starts lifting his gaze up, slowly; if he goes slow enough, it doesn't sting all that bad. He catches himself mirrored in Lelouch's gaze on the way up and is alarmed at how far his pupils have shrank - they're slits, practically, small black dots in the green of his eyes. After a while, he can look around at their surroundings without flinching.
They're under the copse of trees that sits atop a small ledge, the one that overlooks the sunflower field bustling with cicadas during the day and fireflies at night; tonight, however, there are no flies, discouraged perhaps by the intimidating light of the moon. It's a little cold out, for a summer's night - no, Suzaku realizes that he has no idea what season it is at all. He does a fast calculation; it's still only spring. Then it's warm, even, for a night in March. There are no fireflies because it's not yet their season. His legs ache, because he hasn't exercised in ages. Though it's probably been obvious for some time now, he tries to hide the fact that his knees are buckling. One gives beneath him, and he goes down on a knee, hacking ungracefully when he's unwillingly reminded of the collar around his neck. Lelouch teeters for a second, off-balance, but manages to recover, and lower himself to the ground on his own power; he's always been a show-off.
It doesn't matter. The sounds of frogs calling from some stream or marsh is a sound he hasn't heard since he was a child, even. Nor the smell of sunflowers wafting through the air. He takes a deep breath; is that what it is, mercy? A mercy beyond that of simple, painless death? Lelouch jerks the leash once, lightly, and no, it's not either. It's an exercise in dominance, a demonstration of control. He leans away, testing. It's one of those terrible choke collars, not the kind he can simply go slack against. It cuts into his windpipe, making it hard to breathe. He has no choice but to scurry, squirrel-like, to the other end of that leash. He glares, brought up short, and low on breath.
"How scary," Lelouch laughs, in that mocking way he has that others often mistake for being good-natured. "I didn't know you were capable of making a face like that, Suzaku."
"Oh, but you remember, don't you, Lelouch?" The brunette smiles, hard. "I made one just like this at you from down the other end of a gun."
For an instant, Lelouch's expression crumbles, turns ugly, but he closes his eyes and presses his lips together in a thin smile; "It's been a long time since someone other than C.C. has called me by that name." His jaw relaxes, and he drops the fake courtesy. "Yes...it has."
Suzaku puts his back to him and shrugs, coldly. "Didn't I tell you, Lelouch? That nothing good comes of power."
A wry, half-startled laugh. "You did; I remember." Suzaku jumps as the taller boy's forehead comes to land on his shoulder, unexpectedly. He tries to pull away, only to discover that Lelouch has cut all the slack; nearly all of the leash save a few squandary inches or so are wrapped tightly around his left hand; stretched back over his shoulder, pulled taut.
"But something good did come from this power of mine, you know." He pulls the leash even tighter, down the line of Suzaku's spine, and when the brunette reaches his hands behind his back in an attempt to wrestle for some relief, Lelouch catches his wrists, both of them, in his other hand, and handcuffs them. Suzaku struggles, briefly, in a battle he knows is pointless, jerking his wrists and his shoulders and thrashing his head around from side to side before choking himself again, inadvertantly, and subconsciously going limp, trying to get some air down his aching windpipe. He slumps over, breathing hard. He can't even turn his head around to see the expression on Lelouch's face; the collar's too tight, and the leather chafes his neck. It's disconcerting.
Something flits in his hair, and he jerks, instinctively. Lelouch lets out a strange, almost grunting sort of noise. "Don't jerk around like that," he says patronizingly, and there's that sensation in Suzaku's hair again. "You feel like losing an ear?"
Snip, snip, snip. It's the sound of scissors, of shears, and Suzaku watches in morbid fascination as locks of stringy, straggly brown hair drift to the ground near his hips, like little worms the color of brown earth. A bullfrog croaks from an alarmingly close distance. He's getting a haircut?
"And you thought it was necessary to choke me and chain me up for this?" Suzaku asks aloud then, angrily, turning a bit and feeling the scissors pinch against his scalp. Lelouch pauses a moment to whap him across the head with them, before continuing, more confidently than before.
"It's more fun this way," he says evasively, which means he has something else planned, too. Suzaku sits placidly and starts to think of a counterattack.
Lelouch, he knows, cuts his own hair, and Nunnally's as well, which is something he once made fun of but now is rather grateful for, considering. Not that it really mattered what his hair looked like now, or even really that he cared about it, before, but... Well, at least he might be able to scavenge some of his dignity. Unless, of course, the other boy was planning on shaving him bald, or giving him something horrible like...say, a crew cut.
"Why?" he asks sullenly, because he knows Lelouch won't do something like that; it's not in his nature to kick others while they're down. So...why?
"I wanted you to look like Suzaku again," Lelouch answers, shrugging, and it's not really the easiness of his answer, or the way he says it, but instead -
I wanted. Everything with him up until this point had always been a mantra of I needed or had to. Or, failing that, I will, with no reason or excuse, only intention. What is it, truly, that Lelouch has ever wanted?
Euphie, then. Had Euphie needed to die, or was required to die, or was...simply...wanted to...?
Suzaku's shoulders start to shake, and there's a sudden intake of breath; a sharp pain and a warmth trickling down his neck as the scissors catch on the lobe of his ear. Lelouch lets out a breath, as though about to take a unexpected plunge, and there is the sound of the scissors being tossed away; stuck down in the dirt.
Choked again, from front and back. Lelouch pulls him into a feverish embrace, ignorant of how it hurts. C.C's words come back to him; why is it that you're alive? and he laughs, and laughs, and just sits there and laughs, until Lelouch finally starts to laugh with him; shakily, at first, then stronger and stronger until they laugh together, and go numb together, and go crazy together.
***
How best to accurately recount the feeling of delerium? To start from the beginning, it seems.
His ear was still bleeding. Lelouch stares at it, still trembling, like a sailor cast out at sea, before leaning forward in a swift, impulsive movement, and taking the lobe of it into his mouth.
Suzaku squawks, ungracefully, which turns into a terrible hack when he tries to pull away in alarm; in danger of being suffocated, he instinctively goes limp, though his toes start to curl deeply into the ground.
Pavlov's dog, Lelouch thinks, wryly, somewhat ashamed of himself for not even realizing he had never given Suzaku any shoes, and they had walked for nearly a quarter of a mile. He tastes blood in his mouth, Suzaku's blood, and pulls the brunette against him even more, hearing one of the joints in his shoulder pop as he does so. A sign of malnutrition. Why was he so negligent? In a subsconcious attempt to be dominant? To have someone he once regarded as far more powerful than himself to be completely at his mercy? If he was so negligent because of some pathetic desire to be needed; well, then, he might as well say that he had left Nunnally alone with his mother that day on purpose, so that she too could never leave him. It was all nonsense.
He laps at the blood with his tongue, nibbles a little bit on Suzaku's ear; Suzaku, who wriggles a bit, uncharacteristically, and tries to hunch his shoulders up to his cheeks as though he were a turtle, and not a bird. For Lelouch, also, it has been a long time since he's ever been as close to someone as he was like this. Since he was ten, really, and the same person he used to curl up with at night back then is the same one he's clinging to pathetically to now. He unfurls his legs like a spider; entwines them around Suzaku's knees, hooks them behind his calves. The brunette is practically sitting on his lap, now. Since he can't move his arms or his legs anymore, he moves his hips, instead; side to side, as though trying to dig himself a hole to escape through with only his butt.
The image is so ludicrous that Lelouch has to stifle a snort of laughter, poorly, and thinks that's he laughed more tonight than he has in the past three months.
"Let me up," Suzaku mutters, half-angry, half-embarrassed. It's an exhilarating combination; his cheeks are stained red. Lelouch puts his face against one, and sure enough, they're on fire. He traces his nose down the curve of Suzaku's jaw. When the brunette tries to pull away, stretched beyond the point of comfort - if there ever was such a point to begin with - Lelouch jerks at his collar, robs him of his air, and steals his lips with a kiss.
The angle is poor, and probably hurts him quite a bit, but Lelouch doesn't care. He wants. He'll accept penitence for it later. He breathes heavily out of his nose, and Suzaku nearly unhinges his jaw in an attempt to open his mouth wider, to feed his starving lungs. It's fantastic. No book Lelouch has read on the subject is nearly as accurate the reality. No better tutor is there than instinct. It isn't until Suzaku reels, looking alarmingly dizzy, that Lelouch finally lets him go. He appeases the sensation of loss with the acquisition of others; he buries his nose in the nape of Suzaku's neck and slips just the tips of his fingers under the line of the brunette's shirt, testing the waters, seeing what he can get away with. Everything, it seems, from the way there is only the barest twitch in response. He moves his fingers upward.
"You're too skinny," he murmurs, but cherishing the feel of protruding ribs against his skin nonetheless. "I'll tell the two of them to feed you more from now on."
"Even if you did," Suzaku replies, painfully hoarse, "I wouldn't eat it." He hollows his stomach in an attempt to flee from Lelouch's intrusive hands; his skin is cold, ice cold, or maybe it's Lelouch who's fever-bright.
"Oh?" When he shrinks in upon himself like that, he looks even more like prey. Revenge for all of the senseless tickling and fistfights and tears from their childhood; fitting that he should be the one attempting to hide from onslaught. It's no good. Lelouch grinds his hips forward, unable to ignore the instinct of the predator. He's used to erections - it's safe to say that C.C. gives them to him all the time, infuriating woman - but this one hurts. Some fluttering feeling from below his stomach screams to be fed; refuses to be ignored. He drops his fingers lower, lower, until they reach the waistband of cheap cotton prisoner's pants.
Suzaku goes very, very still. "You can't mean - ?" he says after a moment, breathlessly, and bangs his knees together in a hurry. It doesn't matter; they're still bent, up in the air. Lelouch just reaches under his legs, and starts from the bottom up. Suzaku freezes again, and this time, he doesn't even breathe. He just seizes his lip in his teeth, very hard, when Lelouch scrapes the edges of his fingernails against the line of his thigh.
"You were the one who started it, you know," Lelouch realizes, voice a muted hum. More than the sexual desire, it seems, he craved the intimacy. How very escapist of him. "You, and your unending obsession with my face."
There; a fine tremor, or maybe it's just because he's moved his hands up, a bit, treading too close to the killswitch that will shatter the moment, hasten the end.
The idiot won't even let go with his teeth in order to speak. Suzaku, Lelouch notices now, has very fine, sharp teeth - he's an impressive biter. A small trickle of blood escapes his mouth to slide down his chin. For some reason, such a ridiculous display of barely-contained self-restraint truly bothers Lelouch. He takes his hand and pinches Suzaku's nostrils shut.
"Stop that," he says. After a few seconds, the brunette unwillingly opens his mouth. Lelouch kisses him again.
Weeks, months, in captivity have made Suzaku weak, like a once-wild animal fooled into being domesticated. Physically, Lelouch has the upper hand now. He presses his advantage; tangles his fingers into Suzaku's curly, half-cut hair and gains the right leverage to pry his knees apart, feverishly, with only the strength of his own. There is a moan in his mouth that is either desire or despair; either suits him just fine, frankly, and it reverbates down his throat. Blood in his mouth, hips against his, and the feeble kicking of feet in the dirt.
"Well?" he says after he draws back, and Suzaku's struggling has caused pants that were originally quite too large for him to flap down over the ends of his toes, caused the waistband to dip far below that which is acceptable, and ultimately, exposed the only affirmation that Lelouch would need in order to carry on.
But, the words. As Zero, he's learned that words have power. As Lelouch Lamperouge, he's learned that words are all it takes to bring everything around him to ruin. Either or both are probably fitting for what they're about to do. "Well?" he asks again, hearing his own voice echo back at him from the shell of Suzaku's ear. The real thing, he supposed, would be better, but he can't bear to break the contact they have at this moment, can't bear to go without the feel of ribs under his palms or shoulders shaking in his arms for a second longer than he has to. And why should he? For the two of them, anything would suffice.
"I really don't have anything to say to you, anymore," Suzaku answers, quietly, but doesn't struggle when he's touched, or laughed at, or pinned down on the ground, his wrists crushed beneath his back.
It's far more overwhelming than Lelouch had ever calculated, and he thinks that he won't feel the same sort of euphoria again until Britannia crumbles at his feet. He toys with his food before eating it, licking slow lines up Suzaku's torso, his stomach, his thighs. He bites the brunette's hip, roughly, before placating the area with a sloppy, lazy kiss. Once, he nearly falls prey to the attempt to manuever him in a specific direction with a subtle use of legs, but he manages to slither his way out of the trap with only the barest of breaths against the skin of a stiff, straining erection.
"Almost," he admits, and Suzaku thumps his head back on the grass in despair.
He's always had good instincts, but he's not very smart. There's only one thing that Lelouch wants, and it's to make this go on for as long as possible. His body both echoes and retaliates against that sentiment, but he's not the type to be indecisive. He traces out the symbol of the Geass from bone to bone across Suzaku's hips, and the shiver that follows sends a ripple through his body in reply. Contact, no matter how indirect, nearly makes him lose his head, and that's the one thing he doesn't want to lose until he's ready. He moves a subtle inch away.
"Sit up," he commands, lowly, because somehow they've wound up on the ground; the cold, damp ground that robs them of their breath and warmth. Suzaku, dazed, takes a moment or two to follow the order, but he does, struggling valiantly without the ability to use his hands. He's tense, leaning forward with his chest against his knees and his thighs slammed shut, rubbing against each other in the way Lelouch imagines that crickets do, when they make their call to mate. He's trying very hard to hide it, so Lelouch acts as though he doesn't notice. He retrieves his cloak from where it had been rolled into the ground, and wraps himself in it, protectively, both he and Suzaku. He pushes the brunette back down onto the grass again.
It's not really pushing, it's more like falling, and the two of them land together with twin 'oof!'s, breath mixing in midair and noses tapping, lightly. Lelouch looks cross-eyed down into Suzaku's wary, waiting face, and can't quite suppress the smile he knows he doesn't deserve to make. Touching noses...the most intimate and vulnerable act of any wild animal, more so than even copulation, and he leans forward, and forward, and touching lips is the most intimate and vulnerable act of any human being, so he does that, too.
Again, again, again. It turns into something bruising and wet, and it occurs to Lelouch that perhaps kissing is something neither intimate nor vulnerable after all. Perhaps it all depends on the manner in which it's done; the sentiment with which it is done. Perhaps, more accuarately, it doesn't really matter at all. In the typical human instinct to invade, he splits Suzaku's teeth with his tongue and presses it hungrily inside, earning himself a vaguely defeated little sigh and shoulders shaking against his hands. He thinks for a moment of those impressive, biting teeth, but the brunette only opens his mouth wider, permitting the invasion. He's trembling with the fine-precision art of holding himself back; how admirable, how adorable.
Lelouch moves his mouth only when there's a need to breathe; he takes it lower, breathing hard through his nose in an attempt to inhale everything, cutting a hard, bruising swathe along the line of Suzaku's jaw, back to his ear, down his neck, and over to his Adam's apple, where he pauses, brushing gently with his lips as though speaking aloud. When he nips it, suddenly, it jumps high in Suzaku's throat as the brunette swallows, audibly.
He drags his lips downward, across a sharp and angled collarbone, which he nibbles on so hard that it actually leaves marks, over to a thin and slightly marred right shoulder. He forgoes hard, fast pleasure for a moment to let his nose, his lips, linger over the paint-splatter scar that lies there, regretfully. Subconsciously, he slips his fingers down, to an older scar on Suzaku's back right side, to one made also by the bullet of a gun.
Sorry, Lelouch thinks painfully, far too late to do any of them any good.
He rolls his head to the side with a sigh, and lets it come to rest there, his dark hair a sharp contrast to the stark, pale way Suzaku's skin is whitewashed in the light of the moon. In his ear is the thump, thump, thump of Suzaku's heart, and that there is the value of his idle life. Lelouch moves his hand, with the long, brittle fingers and the callous on the trigger finger, and dips it down the line of the brunette's abdomen, towards his navel. He scratches his nails down Suzaku's belly, pauses them just above the head of his stiff, throbbing cock. There is a keening, dog-like whimper that Lelouch has difficulty believing is real, and a powerful, impressive spasm. He pulls his hand away, agonizingly slow.
"Quiet," he orders lazily, eyes at half-mast. Beneath his ear, he can almost hear the blood roaring through his victim's heart. He palms his own erection through the front of his clothes, and the spike of pleasure that slithers up his spine is better than he thought. It was like rubbing salve on an old, burning wound, or finally managing to reach an itch that had been begging to be scratched. He lets his eyes sink closed; moves two of his fingers and rubs them against his shaft, letting out a breath that comes out white in the coldness of the air. It's hot, and wet, and Suzaku squirms a bit when it hits his chest. Lelouch shifts imperceptively to bite him, chastizingly, on a rib.
"Stop fidgeting," he murmurs, voice gone rather low and husky. "Keep still."
The brunette has always been a good soldier; he does as he's told, heart beating erratically out of the right side of his chest and his ribcage rising and falling in a frantic rhythm. He's no good at self-restraint; Lelouch, who had been taught to restrain himself from the moment he was born, takes his time and goes slowly, stoking his desire into an even, tempered flame. He truly wants this to go on forever, but if it carries on any further, Suzaku, he knows, will continue burning from both ends until he burns himself out, and he may choose never to come back to life.
"Quietly, now," he reminds aloud, wrapping long, gentle fingers around Suzaku's erection and keeping his voice steady, his gaze low; "but not without feeling, and it doesn't matter much to me whether you want to move now or not. Understand?" He looks up through lidded violet eyes, and curls his fingers once, flexingly. Suzaku licks his lips once, giving away his trepidation, but says nor does nothing.
He understands, then, and understanding is happiness. Lelouch laughs, bitterly. "Fine, then," he says, lowering his head, throwing the leash in his hand away, "do as you like."
A cacophony of howls, and threats, and curses; accurate accusations of suffering and betrayal, of a hatred buried more deeply than words could ever hope to bare; the bitter dismissal of over a thousand childhood promises, and Lelouch, shoulders shaking from the silent knowing laughter of it all, buried down to his throat with a hard, eager cock that is neither unable nor unwilling at all.
His victory is a pillar of salt, and he's laughing so hard that it bubbles out of the corners of his mouth to drip, messily, onto the blades of grass below. Suzaku's vendetta of hatred is ultimately overridden by a series of helpless, inescapeable moans. He goes taut like a wire, trembling and high-strung, before inhaling sharply, once, and slowly allowing his muscles to relax; minutely, in a series of degrees. Lelouch, though far from satiated himself, merely rolls away and pillows his head against Suzaku's thigh, deciding that he prefers it this way.
"If...I..." the brunette starts, thickly, voice rough from all of the abuse, "...if I was the one who...started it, then...?" He shuts his eyes abruptly from the stars above. "Then what did you ever do with all of those pictures I gave you, anyway?"
Lelouch flows to a sitting position gracefully, and waits for Suzaku to meet his gaze, angrily, before answering.
"Burned them, of course," he says, rummaging around in his pockets and pulling on his gloves. "It's dangerous to hold on to any evidence that might give away the identity of my face."
Suzaku looks angrier than ever. "Why, then?" he asks, voice deadly and low. Lelouch brushes the dirt off of his clothes, and is very careful to conceal his prominent erection, and is very careful not to give an answer.
Why, indeed?
Of course, the fulfillment of sexual desire: the conditioned response of those very same human beings who came up with such a ridiculous term as 'Pavlov's dog'.
***
"Fine, then," Suzaku says later, pants pulled back up and his shirt rearranged into a semblance of order, legs gone as numb as his arms from sitting too long on the ground; "it's only what I deserve."
Snip, snip, snip, and more of his hair falls to the ground. So like Lelouch to finish what he's started. "And what exactly is that?"
"Punishment," he clarifies dully, head hung low, "that I should be used by you, because I've left nothing of her in me - not her words, or her voice, or even her face. So it's fine. In whatever capacity you feel you have to use me...it's fine."
There's only the barest of pause in the scissors to let Suzaku know he's even been heard in the first place. When Lelouch stands, at last, he jerks him to his feet by the collar and his eyes are hard.
***
He's angry, Suzaku realizes sometime later, back in his room, when his feet are knocked out from under him and a hand pushes down in his hair; the other goes over his eyes.
By then, of course, it's already too late.
***
He can't sit or speak for three days after that.
***
On the fourth day, Lelouch returns with a sheaf of papers that he throws, unceremoniously, at Suzaku's feet.
"I thought you'd want something to remember her by," he says, bitterly, uncharacteristically petulant. When he leaves, Suzaku leans over the papers with mild interest.
The entry on Euphemia li Britannia from the Grolier's Standard Encyclopedia, Japan United edition.
He starts to read it anyway, but of course, there's no pictures.
***
He gets to the phrase 'beguiling over a quarter of a million Japanese with her sweet words and innocent smile' before he closes it, crying.
***
He stops drawing Lelouch and starts drawing Karen. Though she protests, at first, wrapping her arms around her shoulders or throwing her hands over her face, she eventually opens up for him, showing him expressions that are neither cruel nor particularly memorable.
He'll find another reason for why it is that he's alive.
***
There's commotion outside, and the Order of the Black Knights are on the move. Karen moves most of the contents of the food that was in storage into his room, and doesn't ridicule him, defiantly, when he moves to help. It takes up a lot of space, and he likes it. There's still nothing to eat it on, or cook it with, but at least it's food.
He doesn't ask, though, until Karen leaps at him, suddenly, enfolding him in a frantic hug and muttering into his ear, "I'm sorry you won't be able to draw me anymore; I'm sorry."
Outside, there is the noise of marching boots and loading guns. Karen grabs her own rifle where she had leaned it against the wall, and slams the door in his face, never bothering to answer.
Lelouch does, however, on the last day he comes to visit him, his left eye a burning red.
The Order, it seemed, was finally making its move on the soil of Britannia.
***
There's nothing to do, and no one to draw. There's a bomb on his door that will activate the second he opens it. Probably. Maybe. At least, that's what he's been told, and it's not as though he can just open it to find out if it were true. Even C.C. is gone, and Suzaku sometimes wonders if she had ever really been there to begin with.
He eats, and sleeps, and runs circles around his room, thoroughly mad.
***
About six months after he's been brought under Zero's captivity, the Order returns, and the world ends.
"Britannia is finished," Lelouch announces haughtily from his door, violet eyes merciless and proud. "Beaten down, broke apart." There is a fine tremble to his voice that Suzaku has to strain his ears to catch. "Aries Imperial Villa has sank into the sea; the old man went with it, and so did everyone else." His eyes waver, and his voice starts to crack. "The...the one who killed my mother was..." His breath hitches, and he hiccups; actually hiccups, as though he were once again ten, and sways in the door, before falling to his knees and starting to sob.
Suzaku doesn't bother to take a guess on his own. There is blood on his hands and the Geass is gone.
***
"The war is over, and with it, my life," Lelouch says after he's recovered, sounding more weary in these five seconds than he has ever sounded in his entire life. "Nunnally...no, there will always be plenty of people to look after Nunnally, won't there? The one who never had anyone was me." He barks out a half-cough, half-laugh. His eyes are watery and red.
"The ones who loved me the most were the ones I wound up hurting the most, in the end," he continues, standing unsteadily and limping across the room, his gun lying flat on the palm of his hand, and his hand stretched out in front of him, regally. "And the ones I wound up hurting the most in the end are now all dead. Except for you."
Suzaku wonders for a moment, worriedly, about Karen, until he realizes that Lelouch probably never cared about Karen at all, and that really, she is probably just fine. Happy, even, with her friends and loved ones in Japan.
"So I decided," Lelouch concludes, and true, there's that hard, determined edge to his voice that he gets when he's decided something, "that the one who should decide where my life will go from here is you." He thrusts the hand with the gun in it forward, impatiently. "Shoot me, if you would, make me suffer. Suffer, and suffer, until you've had your fill, until I'm finally dead. I should have never existed in the first place, wasn't it?" The petty, childish hurt of an old grudge. Suzaku blinks. Had he ever really sounded that terrible?
"Naive," he says, coldly, and Lelouch shakes like he's about to cry again.
"Naive. The dead don't raise the dead."
***
But in the end, he does make Lelouch suffer, because that's what he's wanted, truly, all along. He's yearned to betray, in the same manner that he has been betrayed. He's craved the ability to hurt, the ability to wound, the ability to destroy far beyond the point of ever being salvageable again.
So in the end, he does make Lelouch suffer.
He makes him live.
***
No one visits the Kururugi Shrine these days, and the small, run-down storehouse in the far eastern corner even less so. Suzaku is glad for it. It makes it easier to concentrate, easier to find inspiration in the trees rustling in the breeze or the birds taking flight. He places his cheek on his fist and starts sketching, idly, without really paying attention to what it is he's doing.
No one is surprised more than he when he realizes, upon finishing, that he has finally remembered the face of Euphemia.
***
Lelouch Lamperouge stares down the barrel of a gun and realizes, I have shot more people than I can count in my entire life.
"So," he says aloud, tapping the metal against the roof of his mouth. So.
What meaning is there, then, in a death that does nothing to even the score?
Smiling ruefully, he throws the gun away.
Ending AN?: Uh, I AM REALLY SORRY THAT THIS IS SO LONG. O.o 'Scuse me while I go dunk my head in a bucket of cold water right about now. There was seriously this one part in which I whooped aloud at 2 AM, "Finally! The porn is starting here!" and my brother who was dicking around on the computer outside my room actually came in because he thought I was watching a porno.
This is also...not very good. There was just a point where I struggled with finishing it and I think that point is pretty clear. Also, I'm rusty; I haven't written fic in over six months. I know that's no excuse, but...eh. I just...really don't like this. Maybe I'll read it again when I'm less tired from WRITING it and realize that it's not that bad, but, uh, today is not that day.
[EDIT]: Reread it, and decided it was acceptable enough to cross-post. Thanks for letting me know I did an okay job, Hope.