Note: This story uses a number of concepts from Buddhism for its framework. The majority are defined within the story, but the few that are not I will define here. Bardo is a Tibetan term that refers to the intermediate state between incarnations, which is typically said to last forty-nine days. Bhikkhu is the Pali term for a Buddhist monk. The quotes in part IV are taken from the Adittapariyaya Sutta, a.k.a. the Fire Sermon.
Additionally, this story is a companion piece to When You Lie Howling, my previous obscenely long oneshot. It works fine as a standalone, but I feel it is worth mentioning that the two were written to inform one another.
I hope you enjoy.
I.
Samsāra
(The Cycle of Life, Death, and Rebirth)
She doesn't remember very much from her first life.
There are snippets here and there: eternal blue skies raked with the wisps of desert clouds, green grass so huge and so close that she can count the ants on every blade, pink bedroom walls. There are bits of song she can't remember the words to and blissful half-sleep in the warm, safe arms of maybe-her-mother, maybe-her-sister, maybe-a-nursemaid. They are memories that might belong to anyone, that might be from any bygone time and not actually from the time she wants them to be. By all logic, she should not have any of these memories, but still she cannot imagine them being from anytime else because in this life everything feels completely different, even the ants in the grass.
After that, there is bardo, where she first begins to coalesce as she is now. In these memories, the walls are off-white, yet somehow more vivid than the pink because now she is becoming a person, rather than a mere contented existence. There are no more warm embraces. (The mother who held her is gone, not left or abandoned her, but simply disappeared forever, and the sister who held her has been torn away by powers less great than death.) Instead there are just the pinches of cousins, roughhousing boys who like to pull her hair and make her cry, not out of malice but simply out of a confusion over who and what she is and the childish inability to comprehend worlds beyond their own. There is looking up at the sky and trying imagine she is uninhibited happiness again, but the sky is different here. It rains all the time.
After her forty-nine days are up (though it is actually forty-nine times seven and maybe a bit more) comes rebirth. There is a new mother (of sorts), who she will always secretly fear tolerates her only for her sister's sake, and new siblings. There is even her old sister although she does not seem quite the same as she was before; perhaps she, too, has been reborn, and not so kindly. There is an oak tree and butterflies and warm embraces again, and the skies are dry and blue, but every blade of grass seems ever smaller.
Before everything had to be fixed with blood, Euphemia had believed that everything could be fixed with kisses. More precisely, a true love's kiss, like the one that awakened Briar Rose or coaxed the poison apple from Snow White's throat. In a pinch, tears would work, too. All Rapunzel ever had to do to restore her prince's sight was weep that he had lost it.
At Aries Villa, there grew a great ancient oak with many, many branches. With some boughs snaking low to the ground and others twisting up into the sky, it made for the best climbing in the whole world.
In the courtyard where it grew, there lived a clan of mountain lions. At least, that was what Nunnally said. You couldn't see them because they were sleeping behind the rocks, she said, but, trust her, they were all over the place.
"I saw one here twice," she proclaimed smugly one day, swinging one of her sneakered feet onto the oak's deepest sloping arm before hoisting herself up onto the bough. "Come on, we have to get to off the ground before they wake up."
Euphie cast a glance down at her ballet flats, which were not at all good for climbing. But, then again, mountain lions. So she removed them one at a time and positioned them neatly at the foot of the tree before pulling herself into a shaky all-fours balance on the oak's generous arm. There she progressed slowly but steadily, hand-before-hand, foot-before-foot to catch up with Nunnally, who had begun her impossibly fast shimmy skyward and was already halfway to the top.
Euphie was maybe ten feet off the ground when she heard leaves rustling behind her. She tried to cast a glance backward, but the foliage was too thick, and looking down made her head spin.
"Nunnally?" she called.
"Yeah?" Nunnally called back from somewhere high up and invisible.
A twig snapped below. Her heart pounded in her ears. "Nunnally, there's something behind me!"
She heard Nunnally emit a small, high shriek from somewhere in the oak's vast crown. "It's a mountain lion!" she screamed. "Hurry, Euphie, climb faster!"
But when she tried to climb faster, Euphie lost her footing and ended up hanging by her arms from a branch. Something was panting behind her, and while her bare feet scraped the bark over and over, she could not find a foothold. So she panicked and, in her panic, kicked her feet out behind her like a horse toward whatever was coming after her. Something made hard contact with the ball of her foot, and then there came a high-pitched cry, followed by a snapping of twigs as whatever it was fell through the branches, culminating in a dull thud.
When Euphie finally did regain her footing and was able to keep her balance long enough to look down at the thing that she had just kicked out of the tree, she found nothing like a mountain lion, but Lelouch sprawled on his back in the dirt with his eyes closed. She immediately began to make her way slowly back down, calling up to Nunnally as she went.
"Lelouch fell out of the tree!" she cried. (There seemed no immediate need right then to mention that she had kicked him.)
Nunnally, who, in spite of her age, always took on the role of the older sibling when it came to matters like tree climbing — she was by far the strongest and fastest, whereas Euphie was okay and Lelouch was pathetic — somehow managed to be back on the ground before Euphie was, leaning over Lelouch and cradling his face.
"Are you hurt?" she cried to him as Euphie dropped onto the ground beside her.
Lelouch didn't open his eyes, but responded with a small whine. So he was still alive, but who knew how badly hurt he was? What if his back was broken or he went into a coma and didn't wake up? How would Euphie ever live with herself? So when Nunnally ran to get a grown-up (she was the fastest runner, so of course she went — otherwise she would never have left her brother's side), Euphie knelt down next to Lelouch and looked at his adorable, handsome face.
Please be okay, she thought as she swept his hair back from his forehead. She didn't know a whole lot about kissing, so she started with a dry peck on the lips. But she gave those kinds of kisses to her siblings all the time. It wasn't a true love's kiss, and that was what he needed to make him okay again. She remembered something she had heard once about how grown-ups kissed. They put their tongues in each other's mouths. It sounded gross to her, but then again, all of the princes and princesses in the fairytales were technically grown-ups, so maybe a true love's kiss meant tongue. She leaned over Lelouch again to kiss him the grown-up way, but instead she only ended up licking his mouth.
Suddenly his eyes flew open, and he made a stifled sound like an attempted scream. She pulled away from him.
"Were you just licking me?" he asked dazedly.
"I was giving you your true love's kiss!" she replied, overjoyed. "And it worked!"
His expression changed from confusion to abject horror.
"Ugh!" he spat, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. "You're so gross! Get away from me."
Another time, he might have hurt her feelings, but this time, she was just too happy.
It was not until a few years into her subsequent life — a few years after all of the fairytale princes died with the magic of their stories — that she fell in love again.
His book was not one from her childhood, no family heirloom with gilded pages and a love-worn cover, but one that she found in an obscure section of the University library. The University had become her main source of books that were considered to "niche", too "deviant", or even too "inappropriate" to be housed in the library of a middle or high school. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, she frequently visited the library with the blessing of her older brother Schneizel, who attended the University and would not-so-subtly encourage her to borrow a few of the "forbidden" books on each visit.
This particular book seized her with its unusual name, Jataka Tales, and the cover, which bore an elaborate depiction of two men in strange golden attire, surrounded by all manner of beautiful wild creatures. She started the book in the middle (as she always did with anthologies, since it was her belief that the first story or poem one opened to was luckier than the first in the book), arriving at a story titled "The Tale of the Hungry Tigress."
He was no fairytale knight with a sword and armor, slaying dragons in the name of a beautiful, helpless princess. In her mind, he looked nothing like the old princes with their pale eyes and rosy cheeks (like her brothers and the real-life prince she figured she would probably marry someday). Instead, he stood tall and slender, his skin a deep copper, his eyes two deep black pools of endless kindness and wisdom. He did not have a typical fairytale prince name — when the fairytale princes were named at all, they had boring names like "Henry" or "Eric" — but was called "Sattva", an exotic name that rolled off the tongue in such a wonderful way. He brought salvation not in his kiss or in his tears, but in his own blood, flesh, and pain.
His story went like this:
He was born the son of a King in a land of mountains, but chose the life of a renunciant. One day, he went for a leisure walk with a companion, and the two men came across a tigress. They quickly recognized that they had nothing to fear from her: she was nothing but skin and bones, too weak to hunt. Prince Sattva's heart ached at the sight of the beautiful tigress reduced to such a state, her vivid coat like a rug thrown over bones, her mouth hanging open with thirst, and he instructed his companion to go in search of food.
It was only after his companion had departed that Prince Sattva noticed that the tigress was not alone but had several young at her side, tiny, helpless, and just as starved as she. He also noticed the hungry way she looked at them. He watched the battle play out within the tigress: her mother's love, in all of its fierceness, losing ground by the moment to the burning compulsion of her hunger. He feared for the inability of her simple animal will to fight against it much longer.
When he saw this, Prince Sattva was overwhelmed by love for the creatures before him. Picking up a jagged rock, he slashed his own chest, drawing blood to bring the tigress' attention away from her young. She raised her head just as Prince Sattva threw himself from the precipice upon which he stood, his body breaking on the rocks below.
When the companion returned empty-handed, he found the tigress and her young bounding and frolicking, full of new life. Among them was the blood-stained remains of his Prince's dress. When he saw this, his eyes filled with tears, and he bowed his head, but his tears were of joy, and he cried out in praise of his Prince:
"Such is the world, that a tigress is forced beyond the limits of her own love and looks to her young only as flesh to appease her hunger! O worthy Prince, worthy self-sacrifice!"
Lelouch turned out to be fine after his fall, barring a sprained pinkie finger and a nasty bruise on his back. Euphemia took full responsibility for his injury and full credit for his survival.
"Guess what?" she asked Nunnally as they picked flowers in the garden the next day.
"What?" replied Nunnally, who had spend the remainder of the previous day crying her eyes out because she thought Lelouch was going to die.
"Me and Lelouch are going to get married," Euphie squealed.
Nunnally was silent for a moment, and when Euphie looked up at her, she saw that her sister had dropped the flowers and was staring her down with her little hands balled into fists.
"You're a liar," she said after a few moments.
"Nuh-uh," Euphie replied. "I kissed him, and now he's okay. That means I must be his true love, which means we have to get married."
"Liar," Nunnally said again. "Lelouch would never kiss you. He already promised to marry me! He promised me when I was four!"
"You can't marry him," Euphie protested. "He's your brother. That would be gross."
Nunnally looked indignant. "He's your brother, too!" she shrieked.
"Yes," Euphie put on her best arm-patting older-sibling tone, "but he's my half-brother. It's not the same thing."
Euphie watched Nunnally furrow her brow and struggle briefly with the logic before shouting, "It is the same thing!" and bursting into tears. After that she ran inside and tattled to Lady Marianne, who, after picking Nunnally up and rubbing her back until her tears subsided, giggled and said, "You know, if Lelouch ends up anything like his father, he could probably marry both of you." Then she laughed and laughed at her own joke as the two girls looked at each other with wrinkled noses.
Then the door swung open and Lelouch, who had ostensibly been listening on the other side until that moment, stormed in, his pinkie finger wrapped in gauze, and yelled, "I don't want to marry either of you!" before stomping back out and slamming the door behind him as his mother and sisters erupted in a fit of giggles.
Before Prince Sattva was Prince Sattva, he was the Great Monkey King, who laid his body between two boughs of a mango tree so that his monkey subjects might escape from the archers of the human king. But after his subjects had fled to safety, he was betrayed by one who wanted his power.
After Prince Sattva was Prince Sattva, he was Prince Vessantara, who gave away his children and called it generosity. Euphemia hates this story. She thinks it would have been fitting for Prince Vessantara to have next become the Monkey King, who was trod upon and betrayed in spite of his goodness. That would be justice. But instead, Prince Vessantara became Prince Siddhartha, who ventured beyond the palace walls and learned of suffering before finding Happily Ever After under a sacred fig tree.
The world was not just. As it turned out, Euphemia never had to leave the palace walls to learn of suffering, and sacred figs did not grow in Pendragon.
II.
Dukkha
(Suffering)
She was with Nunnally when they came to take her away. Euphie had stayed in the hospital with her for almost two weeks, waiting for her to wake up. She knew Lady Marianne was dead, but she told herself she didn't have to think about that until Nunnally was okay again. Nunnally had woken for the first time three days before they took her, when Lelouch and been there, too.
"Lelouch?" she had asked. "Is Mother really dead?"
Then Euphie had watched silently from the chair in the corner while the two of them cried in each other's arms.
The day that the men came and took Nunnally away, Lelouch was not there. He had left two days before, saying that he had something important to attend to and promising that he would be back soon. But he didn't come back the next day, or the day after. Nunnally, however, seemed to be doing surprisingly well, even when the doctor's told her that she would not be able to see or walk again, and she definitely would not be able to climb trees. She didn't even cry when they told her that. When Euphie said to one of the doctors that this must mean Nunnally was doing really well (stupid, stupid, stupid, she whispered to herself over and over again later), the doctor just shook his head and said, "She is in shock. It's normal. The grieving comes later." He had seen it a thousand times.
With Lelouch gone, Euphie spent hours at a time in the corner chair, which she had dragged to the bedside. She sat upright during the days with her back straight and her feet touching the floor — the way she had been taught a proper princess must sit — and at night, she curled up on the seat like a cat and woke with her legs and back aching.
She was sleeping in that way, lulled by the sounds of Nunnally's oxygen tank and trying to dream about something other than gunshots and neck pain, when she heard the door open and someone flicked on the lights. Euphie sat up in the chair, blinking against the sudden fluorescence, and watched as two men entered the room. They were large and official-looking, clad in uniforms that she would later come to know as those of the Emperor's Royal Guard.
"This is the girl?" one asked the other.
"Yeah, the one in the bed," his counterpart replied, indicating Nunnally.
"Thanks, I figured that much out."
The first man walked over to Nunnally's bed and shook her by the shoulder, not extremely roughly, but not delicately either.
"Rise and shine, sleeping beauty."
Nunnally stirred and stiffened at the unfamiliar voice. "Who are you?" she said, removing her oxygen mask.
"I'm Plass," said the second man, "and this is Engler. We are here by order of His Majesty to escort you to your new place of residence."
"What gives? I figured they would have her bundled up and ready to go by now," Engler complained. He walked out of the room, leaving the door ajar behind him.
It was at that moment that Euphie, who had been watching the confusion in a daze so far, remembered herself.
"What are you doing?" she asked. "Where are you taking her?"
"Where are you taking me?" Nunnally echoed. "Where's my brother?"
The man scowled. "We can't disclose that to third parties," he said, indicating Euphie with a small nod of his chin. "His Majesty's orders. Don't worry. We have your brother. Everything's fine."
That was when Euphie knew that everything was definitely not fine. She was ready to run and shout for help when the other man returned with one of the doctors in tow.
"Can you get her out of all these machines?" he asked.
"I really don't think…" the doctor muttered. "We really ought to keep her here a few more days—"
The one called Engler stifled the doctor's protests by shoving a piece of paper in his face. "Which part of 'His Majesty's orders, effective immediately' do you not understand?"
With that the doctor sighed and moved to begin unhooking Nunnally from the I.V.
"Wait!" Euphie cried. "You can't do this! Stop them!"
He looked at her helplessly and continued. When Nunnally was fully unhooked, Plass turned to the doctor and said, "Now get out." The doctor skittered from the room and shut the door behind him.
Then Engler picked up Nunnally and slung her over his shoulder as if she were a sack of flour. "No! Put me down!" she screamed, clawing helplessly at his back.
"You, too" Plass said, turning to Euphie. "Get out."
"No!" she screamed back. "Put her down! She's a princess. You can't treat her like that!"
"She's no princess. Not anymore."
As he started toward her, the door opened again, flung open really, hitting hard against the wall, and Cornelia stormed in. Everything will be okay now, Euphie thought.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?" Cornelia said, marching right up to Engler, craning her neck to get face-to-face with him even though he stood more than a head taller.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Plass muttered, brandishing the paper again. "Emperor's orders, effective immediately. Get out, and take this one with you." He motioned toward Euphie.
"Don't you dare order me," Cornelia snapped back. "Put her down now. I am the Second Princess, and I command you to release her."
Plass turned. "Did you hear that Engler? The Second Princess thinks she's in a place to overrule His Majesty's orders. Is this a coup, Princess?" he sneered. "Let us know, and we can just nip it in the bud here and now."
Cornelia's cheeks flushed. "I will speak with His Majesty myself then. Just put her down!"
"Effective immediately," he repeated again. "Any further attempts to intervene by either of you will be considered obstruction of governmental administration and punished accordingly."
"No!" Euphie screamed, flinging herself toward Engler and trying to grab Nunnally's hand. Instead, Plass blocked her path, and, with one hand, effortlessly sent her tumbling backwards. She fell and immediately began to cry. Be strong, she told herself silently, be strong, be strong, be strong. But that only made her cry harder.
"Don't touch her!" Cornelia screamed.
"Then I advise you get her in line," Plass snarled. "Last chance."
That was supposed to be the moment when Cornelia beat up both of the bad guys and rescued Nunnally. But instead, Cornelia — her strong, brave, infallible sister, who didn't put up with anything from anyone — pushed past them and grabbed Euphie by the shoulders. Fighting hopelessly against her sister's iron grip, she opened her mouth to scream, to shout "What are you doing?", to shout anything, but Cornelia clapped a hand over her mouth.
"Be quiet," she whispered.
"Good thinking," said Plass, moving to leave. Engler followed with Nunnally, and they shut the door behind them.
When she woke up, it was in the comfort of a bed with no neck pain, but it only took a few moments for the horrible memory to come back. The bed was Nunnally's hospital bed, and Euphie was sleeping in it only because Nunnally was not. It was still dark, but when she sat up, she could see the shadowy outline of her older sister slumped in the chair at the bedside. At first Euphie thought she was asleep, but then she spoke.
"I'm sorry, Euphie," she said softly. "I didn't want them to take you, too. I'm so sorry."
And Euphie wanted to be mad at her. She just wanted to be mad at everything. She wanted to throw a tantrum, to be a child, to kick and scream until everything was exactly the way it should be. She wanted to pretend that the world was still a place that went her way, and if it didn't, it was only because someone else was being mean or stupid or not trying hard enough. But she also knew that the world could not be that place anymore. People died and would not come back, no matter how much you screamed and cried about it. People would tear other people's lives up by the roots — could do so with nothing more than a piece of paper — and it wasn't because they were evil or hated you, but because they just didn't care. There were no heroes and villains, just a bunch of people trying to find their own happiness, and sometimes other people just got in the way.
And Euphie found that she had no anger in her, only a terrible sadness. So she slipped out of the bed and walked to where her sister sat, climbed into her lap like a baby (because she wanted to be a baby) and hugged her. "No, I'm sorry," she said back, although she could not say for what. Just sorry. Sorry for wanting to be mad. Or sorry that she had made her sister worry more. Or sorry for all that had transpired, even if it was beyond her control, just because she had stood there and watched it all happen.
"Will they ever come back?" Euphie asked.
"I will get them back," Cornelia replied.
And they clung to each other in the darkness, and there were no heroes and no villains, only helpless princesses left alone in their towers with their dwindling hopes and their desperate escape plans and the sacrifices they made to survive.
In the months that followed, both sisters became increasingly ghostlike in their own ways. Euphie noticed it in Cornelia before she recognized it in herself. Her sister seemed to grow thinner and paler by the day. She had dark crescents under her eyes from not sleeping and spending hours locked in her office (or, rather, former office, since Lady Marianne's guard had been disbanded, and Cornelia was now in charge of nothing) in front of a computer screen. She seemed torn between the dead and the living — working desperately both to uncover the circumstances of Marianne's death and to bring Marianne's children home, and hating herself for spending too much time on one at the expense of the other.
While her sister became more and more like the fearsome specters of campfire stories, fueled by guilt and anger, terrorizing anyone who crossed her path with her ever-mounting irritability, Euphemia found herself turning into the Invisible Girl. She still took good care of herself, conditioning her hair with tea tree oil every day and dressing in her best, because it felt normal to preoccupy herself with things like appearance. She still went to school five days a week, although the driver who took her was no longer Marek, who had been her friend (he had also driven Lelouch and Nunnally every day. Perhaps he had only taken her, too, as a courtesy to Lady Marianne, and that was why he left when they were no longer around), but a different man named Nathan, who never spoke to her more than his job required him to. The servants still prepared three meals a day for her, but it seemed less for her immediate benefit than a matter of superstitious ritual, like daily offerings placed on an altar.
On weekends, she sat cross-legged in the garden and read Wordsworth to the flowers and the birds and the trees. Perhaps they did not hear her voice or understand the words, but they did not need to: they lived them. And perhaps through the reading, she might find her voice temporarily joined with theirs in Wordsworth's vision of nature's joyful eternity.
One day, on a strange impulse, she dragged out Lelouch's old chessboard. She had always been an awful, awful chess player, not just hopeless when it came to strategy, but unable to even remember the way the pieces were supposed to move. ("No!" Lelouch would bellow at her. "Knights don't move like that!" Then, clutching his head in frustration, "No! You can't do that either! Now you're putting yourself in check!")
She still could not remember the rules, so she simply laid the side of her head on the table and moved the pieces aimlessly around the board, smiling mildly at her own imaginings of Lelouch's outraged protestations, until she fell asleep with a white pawn clenched in her fist.
When she learned that they had died, she finally had to accept that there was no going back to any semblance of the way things had been before. (She would later come to think of these invisible months as her second time in bardo.) She knew something was amiss when she awoke one morning to find a strange hush fallen over the villa. The usual bustle and casual chit-chat of the few servants who had remained following Marianne's death was nowhere to be heard. Instead, two maids silently set the table for one, laying down a lonely dish of bread and eggs and a glass of orange juice, while others could be seen from the window, pacing or seated in front of their quarters, smoking cigarettes and exchanging few words between them. Maybe Euphie just imagined it, but even the morning song of the birds seemed subdued.
It was Tuesday, which meant she had school, so she started down the front walk to where Nathan would be waiting with the car. Instead, she was stopped by Alyssa, a housekeeper who had served at Aries as long as Euphie had been there and probably longer, who put a gentle hand on her shoulder and said, "There will be no school today, dear."
"Why not?" she asked.
Alyssa crouched down and took Euphie's face in both her hands. "There has been a tragedy. I am so sorry. Your brother and sister have passed away. They were caught up in the invasion."
The whole world seemed frozen then in a vivid moment: dull sunlight through the hanging gray of morning fog, the crying of a crow echoing indefinitely, the dew hanging on each blade of grass. And then all of it blurred with tears as her legs collapsed beneath her.
"No!" she cried. "No! That's not fair!"
"That it is not," replied Alyssa, stroking Euphie's hair before picking her up and carrying her back inside.
In the days that followed, it was Alyssa who stayed at her side. Cornelia had gone to the palace to request an audience with the Emperor early on the first morning before Euphie had awoken. When their father had refused to speak with her, she had asserted her presence by putting her fist through two windows and had to go to the hospital. When Euphie asked to go visit her, Alyssa simply murmured, "Oh, dear, I don't think that is a good idea. Your sister needs to rest. She will be home soon enough." But Cornelia did not return for another three days.
On the third morning, Euphie slipped unnoticed into the courtyard where the great oak tree stood. Removing her shoes, she made her slow but steady ascent into the branches. Soon she had climbed higher than she had ever climbed before — all the way up into the crown where Nunnally used to go to hide from imagined mountain lions — and there she stayed for hours, clinging to the branch and crying until her whole face was stiff with dried tears. She thought of Lelouch and how she had revived him with a kiss beneath those very branches, and how now he was gone for real, too far away to kiss and too dead to bring back. She thought of Emily Dickinson, whose life closed twice before its close, and wondered if dying felt anything like being left behind (So huge, so hopeless to conceive): the stoppage of the heart, the difficulty of breathing, the sudden sense of being vanished from a world that keeps moving on.
(Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.)
It was not until the sky began to darken and the air grew cool against her bare arms and legs that she realized she was unable to get down. She was eventually discovered by a gardener, who came calling her name. When he heard her call back, he climbed until he reached her and carried her all the way back down again, her arms clinging tightly around his shoulders.
When they were on solid ground again, she asked him what his name was.
He said it was Matiu.
He asked her why she climbed up so high.
She said it was because she was sad. She said it was because her brother and sister died.
He looked deeply and earnestly sad and said, "I know. I'm very sorry."
As he walked her back toward the house, she asked if he there was anyone he missed so badly.
He said, yes, his daughter.
Did she die? she asked.
No, he replied, he just had to leave her back in Area Nine. He had to leave her so he could make a better life for her.
"Oh," she said, not fully comprehending. Then "What is her name?"
"Anahera."
"How old is she?"
"Seven in January."
She asked what was the real name of Area Nine, but he refused to say. She asked what it was like there, and he smiled wistfully and spoke of rolling green hills dotted with white sheep, black sand beaches, pink sunsets, and volcanic geysers.
When they returned inside, Alyssa was waiting anxiously and immediately began fussing over Euphie, berating her for disappearing and wrapping her in blankets as if she had just been brought in from a blizzard instead of a mild late summer evening. Euphie turned to Matiu and said, "Thank you for rescuing me. I hope you get to see Anahera soon."
He smiled sadly. "So do I, little princess. You get warm now, all right?"
Later she would learn from one of the forbidden books that Area Nine was really called Aotearoa. She would learn that, amid the rolling green hills and volcanic geysers, Anahera most likely lived in poverty and experienced terrible discrimination. After he carried her down from the tree, she never saw Matiu again. And she knew that, to him, her words and well-wishes must have been empty and meaningless because, young and innocent as she was, in the end she was just another symbol of why he could not go home.
III.
Anicca
(Impermanence)
After that, she was taken away from Aries forever, from the oak tree, from the memories, and there was yet another new family. Her father did not want her; he was a busy man, his hands full with an entire empire and many children already, and her lower position in the lineage paired with her mediocre performance in school made her of little interest to him. This bothered her less than she wished it would; she had already begun to develop a repugnance for this man she barely knew. She had seen the way he pressured her siblings to push themselves until they cracked and how he had made the mourning of Lelouch and Nunnally an unspoken taboo, since the lamentation of their deaths could be construed as a criticism of the way he ran his family. Still, what a tragedy it was, she thought, to hate one's own father, who shared a part of her own essence as well as that of the siblings whom she so dearly loved.
Her new guardians turned out to be prominent nobility — an archduke and his wife — and, more importantly, the parents of one of Cornelia's most trusted friends. Despite her longings for stability and resentment at being handed off once again, Euphie approached the couple with trust. Fostering one of the Emperor's younger children was seen by many minor nobles as a path to favor, but no one so prominent already would volunteer with impure motives. Indeed, the archduke — Alfonse Enneagram or "Uncle Alfie" as Euphie would come to know him — was already so influential that he had been invited to reside in Pendragon to advise the Emperor himself, leaving his oldest son to rule his dukedom in his place. Furthermore, Cornelia trusted them, and that meant everything to Euphie.
When she first met them, the archduchess, Lady Eleanor gushed,"My goodness! You look exactly like your mother!" Her husband grunted and gave a small nod of agreement. This was the first of many times to come that Euphemia would be told just that, and it was enough to make her immediately like whomever said it. The thought that she carried within her a piece of her mother, whom she could hardly remember but had never forgotten how to miss, was enough to make her feel much less alone and adrift.
The couple's children were all grown, but the youngest, Cornelia's friend Nonette, gleefully took on the role of an older sister whenever she was around.
"I never got to be an older sibling before," she giggled the first time they met. "I was always the one getting pranked and teased and beat up. I would never do any of that stuff to you, though. My brothers were jerks." She rubbed her hands together with faux-anticipation. "I'm just gonna be a really, really bad influence!"
Nonette turned out to be a bizarro-Cornelia of sorts: strong, doting, and protective to a fault — but, unlike Cornelia, she was also loud, crass, and goofy, much to the chagrin of her mother, who often jokingly referred to Nonette as "her youngest son." ("Just ask the boys from the Academy, Mother," Nonette had retorted once. "At least fifty of them can tell you I'm all-woman!" Poor Aunt Nora had gone white as a ghost and nearly fainted.) Still, Nonette did well for herself, earning candidateship for the Knights of the Round and, a year later, the position of Knight of Nine. Once she was officially based in Pendragon, she became a frequent visitor, although it seemed to be more for Euphie's benefit than her parents'.
However, as Nonette's presence in her life increased, her real older sister became more and more distant. Soon after Euphie's living situation was arranged, Cornelia returned to boot camp to hone her rusty combat skills. Shortly thereafter, she took a personal knight and disappeared halfway around the world. When she came back months later, she was a killer and wore a stony mask, and from that point forward, she was all comings and goings as she ascended rapidly up the military ladder. They saw each other frequently enough, but she was never again the permanent presence that she had been, and that was indescribably saddening.
It was at the bidding of Aunt Nora that Euphie began to turn into a society girl and so began to learn about society. She attended what felt like endless balls, weddings, benefits, and high teas, standing about in heels until her feet blistered, making vapid conversation until her brain was numb. Some of the events were fun. Others ranged from dull to torturous, but she put up with it because it made Aunt Nora — the woman who had stepped into the ever-vacating spot of 'mother' simply out of the kindness of her heart — so incredibly happy.
("It's so wonderful to finally have someone to go to these things with," she once chirped through the curtain as Euphie stood in a fitting for yet another frilly dress. "My husband is hopeless, my sons are scattered to the four winds, my daughter goes out of her way to be as embarrassing as is humanly possible — do you know she once spit in Lord Harris' drink? Yes, apparently he had called her a shrew. I cannot imagine what ever gave him that impression!")
"Society" seemed a place that was always changing, yet always staying the same. Fashions changed from one day to the next, reputations were in a perpetual state of overhaul, today's allies were tomorrow's enemies and vice-versa, yet there never seemed any real reason behind any of it. It was as if the entire scene was sustained by its own superficial flux, a game in which doing away with the arbitrary standards would cause the lives of all the players to fall apart completely.
"Be an observer, Euphie," Schneizel said when she complained to him about being asked the same set of questions no fewer than fourteen times in the same night. "You can learn a lot more about people from these events than you can from any book."
She followed his advice, but found most of what she learned to be too unsavory. She didn't want to think that these people were a good representation of "people" in general. She preferred the books.
It was around this time that she discovered the forbidden books, and once or twice a week, she would ask Juan, the latest driver who took her to and from school, to stop by the University in the afternoon on the pretense that she wished to see her brother. Instead, she would run to the library and deposit the previous week's books into the dropbox before running inside, picking a section on intuition alone, and grabbing anything from it that looked interesting. It was a hit-or-miss system, and it yielded a great variety: unreadably dense philosophy where half the words seemed to be untranslated Greek, novels about men who fell in love with other men, dumbed-down translations of religious texts, analyses of dead languages, even erotic poetry that made her blush and giggle at the same time, looking around to make sure no one had seen what she was reading before guiltily continuing. When she found something she liked, she knew what section to return to the next time.
While she loved school, she relished these reminders that the ideas she was taught there, which often seemed dull and bland and bleak and which did not take kindly to criticism, were not the only ideas in the world. Of course, this sometimes led to trouble with her teachers and peers. After a teacher caught her with a tiny copy of The New Testament nestled inside her history text during class, leading to a long lecture on "decadent values," the other students began to refer to her teasingly as "Saint Euphemia." Then, when she tried to inform them about the real Saint Euphemia, the martyr who was killed by a bear in a Chalcedonian arena, they simply amended their taunt to include "Watch out for bears!"
After she unearthed Jataka Tales and read about Prince Sattva, she made the mistake of relating the story to her sister Carine. Carine was Euphie's best friend by default. She was the closest in age to Euphie of all of her sisters — the same age that Nunnally would have been — and bound by a threadbare sense of shared blood to be somewhat civil where the girls at school were not. Still, Carine was hostile, and she slapped away every olive branch that Euphie tried to extend her. On that particular day, they were sitting in front of a chess board while Carine played against herself, since she had long forbidden Euphie from partaking in what was supposed to be their games.
"Just watch me play and try to learn," she would order when Euphie arrived at her home. "I'm tired of correcting your mistakes."
Euphie could not say why, of all the people in the world, she thought her bullyish younger sister a good person with whom to share a foreign religious story involving self-sacrifice (of course, she didn't frame it like that, just as "this interesting story I read"). Perhaps she thought that sharing something personal and meaningful would help them build a closer relationship. Instead, Carine snorted and said, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard! He threw himself to a tiger? I thought the only people who did that were drunk morons at the zoo. What a dumb ass!"
"That's not the point!" Euphie huffed. "It was a sacrifice because the tiger and her babies were going to die!"
Carine shrugged, reaching out her hand to move another piece. "Still pretty retarded."
After that, Euphie began making a greater effort to do well in school so she could study at the University someday. It was always a struggle because paying attention to the subjects she did not particularly care for was hard. Resisting the ever-present temptation to pull out a Shakespeare text or her beat-up copy of Idylls of the King under the table during algebra, she scribbled down pages of jumbled letters and numbers that made no sense at all to her. Often, her focus gave way to doodling, and she found half an hour gone by with only two lines of notes on the page amid a mess of sloppily-drawn flowers. When she tried to sneak a glance at her surrounding classmates' notebooks in order to copy down some of what she had missed, they would inevitably throw a shielding arm around the page and cast her a dirty look.
Before she went to bed at night, she listened to tapes and repeated diplomatic phrases in Chinese in the hopes that one day she would be able to set it aside and maybe learn Pali or Latin or Ancient Greek. She had lots of brothers and sisters, older and far more talented, who could become diplomats. Who wanted to become diplomats in the hopes that maybe one day it would win them the throne. She didn't care about the throne. Maybe she could sneak away and become an anthropologist or a sociologist or a psychiatrist or something.
She knew she wanted to make the world better. In that respect, diplomacy, at least as it was being taught, only provided false hope. How could one expect to promote understanding between nations when one only learned another nation's language with an agenda? With limited knowledge of and no respect for culture? Diplomacy was just another version of high society, living off of its own conflict, only diplomacy played with people's lives and livelihoods instead of just silly things like fashion and gossip. But, at the same time, the world was huge, and you needed influence to make any difference at all.
It was some time after the incident with Carine — Euphie was maybe fourteen, Schneizel had already graduated with his law degree and was poised to be named Prime Minister, leaving her no more excuse to visit the library — that she brought up Prince Sattva to Cornelia. She knew going in that there was a chance it would end in disaster; it was no longer in question that she and her older sister held very different views of the world — that Cornelia believed her too young and naive to even really have a view of the world — but, still, it made sense that someone who knew all about war firsthand would have meaningful views on the value of sacrifice.
As with Carine, she framed the story delicately, omitting all mentions of religion and foreignness, even changing the Prince's name to "John". Cornelia's response was far more measured than Carine's had been, and perhaps that was why it hurt so much worse.
"The allegory is poorly constructed," Cornelia replied. "It was not a pragmatic sacrifice. The tigers were starving. It's not as if one man's body is going to keep them from starving for very long if there is no other food around. If he wanted to help them, he would have put them all out of their misery."
The thing that stung the most was that Cornelia was most likely right. Maybe sometimes there was just nothing that could be done. Maybe some sacrifices were in vain — and not just in vain, but themselves vanity. Vanity in the belief that one could throw one's own suffering at a problem and it would go away. What was the point of exercising virtue, of being saintly, if it didn't accomplish anything in the end?
For the rest of the day, Euphie felt horribly depressed. Maybe she really was just naive. Maybe she really didn't understand anything about the world. Once again, she had fallen for fairy stories that failed to reflect the way the things really worked.
However, as she drifted into sleep that night, she came to a new understanding: maybe the point of Prince Sattva was not that he saved the tigers, not that he gave them Happily Ever After. Maybe the point was that he knew he could promise nothing, but he still took the chance. He gave up everything just so they could have that tiny sliver of a fleeting chance — a chance to be a happy tiger family, to love one another, to experience all the wonders of life. Even if that was all he could do, maybe it was still worth doing.
VI.
Sabbam Ādittam
(All Is Burning)
When she was sixteen, another brother died, and it began to feel as if the losses would never end. After the public funeral, Euphie pushed her way through the herds of reporters to where her driver waited, climbed into the car's back seat, rolled up the partition, and burst into tears. She did not cry because he was dead — those tears had already been used up long before — but because of the things her father had said.
She wished she did not cry when she was angry. She wished that she could wear her sister's mask. Children of Britannia were not supposed to cry. Yet the anger and the sadness fought hard inside her chest, one pulling in, the other pushing out, culminating in an explosive outpouring of furious sorrow that felt like it would tear her into pieces.
Admittedly, she and Clovis had never been especially close. As a child, she had always felt rather distant from the older boy, who was just another face among the vast horde of older brothers that tended to ignore her in favor of competition with one another. When he visited Aries, he mainly occupied himself by flirting with the serving girls and bickering with Lelouch, with whom, despite the difference in their ages, he seemed to share a rough maturity level.
Still, there had been some affection between them later on. When Euphie learned that Clovis was a painter and commented on the beauty of his works, the young man who had never before seemed to have anything substantial to say was suddenly full of poetry, going off on long, impassioned speeches about the nuances of color and how art was part of what it meant to be human. When he stepped up as Viceroy of Area Eleven, she confided in him the things she had read about the conditions in the Areas and begged him to make it better there. He had given her a strange, tight-lipped smile and said that he would try.
She saw how desperately he struggled to please their father. Like all of her siblings, he had craved the Emperor's approval and lived under the constant pressure to prove himself a worthy heir. However, unlike Cornelia, Schneizel, Carine, Lelouch, and even Nunnally before her injury, he had never quite measured up. Deep down, Euphie knew it was probably a common sense of inadequacy that had lain at the core of whatever bond they had shared.
And what was the response of the man they called a father to the death of a son who had so fully dedicated himself to gaining his approval? At the cost of his own happiness, the cost of his own goodness, the cost of his soul, the cost of his life? Nothing. To him, Clovis was just another face among the horde of sons, another expendable offspring, a weakling culled from the herd in the name of progress. And he would have his whole empire know it.
At first, she did not understand why her father ordered her to Area Eleven. She only resented the fact that she was being forced to leave school, to abandon her hopes of attending University and instead becoming the one thing she never wanted to be, a politician. Why her, when there were so many others who would do it better and willingly? Why, of all the places, that place, which had a history of devouring those she loved?
There was no use in questioning her father nor in fighting him, so she tried listing the positives instead. She would be able to spend more time with Cornelia again, even if it would only be for the time it took her sister to eliminate the terrorist threat (the likely very, very brief time, knowing Cornelia). Maybe it would only be a few months, maybe it would be mostly business, but maybe, just maybe, they would finally get to feel like sisters again.
And then what? Then everything would be left in her own inexperienced hands. She didn't know how to rule. She didn't want to rule. What if she ruined everything? What if she just made everything worse? Yet here was a chance to do something good, and she clung to that hope even through all of the resentment and uncertainty. She would make things better.
It was this positivity that she tried to wear when she videophoned Cornelia later that night.
"Won't it be wonderful to live together again? I feel like we haven't seen each other at all in so long." Euphie smiled at her sister over the connection. "I am so excited! I have always wanted to see other parts of the world!"
It was only for the briefest fraction of a moment, but Euphie was certain then she saw a darkness pass over her sister's face. Then Cornelia smiled back with her mouth but not her eyes and said, "I look forward to seeing you, too, Euphie. But you must understand: Area Eleven is not a safe place right now. You need to be careful when you arrive."
And that fraction of a moment was all it took for her to understand — to understand the real reason she was the one being sent. To understand what a powerful weapon love could be.
It was hard to say what initially drew her to Suzaku Kururugi. In the end, she decided it was his principles. A truly principled person was so hard to find, it seemed. There he was: an apparent mess of contradictions — a military man who despised killing, a son of Japan who fought alongside Britannians. Yet he was authentic, honest. He was not afraid of judgment when falsely accused because he knew he was innocent. He stood alongside Britannia not because he believed they were right, but because he believed they could become better. It was the same thing that Euphie had always wanted to believe, and so it was why she was drawn to him.
The day of his release was the second day following her arrival, and she had been forbidden from leaving the Government Bureau "for your own safety, Your Highness." For two days, she sat in front of the television, biting her nails through periodic updates on the Kururugi trial, even though his acquittal had been a foregone conclusion since the appearance of the masked terrorist Zero. While pundits vehemently speculated on missing links in the story ("If you ask me, Kururugi and Zero are in cahoots! It's obvious folks! We must not allow these theatrics to distract us from the logic…" a man with a fat sweaty face and a bad toupee shouted from the lower right hand square of a four-way talk show debate), Euphie chewed her lip and became only more convinced of his innocence.
Surely enough, he was released, and so she decided it was time she was released as well. Crouched on the floor of her spacious new bedroom, she fashioned a long rope from the bedsheets the way Nonette had taught her ("When you get a boyfriend, you'll thank me," her surrogate sister had said sagely). She knew the building's exit went directly under her window, so then it was simply a matter of waiting. (How strange, she thought, that he had been in the same building with her the entire time. Even stranger that he had been the true prisoner, yet he was the one who would be walking out the front door.) The rope had left a good ten feet between her and the ground — just low enough to not be too dangerous — so when she practically landed on top of him, she considered it to be a flawless execution of a half-baked plan. She was a Rapunzel with a wanderlust that no tower could contain, and this strange boy, who was a such a beautiful mess of contradictions, would be her unwitting prince for the day.
She sent him to school because she had the authority to do so, even if she did not have the same authority over her own life. He had not attended since he was fourteen, and catching up proved a challenge that she was committed to helping him meet. So it became their ritual to meet up for weekly study sessions where he would discuss with her whatever he was reading in school at the time and she would return the favor by heaping her favorite works on him. She had even persuaded him to begin teaching her a few phrases of Japanese each time they met.
The time it happened they had been sitting together on the floor in her room in front of a roaring fire, a pencil and a copy of Romeo and Juliet laid out in the space between them. It was raining outside, and Euphie had becoming soaked to the skin after going down the front walk to escort him inside, only to be sidetracked by the Sisyphean task of rescuing marooned earthworms from the pavement.
"What are you doing?" Suzaku had asked, trying to keep his umbrella over her head as she made another detour into the shrubbery.
"I'm saving the worms," she had replied. "Earthworms enrich the soil so plants can grow. They come out here so they won't drown in the ground, and it just breaks my heart to see them getting stepped on! I know it's silly — I've always wanted to save them all, ever since I was little. It's a bad habit."
"I think it's a really good habit," he had said, reaching down and plucking a small pink worm from the pavement and examining it as it writhed blindly in his palm.
"Aren't they wonderful?" she asked. "Would you kiss it?"
He gaped at her. "What?"
"Kiss it. Like this." She landed a soft peck on the worm. "Thank you, Mr. Earthworm, for everything you do for us."
"You are very strange, you know," he had murmured.
She had blushed then, worried that she had put him off just like she had done with all of her classmates in school, but then he had smiled and said, "I think it's awesome." She had beamed back at him and for the rest of the way up the walk, they rescued every earthworm in their path.
Because each one mattered, even if they could never save them all.
After they made their way to her room, trying not to attract too much attention (there were already some low-key rumours among the officials about the regular presence of her "friend", which didn't bother Euphie too much because she was a Princess and her business was her's and no one else's — except maybe Cornelia's, so they did try to keep a low profile), Euphie slipped into the bathroom, where she threw the wet dress into the corner and changed into her flannel pajamas.
Two hours later, they had made it all the way through Romeo and Juliet, with him reading aloud from acts two and four, and her reading one, three, and five, crying sappily through the whole ending and Mercutio's death, just like she always did.
"Everyone thinks it's this amazing romantic work," she said, lying on her stomach, twisting a strand of hair around her finger, "but supposedly Shakespeare wrote it as a commentary on how dumb young lovers are."
"I dunno, I thought it was kind of beautiful," he said. "Do you think they were dumb?"
"Maybe, but that's not the point! It is romantic because it's love. They died for each other. I mean, if that's not love, what is! Right?"
"Yeah," he agreed. "And they didn't die because of love anyway. They died because of hate. Because the people around them hated each other. That's the dumb part!"
"Exactly!" she said, and then she grabbed his shoulders and planted a big wet kiss right on his mouth.
He pulled away from her. "Euphie…"
"Suzaku," she whispered. "I think I might be in dumb young love with you."
He smiled and kissed her back, a feather-light, gentle kiss that only lasted a few seconds before he broke away nervously. Holding his shoulders, she looked into his eyes — those melancholy, deep green eyes — and said, "It's okay. Everybody is afraid to touch me. Everybody thinks I might break. I am not going to break." She pulled him onto the floor, kissing him, relishing the softness of his lips against hers.
("Bhikkhus, all is burning," said the Buddha to the thousand monks at Gayasisa Hill.)
"Euphemia," Zero addressed her, "you were willing to sacrifice yourself for the commoners. You haven't changed."
And she wondered, could it be?
And when she knew it was, when she saw once more that face she had believed lost to eternity, she felt the pull of all the cycles of being, and she felt the heat of their fire.
There was the cycle of rebirth, which she knew so well, that had brought him back in this new form.
There was the cycle of hatred that had brought her to him, to the understanding that it was a brother she had loved, who had killed another brother she had loved.
There were the two voices inside her, the two pulls of the heart: the one incipient and growing like a weed, crying hatred, crying for revenge, crying blood for blood to fix everything; the other as old and strong as the oak at Aries, as old as she herself from the days when she herself was mere happiness, reaching out with love, with warm arms, with kisses, with cool water to quench the fire, to put an end to the human evils that had brought them both to where they stood in that moment.
("When one lets go, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, one is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that one is liberated. One understands: Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.")
So it was joy she chose, and not despair. Lelouch was here. Lelouch was alive, and in spite of all he had done — to her and to others, helpful or harmful — she decided that she would do all she could to see that he found the joy and the respite that he, like everybody, craved.
And then, like always, everything fell all apart again. Suzaku left her because he had lost her to Zero, which meant that everyone who doubted them was right. That wonderful moment, in which love had been her strength instead of her weakness (a weapon), faded like it always did, and she wondered yet again if she was simply weak, a fool.
If she had only gone to him sooner, instead of lingering behind, hoping to catch the light while she stood in the shadow of the past. If only she had focused on present love instead of trying to win back a bygone love that had most likely gone sour. If only she had not stood before her own brother's killer like a desperate, stupid puppydog so starved for affection that it willfully forgot a litany of beatings and abuses in the hopes of a moment of companionship.
"The Numbers must not be trusted," Cornelia had said when Euphie made Suzaku her Knight. "We conquered them. They have no reason to have anything but hatred for us. The only reason they would ever fight for us would be to advance their own agenda. The only people we can trust are our own."
But Euphie had replied that their own had never given her much reason to trust them.
Cornelia's eyes had narrowed at that, maybe because of the insolence, maybe because she knew it was true. "Don't be a fool, Euphie. He doesn't love you. You are nothing more than a key to his ambitions. You have status, and status is a foothold to those who lack it. He will use you, and he will throw you away."
"You're wrong!" she had cried. "He isn't like that!"
"I hope you will rethink this," her sister had replied. "Don't give me a chance to be proven right."
Now Euphie had given her sister that chance, and it was none of Suzaku's fault, but all of her own.
And then, like always, things cycled back around.
"I need your goodness," said the quiet girl from the hotel, and Euphie remembered that each one mattered, that every sacrifice was worth making if only for the chance.
"I command you to love me!" she told Suzaku, not feeling the slightest bit silly when she said it because she meant it. If love could be a weapon, wielded by power, then it could just as well be her instrument.
He obeyed, and with that she learned the true extent of the pain he carried and vowed ever harder to do what she could to end the cycle of hatred and guilt with love as her instrument. With love as her weakness and weakness as her strength, because strength upon strength was the world that Britannia had made, and so it was only weakness, the vulnerable soul and flesh and the collective agreement to risk it, that could absorb all of that horrible strength.
So when Suzaku returned to her at last, she gave herself over to him fully, as did he to her. And it was as they held each other, skin against skin, sweat against sweat, she knew that this was all she had ever wanted: to pull another person in close with no restraint. To hold and be held in an eternal moment. This was happiness. This was strength. This was being loved.
"So Euphie, do you still love him?" asked Nunnally, and with no thought at all, Euphie knew the answer was unequivocally yes. She would never hate Lelouch; she would always love him as she always had, and she would never doubt it again.
She was in awe of Nunnally in that moment — her beloved little sister and best friend, who had been taken before her eyes, who sat before her still bearing the scars of hatred on her body, yet, unlike the rest of them, harbored none of its poison in her veins.
Nunnally needed her brother back. What he could give her — had always given her — in love and care and hope was more than he could ever give all of Japan in blood and violence. Euphie vowed to herself that she would bring him home to Nunnally, even if it cost her everything.
So she gave it all up — the claim to a throne she never wanted, the power she never did know how to wield, the privilege of status that Cornelia said made her nothing more than a tool — and dreamed instead of a life of simplicity. So would be her last act in her present life: to create an oasis of simplicity for those who craved it. It would be a place where Lelouch would not have to fight, and Nunnally could live out the rest of her life with him in peace and happiness. It would be a place where Euphie would begin her next life anew, not as a princess with all of the towers and politics and sacrifices that came with that, but just as the girl she always wanted to be, with Suzaku not as her Knight or her prince, but as a lover and a friend in a place where there were no political machinations to call that into question.
This new life, she decided, would be her happiest of all.
("Bhikkhus, all is burning.")
Something was under her skin.
("And what is the all that is burning?")
His heart was a well, and the water was poisoned. She fell in through his eyes, and now it was in her, too.
("The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning…")
It was in her nose, in her mouth, in her stomach, in her veins. It drowned her lungs, the air she breathed was fire, but she still believed she could scratch it out if she just dug deep enough.
("...also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.")
A riddle:
("Burning with what?")
What in us grows stronger as we grow weaker?
("Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.")
The answer:
("I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.")
Hunger.
(That is what the Blessed One said.)
She clawed at the darkness with everything she had. It oozed corruption, and its wounds consumed her whole.
V.
Upekkha
(Detachment)
No one tells her she is dying, but she knows. She wakes to Suzaku at her side and the feeling of her body giving up. She feels no pain; there is a lightness in her head, but she feels so weak, so tired, so worn that she knows. And she wonders how this can be happening to her now. Why now, when her new life was just going to begin? Why now, when she was finally about to make a difference, to become someone, to do something?
"Why did you give that order?" Suzaku asks through tears, and she doesn't understand what he means, but there is something else pressing. The poison is still inside her, and it promises to keep her alive just a little longer if she only gives it him. It will let her live, it whispers, until its work is done. All she has to do is let it work in her, and she will live.
No.
She wants to live. She wants it more than anything. She hasn't even begun yet. She has only just begun to see the world. She wants to see the rest of it. She wants to see the black sand beaches and volcanic geysers. She has only just begun to learn of love; she does not want to let it go so soon. She wants to hold Suzaku close to her again and never let go. She wants to see Nunnally again, to bring her home and press her hand against the trunk of the oak tree to show her that their childhood is still alive. She wants to tell Cornelia that Lelouch and Nunnally are here and see her smile at their reunion. She wants to cool her feet in every ocean, to see snow for the first time, to hold another earthworm in the palm of her hand and release it so it might make the flowers grow. There are a hundred billion stars in the sky, and she wants to learn the names of every single one.
No.
Even if she lives, this is not a life that she can ever have. The thing under her skin writhes and growls with a hunger that is beyond rationale and cannot be controlled, and when she looks into Suzaku's eyes, she does not see love but a dirty salvation, a chance to momentarily alleviate the foreign aching within her.
No.
She looks away. She thinks of Prince Sattva. She wishes he would appear before her now, a man so liberated from the trappings of life that he would joyfully throw himself before her and give her a chance to live as she once was, free from craving and free from poison. She wonders what must become of the tigress when Prince Sattva never arrives, for the sad reality is that it is not the norm for starving tigresses to cross paths with saints, and so the vast majority will, in the end, be driven to consume what they love.
No.
Compassion lives inside all things, even the starving tigress.
All her life, she has secretly hoped for a prince to save her, but now she understands that she must save herself. So when no prince appears in the mountains above her, his morning stroll suddenly transformed into a noble mission of self-immolation, she climbs the precipice herself.
Death is nothing to fear, she thinks. Her mother died. Her brother died. She will die, no matter what, as will everyone she loves and everybody else. Everything is brief, everything hurtles toward oblivion, nothing lasts forever. So she embraces her death, she chooses her death. She will not be helpless any longer.
When she jumps, she watches as Suzaku's eyes fall away and sees nothing in them but love.
He promises that everything went incredibly, that she has made her difference, and she chooses to believe him.
She promises that everything will be okay, and hopes that he chooses to believe her.
She feels his hands warm on hers, feels his tears falling on her fingers, and she hopes that he will live long, stay in school, and come to love another.
She hopes that Japan will flourish and its people will be free.
She hopes that Matiu will get to live with his daughter again someday, if he hasn't already.
She hopes that Lelouch will go home to Nunnally.
She hopes that Cornelia will not have to kill anymore or wear a mask.
She doesn't hate her father.
As the ground comes up to meet her, she lets go of all of her hatred and anger and sorrow until all that remains then between her and the darkness is hope. And in that final moment before there is nothing at all, she is happy. She is so, so happy.