The Death of Gods

They died on this island.

On this island, warm mist covered its slopes and palms, through which heat dripped into murky puddles on the mossy floor. On this island, there was always a hush of silence, a collective whisper of dead voices- or maybe it was just the mist and its heavy presence, weighing down, rising up, with every gasp and sigh of the ocean wind.

It seemed like an island where immortals dwelled, and the mortals were sacrificed; where mortals sacrificed themselves, without knowing it. For their terrors morphed into rabid beasts that turned on them and preyed on their weak souls. Fear of death acknowledges death, and thus they ran, faster than ever, toward the ending which they so feared.

But really, here is where gods die.

When the boy awoke, he was scarred from head to toe.

Once he had been very handsome. He reached an exhausted hand to his eyes, too tired even to weep. A croak escaped from his parched throat, the dry tongue sticking in its cave, choking its own passages. He climbed to his feet, black tatters of clothing hanging from his body.

And he remembered nothing.

When he reached the water, he plunged himself headfirst into the shapeless mirror.

And gasped for breath, and flailed his arms, and the remains of his black tatters fell away from him, sinking into clear, dark depths.

And when the girl found him, he was still in the lake, but slumped on top of a shiny black log that looked less scarred than he did.

She knelt down and whispered into his ear. He convulsed, and spat something from his lips. He turned to look at her with feverish, wounded eyes. An unintelligible wail, pitiable and terrible, flew from his lips.

She dragged him from the water, not kindly, but not unkindly, through the forest, up a hill, down a hill, and finally to the ocean. He looked. "The... ocean..." he managed to whisper. She found herself glad that he was capable of words. He slowly turned forlorn eyes back the way they came. "...I... thought-"

"Lelouch," she said, but her voice was carried by the wind, and he didn't hear the sorrow in the cracking voice, nor the apology in the way she said his name. Never had she said it with such emotion before; never was she to repeat it. "I..."

And it became silent. She stood with her ankles in the lapping tides and her eyes were the source of the ocean's pain, dripping down her face, across her heart, down her legs, and into the water.

The next morning, Lelouch woke up, and he remembered nothing.

She came to him with an armful of freshly caught fish, dripping from head to toe in salt water. He looked at her, panic convulsing across his face for a moment. "Who are you?" he asked, and his voice sounded nothing like the one she knew.

C.C. froze, dropping a fish. But an instant later her face fell blank.

"You don't know me?" she asked, and it turned out more like a question than she liked. It was meant to be a statement.

He hesitated. Then he shook his head once.

C.C.'s reply was silence; she simply fed him fish, wordlessly proffering it to his hungry lips until he stopped resisting, and finally accepted it directly from C.C.'s outstretched fingertips.

One morning, C.C. awoke in the sea and didn't know how she got there. She dragged herself out until she was four-legged in the sand, seaweed hair falling in clumpy strands around her face and trailing rivers in the damp rocky dust.

She stood up at last and shook herself to find him standing in the trees, watching her.

She was surprised at how fast he had recovered.

In a few days he stood tall, and some of his lost hair had grown out enough to resemble a messy version of his old hairstyle. The scars on his face were even healing. But this Lelouch lacked the pride to make him genuine.

"Do I miss it?" C.C. mused to herself. Then she laughed.

He stepped forward into the grey light of the cloudy dawn.

And he took another step. Then another. And then another. He was one step away. He reached out a hand, and brushed it across her forehead.

She started to speak in a sarcastic voice. "Don't tell me you're fall-"

And then his lips closed on hers.

"Who am I?" he asked. He squinted into the sunlight, sitting rather like a frog, hands spread out on the sand. C.C. sat a distance away, staring at the sea. "Tell me."

C.C. sighed melodiously, almost like the way she did before. Almost. She eyed him with liquid honey eyes. "You," she said. "Are the man I rescued," she said.

"I want you to tell me."

She sighed again, then ha! ed. She spread herself out on the sand, just out of Lelouch's reach.

He propped himself onto his elbow. "Why?" His eyes smouldered; one orb gleamed scarlet.

"Because." she said.

When the night came, she couldn't help herself. They slept together in a heap, arms around each other, in a messy bed of dried leaves. It was only practical; they needed to conserve warmth.

Warmth.

C.C. would sigh into Lelouch's overgrown hair and ask herself just why she still needed it after all these years of living. Even the word seemed luscious. Warmth. C.C. had given up on warmth long ago.

Her half-lidded eyes snapped open and she rolled away, and he groaned, reaching out in his blind dreams for something missing.

C.C. pressed herself against the trunk of a nearby tree, sitting between two curved roots, and tried to use her hair as a blanket for her knees.

She thought back to the day she woke up in the shallows of the ocean but had not felt cold at all.

He became more persistent.

It was funny how the violet pupil threatened her more than the red one. But of course, the Geass never worked on her. She imagined his madness growing as they spoke; wondered if people on the other side of the world, on other islands, were searching for his identity, desperately hoping they could give him the truth he wanted.

But C.C. would only turn her back and continue searching for food. Or she fished. She was good at that.

Lelouch and C.C. were just starting to get used to their new lifestyle, living in the shadows, putting on and taking off fake identities, when they ended up here.

He cornered her with two suspicious looking green fruits in his hands, completely furious. "Tell me."

She dodged. "I don't know anything," she replied, meeting his gaze.

His eyes were fixated on hers. "I know you do."

"I don't, I really don't." She sauntered away tantalizingly as she spoke. "I just found you lying in the water one day. I have no idea who you are, where you came from, or why you're here."

And it was true in a way, C.C. thought with amusement. It was true in a way, after all.

Meanwhile, the hours passed by feverishly, but to them it felt like everything moved in slow, slow motion.

The moon observed them, her implacable serenity undisturbed. Two little ants lived out their petty lives on the land below. Their passion for life fell short of the millions of twinkling stars strung through the cobalt sky.

"Moon," C.C. said. "My friend. What should I do?" She missed Marianne. She curled up, alone on the beach. Her eyes were closed in irritation.

Should she give him a new name? A new past?

With a finger, she sketched the roman numeral for six into the sand. VI. 6 days.

The beach stretched on for miles and miles, and she covered her jaded white face as the wind swept through, striking up clouds of sand.

One afternoon, C.C. grasped at a extra large coconut while Lelouch held her up around her waist, dripping sweat onto his arms as she sought for the largest fruit. His Britannian decorum was forgotten in this wild place.

"Did you-" he asked, in his soft, elder brother-like voice. This must have been how he spoke to Nunnally before everything started.

"Higher," C.C. commanded. She heard him grunt, then felt herself lifted a few extra inches. The top of his oily hair brushed her butt.

When they landed on the dirt, both exhausted, C.C. held up the prize. Lelouch's confused expression surprised her.

He was wondering why this expression jarred him. He would soon remember C.C. had never smiled like that, not in all her time as holder of the Code and Mistress of the Black Knights.

When Lelouch's facial hair started poking out, C.C. laughed noisily and made fun of it. Eventually he tried to cut it off.

"It's too hard," he said, frustrated and hairy.

"Let me," she offered, and held up her sharp, blade-like rock.

He recoiled. "No, thank you."

"You don't trust me?" she asked.

"I trust you." He looked straight at her. "Just like I trust you when you say I will remember."

C.C. had never said such a thing. For once, she didn't know what to say.

When the fated afternoon suddenly arrived, they had been playing a game they constructed consisting of stones, shells, and fruit nuts.

But he did not ask her a single question about the war, about Nunnally, or the island. He simply said:

"I knew you would be able to tell as soon as I remembered everything," and it had been so familiar, the commanding way he called out her name as soon as she stood up, ready to disappear, upon seeing recognition in his eyes. "I lost everything, but I didn't forget how to read you," he said.

"Don't be so proud," C.C. responded. "You can't read me."

"I am getting better," he replied finally, in anguish.

C.C. looked at him sidelong. She sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe I could have told you."

"No. You've done enough."

"Hm." C.C. said, trying to decipher how she felt.

Another pause. Then, "We will speak of this no more, C.C."

C.C. raised a whimsical eyebrow at him, but he said nothing else for the rest of the day.

And it was funny that things went on the same way they did before.

After Lelouch returned, he was as lifeless as he had been before. He had no questions to ask. It was as if his soul had been consumed in the explosion that landed them on this island; when he found it again, it was nothing but a suit full of holes.

C.C. felt relieved.

That didn't make sense, C.C. realized a moment later, so she stripped and went for a swim, hoping the clear water would seep in through her eyes and ears and clean her brain.

C.C. walked to the lake where she had retrieved Lelouch after the plane crash. There, she observed her own disorderly face on its murky surface. It had looked so pristine when she saved Lelouch.

Behind her, Lelouch followed. But then, he saw a gleam on his right, and strayed toward the unnatural glow. He was momentarily blinded.

Metal flashed under the sun. Bits of plane came into view. Wreckage. Manmade oxygen tubes. Decaying human. Foreign materials. Insignia of a world forgotten. Torn aircraft uniform. Shattered plastic and glass. Flies.

Unexpectedly, Lelouch sunk down, and threw up.

"If you hadn't delivered him those commands," C.C. said, silently appearing from the woods to stand beside him, "You would be dead."

"Yes," Lelouch said with gritted teeth, piecing it together.

He now remembered being punched, then blindfolded, and the feel of a cold knife at his throat. Suddenly, light streamed in as one side of the blindfold was peeled of by C.C. Lelouch used Geass on the pilot after one side of the eye mask was peeled off by C.C. and the Black Knight traitor tumbled to the ground from C.C.'s blow.

When he got the opportunity, Lelouch used the Geass. "Bastard," Lelouch decreed. "Save us and live with your regret."

It seemed like only seconds later when the bomb exploded.

"Your Geass, which I granted you, saved your life. He didn't make it," C.C. said.

Each day, the real Lelouch came back, a bit more vivid, and a bit more real, even as his body shrunk with the island food.

"Tell me about this place," he commanded C.C., who was lying back, checking for split ends.

C.C. shrugged. It was an island. She knew this because she had searched it high and low to find him.

"Hm," C.C. replied.

Lelouch looked at C.C. out of the corner of his eye.

"Why won't you help me remember?"

"I thought I'd spare you," C.C. replied.

"I saw no reason to leave this place," C.C. added, and she waited for his response, and heard it, his quiet sigh as he remembered that living was his privilege and his alone, and that C.C. would always be this way, for as long as she lived.

Looking at her split ends, C.C. imagined how happy her body would be, to decay and decompose, here, buried by nobody and missed by no one.

If C.C. had once thought that Lelouch could not stand idleness, she was wrong. Lelouch loved it as well. He loved it as much as he loved, loved, loved to give orders.

"You fish," she said that day, spread out like a starfish on its rock in the darkest shadow she could find. It was so hot that Lelouch was soaking wet even though he occupied an even darker shadow that was farther within the forest. "I won't do it."

"The fish are dead," came Lelouch's lifeless reply. He reached to nudge her head but found a tangle of green hair instead. C.C., limp like a rag doll, did not respond.

"You know... how it is," Lelouch said. He sighed Zero's sigh. "I am a strategist. To get my hands dirty would defeat the purpose."

He thought he heard a scoff from C.C.'s direction, but he wasn't sure.

He nudged her successfully this time, but she made no noise, as if she, too, were dead.

A long while passed. Then, finally, in a weak murmur, a man's voice could be heard: "I see you're not hungry."

At her lack of response, he continued. "Well, neither am I."

"Do you remember," C.C. said in singsong. "Who you were before the revolution?" She picked a rainbow-colored beetle off a tree.

Lelouch's face did not change. Back at work now, Lelouch designed their impressively complex escape vessel. C.C. had explained that they were on an island. "I do," he snapped.

"You wanted me to forget," Lelouch remarked.

"The war was inevitable, you know." C.C. said, off-topic. "There was going to be bloodshed whether you existed or not. I merely gave the Geass to someone I believed was worthy."

Lelouch grunted.

"I was different before I met you," C.C. said, still off-topic. "With every man, it's different."

"You're a selfish witch." Lelouch said. "Or a selfless one? Since you don't have a permanent personality."

"Selfish," she answered. "I didn't care whether you remembered." She said it coldly, but as she thought about it, she saw how it could mean something different, remembering how she had fed him, bathed him, and cradled him as if he was her baby.

"I didn't know you smiled," Lelouch responded, and he looked at her, and she saw his posture held proud like the hero, rebel and Emperor and Zero that he was, but his eyes had become too gentle, too similar to the forgetful man she pulled from the lake, many days ago.

That night, he called out her true name in a dream.

She stiffened. There, there it was again. C.C. covered her ears with her hands, rolling away from him. "Stop, Lelouch," she growled.

C.C. found the event entirely disgusting, and tried to pretend it didn't happen, but he mumbled something else, entirely too intimate. She rolled away, and he reached out, searching in his blind dreams for something missing. His eyes flickered open. Suddenly, she asked him. Because Lelouch had become too complacent here.

"When will you kill me?" she breathed, her owl-like face terrifying and inhuman in the dark.

The silence that followed was not merely uncomfortable. It was also puzzled.

"C.C," Lelouch asked. "Are you so sick of me?"

"Yes."

Lelouch looked up, but C.C. slipped away.

The next morning, Lelouch found that the first few panels of his raft had come undone, the rope tying it together chewed up and scattered all over the beach. It looked like the work of rats.

"What a mess," C.C. said.

Ignoring his groans of frustration reverberating in the hot air, she went to take a cold dip in a slippery waterfall.

Her skin burned and peeled every day. She rubbed it to remain the ivory smoothness. She combed out her tresses and threw some shedding green hairs into the water.

She was satisfied that the fruit she left on the raft made the rats so happy.

Lelouch called for her as soon as she returned. "C.C." He hoisted up what was left of the escape raft.

But she ignored him, and walked toward the ocean.

"I'd like to wash my hair," she said, although it was still wet, glistening with beads of water.

Her body was engulfed by wave after wave hitting the beach. Philosophical musings filled C.C.'s head. They melted and floated like clouds in the sometimes white, sometimes blue sky.

"When Lelouch dies," she thought, "I'm going to forget about him and then I'll find someone else to inflict my curse on and this will all happen again." She chuckled to herself and tried to find the humour in this bitter thought.

They were all the same.

"I can't live with you, Lelouch."

She was talking to herself.

"If I leave this island with you, it will never happen."

It always ended the same.

Perhaps it was her fault.

She missed every wretched soul who had become her friend. Perhaps it was C.C.'s fault that they all failed the fulfill the contract, because she would spare them, every time, the horror of being the one to give C.C. death.

"If he doesn't take my Code-" she thought, "I'll forget about Lelouch just like I've forgotten about Mao. And then I'll be reborn."

Her rambling fluttered in the air like cheerful butterflies, but she felt grieved and exhausted.

She had already begun to act out her betrayal before her heart was settled on it.

C.C. half-regretted saving him.

If only Lelouch hadn't remembered anything. Then he wouldn't remember how much he needed C.C.

"So, you're back, C.C."

She ignored him.

He swatted away flies. He held a large leaf over his head as a shield against the sun. Turquoise dragonflies skittered through their weak supply of clean water.

"Tell me how long we have been here. Including the days I wasn't myself."

"I didn't keep count," C.C. lied.

"I can guess," Lelouch said. "It has been three weeks. I know how fast my body metabolizes."

"Hm."

"C.C., I need your help," Lelouch ordered, oblivious to her betrayal. But his eyes drifted off the mosquitoes hovering around them and frowned at the most stubborn part of her face.

Lelouch worked at his escape, while C.C. idly sabotaged his work.

It was evening. She observed his hands. The rash was worsening on Lelouch's arms, but although she knew of a plant which could cure it, she said nothing.

C.C. knew the days. XVIII. 18 days. Not much time before Lelouch became ill from malnutrition. She wanted to tell him, but-

He would figure it out.

A tension floated thickly in the air between them. He presented the remnants of their best makeshift knife, which had been made shattered into little pieces.

"C.C., what do you want?" he asked, full of pity and dismissal. He quickly answered his own question.

"You want to stay here."

"Yes."

There was a long pause.

"You don't want to die in this miserable place," Lelouch guessed quietly.

Her voice was so quiet it was almost drowned out by the crickets. "But if we leave together, it will never happen," she said. "Countless people like you have failed," C.C., her eyes shining. "But all men are the same in one respect," she said, lingering on the words.

"They will save themselves."

After a very long and hideous silence, Lelouch stood up, and walked stiffly away.

C.C. ran to the lake where she had retrieved Lelouch's limp body.

The sky was aglow in angry indigo and scarlet hues. Sunset.

She dropped her naked body into the pool. Aquatic insects hopped merrily. C.C. looked at the surface of the lake and recalled an old fantasy in which she could simply sink down and slowly asphyxiate, without anyone's help.

"Please, Marianne, help me," C.C. implored. But Marianne was no longer there, and couldn't advise C.C. about how to handle her eldest son.

C.C. didn't know how to be more gentle about what she wanted. Like it did every single time before this, the request filled her with pain.

It had seemed like the right time, being on this island, just the two of them. But now she knew that it was never the right time, and it was never going to happen right, and it would never feel easy.

A hand reached out of the dark and C.C. was startled awake, but the hand held fire, and then out of the night came Lelouch's face, flickering in the flame's light.

"You want to be eaten by a wild animal," he stated cruelly. "Aren't you immortal?"

She followed the sparking flame through the cold, back to their camp. Then she knelt down, and watched his glowing eyes.

Lelouch put out the fire.

They sat in pitch dark and the background noise of the island.

"Speak, C.C." Lelouch commanded.

"Why are we together, Lelouch?" she asked.

"We are partners."

"No, no," she said. "That is not why."

"You have been using me," he said, and his voice held the crackling quality of the wood that burned earlier, but upset, very upset. "Now I know why you saved me again." This time, he didn't feel gratitude. He simply knew he was a tool.

"Yes. But haven't you been using the Geass I gave you too?"

"You are my Queen. My savior. You love me."

C.C.'s voice was soft. "To what end, Lelouch?"

Lelouch thought he heard two questions, two souls within C.C. asking two different things. He heard C.C. asking about the contract, but she also seemed to ask him whether he also loved her.

"How could you doubt me?" he asked. He felt itchy. He wondered whether C.C. had poisoned him.

"I doubt every man," C.C. said. "You're not different. I've had so many."

"Good night, C.C." Lelouch said finally.

"Good night," she replied.

On this island, warm mist covered its slopes and palms, through which heat dripped into murky puddles on the mossy floor. On this island, there was always a hush of silence, a collective whisper of dead voices- or maybe it was just the mist and its heavy presence, weighing down, rising up, with every gasp and sigh of the ocean wind.

It was an island where paradoxes prevailed in an endless cycle as deep as the poles and as long as the equator.

The long hush of the sea and the infinite blueness of the sky and the life and death of nature cleared Lelouch's mind of all distractions and he could think of nothing but this ugly little problem.

On one end of the beach, a black speck worked halfheartedly at his dinky life raft.

On the other end of the beach, a paler speck lay still, watching a crab crawl across her naked belly.

Between them, the waves rolled in and rolled out.

There was nothing like a decayed beach to bring out the isolation of a man and a woman, a mortal and an immortal, and their issues.

C.C. had once read a legend about an immortal god who fell in love with a human.

To kill a god, one must make it fall in love with a mortal.

Consumed by passion, the god will desire to be mortal himself. He cannot stand the idea of living forever without his love by his side.

The god sacrificed all his power and his immortality to live alongside his mortal lover.

Together, they lived a long, rich, life, full of the blessings and sufferings of man, before they died together, satisfied with their days.

C.C.'s case was different.

For her to die, was to pass on a curse.

When C.C. took the nun's Code, the bitter woman died instantly. C.C. was bestowed with all that the Code could offer- power, eternal life, and knowledge.

Perhaps it was pathetic, but C.C. had loved many of the useless men that failed to fulfil her contract- and she could only watch jealously when they perished, though human death was tragic to C.C., then and always.

It was the cool, quiet hour before the dawn, and although Lelouch coughed, lungs a little weak, and scratched at the rash on his face, he was working fast.

"You are almost done the raft," C.C. remarked.

"Yes."

C.C. watched his work over his shoulder, expressionless.

"Are you thinking about how to destroy it?" Lelouch asked.

"No," C.C. said. "I already know how."

"You don't want to end it in this miserable place," Lelouch said. "It's a terrible place. Not even the animals like it."

"You know what animals like? Isn't that going a bit too far, Lelouch? To convince yourself you know better?" C.C. asked coldly.

"Follow me, C.C. You always have," he said. "We'll leave this island and continue to Athens."

"If it burdens you so much, I can release you from the contract," C.C. said.

The longer she stood there in the twilight, looking at his frailty, the more anguish she felt.

"But if I stay by your side, it's only temporary. I have to find someone else to free me," C.C. explained, and he looked at her in surprise.

"I will take the Code," Lelouch said, looking her straight in the face with those mismatched eyes. His voice implied as if it was his plan all along and the fireless conversation last night had never happened. "I will fulfill that contract."

"The mountains of Canada that you saw before you gained the Code. I always felt that you belonged there," Lelouch continued. "This place isn't worthy of you."

"C.C., live as long as you want. But keep me company, please," Lelouch said.

And it was over, just like that.

But C.C. had turned before he finished speaking. C.C. looked over her shoulder, back at him. She looked ahead at the ocean, then over her shoulder again. She sprinted herself into the waves before he could look at her again with that resolve which filled her with an ache from her spine to her forehead.

XX. 20 days. C.C. waited until the stars came out, then studied them, muttering something silently. She waited until Lelouch fell deeply asleep, then crept into the camp, and unraveled a ribbon where C.C. had stored a rash-soothing weed.

C.C. placed the leaves into her mouth. She chewed them until the juice came out. C.C. applied the juice to his arms and cheeks with gentle pale fingers, before letting herself dream, wrapping herself into his wheezing chest.

They resumed a pause, a truce, an agreement, a partnership, a team. It had been XXV. 25 days. Soon, they would depart on their vessel.

C.C. whispered a thousand years of constellations into Lelouch.

She leaned against him, and he smiled, grief restraining his lips. She saw a beautiful generosity in his two-toned gaze.

"Lelouch, I do miss..." C.C. began, thinking of the future.

"Us?" he asked.

"Pizza," she said.

"What will we do now, Lelouch?" she asked. Her question was a petal floating on the heavy air.

There was still time to spend. Their boat awaited them.

He answered with a singular pronoun, something C.C. thought was fitting, everything considered.

"I'll..." he began to say.

But he never finished his sentence, and although she would have liked to know, C.C. never asked.

She cracked open a coconut.

"Let's take a break," C.C. said, passing the fruit to him.

"There is hardly time."

But he lay down next to C.C., and wasted the day with her anyway.

Note: The contract between Lelouch and C.C. always fascinated me. Watching the dynamic between C.C. and Lelouch in the series always made me wonder how Lelouch would ever find the will to take C.C.'s code, after everything they went through together. This fic is my attempt to interpret that strange philosophical struggle. I hope you enjoyed it!