the emperor.
He had lied.
V.V. - his beloved brother - had lied.
With a few words, everything that had existed between them had been irrevocably altered.
Charles clenched his fists, feeling the bite of rings against skin. Even though the position of emperor required a great deal of pomp and circumstance in the matter of appearance, Charles was not a man that took to glittering baubles and heavy jewels. Rings were different -- each he wore had its own special meaning. The ring that signified his union with Marianne; the seal of House Britannia, back when it had been just that; a simple, solid gold band with a single phrase inscribed on the surface.
Latet Veritas, it said. Lies, truth. Lies buried.
When asked about it, Charles would simply smile and say, "It's a way of life."
Few people knew the ring had a twin. To keep them close when they were apart, V.V. had said. A second gold band his brother wore with the inscription, Veritas Lacet. Truth, lies. Lies at rest.
Meaning upon meaning, with a truth that could only be ascertained by unflinching devotion. Not many people knew that Latin was Charles' favourite language; the language of the churches and hymnals, of structure and belief. At their core, the inscriptions meant life (at rest) and death (buried). One force opposing another -- together they bring balance, but if they ceased to work in tandem, only decay would follow.
He splayed his hands out in front of him, studying the pulsing of his veins, the gleam of gold and silver against the heavy sun.
Decay had finally caught up to Charles. It had masked itself in his brother's face, the brother he had left behind. They were no longer in tandem, but his blindness had cost him his wife. He couldn't remain a fool any longer; Marianne's children, the children closest to his heart, would follow if he did not send them away. He would not suffer V.V. to cut them down as he had done to Marianne -- better himself to be the one to declare them dead. He would bury them with the last lies he would ever tell.
the empress.
Marianne Colleville had born the only daughter of a penniless, drunken merchant and the streetwalker he had never been able to stop thinking about. She had sought to rewrite her history from a young age, rising above the limitations of genuine poverty and mistreatment at the hands of her societal betters. The top of her class, she sat with an impeccably straight back - no one knew that she had to sew her shoes back together every night, or that she mopped floors after all the students had gone home in order to pay her tuition. Eventually, she had taken a new name -- Marianne Lamperouge, severing all of her ties to the family that had given her nothing except an intense desire to break the cycle, to become something else.
Marianne Lamperouge was a goddess of battle, they whispered. Marianne the Flash, a Knight of Honour who had risen from the ashes of a life no better than the dirt she walked on. She had turned the head of Charles zi Britannia, who whisked her away from the military corps and into a live of true luxury, beautiful dresses and servants attending to her every whim.
It was a paradise. Layered petticoats made of silk, the finest food set out every night. When her shoes broke, she simply tossed them away.
It didn't compare to the feeling of a life growing within her. As Marianne grew soft and round with pregnancy, she took to the swell of her stomach with a fascination she had never felt before. Love, it must have been -- and whatever she felt for Charles, who had eradicated her past, was nothing compared to what she felt for her unborn child, who gave her a future. It prompted her to take part in all the cliches of expectant and, indeed, new mothers. She whispered to him of a wonderful life, cosseted in silk and never knowing a day's hunger; she counted his fingers and toes, marvelling at the soft face and falling anew the first time he smiled at her.
"Lelouch," she crooned, holding the baby close to her chest. Each soft breath he gave was like another chord in her heart, bringing her closer to one final burst. "I'm going to reshape the world for you, you'll see."
the immortal witch.
"C.C.," Marianne had said. "Come with me."
It would be years before C.C. could stand up and say, "No."
the liar.
Since the beginning of time, it was the woman who led the man astray. It had been Eve who had demanded that Adam bite the apple and had them cast out of the Garden of Eden. She was real serpent coiled around his leg, whispering pretty lies from dirty lips and smiling all the while. Women were the chains that held their men down, V.V. knew. Nothing good would come of them.
Despite this, he had allowed Marianne and the spectre that hung from her arm into their inner circle, his and Charles'. They were blind from the very beginning, unable to see what he and Charles were to one another; a single soul split into two bodies and forced to watch the world's cruelty not once but twice. Twice, the soul watched its mother die. Twice, the soul was used as a bargaining chip, one day away from having its own number called in the name of opportunity and familial law. Twice, the soul begged to wake up in a different world and was disappointed.
Somewhere along the line, Charles became weak. V.V. cast off his name in exchange for the title of Geass, a constant jab to the spectre as she hovered at the edge of his life. Charles kept his own name - the name that had passed through his mother's lips with tenderness, once - and the rules it adhered to. He couldn't see that they needed to become something new, that the soul was blinking out every day it remained divided. The soul would starve on a steady diet of air if it continued to live that wretched half life. Charles did not care; for him, the stars had aligned when the world knelt for him. He had his titles, his ten foot tall palace walls, his concubines trembling just for him to touch them. He had the ardour of the only woman who had truly caught his eye: Marianne the Flash. Her touch, her eyes, the heave of her bosom, what lay under her skirts; she offered it all for him.
She would lead him astray. Charles and V.V. would never be rejoined -- instead, the soul would die of heartbreak when she left. He saw the way her gaze traveled, the way she giggled with the spectre in the corner when she thought no one was watching. Women... women were fickle, flightly, useless. Women took everything there was and only left when they had bled their men dry.
V.V. was the older brother, the initial spark of the soul. He was wisdom where Charles was folly, and he saw what really was. He would fix his little brother's mistakes - no matter what.
the white prince.
People were, Schneizel had learned, utterly stupid.
What they wanted was to be lead by the hand into their own happiness, like a child who would fight every inch of the way. They wanted a world that welcomed them with open arms, but they did not want to work for it, and they were unremittingly afraid of change.
It was unfortunate, really. It meant that the world rested on the backs of those who seized power. Those who were too meek to take control for themselves yet ranted without end about the state of decay and rot the world had sunk into became hypocrities. Those who did fight without any hope of winning were deluded with their own nobility, believing themselves martyrs of a cause that would be handed off like a baton to the next equally deluded soldier for justice. In the end, they all wound up in the same place. Drowned in the mud; bloodstains to be scraped off the side of a building.
They'd never stop fighting, either. They'd always believe in the cause, believe that it was worth dying for.
Schneizel had no delusions about his own omnipotence. He was -- at the end of everything -- a single man. The difference laid in the willingness to see what was really in front of him. Some people turned a blind eye to cruelty, lived a life free of sin and hoped they'd die as peacefully as possible - never hurting a single person, never accomplishing a single thing. Some people turned a blind eye to hopelessness, fighting with all their power for a better tomorrow and not living to see it. In the end, they were all powerless and nothing ever changed.
"Uh, sir?" Kanon's face sunk into view, his brow knit with concern.
"Yes, of course." He studied the board in front of him with renewed concentration. If the right conditions were met, nothing was beyond his reach. One single move was all that was needed to change everything, and he would always be the one who had to make it. With the sound of the Black King hitting the board as an appropriate prelude, Schneizel let a slow smile crawl up his lips. "Checkmate."