A/N: It's genfic. (With about every pairing in the series implied, if you squint and tilt your head to the side.) I'm surprised, but I like it.
Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own Code Geass.
Warnings: Spoilers for most of the series. I'm also a bit sketchy on the details of what happened during the timeline of R2, so a few things are probably out of place.
red poppies
Must not all things at last be swallowed by death?
This is the way the world ends:
In a garden of flowers. The scent of roses is heavy on the air, and C.C. can imagine them crawling up her throat and wreathing her mouth, pricking her tongue to bleeding. Lelouch looks at her. He is desperate and lost and his eyes, dark like the shadows of half-truths and dreams, beg for help, and C.C. thinks that if she loved him anymore, her heart might break.
She reaches out and presses her hand to the side of his face and smiles. I'm sorry, is perhaps what she would say if she were younger and less jaded, a little less bitter. Instead the word goodbye tumbles from her mouth, whispered and sharp, just as the skyline builds up, the eternal velvet blackness of a summer night sky exploding into a white-hot inferno that blazes its way, eats the world like a monster with an unhinged jaw, and—
-
Nunally vi Britannia does not see the sky sucked into itself, stars disappearing, the sky smoggy for hours after FLEIJA dropped. She feels it instead; the pain of hundreds dying settles next to her and throbs there, and tears somehow slip underneath her eyelids.
"Is it over, brother Schneizel?" she asks, eventually, the words dry as dust and deader than, passing through her lips like a ghost. She feels small and fragile and intangible, and utterly weak. Brother would have wanted her to be strong. Brother would have wanted her to be brave. Brother would have wanted her to—
Lelouch is dead, she reminds herself, and the words are her own punishment. Her punishment for not seeing his sins sooner. For not stopping him. For not being so naive or not putting the pieces together, or maybe her punishment for not letting him know she wanted him with here more than she ever wanted peace or smiles.
But she's been alone all along.
-
Kallen doesn't have time to think. She's high on adrenaline, swinging, the buttons and the clutch all slick from her sweaty palms. With one forceful lurch forward, the newest Guren model (there's been so many she can't keep track of all of them, now) slams its fist into the Knightmare attacking her. Maybe her vision is blurry with tears. She's been betrayed and it hurts, it burns like acid in her throat and her stomach and she just wants someone else to feel the pain as much as she does. She'll break his pretty face and his thin legs and his birdcage rib, because he lied. Because he made her love him, and maybe he loved her back. (He sure had a funny way of showing it.) And she doesn't love just anyone. Of course, the funny thing is that she doesn't know which she loved more, the ideal or the man.
She doesn't even know that the world is ending until she sees the reflection, lighting up her from the back, falling around her shoulders in licking flames. /Quenching the sword,/ she thinks, and turns the Guren around, only to face—
Her last thought is damn it, Lelouch; this is all your fault. Or maybe it's I hate you for making me love you.
It doesn't matter. Kallen died, nothing more than a cataloged number on a list of casualties.
-
Lelouch takes off his mask and looks in the mirror. He drags the cloth off his mouth and breathes freely, watching the sunlight illuminate the room before him. If he knew it would soon all go to hell, maybe he would do more. Maybe he would try a little harder, try to stop clockwork fate and its turning, but he doesn't. (No one ever does.)
C.C. looks at him, sprawled out on the couch like a cat. She is in nothing but one of his button-down shirts and undergarments, having abandoned all attempts at modesty long ago, far before even Lelouch was born. With slit eyes, she watches him go turn towards a window, watching the horizon. He looks tired and weary in the sunlight, moreso than he ever does in the dark. Lelouch is a creature of the night, she thinks, and as such creatures of the day seek him out.
She gets up, lazily swaggering across the floor. Running her fingers through his hair, she presses herself up against him. C.C. nuzzles the nape of his neck, smelling cologne and metal and smoke. She kisses the space between his shoulders.
"Come back to bed," she says, and begins unbuttoning his shirt. He stops her. C.C. takes his fingers in her hand and tries to tug him back to her couch, but he gives her a warning glance and she stops.
"I'm not used to being denied," she tells him. Coming from any other woman, it might be a warning. From her it is nothing but the truth, laid bare like a specimen— perhaps a frog— onto a metal slab to be examined and dissected.
Silence greets her words.
"I have work to do, witch," he replies. He picks up Zero's mask and puts it back on.
"Turn the lights off as you leave." C.C. slips underneath her coverlet, turning her back on the door and the woes of the world.
-
Suzaku tries everything he can to die.
He stays while his muscles bulge out, his heart hammering faster and faster and the world swimming together, blurring like runny paint, colors mixing together. Somehow his hand finds and clenches Euphemia's pin, hanging on a cold chain against his heart. When he sees his hand again, just before everything is devoured and it seems that Fenrir has finally be unboud and the gods are fighting in the sky, the world ending on repeat, it is smeared red where the edges went in too deep.
And he does.
-
The Ashford gang watches it, safe behind television screens. They don't know whether to cheer or cry.
Cornelia stares at the newspaper, and grasps Guilford's hand so tight her knuckles stand out white.
Schneizel and Kanon open up a bottle of champagne, and cheer.
Nina beats her fists until exhausted, and ponders taking whiskey with arsenic. Instead she swings back her arm and breaks the glass against the wall, condemning herself.
Everyone in the world either cries or laughs; celebrates with confetti and cheap wine, or mourn in black cloth and red eyes. They have no idea what will come. They probably don't want to know what will come, either.
And the memory of everyone who ever mattered is dead with the people themselves.
-
There are several paths the world could have taken:
The world is dominated by Britannia. Any resistance is forcefully crushed, and Schneizel, the White Emperor, is remembered as a prosperous ruler.
Geass dies out, forever inscribed upon the pages of myth and ruins scattered across the globe.
But the worst of them all is that the world folds in on itself, implodes, because of one man and his accomplices: Charles di Britannia.
Or, in the case of people:
Nunally never opens her eyes. She dies every day, again and again, and hopes against hope that it was all a mistake, that the painful sting in her heart is just melancholy and misery.
Milly and Rivalz continue on with life, as normal as possible. Nina retires to a life in the country. Kanon stays as Schneizel's right-hand man. Cornelia disappears, opposed to being just a puppet.
Memory fades and history tangles itself. And perhaps death is only when even the barest bones of memory disappears.
And so they die.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow—
A/N: People who are expecting an update for Believe Me, I'm Lying should expect it later tonight or tomorrow. School does wonders to my writing capability.
Also, this was probably riddled with typos. Point them out to me, please?
Feedback appreciated!