a/n: i just couldn't help myself. anyway, happy new year!
dedication: to the whispers that are carried on the wind.
disclaimer: don't own anything.
summary: In another world, a sharp prince rules alongside a glittering queen. – Lelouch/Euphemia, C.C, AU.
the night sky
how much do you love me?
She twists a lock of green hair around her finger as keen red eyes scan her surroundings. A new world, a new land, a new king.
She wonders if her search is finally over. Skipping to the palace, she arrives to the 98th Emperor's stifling court, and patiently waits her turn. She can tell it is not yet time – Lelouch is yet to be born.
When Marianne dies, she sighs, regretful. This is not the world she is looking for.
When Lelouch vi Britannia is born, the fourth Prince of the Empire, it is to death and defiance and a burning world.
His mother dies in childbirth and Lelouch opens his eyes to the sound of a funeral hymn and the sight of Queen Marianne being lowered into a grave, her coffin as black as night. The commoner princess was beloved by her people and the whole world mourns her death.
The Emperor does not take another wife.
Lelouch is three when his elder brother dies. Three and much too sharp for his own good – he explores the Royal Palace, then the gardens outside and one day, he even manages to slip through the walls and make it to the city before the guards notice something is wrong.
But Lelouch is a child, still, and he does not understand Schneizel's gleeful grins or Cornelia's bright red smile as Prince Odysseus is paraded through the capital city of Pendragon, through crowds that remain silent and slint-eyed, the tension choking the very air.
So Lelouch clambers onto his father's lap, still in black mourning clothes as they watch the procession from the balcony of the throne room, and asks the Emperor why the people don't weep for Odysseus as so many people told him they wept for Marianne.
- "People cry when they're sad, right?" Lelouch tilted his head to one side, looking at the most powerful man in the Empire with bright violet eyes, "So how come people aren't sad for Odysseus-niisama?" –
The Emperor merely smiles and tells him that he's much too young to understand, inwardly sighing with relief. Odysseus was a terrible prince and an even worse person and seating him on the throne would have meant riots and bloodshed.
The Emperor has three more sons, though.
At five, Lelouch is much too young for politics – yet he learns, anyway. He watches Schneizel carefully and remembers the words he uses, although half of them are far too advanced for Lelouch's minds. He watches and learns and even though he's too young to understand why his elder brother gives money away and why he smiles and talks with pretty girls, he grins in awe – his elder brother is the coolest person in the world.
Schneizel is dead a fortnight later.
This time, the people mourn. Schneizel cultivated many friends – both in Pendragon and around the world, capturing their hearts with his quick-witted words and easy smiles. It is no secret that he lusted for the throne, for power, and with Odysseus gone, Schneizel had been the Crown Prince – but his enemies outnumbered his friends.
This time, Lelouch sits alone in his room, his face pressed to the window, guards at his back, an air of pensive paranoia infiltrating the palace. Cornelia and Clovis – the golden twins – have likewise been shut in their rooms, the palace on high alert as they scour it for the assassin that poured the poison in Schneizel's wine glass.
Lelouch almost wants to tell them not to bother – he had been watching, after all, and the wine glass that his elder brother had drank from was handed to him by a woman, exotic and alien.
However, anger and revenge drive all sane thought from his mind – Lelouch is too young, but that doesn't stop him from thinking and planning and plotting to destroy the woman who killed his brother – to look her in the eyes and make sure she knows how much suffering she has caused before ending her life.
Lelouch is much too young but he remembers the slitted eyes, the pale skin and short, dark hair of the woman from Province Eleven – for even if he is too young, he is a Prince of the Empire, and he is second-in-line for the throne.
Lelouch is eleven years old when he meets the girl. He is playing chess against one of his father's advisors and winning easily – Schneizel was the only one who had given him any difficulty, and that was years ago, when his elder brother had taught him the game in a moment of free time.
The Emperor watches him play – watches the kaleidoscope of emotions that dance on his face, for although Lelouch is brilliant, a child prodigy, he has never mastered the mask Schneizel had perfected. His heart screams at him – Lelouch is young, much too young…but Cornelia is dead now, Cornelia and the fragile peace he had sustained with her marriage to the Duke of Province Four.
He coughs, and watches Lelouch stop playing and turn – disbelief warring with suspicion before happiness breaks through and he runs to embrace his father. The Emperor has to remind himself that Lelouch is only eleven, only a child, but he has only two children now and fears for both their lives.
So he introduces Lelouch to Lady Euphemia, whose parents control a great deal of trade in the Empire – whose influence Lelouch cannot survive without – and hopes that the slim, cheerful girl next to him can smooth the sharp edges and tame the violent storm that began raging when Schneizel died.
Lelouch does not know what to do with this girl. She has pink hair – pink hair! – and a bright smile and the prettiest blue eyes. He does not tell her this, though, only teasing her – cruelly, as only a little boy can – on the color of her hair. He does not expect her to retaliate, her smile growing cold and her eyes lighting up with fire.
He does not know what to do at all – watching from the balconies and peeping from the eyeholes to watch Schneizel did not tell him what court was like, and the Emperor forbade him to attend court once Cornelia had died – with a girl who does not bow and simper to his title but actually fights back.
He pushes her into a pond in a fit of shock.
Euphemia forgives him after he comes, sullen, to her door, bearing a bouquet of flowers. She makes him beg for awhile, though, her stubborn personality asserting itself.
The Emperor watches from the tinted limo, and smiles. Marianne had been a spitfire as well.
At age fourteen, Lady Euphemia is on Lelouch's arm, steering the numb Prince through the crowds, fighting back the sycophants with a sharp smile and cutting words. Prince Clovis is dead and all the court wants to do is devour the new heir with their sickening smirks and barbed insults.
Lelouch watched his siblings die, one after the other, leaving the ageing Emperor with only one child left. And Euphemia vows, supporting her beloved Lelouch with one hand as she strides quickly through the masses, that one child will live.
Even if she has to die – Lelouch will sit as king.
At age sixteen, she marries Lelouch, becoming Princess Euphemia li Britannia.
Lelouch sits in cold shock at the bedside of his dying father. He is only seventeen, a child still – still too young.
A child, and in a few short minutes, the new Emperor. Lelouch remembers revenge and the foreign beauty from Province Eleven. He remembers Cornelia dying in Province Four. Clovis' tragic accident on a cruise ship traveling from Province Three to Province Ten. And, although it is his vaguest memory, buried in the sands of time, Odysseus, killed in Pendragon itself.
The Emperor watches this dance of emotions – of vengeance and anger and numbness and grief so strong that Lelouch nearly breaks down, this would-be king cracking under the strain. The Emperor watches him – this thin slip of a boy who has never properly learned to control his expressions, who has never been at court, who is brilliant and intelligent but so painfully unaware of the language of royalty.
The Emperor smiles sadly – Lelouch was the fourth Prince and last in line, his beloved son, Marianne's beautiful boy and even on his deathbed, the Emperor wants to hide him, take him away from the cruelty and suffering that awaits him.
But he knows that it cannot be – knew from the beginning, from a week before Lelouch's birth when the green-haired witch came to visit. She told him – as she had told him many things before, prophecies which would save or destroy the Empire, knowledge so powerful it couldn't fall into the wrong hands – that the life growing inside Marianne would someday rule.
He believed her and this is the result of his belief.
The Emperor weakly brushes away the tear gathering under Lelouch's beautiful violet eyes – Marianne's eyes – and gives him one last piece of wisdom to add to Lelouch's formidable arsenal.
- "You were always meant to rule, my son." –
Lelouch vi Britannia is crowned the 99th Emperor of the Holy Empire of Britannia. Princess Euphemia becomes his Queen.
Euphemia stands next to him, next to the large golden throne where Lelouch sits, its massive proportions threatening to swallow her husband's slight frame. The crown sits on his dark, ink-black hair – Queen Marianne's hair, as she has heard so many people remark – twinkling in the morning light.
The witch is kneeling on the ground. Her red eyes move from Lelouch to Euphemia and back again, a thin smile curving on bloodless lips. Her green hair is long, brushing the ground and contrasting sharply with her white dress. Her face is young – as young as Lelouch when he first became Emperor – but it looks so old, knowledge darkening its features.
Euphemia does not trust her, this child-witch. She is immortal and Euphemia has always been wary of that which does not die. For if it dies, it fears death and Euphemia can control fear – control everyone, in order to keep her husband alive and on the throne.
To keep the life growing inside of her alive long enough to succeed him.
But this child-witch does not fear. She speaks to the Emperor as if speaking to an old friend and Euphemia shudders at the thought of how old she actually is – the green-haired immortal has seen the Empire grow from the 1st Emperor. She has advised Britannia through ninety-nine Emperors and countless centuries, sacrificing her peace for the world.
No, Euphemia does not like her at all.
Lelouch is alone when the Eleven assassin comes. His wife has been confined to her bed, his child in her womb, and the throne room is empty. Lelouch disbanded court a long time ago – he still hasn't learned to control his emotions – and when the dark-haired, slant-eyed woman walks through the doors he snarls and has a knife to her throat before the guards can move.
He knows who she is, now – Kallen Koizuki, Princess of Eleven and the leader of the Black Knights, Eleven's personal army.
Kallen merely steps forward, the blade at her neck breaking her skin and causing beads of blood to form at her throat. She smiles at him, and Lelouch realizes that she's only a child – much too young to have been the same woman who killed his elder brother.
As Lady Viletta and Lord Jeremiah – the only guards Euphemia trusts – break Lelouch's hold and point their guns at Kallen, Lelouch sees the pink roots hiding in her dark hair.
- "Stop," he commanded, eyeing her with suspicion, "Who are you?"
"Kallen Koizuki at your service, Your Majesty," the girl executed a mockery of a curtsey, "I have come to petition aid for Province Eleven – I had not expected to be greeted with a knife to my throat."
"Would you prefer a bullet through your heart, Kallen-san?" Viletta smiled, sending the temperature plummeting.
Lelouch pinched the bride of his nose, sighing, "Don't shoot; Viletta, Jeremiah. I seem to have mistaken the princess for someone else." –
Her mother, to be exact. Lelouch feels a headache building up as Kallen details the situation with the pirates that raid down Eleven's coast, killing her Black Knight army.
Now, when he needs her the most, his blue-eyed Queen is absent. However, Lelouch verifies Princess Kallen's story with his reports in Province Eleven, sending her to his personal doctor to get treated for her wound, and promises to send her troops.
This is his first crisis as Emperor and Lelouch is determined to survive it.
Euphemia gives birth a month later, to a healthy baby boy that Lelouch names Suzaku.
He is twenty now, sitting on his throne and smiling as Euphemia plays with two-year-old Suzaku. The brown-haired boy tires of his mother and comes running to him, his short legs scrambling over the few steps to tug at Lelouch's legs, smiling at his father with a wide grin.
Lelouch returns the bright smile and scoops him up, seating him on the throne that will be his – Lelouch refuses to think of Odysseus, Schneizel and Clovis – tickling him and listening to Suzaku laugh.
Euphemia stands up and walks to his side, to the throne Lelouch had made for her. Viletta and Jeremiah stand as sentinels, unmoving even as the door swings open and another petitioner walks in.
Lelouch starts in surprise – these days, the problems are few and far apart. The Empire is at peace…and it is the green-haired witch that has come, her red eyes serious and still.
She tells him that Suzaku will never sit on the throne.
Euphemia cries herself to sleep that night.
As the years pass, peace continues to reign and Lelouch soon pushes the prophecy from his mind. Euphemia gives him two more children, another son and a beautiful baby girl. Their fourth child is on the way.
Content in the present and sensing no threat to the future, Lelouch digs into the past, to wonder how the string of fate weaved through time to drag a fourth Prince to be king.
What he discovers is so horrifying that he promptly throws up.
Odysseus was a psychopath. He used to experiment with human lives and discard them like trash. He was brash and cruel and vindictive, using his status as Crown Prince to get him everything. The world as a collective hated him, and none more so than the women he courted and the bastards he fathered. Lelouch quickly traces the murder to one of his concubines, a former noblewoman, Lady Cecila, who was disgraced by Odysseus.
She now lives happily in a marriage to one of Pendragon's many Earls and Lelouch lets her be. He does not wish to ruin her life, the life she had forged from the ashes of shame.
Schneizel…here the path is more difficult to follow. Lelouch adored Schneizel, had placed his beloved elder brother on a pedestal none could hope to reach and watching him fall from that nearly tears his heart apart.
However, his queen realizes his misery and helps him hunt for the truth, soothing the pain of betrayal with her soft words and gentle hands. Many people favored Schneizel but those he manipulated had not forgiven him. One of those people was the ex-Princess of Province Eleven, Kallen's mother.
She is dead, her life long since forfeit to the addicting drug Refrain that poisons his Empire. Lelouch resolves to double his efforts in eradicating the drug trade, his vengeance dissolving its poisonous hold on his heart with nothing more to latch on to.
Clovis' death was an accident and Lelouch puts the matter aside, telling himself that he can only grieve for so long. However, Cornelia was definitely murdered and Lelouch smiles as he buries himself in reports and camera footage and news articles to hunt for her murderer.
It is Euphemia that finds him – a native of Province Four – and it is Euphemia that leaves to dispense justice, protecting Lelouch even from himself.
Lelouch cannot help but think that someone very badly wanted him as king.
Queen Euphemia li Britannia is always strong, a smile on her face. Lelouch may be expressive but the Empire needs a strong Queen who will not break in the face of adversity. She tends to her six children – Suzaku will be married to Kallen in a year's time, while the youngest, little Princess Shirley, is only seven – and supports her husband, smoothly removing his enemies and cultivating a network of allies.
The 98th Emperor had succeeded in choosing the best possible wife for the son he knew would rule – in choosing the best Queen to lead the Empire.
However, Euphemia is only human and when the immortal comes to visit again, to tell Lelouch the heartrending news that none of his children will ever sit on the throne, Euphemia breaks down and cries – for the first time.
Lelouch comforts her, his arms wrapping around her shaking frame and whispering reassurances into her ears as she clutches him and sobs.
Euphemia is the first person to see her first grandchild, Princess Nunnally vi Britannia.
Lelouch is old, now, nearly seventy years of age. He is sick, Euphemia can tell, very sick. The doctors all say he is dying, so Euphemia dismisses them all and sits on the side of his bed, pushing away his gray hair from his face, smiling into the vibrant violet eyes that never once lost their color.
- "I am dying, Euphy," he smiled at her, only to cough violently, blood staining his lips, "I am old and I am dying."
"Shush," Euphemia frowned at him, "You will get better. Don't talk like that."
"You know I won't," Lelouch said gently, "This disease has no cure."
"Then I'll find one," she retorted stubbornly, "I'm not letting you go that easily."
"It's only for a short while, my dear queen," Lelouch laughed, the chuckles turning to coughs, "I expect to see you soon – but not too soon. You must support the children like you once supported me."
"I love you."
"I know, Euphy," Lelouch traced the path of the single tear that fell from her blue eyes, "I love you too." –
The 99th Emperor of Britannia dies peacefully in his sleep. The whole world mourns, as they once did for his mother, and sadness and grief are dispersed through the Empire as the people hail the Emperor who successfully maintained peace and balance for so long, so well.
Euphemia crowns Nunnally vi Britannia the 100th Empress of the Holy Empire of Britannia. At the age of twenty-five, Nunnally is beautiful, vivacious and a quick learner. She is a wise and benevolent ruler, having been groomed for the throne since she was born.
Ten years later, Queen Euphemia collapses, her last memory that of the bright violet eyes of her husband.
The green-haired witch moves from land to land, world to world, time to time as she observes the flow of fate. She watches Lelouch grow to futures both happy and sad, horrific and peaceful. She watches a dark-haired prince who died long before his time and a king living decades long.
She watches, she waits and she learns.
In some world out there, her Lelouch is waiting and she will simply have to keep looking.
I love you for every star in the sky
le fin
a/n: Well. I have no idea what happened here. It was supposed to be Lelouch/Euphemia, but one-sided Lelouch/C.C apparently wanted to be written and Suzaku/Kallen kinda sprang up out of nowhere. A play on the whole 'every star is a new world' idea.