'til now I was a soldier, 'til now I dealt in fear...

[oftherefusal]

Who: Lelouch, Elena, OPEN to anyone who's been involved in his plotline
What: Final Denoument: lines-within-lines converge at the vanishing point
When: Friday, 5/29 (backdated)
Where: Brittania-Shinra Mine

Comments

[agentmoreau]

Elena swallowed hard as she came up on the limousine. It looked like her shot had been accurate, but there was a hell of a lot of bleeding. So far, none of the staff had come pouring out of this entrance yet. She might still have time to pull this off.

Then the driver came running and Elena nearly turned white. Jesus, the driver. She'd forgotten.

She had to get him away before the explosion went off.

"We need another car!" she shouted to him. "I'll put him in here for now, get him out of the open, but this is too high-profile and not armored enough!"

"Is - will the master be okay?" the driver asked, looking green. It must have been the blood.

Elena made a show of checking the wound over. She knew she was sheet white herself. She looked back up at the driver slowly. "Just go get the secure car," she said heavily, and let out a slow sigh of relief when he turned and ran.

Now for the tricky part.

Elena dragged Lelouch to the other side of the limo, throwing open both its back door and the door to her car. She barely glanced at the cadaver inside - male, slight build, shot through the heart as she had requested - just grabbed it by the feet and hauled it bumping across the space between the cars, shoving into the limousine before hoisting Lelouch into her backseat.

She slammed into the driver's seat, started the engine, and was well on her way peeling out when the driver flagged her down out the window of the secure car. "I'll go ahead to the hospital, make sure they're ready for us! I have to get on the phone with my team and make sure none of this gets to the press!"

Elena floored it, squealing across the parking lot to the gates of the property. Her eyes fell on the detonator to the pack of explosives under the limo: something else she had emptied her pockets handsomely for.

It was done, for better or for worse.

She pushed the button. The resulting explosion nearly deafened her, her car fishtailing, but she didn't stop to look. Maybe the driver would assume she had cut her losses. Maybe he would suspect she had taken Lelouch with her. But to the staffers and security now pouring out of the building, it seemed undoubtable that their precious CEO was certainly dead.

[oftherefusal]

When he woke up, he felt very very cold and he could not feel his left side. Blood covered him in a sticky carpet but he didn't feel pain. He merely shivered and wondered what had happened.

Clearly he wasn't dead yet. And he appeared to be in Elena's car. Moving his eyeballs to look around felt like a herculean effort.

Two possibilities presented themselves:

-He was hallucinating as he bled out on the floor of the parking lot. His oxygen deprived brain was firing off random shit at him.

-Somehow she'd missed and was taking him somewhere else to finish him off.

"Either way, this won't take long..." He muttered as he slumped against the seat.

[agentmoreau]

Elena heard him stir from the backseat and grabbed the towels she had kept wadded in the center console for this very purpose. She tossed them back to him, hopefully hitting him in the face. "Stop whining back there and put pressure on your gunshot wound. You can thank me for fixing your retarded plan later."

She did not have the patience for freaking out. The only clinic she could take him to that wouldn't ask a million questions - and would keep his identity secret - was far enough away that she was risking a lot by trying to get there.

[oftherefusal]

In his current state, he could think of nothing to do but obey. Clearly the plan had hit a snag and she was improvising.

So he took the white paper that hit him in the eye like a blow from a hammer (it actually snapped his head back a little) and, straining at the effort, plugged it into the new orifice under his collarbone.

Only then did he realize what was happening. She's trying to save me! This can't happen!

"I f-forbid..." he managed to get out. But it was too late. The wound was plugged and his hands were already over it.

[agentmoreau]

"Shut up, your martyrness," Elena snapped. "According to a whole mess of witnesses, you're dead. I even blew up your limo."

She glanced back in the rearview mirror and frowned. "Hell, you're losing a lot of blood." Her lips compressed and she pressed down harder on the gas, her hands tightening on the steering wheel. Right now, she'd risk a high-speed chase to get him where he needed to go.

[oftherefusal]

Lelouch grinned a bloody mask. Weakly, he pressed on the wound. All told it was only a shoulder wound with a .25 caliber bullet. A less frail person would probably have remained conscious throughout.

"Have...taught you well...Grasshopper..." He managed to joke. Which, considering David Carradine's fate a few days later, was doubly ironic.

[agentmoreau]

"Hey. Hey," Elena said, a bit of a frantic note creeping into her voice. "Stay awake, come on. It's not that much farther. You can't pass out on me again, then who'll keep pressure there?"

She saw him fading rapidly the rearview mirror and dared to take one hand of the wheel to reach into the back seat and whack him. "I payed a lot of people a hell of a lot of money to get this plan to work, and I'm going to be really pissed if you die before you hear how I did it."

[oftherefusal]

An angry Elena was indeed a fate worse than death. And, while his ego roared at him to just fade out because noone knows better than me, something he'd left buried kept him awake and focusing.

Things were fuzzy and swimming but he tried to focus. "T-tell me...'vry...last detail."

[agentmoreau]

Elena would have grinned, but the situation was a little dire for that. "Well I knew that the outcome had to be the same," she said. "It had to look like you were dead. But that can be done in a number of ways. The most fun, and most likely to work, is a Kansas City Shuffle. You get everyone else to look left, and then you go right.

"That weekend I up and vanished? I went to LA for a few days, ran into some friends of mine I had made last summer while I was on the run. A few well-placed words and a fuckload of cash, and I arranged to have your replacement delivered from LA yesterday." Now she did grin. "John Doe, white male, slight build, gunshot wound to the chest, dead on arrival." Wasn't quite as cute as you, but then again he was dead.

"When the plan went down, all I had to do was make sure I did the switch. A little more money had a demo expert come in to rig the limo to blow. Then everything relied on my expert aim and getting you to a no-questions-asked clinic before you bleed out. I ran into a little snag when your driver showed up, but sending him for the secure car took care of that. Hope nobody was hurt in the explosion."

[oftherefusal]

He coughed a couple times. "B...beautiful." It was unclear if he meant the plan or her.

Outside, he noticed, they were moving at a pretty dangerous speed. "'rwe there yet?

[agentmoreau]

"Almost," Elena said, aware that he was fading fast. "Almost, almost- there!" The sign for the clinic loomed up on the side of the road, and Elena pulled into the parking lot so fast that, if she had been driving a higher profile vehicle, she definitely would have flipped it. As it was, the car screeched to a stop in the parking lot, she threw herself out the door and flung the back door open.

He really had bled an obscene amount. "Jesus Christ," she muttered, trying desperately to hold it together. She had to half-pull, half-drag him to a position where she could pick him up fairly easily, and then she hustled him into the clinic.

He was immediately taken out of her arms and put on a gurney, probably because he was bleeding all over the floor. "Gunshot wound," Elena said helplessly. "Shoulder. He bled a hell of a lot."