We deceive ourselves
Theme date: February 26, 2008.
Done for a prompt from a friend: "biznez tiem". Set after Euphemia's death.
Sometime after the axe had dropped and everything (most of it against his will) had fallen into place, C.C. found Lelouch sitting alone in the War Room of the Knights of the Black Order with a bottle of water in one hand and a chess piece in another. He was twirling the piece with his fingers, surrounded by discarded papers, staring at the display in front of him, mulling over diagrams penned by his own hand. It looked like just another one of Lelouch's grand plans in progress at first glance, but the names broke the illusion. Lelouch, C.C. realized, was restructuring all the scenarios he had planned, juxtaposing them against what had really happened, and playing out all the possible permutations over and over again, convincing himself that the sacrifices that had been made and the losses that he had taken were justified and necessary.
C.C. did not announce her presence; she chose to linger in the doorway watching her latest partner at work. Lelouch was a genius and a visionary, but she had been with and learned from many, many others in the past — some of them had been just as remarkable as he, if not greater than him in a few aspects. She knew that half the time, he was manipulating the variables in favor of skirting over the truth and preserving his peace of mind. It would have been the immediately brutal but ultimately humane thing to approach him and point out what he was doing. C.C., however, needed a functional partner, and if lying was the way to keep Lelouch going, then she wasn't willing to change things. She could deal with the consequences when they came.
C.C. watched Lelouch stare at Euphemia's name, cross it out and write the word "NECESSARY" in its place for the umpteenth time before she decided to leave.