[log] well, I'm not stoned, I'm just fucked up [week 11, day 6]
Who: Lelouch, Suzaku, perhaps C.C. later
Status: Closed
Style: Third person present (the opening post plays with perspective, but the rest is third person present)
Where: Himorogi
When: Dawn; Week 11, Day 6 [immediately after this]
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Lelouch has an emotional breakdown and yells at a tree. Suzaku is in the tree. JERRY, JERRY, JERRY.
Himorogi is quiet. It's always quieter than it should be, but especially now, in the pre-light of dawn, the stillness is almost its own tangible thing.
The loud, sharp sound of Lelouch's Hitomi striking the large tree in the center of the garden sounds as violent and loud as a gunshot. He's breathing heavily, and not from the walk. Breathing like he's had someone's hand to his throat.
Imagine you are Lelouch, for a moment. Imagine you have been running from your home, running from any home, running from an entire life, for as long as you can remember. Imagine seeing your mother dead, full of holes and bleeding out red red red on a staircase, so many bullets they said she was dead before she'd bled out. Dead before her heart stopped. This is your first understanding of death, first experience of it firsthand, if you are Lelouch; not your first exposure to the idea as a concept, but your first time seeing and feeling the physicality of it. Nunnally all soaked in her blood. Mother's face frozen, stuck, just gone. Imagine, she's gone out of her own eyes, you'd thought.
Imagine, you as Lelouch, imagine going to your father, the Emperor of Britannia. Imagine gaining audience at ten years of age, all the nobles whispering behind their fans at your bravery or insolence or stupidity, only to be told, when you raged at him for dismissing the two of you as if you did not matter - Charles standing, imagine this, tall as a colossus, saying to you, "You mean nothing to me because you have never existed. There is nothing you have that I did not give to you - you have been dead, then, since the day you were born."
Dead. Your understanding of death is Mother's eyes, all glassy and gone. Gone out of her own head. Years later you would see this in living people, cause it in living people, watch them dead-and-alive, walking and speaking with nothing in their eyes but mirror glass, and feel cold thinking of yourself as nothing. Hollow. Gone out of your own head. Maybe you have always been dead. Imagine staring in a mirror for hours at the faint red glow in the heart of your left eye and wondering, wondering, wondering.
Imagine, long after this, a time, months, a year spent with no recollection of this. Imagine thinking of death as a concept and seeing dead mirror-glass eyes of someone you've never met. Not knowing who. Not knowing how. Not knowing why. You were dead then, imagine this, unmade, broken up into pieces and sectioned off, carved up, stitched back together lopsided and incorrectly with all the stuffing in the wrong places. You were not the same even after C.C. put you back the way you were meant to be. Never the same. Because you could remember, imagine remembering nothing, not "not anything" but nothing, the black crayon scribbles over your sister's face, the hours spent late at night chasing the severed tail-ends of thoughts around in your mind, knowing (or thinking, but never being entirely sure) there was something wrong with you and there had been since the Black Rebellion but not knowing what, where, how, why, when, who you couldn't put a name or face or identity to. Waking up certain that you were about to say a name, but struggling with nothing for minutes before that certainty melted like the remnants of a nightmare.
This is death, to Lelouch. His entire understanding of it. Death is not being known. Death is not knowing. Death is not anything, not anything but nothing. For a time, he'd tried to be nothing, to be nothing and nowhere and endless. He'd tried to be Zero, because Zero (from the French zero from the Venetian zero from the Italian zefiro from the Arabic safira, safira: “it was empty") embodied nothing but was really everything, because only nothing can be everything. Nothing was unbreakable. But that wasn't true. They'd broken him. He, Suzaku, had broken him.
Lelouch rubs his hand over the place in his ribs where C.C. had felt the day before. Feeling for the holes (the bullet holes dripping red) - You were stabbed through the heart. That's why I was looking for the wound.
He's dead.
He knows this truly now, and it's not because C.C. told him so. It's because he could see it breaking her to say it. Because Suzaku is Zero. Because Lelouch doesn't know. Is not known. Is not nothing. Is not anything. Safira, it was empty, he is empty.
"Is this what you wanted?" Lelouch hisses. The tree. That stupid tree. He knows it's not going to answer him - it's a tree - knows that it's the gods who are responsible for bringing him here, bringing him out of even his own real death. Bringing him here to fade into non-existence. I'm not dead, I'm alive, I exist, I am something - no. He is dead. He is not alive. He does not exist. He is not something. And it all started the day he awoke here, at the foot of this enormous tree, this tree as huge as the gods themselves. "Is this what you wanted from me after all? Like I'm supposed to learn something like this? From being here?"
Fuck this. Lelouch reaches up, practically claws the contact out of his left eye. It burns fierce and hot, hotter then he ever remembers. Good. It won't do much of anything, but it never would have. Lelouch is dead. He doesn't exist. This doesn't matter.
"So go on! Tell me, you so-called gods!" He's shouting now. His eye sears; the Geass burns up into his skull, runs heat and lightning through his veins: "Tell me what you want! Tell me what the point of this is! I, Lelouch vi Britannia, command you to tell me what the fuck it is you want from me!"
His hands shake. It hurts. It hurts, god damn it.
And when the echoes of his voice die, Himorogi is silent once more.
Status: Closed
Style: Third person present (the opening post plays with perspective, but the rest is third person present)
Where: Himorogi
When: Dawn; Week 11, Day 6 [immediately after this]
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Lelouch has an emotional breakdown and yells at a tree. Suzaku is in the tree. JERRY, JERRY, JERRY.
Himorogi is quiet. It's always quieter than it should be, but especially now, in the pre-light of dawn, the stillness is almost its own tangible thing.
The loud, sharp sound of Lelouch's Hitomi striking the large tree in the center of the garden sounds as violent and loud as a gunshot. He's breathing heavily, and not from the walk. Breathing like he's had someone's hand to his throat.
Imagine you are Lelouch, for a moment. Imagine you have been running from your home, running from any home, running from an entire life, for as long as you can remember. Imagine seeing your mother dead, full of holes and bleeding out red red red on a staircase, so many bullets they said she was dead before she'd bled out. Dead before her heart stopped. This is your first understanding of death, first experience of it firsthand, if you are Lelouch; not your first exposure to the idea as a concept, but your first time seeing and feeling the physicality of it. Nunnally all soaked in her blood. Mother's face frozen, stuck, just gone. Imagine, she's gone out of her own eyes, you'd thought.
Imagine, you as Lelouch, imagine going to your father, the Emperor of Britannia. Imagine gaining audience at ten years of age, all the nobles whispering behind their fans at your bravery or insolence or stupidity, only to be told, when you raged at him for dismissing the two of you as if you did not matter - Charles standing, imagine this, tall as a colossus, saying to you, "You mean nothing to me because you have never existed. There is nothing you have that I did not give to you - you have been dead, then, since the day you were born."
Dead. Your understanding of death is Mother's eyes, all glassy and gone. Gone out of her own head. Years later you would see this in living people, cause it in living people, watch them dead-and-alive, walking and speaking with nothing in their eyes but mirror glass, and feel cold thinking of yourself as nothing. Hollow. Gone out of your own head. Maybe you have always been dead. Imagine staring in a mirror for hours at the faint red glow in the heart of your left eye and wondering, wondering, wondering.
Imagine, long after this, a time, months, a year spent with no recollection of this. Imagine thinking of death as a concept and seeing dead mirror-glass eyes of someone you've never met. Not knowing who. Not knowing how. Not knowing why. You were dead then, imagine this, unmade, broken up into pieces and sectioned off, carved up, stitched back together lopsided and incorrectly with all the stuffing in the wrong places. You were not the same even after C.C. put you back the way you were meant to be. Never the same. Because you could remember, imagine remembering nothing, not "not anything" but nothing, the black crayon scribbles over your sister's face, the hours spent late at night chasing the severed tail-ends of thoughts around in your mind, knowing (or thinking, but never being entirely sure) there was something wrong with you and there had been since the Black Rebellion but not knowing what, where, how, why, when, who you couldn't put a name or face or identity to. Waking up certain that you were about to say a name, but struggling with nothing for minutes before that certainty melted like the remnants of a nightmare.
This is death, to Lelouch. His entire understanding of it. Death is not being known. Death is not knowing. Death is not anything, not anything but nothing. For a time, he'd tried to be nothing, to be nothing and nowhere and endless. He'd tried to be Zero, because Zero (from the French zero from the Venetian zero from the Italian zefiro from the Arabic safira, safira: “it was empty") embodied nothing but was really everything, because only nothing can be everything. Nothing was unbreakable. But that wasn't true. They'd broken him. He, Suzaku, had broken him.
Lelouch rubs his hand over the place in his ribs where C.C. had felt the day before. Feeling for the holes (the bullet holes dripping red) - You were stabbed through the heart. That's why I was looking for the wound.
He's dead.
He knows this truly now, and it's not because C.C. told him so. It's because he could see it breaking her to say it. Because Suzaku is Zero. Because Lelouch doesn't know. Is not known. Is not nothing. Is not anything. Safira, it was empty, he is empty.
"Is this what you wanted?" Lelouch hisses. The tree. That stupid tree. He knows it's not going to answer him - it's a tree - knows that it's the gods who are responsible for bringing him here, bringing him out of even his own real death. Bringing him here to fade into non-existence. I'm not dead, I'm alive, I exist, I am something - no. He is dead. He is not alive. He does not exist. He is not something. And it all started the day he awoke here, at the foot of this enormous tree, this tree as huge as the gods themselves. "Is this what you wanted from me after all? Like I'm supposed to learn something like this? From being here?"
Fuck this. Lelouch reaches up, practically claws the contact out of his left eye. It burns fierce and hot, hotter then he ever remembers. Good. It won't do much of anything, but it never would have. Lelouch is dead. He doesn't exist. This doesn't matter.
"So go on! Tell me, you so-called gods!" He's shouting now. His eye sears; the Geass burns up into his skull, runs heat and lightning through his veins: "Tell me what you want! Tell me what the point of this is! I, Lelouch vi Britannia, command you to tell me what the fuck it is you want from me!"
His hands shake. It hurts. It hurts, god damn it.
And when the echoes of his voice die, Himorogi is silent once more.