[solo] like a bottle of your favorite poison [week 17, day 1]
Yomisato. The only city in Kannagara that feels like a real city, at least from Lelouch's experience. Aside from the obvious lack of modern amenities, of course, it has all the requirements: people (and lots of them), an infrastructure more sprawling and disorganized than not, disease, poverty, crime, and a noticeable gap between the rich and poor residents. Hell, it almost feels like he's on the fringes of the ghettos at home. Small comforts.
It's some time between midnight and dawn. Lelouch hasn't checked. He had jerked awake on the floor of a tiny shack in Hisato a couple hours ago, screaming his head off and covered in sweat. Hyperventilating. It took almost five minutes for his heart rate to go down to a manageable level, and during that time he could do nothing but breathe and tell himself, it's okay, I am not dead, I am not dead, I am alive, I remember her, it was only a dream, he's not here, I am not dead - until the room stopped spinning, until his eyes adjusted to the dark and he could (for once) take comfort in the fact that he was in Kannagara, a place as far removed as it is possible to be from Britannia, from that room with the carpet red as blood. (His blood. Charles' blood.)
That was the point around which Lelouch had said, to hell with it, and started walking. Come to think of it, he never really consciously decided to go to Yomisato in the first place; his legs simply seemed to take him there. It's always somewhat comforting in a terrible way to see people slightly worse off than yourself, an indestructible facet of human nature. Lelouch doesn't want to be comforted right now. He just wants to be doing something dangerous, really. He hasn't risked life and/or limb in weeks. The boredom is stifling. That's why he had that nightmare, he decides, it's because he is beginning to feel the way he did during that year, caged in his own mind, dead but walking, broken in ways he didn't have words for. Milly had found him once, in the student council room, sometime in mid-October, found him trembling and pressing himself backwards into the corner where the walls met, trying to see all of the room at once, trying to see what was missing. There's something wrong with me, he had gasped, shaking his head and flinching from her concerned touch, shaking and clutching at his hair, there is something wrong with me and I don't know what it is, there is something wrong with me, Milly, and it's like no one can see it but me.
Here, it doesn't matter if there's something wrong with Lelouch again - there isn't anyone to see it but him. C.C.'s gone. Kallen's gone. Suzaku is here but different, different and incomprehensible and strange now, strange because of a future Lelouch doesn't know how to see.
Well, fuck the future. Fuck the past, for good measure. In fact, let's go whole hog and fuck the present, too. Lelouch will just give the collective metaphorical middle finger to everything in his life right now, and go do something to take his mind off things like loneliness and fear and boredom and emotional shit.
In retrospect, he's surprised it's taken him this long to find a gambling den, really. That's what Lelouch needs right now - something high-stakes. Something that might get him beaten up in a back alley before dawn breaks. That sounds like a fantastically great idea. It's too bad Rivalz isn't here to provide color commentary. Thinking about Rivalz only makes Lelouch think of the entire Student Council, though, and that is a topic strictly in the category of Things Lelouch Just Gave The Metaphorical Finger To. So. Now he's just moving among the tables, earning stares from most of the occupants as he passes. Lelouch doesn't know if some of the hostility is due to his status as an outsider, or the fact that he's new to this particular establishment and as-yet untested in these waters. Perhaps a mixture of both.
They don't appear to play chess here. Not that Lelouch was really expecting it. There's a match of something that resembles shogi going on in one of the corners, but Lelouch still has to master the finer points of that game before he'd feel comfortable gambling on it. Same with Go. He moves towards the card tables instead. Hanafuda. Sayoko taught him how to play this game once - and since Lelouch knows how to palm cards, it will be interesting to see how this works out.
He slaps his last bu down on the table. "Deal me in," he says.
Lelouch is careful. He waits to re-familiarize himself with the game a little, and allows himself to lose the first couple hands spectacularly before gradually winning most of it back. The game takes up most of his concentration. Lelouch's shoulders are finally beginning to relax, the tension smoothing out a little. Without any rebellions to organize or people to kill or governments to overthrow, Lelouch had begun to really miss this kind of thing. After a couple hours, though, Lelouch gets a little cocky, and wins a round by such a wide margin that one of the men at his table takes offense.
The large man stands up, cracking his knuckles. Lelouch should be afraid or something, but he can't summon up anything more than a vague wonder at the stereotypicality of it. This is the part where he gets in a terrific bar fight, right? It's all part of becoming a man. He must be getting slightly drunk off the fumes from the others' cups of sake. That's ridiculous - a better explanation is that he's sleep-deprived and high on adrenaline and he doesn't really care. "I've had my eye on you all night," the man says - Lelouch has to really fight the urge to giggle at his phrasing, which almost sounds like a proposition of some sort - "You think you can pull one over on me? Think you can walk in here and fleece me?"
"No, sir," Lelouch says, with the most naked insubordination dripping from his voice.
The man's arm shoots out, shoving Lelouch back several feet. "Shut the fuck up. I think you need a lesson in how we run things in here, out-worlder -"
"And I think," Lelouch says, having taken the advantage of the confusion to slip his contact out, "that you should be going home now." His Geass, gone unused for weeks, sears with a familiar burn that leaves his blood tingling, almost more quickly than usual; surges with a dark excitement that is almost its own living thing. (There will always be a part of him, now, that relishes in this alone; Lelouch has come to realize this - that there is no other feeling quite like this no matter how many damning philosophical arguments he can make against himself. The thought but I could always leaching into his conscious mind around the barriers he's erected against that kind of reasoning, those kinds of excuses, bubbling up the back walls of his skull.) Oh, god. It's terrifying to realize he'd missed it, wondered if he still had it in him. It's there, alright. It might never leave.
The man, quite docile now, nods amiably. "Yeah," he grunts, and his friends look on with evident surprise, "I should get going," before he walks off, leaving his drink alone at the table. The barkeep shouts after him about a tab, but gets no answer. There, that's how you solve a problem without violence. Shame to waste that drink, though.
In fact, Lelouch is just going to take that. Its previous owner won't be returning for it, after all.
The man's companions regard Lelouch with a vague wariness now, unsure how to group their friend's strange behavior with anything Lelouch did to provoke it. For his part, Lelouch raises the man's sake bowl towards them in a mockingly friendly gesture, before tipping it back like he'd done at the matsuri. He's already slipped his contact into its case, instead of back into his eye. They can't see the red glow of his Geass burning in his left eye, but maybe they can sense it, the subtle hum of power in the air. Maybe they can sense the tension. (but I could is already chewing its way through his synapses, hissing in his ears like the serpent in the garden, but the tree is already stripped bare)
"Gentlemen," he says, after putting the bowl back down with a thunk, and he turns to leave.
It was, surprisingly, a good night.
It's some time between midnight and dawn. Lelouch hasn't checked. He had jerked awake on the floor of a tiny shack in Hisato a couple hours ago, screaming his head off and covered in sweat. Hyperventilating. It took almost five minutes for his heart rate to go down to a manageable level, and during that time he could do nothing but breathe and tell himself, it's okay, I am not dead, I am not dead, I am alive, I remember her, it was only a dream, he's not here, I am not dead - until the room stopped spinning, until his eyes adjusted to the dark and he could (for once) take comfort in the fact that he was in Kannagara, a place as far removed as it is possible to be from Britannia, from that room with the carpet red as blood. (His blood. Charles' blood.)
That was the point around which Lelouch had said, to hell with it, and started walking. Come to think of it, he never really consciously decided to go to Yomisato in the first place; his legs simply seemed to take him there. It's always somewhat comforting in a terrible way to see people slightly worse off than yourself, an indestructible facet of human nature. Lelouch doesn't want to be comforted right now. He just wants to be doing something dangerous, really. He hasn't risked life and/or limb in weeks. The boredom is stifling. That's why he had that nightmare, he decides, it's because he is beginning to feel the way he did during that year, caged in his own mind, dead but walking, broken in ways he didn't have words for. Milly had found him once, in the student council room, sometime in mid-October, found him trembling and pressing himself backwards into the corner where the walls met, trying to see all of the room at once, trying to see what was missing. There's something wrong with me, he had gasped, shaking his head and flinching from her concerned touch, shaking and clutching at his hair, there is something wrong with me and I don't know what it is, there is something wrong with me, Milly, and it's like no one can see it but me.
Here, it doesn't matter if there's something wrong with Lelouch again - there isn't anyone to see it but him. C.C.'s gone. Kallen's gone. Suzaku is here but different, different and incomprehensible and strange now, strange because of a future Lelouch doesn't know how to see.
Well, fuck the future. Fuck the past, for good measure. In fact, let's go whole hog and fuck the present, too. Lelouch will just give the collective metaphorical middle finger to everything in his life right now, and go do something to take his mind off things like loneliness and fear and boredom and emotional shit.
In retrospect, he's surprised it's taken him this long to find a gambling den, really. That's what Lelouch needs right now - something high-stakes. Something that might get him beaten up in a back alley before dawn breaks. That sounds like a fantastically great idea. It's too bad Rivalz isn't here to provide color commentary. Thinking about Rivalz only makes Lelouch think of the entire Student Council, though, and that is a topic strictly in the category of Things Lelouch Just Gave The Metaphorical Finger To. So. Now he's just moving among the tables, earning stares from most of the occupants as he passes. Lelouch doesn't know if some of the hostility is due to his status as an outsider, or the fact that he's new to this particular establishment and as-yet untested in these waters. Perhaps a mixture of both.
They don't appear to play chess here. Not that Lelouch was really expecting it. There's a match of something that resembles shogi going on in one of the corners, but Lelouch still has to master the finer points of that game before he'd feel comfortable gambling on it. Same with Go. He moves towards the card tables instead. Hanafuda. Sayoko taught him how to play this game once - and since Lelouch knows how to palm cards, it will be interesting to see how this works out.
He slaps his last bu down on the table. "Deal me in," he says.
Lelouch is careful. He waits to re-familiarize himself with the game a little, and allows himself to lose the first couple hands spectacularly before gradually winning most of it back. The game takes up most of his concentration. Lelouch's shoulders are finally beginning to relax, the tension smoothing out a little. Without any rebellions to organize or people to kill or governments to overthrow, Lelouch had begun to really miss this kind of thing. After a couple hours, though, Lelouch gets a little cocky, and wins a round by such a wide margin that one of the men at his table takes offense.
The large man stands up, cracking his knuckles. Lelouch should be afraid or something, but he can't summon up anything more than a vague wonder at the stereotypicality of it. This is the part where he gets in a terrific bar fight, right? It's all part of becoming a man. He must be getting slightly drunk off the fumes from the others' cups of sake. That's ridiculous - a better explanation is that he's sleep-deprived and high on adrenaline and he doesn't really care. "I've had my eye on you all night," the man says - Lelouch has to really fight the urge to giggle at his phrasing, which almost sounds like a proposition of some sort - "You think you can pull one over on me? Think you can walk in here and fleece me?"
"No, sir," Lelouch says, with the most naked insubordination dripping from his voice.
The man's arm shoots out, shoving Lelouch back several feet. "Shut the fuck up. I think you need a lesson in how we run things in here, out-worlder -"
"And I think," Lelouch says, having taken the advantage of the confusion to slip his contact out, "that you should be going home now." His Geass, gone unused for weeks, sears with a familiar burn that leaves his blood tingling, almost more quickly than usual; surges with a dark excitement that is almost its own living thing. (There will always be a part of him, now, that relishes in this alone; Lelouch has come to realize this - that there is no other feeling quite like this no matter how many damning philosophical arguments he can make against himself. The thought but I could always leaching into his conscious mind around the barriers he's erected against that kind of reasoning, those kinds of excuses, bubbling up the back walls of his skull.) Oh, god. It's terrifying to realize he'd missed it, wondered if he still had it in him. It's there, alright. It might never leave.
The man, quite docile now, nods amiably. "Yeah," he grunts, and his friends look on with evident surprise, "I should get going," before he walks off, leaving his drink alone at the table. The barkeep shouts after him about a tab, but gets no answer. There, that's how you solve a problem without violence. Shame to waste that drink, though.
In fact, Lelouch is just going to take that. Its previous owner won't be returning for it, after all.
The man's companions regard Lelouch with a vague wariness now, unsure how to group their friend's strange behavior with anything Lelouch did to provoke it. For his part, Lelouch raises the man's sake bowl towards them in a mockingly friendly gesture, before tipping it back like he'd done at the matsuri. He's already slipped his contact into its case, instead of back into his eye. They can't see the red glow of his Geass burning in his left eye, but maybe they can sense it, the subtle hum of power in the air. Maybe they can sense the tension. (but I could is already chewing its way through his synapses, hissing in his ears like the serpent in the garden, but the tree is already stripped bare)
"Gentlemen," he says, after putting the bowl back down with a thunk, and he turns to leave.
It was, surprisingly, a good night.