[dream 14] remember to learn to forget [week 17, day 1]
[ This is Britannia.
All this gilt and painted columns, the floors carpeted with fabric so thick it might stifle a fire, except in the places where it’s worn down to the hardwood from official people walking in their shiny black boots, this is the Imperial Throne Room. The marble walls would glisten if the lights weren’t turned down to a dim glow.
There is power in this room; it stinks of it, reeking out of the opulence. Privilege and power and wealth, and all the things that make a country into a Holy Empire.
The carpet, red as blood, with gold gleaming in the trim.
This is Britannia. ]
There is nothing quite like being in a straitjacket. It’s not painful, per se, but it lingers right on the line between that and really, really intense discomfort. Mostly the real horror of being shoved into one is the frustration - with your arms, twisted up behind your back, pulling at your shoulder sockets, and your legs tied together, you can only thrash impotently, like a worm pulled out of the earth. Squirm like a fetus in the womb.
The thick, heavy feeling in your lungs and limbs is left over from the sedatives they’ve kept you on for the past two days during your incarceration and emergency rush to the homeland, though you hadn’t even known where they were taking you until you came to, woke up in the interior of a jet flying at some Mach speed over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. You were strapped sideways into some military seat with the padding all worn out of the cracked industrial leather; they’re not built for comfort. Strapped sideways with your legs crunched up under you like a failed origami project, arms twisted up and tied behind your back. You were the bow on a child’s birthday gift. Craning your neck around, you couldn’t see anyone but the pilot and copilot, with opaque black visors that covered their entire faces.
They knew. Or whoever had given them their orders had known. It didn’t matter. It had meant someone knew, someone somewhere, and that’s as good as everyone knowing in the long run.
And from the seat behind you, a hand had come down on your shoulder. We can’t sedate you anymore, a voice says, a voice you would know if you weren’t so woozy and hollowed out. He wants you lucid when we get there.
He.
He.
Who is he?
You were in a straitjacket, and you still are, and in that former military jet with the steel gray interior smelling of sterilized vomit from the younger recruits who’d never jumped to their maybe-deaths before, you had gone cold. Even with the remains of the tranquilizers in your system, your tongue dry as cardboard, your insides moaning for food because your throat kept closing up too tight to swallow, you had gone cold. Your marrow chilling until your bones could have frozen you from the inside out.
No, you had meant to say, but you hadn’t spoken in a day or so, hadn’t been awake in hours, so what came out of your sedated, rusty mouth was something more like Nnuhhh, something with the shape of a word but you couldn’t make the vowel. A panic-sound with no panic; you were too hollow to really panic, this was fear with no real urgency because your urgency functions were offline. No. Nnuhhh. Something like that.
The hand on your shoulder squeezed, hard. Yes. You’d craned your head back the other direction. Not enough. Ouch. This would have hurt more on another day. Crane your eyes as far to the left as you can, until all the nerves and tendons and muscles and body wires that hold them in place scream with the effort.
Suzaku.
Oh. It was Suzaku. Oh. Yeah, sure, yeah, of course that made sense. They wouldn’t have put anyone else in there with you. No, it had to be Suzaku, because he was the one who captured you, because he was one of those positively confirmed to have already been Geassed by you, so he’s free, safe and free to look you straight in the eye and nod. He’d nodded.
Yes.
He.
Oh, shit.
You’d tried struggling some more, but you were too weak, drugged and dehydrated and wrapped up all beautiful, Suzaku’s birthday gift to the Holy Britannian Empire: one of those transforming action figures made out of reject plastic, part Hero of the Rebellion, part Exiled Prince, part Mild-Mannered High School Student, all the accessories sold separately. Batteries not included.
Wrapped up all beautifully - this is how Suzaku’s going to hand you to Charles zi Britannia.
Which brings the story back up to speed, now: you’re wriggling, squirming inside the rough canvas, trying to break Suzaku’s grip, as he drags you - personally, drags you, because even though it’s against policy for only one guard to take a prisoner before the Emperor, no one’s going to argue with the cold sculpted concrete of the new Suzaku’s face, the brand-new deadness in his stare - he drags you up fourteen flights of stairs, through maybe thirty sets of obnoxiously huge double doors, and when he gets to the Throne Room, he gives the proper genuflecting bow and slams your face into the floor by the hair on the back of your head.
You bite your tongue and taste coppery blood, the warmth of it blooming over the insides of your mouth.
This is the Emperor of Britannia. Enormous, he’s enormous. Maybe in the back of your mind, you’d thought he only seemed that huge because he was that huge when you were a child, your memories clouded by a child’s perception, back when you were ten and everyone was that much bigger than you, but you’ve been proven wrong now: he’s still that huge. If anything, he seems even larger than you remember. Charles is the God of this empire, the left hand that destroys and the right hand that conquers.
With your face grinding against the carpet, your throat too dry to even spit at his feet, he speaks.
Former seventeenth successor to the throne, Lelouch vi Britannia. It has been a while, he says, my son.
Too late. You had vowed to never again think of this man as your father.
Your lips curl back from your teeth. Against Suzaku’s hold, you manage to raise your head slightly. You - you snarl, but Suzaku slams you back to the floor. He held a gun pointed at you more gently than he’s holding you by the hair right now. The carpet tastes like dirt and dust and synthetic fibers and it makes you gag slightly, soursweet bile bubbling at the back of your throat.
I won’t let you use your Geass, Suzaku says. Just like that. He says it. You wish he’d sound angry, like this is an action charged with some kind of meaning to him, but he’s already been angry with you. He’s already shot the mask right off your face. Suzaku has already hated you right out of being, and now you only exist as a body to him. Right now, you’re a package he’s delivering.
Your throat is so dry, the rage is making a sound that might have been a growl, but is something more like a choke. Like something strangling you.
Suzaku is already no longer paying attention to you. His hand in your hair, you on the floor, he’s already moved on to a new train of thought. Your Majesty, he says. I have a proposal.
Please, he says, you on the floor tasting carpet and blood and acid bile with your body still hollow from the sedatives (but lucid, your head is perfectly clear now, because he’d wanted you lucid, wanted you to understand and grasp the magnitude of this defeat), Suzaku says, let me join the Empire’s most elite twelve knights, the Knights of Rounds.
A promotion.
You ask as your reward for capturing Zero? Charles asks, lazily.
He has sold you for a promotion.
You... you hiss against the floor, voice still hoarse from the stomach acid burning your throat red and raw.
He whispers to you, without even looking at you, I told you, Lelouch. I’m going to change the world from within.
From within. Oh, sure. He’s pulling out chunks of your hair and he’s going to change the world from within. He’s pointed a gun at you, same as you pointed at him, and he’s going to change the world from within. He’s kneeling before Charles zi Britannia, Kururugi Suzaku, son of the late Prime Minister of Japan, murderer of the late Prime Minister of Japan, trading him Zero for a seat in power in the Empire, and he’s going to change the world from within. Oh, this would be funny if it weren’t so very not funny at all.
By selling your friend for a promotion? you snarl from the floor, neck twisted around so you can at least see him out of one eye.
That’s right, he says. Immediately.
You know now. You are already dead, stone cold dead to him.
Very well, Charles booms from the throne. I admire your answer. He would, you think, hissing against the floor through your teeth, struggling inside the straitjacket, your shoulders aching with every movement. Well then, and now he is standing, standing like a colossus you wish would fall, wanted to make fall, I name you to the Knights of Rounds. There’s a fraction of a pause. Not even long enough for you to wonder, before -
Seal Zero’s left eye.
He wants to speak to you. He knows about your Geass, the power that is even now burning in your left eye, sizzling beneath the eyelid Suzaku forces shut with his fingers as he replies, Yes, Your Majesty, as he pulls you up to some sort of back-bending kneeling position by the hair to look your father in the eye. You have to see him. (He’d wanted you lucid, Charles, for whatever reason that has to do with you losing and him winning, and you wonder when he’s going to get around to killing you.)
You’re trembling.
Oh, this is so stupid, this is so sad, sad like you tied up and tangled up like a worm before a bird, like a newborn puppy still hairless and blind, shaking, shaking, shaking. Yes, this is fear. Don’t lie. It’s pointless to lie now. This is fear, fear that has your muscles twitching, fear that churns your empty stomach, fear that has you cold to the touch as if all your blood had retreated to the core of you to hide. This is absolute abject fucking terror is what it is. In many ways, you have never grown up; you are still a child in so many ways, and this is one of them: you are completely, utterly, totally paralyzed with fear for the man before you. Without your Geass, without allies, without even the ability to stand up, you are powerless and he is power, is all the definitions of power you have ever known in your life.
Charles zi Britannia is walking towards you, and every nerve in your body is alive screaming RUN, RUN, RUN, RUN, RUN, RUN, RUN.
You were a prince, and yet you started a rebellion against me, you unworthy halfwit, he says, striding slowly towards you, growing larger in your field of vision with every step, larger like a planet, like a moon falling to earth, like the way you think of God as big, but -
(The light retreats with every step he takes.)
- I still have a use for you.
He’s smiling. Oh, god.
W...What? you gasp, and your eye might have widened in shock if Suzaku’s fingers splayed across your face weren’t limiting most of the expressions you could be making.
He’s not going to kill you.
He is close now, so close you are literally in his shadow, held frozen in the umbra he casts, and you can see it, like with Mao, the reddish hue less seen than unseen, the flecks of light scattering across the surfaces of his irises, the buzz, sense of power that hums in your bones, rattles in your teeth, nails-on-a-chalkboard that no one else can see/unsee/sense like you, and that means -
and that means -
I shall rewrite your memories, he says, about the fact that you were Zero, about Marianne, about Nunnally -
It can’t be... you croak, rattle without moisture in your throat, Geass?
No. Oh, no.
Was that fear, before? That was nothing. That was not even close to something.
Charles has Geass.
It sounds like some ridiculous, absurd anxiety dream you might have had weeks ago, the one where you woke up too late and you forgot your pants and you failed a math test and you missed the decisive air strike battle and Charles has Geass, Charles has Geass, oh my god Charles has Geass.
Forget everything and just become a normal human,and he is not even smiling anymore, this is not a game, this is not him laughing at you, this is something that is happening, that is going to happen -
Stop! You squirm. Oh, you squirm, you buck and thrash as much as you can while still all filled with lead in your limbs and tranquilizers swimming in your bloodstream, you writhe and the whole time, Suzaku has you, Suzaku is made of liquid steel and his grip is inexorable, Suzaku is slowly, patiently prying the lids of your right eye open even as you struggle to clamp it shut, the tears are forming and Suzaku will not let you go, hands you held in your boyhood are pulling your eyelids open and turning your head towards Charles and you cannot help it cannot fight it cannot cannot cannot cannot let this happen. Oh, god, oh God, oh sweet, merciful, God, God you bastard, my God my God why have you forsaken me, this is not going to happen, no it isn’t, no.
Your voice cracks: You’re going to take away everything from me again?! He has everything. You have been dead from the moment you were born, he had said, everything you had was given to you from him, your mother, your lodgings, your possessions, the clothes on your back, your life, your face, your eyes, your name. Without him, you were nothing. Without him, you were dead. Mother... and even Nunnally?!
You didn’t exist, and that was fine with you. You had Nunnally. You would always have Nunnally. You had you. If you could take the whole equation of you and become a wave, a curve, a line, a point, a nothing, a none, a no one, zero, that was alright with you. That was all you needed. Nothing was unbreakable, was everything and nowhere and endless. You would be unbreakable. Or so you’d thought. You’d thought, but here, here and now, you are going to be broken into nothing, you are going to be less than nothing. He made you and he is going to unmake you. And remake you.
He spreads his cape, and it blocks out the light entirely. Night. Nuclear winter. A total eclipse of the sun. The light is gone and your eye is held open and bleeding tears so full of salt they scratch, and all you can see, all that exists is the red, scattering light in his eyes, and he is saying, Charles zi Britannia shall engrave...
You’re screaming. Stop! Stop. Stop. Stop. Go ahead and scream. Scream all you want. Scream and it scrubs your throat dry, until you try to bite down on your tongue and bite it off, bleed from the mouth until you die, bleed into your lungs and drown in your own blood, Charles’s blood, fill up your lungs and die dead on the red carpet, another stain to clean out, but the tip of Suzaku’s little finger is far enough down your face that he can push it into your mouth and your teeth come down on it, he pries your jaw up so you can’t, you can only taste the material of his glove and it tastes like the sterilized interior of a Knightmare cockpit and the blood that was already in your mouth from earlier, this is what betrayal tastes like, so swallow it down, swallow it all down -
You don’t even hear the last words he says, and something that buzzes against your teeth hits home, the scattering light is now pouring into your head through the eye you can’t close, racing tracing neurons in your brain, and you scream, oh God, how you scream, you scream your throat raw, your scream your lungs empty, you scream and scream and scream and even the breaths you gasp in sound like you’re still screaming, and then you scream some more.
[ Imagine being crushed to death.
Imagine the most massive weight that your body could even take without immediately bursting like the skin of a grape, oozing bloodandgutsandbonebitsandinsideparts, imagine this massive weight slowly, centimeter by centimeter, crushing all the air out of your lungs. It’s so slow you might not even notice. Air is simply leaking out of you as it slowly settles lower and lower on your chest, and when all the air is out of your lungs, you’ll die, because you won’t be able to take another breath. Two choices - inhale and rupture your entire body, or don’t inhale and just sit and listen to your own brain running around screaming for oxygen until all the system lights shut down.
Or rather, don’t imagine that, because you don’t have the time for metaphors and thought experiments right now, because you can feel hot sick tendrils working into your brain, eating, swallowing, digesting bits of you, parasites, cancers, rotting like the Empire like the guilt and the rot that has eaten you full of holes for years and years
(this hurts oh god it hurts it hurts so much this is too much this is too much this is this is what is this it’s like dying dying dying dying)
You’re scrambling, mentally reshuffling, trying to block this out, trying to hold onto everything of you you can, running through old bits of memory even as they burn out from under your fingers
(playing chess in the Aries Villa with Mother and Nunnally and
Mother’s blood dripping down the stairs and Nunnally in your arms and
Charles booming you have been dead since the day you were born and
C.C. grasping your hand and
and
and
and)
no use, it’s no use, try to distract it, maybe thinking about them leads him right to them, so you run through every useless bit of information you have stored, all the null content of your head, phone numbers, commercial jingles, nursery rhymes, old prayers you used to half-know and less than half-believe
now I lay me down to sleep and London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down the empire is falling down my fair lady who art in heaven hallowed be thy name that tune and win a 765.886.1900 zero zero you were Zero don’t think about Zero times one is still zero the sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides of a right triangle will yield the square of the hypotenuse hypotension hypoglycemia hypochondriac am I (sick am I breathing am I still alive) our father our father our father who art in heaven hallowed harrowed? harrowed be thy name thy kingdom and the power and the glory come and this isn’t working you’re not no you can’t this isn’t try harder falling down falling down you’re falling down falling falling down falling down down (down thy kingdom come thy will be (down?)) harrowed be thy name you can’t this isn’t this can’t you don’t know (no?) no know doesn’t matter
think of nothing
don’t think
no, he’s still there, he’s still (who is [there was there ever {a beginning to (this has it been [long or has it been {seconds or has it been (ages or has it been [eternity]ternity)ernity}rnity]nity)ity}ty]y) here, where is here, are you here, is there even a here
{ something that hisses and boils under your left eyelid is retreating, cooling, cooling like death, this is distressing but you don’t remember why, all that’s left is a vague sense of intense gut-churning fear that’s still draining away like sand through all the holes eaten up in you }
(think of Mother, think of
mother
you had a mother
everyone has a mother
think of
{ “Lelouch, do you know why the snow is white?...” }
your mother
you
mother
can you
{ ”...it’s white because it has forgotten what color it’s supposed to be.” }
no
)
you have been dead since the day you were born, you wanted to be nothing and now you are nothing, now you are nothing and no one and none, less than zero (Zero, Zero, Zero, there is something you should know something like a something important something something (anything?) nothing zero the mathematical concept of nothing from the French zero from the Venetian zero from the Italian zefiro from the Arabic safira, safira: “it was empty,” and this is you, you are empty) if I should die before I wake wake wake up Lelouch wake up wake the fuck up
(You’re screaming, but at this point, with your voice so cracked, so broken and bleeding, it’s less like screaming and more like sobbing.)
{The last thing you have left. The last name you hold in your hands, gripping so tightly your bones ache, gripping even as it burns and scalds your skin. Remember her. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally. Nunnally...}
]
You can hear, in front of you, someone saying It is done, and you’re tired, so tired, your throat hurts and you don’t remember why, so cold you’re shaking right down to your core, you’re tired to the point that random thoughts just circle around your mind like disturbed doves, thoughts that don’t even make sense, done thy will be done it’s done I am undone, why do your shoulders hurt, why are you on the floor, tasting blood and sick in your dry mouth, why, why, why, why, why? None of this makes sense.
You open your mouth.
There’s a word.
There’s a word you have been trying to say.
{ the snow is white because - snow, why are you thinking about snow? }
There’s a word you don’t remember how to say.
[ Nunnally ]
Nnuhhh, you gasp. Not a word. Not a word but something with the shape of a word. (Not you. Just something with the shape of you.) You try again. N-
( Nu- nun - nun? none?
None.
Nothing.
There’s nothing. )
And mercifully, darkness closes down.
[ The Hitomi continues recording and Lelouch is screaming, has screamed himself awake, screamed himself hoarse; he’s screaming a name and the feed clicks off in the center of “NUNNAL-” ]