Spoilers for the end of R2.
Disclaimer: I am but a poor high school student.
There are fireworks.
"Zero," Nunnally says, hands folded in her lap, "Come watch them with me."
For a long time she knew nothing but sound and heat and touch, and the world she created from them was piecemeal, fragmentary. Now she sees the colors exploding in the sky: vibrant gold, verdant green, a red that is less like blood and more like the roses in her garden. She sees her face, reflected in the glass door of the royal suite, her eyes wide. Shadows collect and tremble at the hollow of her throat, and the fireworks flush her skin. She doesn't look imperial, or regal; she looks like an eager young girl, awed by the night's display.
They're beautiful. Celebratory. Her chest aches, suddenly, for all the people that aren't there with them - but so it goes. She was not crowned with the expectation that she would hold onto grudges, that she would hate the world that took everything she really had. Nunnally shuts her eyes. Tonight she will go to the grotto, and light a candle for her brother. It will be a royal shade of purple. Afterwards, she will climb the steps to the roof, and she and Zero will take a lantern and light it and send it into the sky, to the stars, and it will be white, untarnished, and it will fly as easily and peacefully as a dove, and it will be for all they've lost.
On the first day of the new year there will be dancing, and parties, but this night - the last night - is for her and her ghosts, and that includes Zero. He bows to her. She touches the curved surface of his mask. Remember, but do not regret, is what the gesture says, and what she leaves unvoiced.
Nunnally stands, smiling, solemn. "They'll be much brighter outside," she says, and takes his hand.
Together they will make something new, something clean. Tonight they will tell their old ghosts to sleep easy and untroubled in their deep graves, and tomorrow they will begin again, their slates clean, their hands unstained.