Rebellion.
Demanding impertinence, the fury of a child who would be king, raving and ranting at his king on the throne -
Exile.
Nunnally at his side.
Lost.
He met her on an inauspicious Tuesday, when she was the graceful host, and he the wounded animal, ragged and regal, glaring daggers into her eyes.
"I am not going to marry you," he said contemptuously, the first time they ever meet.
"I know," she smiled, eyes sparkling. "You're far too thin for me, Lelouch."
He was so taken aback that he had not been able to restrain the tiny smile that rose on his face - recognizing the feeling of exhilaration rising in his chest as the excitement of meeting a worthy foe.
Perhaps, if he was a more primal creature, he would have given in to the easy temptation that Milly Ashford offered him. It would not have been a strange thing. Her body sang to him the songs of womankind, sweet and smooth and soft. Certainly, there were times that he considered her. He was a boy, after all, on the cusp of becoming a man - and she was so much more than a girl, even then.
He made the mistake of brooding once, in her presence, and -
"Lelouch, relax!" The golden-haired girl swatted him with a stack of papers, leaning forward, her uniform pulling tight in all of the right places, enticing without overbearing. Friendly. Encouraging. "That's a presidential order!"
He would deny it, but that moment was for him not a moment of annoyance, but of glowing warmth.
Milly Ashford was earthly and whole, full of friendly promise and tender kindness and honey-blonde hair, and with her presence, offered to him all of the things that he had never had.
He was Lelouch vi Britannia, prince of an Empire, son of an Emperor, brother to a queen-to-be, tall and slender, as beautiful as he was fierce, as respected as he was revered, and more alone respect or reverence could possibly explain.
Gambling, his smile whispered, is the last thing about me that you should be worried about.
What could a mere Ashford offer an exiled prince? What could a mere woman offer to an emperor who never would be? What could a student offer to the great Zero? He never considered her, of course.
He never even glanced her way.
But there was the briefest of moments, when rain pelted the earth like burning bits of Knightmare frames, when he glanced at the monitor and saw the beautiful blonde standing firm against the tempest, her smile as infectious as ever, her eyes worried and reassuring at the same damn time - there was a moment when he wondered, all the same.
Then, of course, he remembered.
He would never have been content, knowing that Milly Ashford deserved better than he.
Shirley Fenette.
It is the one name in the entirety of the world that he can think to himself, occasionally, without being followed by torrents of grief and rage and helplessness so powerful that they make him lose control, for an instant, and flinch.
At first, anyways. That will change.
She is not as beautiful as Milly Ashford, though she is, he knows, far more beautiful than most men could ever hope for in their lives. There is an innocence to her, as well, something he dislikes almost as much as he covets, and though he tries to deny it to himself, it arouses an instinctive protectiveness in him, not unlike that which he feels towards Nunnally.
Lelouch dislikes, on principle, anyone who tries to compete with Nunnally, but somehow, Shirley never does incite his ire. He never does figure out why.
And if one draws tallies by the sheer number of trouble that a girl manages to get herself into - then yes, Shirley takes first prize.
She is the first girl that he ever kisses.
She is the only girl that he would not mind kissing again.
Any fool could have known where it was heading. Any fool could have seen the signs. The conditions for the situation were all met, one at a time; every flag was triggered, every foreshadowing observed. Except, of course, he didn't see it coming. Even the power of the King was not enough to protect her. First there was Mao, and then Jeremiah, and then, suddenly, Rollo -
And suddenly, he was holding a corpse in his arms, wondering, belatedly, how on earth it had come to this.
It would not be wrong to say that Shirley was the first girl he ever loved.
It would not be true, but surely it would not be wrong to say that, at least.
Surely he can say that he loved her first.
Because if he does anything else, he will be forced to admit that she did not matter. That she was a throwaway, a side character, a subplot so miniscule that the main plot did not see fit to include her in its endings. She was insignificant. Irrelevant. It was, frankly, a relief for her to die. It was one less condition to be cleared, one less variable to account for.
And he does not accept that.
Shirley.
His first love. His first death. The first death of the first love is always something you should remember, he decides firmly, and that is that. She will have her claim to immortality through him.
She, too, deserves far better.
But that is all that Zero has to give.
Fire and grit, sex and strength. KĊzuki Kaellen was a whirlwind of emotion, as tumultuous as she was reliable, as powerful as she was beautiful.
It was a fortunate thing, he reflected in some distant corner of his mind, that his drive was as great as it was. It was also fortunate that he had recorded the conversation for the maid in the tower to use in advance - because even with his great mental prowess, it would have been difficult to disguise the low huskiness of arousal in his voice as she threatened death from behind a half-closed shower curtain.
In retrospect, he supposed, if it was to have been any of them, it would have been her. She knew him, more than any; the passion she felt for him, real and imagined, was the sort of fire that dwarfed the gentle love of Shirley or the sly humor of Milly.
She was not quiet. She was not subtle. She was power incarnate, voluptuous and virile, and she threw sparks off of her eyes when she glared. He grew to treasure the operations that involved Kozuki Kallen because of the ecstasy that rose in his chest with every word she said, every twist of her Guren, every sharp jerk of her head and every sway of that fiery hair.
It was the feeling of riding the typhoon.
She was a whirlwind, and he rode the winds gleefully, until he could ride them no longer, and he cast them away with nothing but a fond memory to keep.
Even a typhoon could not captivate the attention of an Emporer.
But then, quite suddenly, her lips were pressed against his, for ever so brief a moment - and the feeling that rose in his chest, he could not describe -
He kissed her back with all of the tenderness he had never known himself capable of.
Her hands linger briefly on his shoulders, but it is a fleeting moment, and her eyes, for once, are not wrathful but sorrowful. "Farewell, Lelouch," Kozuki Kallen said to him, and then, with her head held high, she walked on.
"The Supreme Council will convene in the gymnasium," she called back to him. "I'll take you there."
Lelouch wondered, with a touch of sadness, when it was that the passionate girl with her fiery temper and furious loyalty had so outgrown him. But by then, of course, it is too late to wonder, and any chance with her he might have had was long since lost.
"Farewell, Kallen," he said softly.
He would have liked to think that she heard, but he does not like to lie.
Then, of course, there was Nunnally.
When they were children, he contented himself with her, and her happiness, and his, but such a time had long since passed, and when he had later reflected upon it, the only emotion he could associate with his little sister was rage.
Rage at a dead mother and an unforgiving father. Rage at the kind of world that would condone such an emperor. Rage at himself, at his friends, his world -
But he was a master of emotion, if nothing else, of the sort of brilliant intellect that could, with ease, brutally suppressing the rage, and focusing it towards something that would help the sister he once loved.
Or perhaps that is the lie he tells himself.
Because, if he was honest, he would have to admit that it was not the desire to sculpt a new world for her that drove the face of Zero. It was the desire to tear down the old one, to rip it to shreds, until there would not be a single person who would ever claim there was such a man as Charles vi Britannia. He would have to admit that his crazed hunger for revenge destroyed Nunnally more completely than any emperor ever could.
And so he lied.
And perhaps, more than anything, he derived pleasure from his death because it was the first time in many, many years that he was honest with his sister.
It is, he thinks, a good way to die.
His first sensation when he awakens is the brush of her hair against his face. The second is the smell of oven-baked tomato and salted cheese, and despite everything, it is all he can do to stop from laughing aloud.
"I'm not your friend, Lelouch," she had told him once. "I'm your accomplice. Nothing more."
He had thought that to be a goodbye, but it wasn't, of course. She had never known how to say goodbye.
She is not fiery and furious; vague amusement seems to be the closest that she can manage. She is not gentle and sweet; when he falls down, she is twice as apt to mock him as she is to comfort him. Nor is she what he would call beautiful - her face is too narrow, her nose too sharp, her hair too strange, her body too scarred. But she has always been with him, and she always will be, and that is far more than he or she ever dreamed of.
"Geass isolates a man," she muses. "But that doesn't seem to be quite right, does it, Lelouch?"
Lelouch smiles.
He does not reach back to hold her hand, nor does she slide down her pile of hay to lean against his side, but they are riding off into the sunrise together, and the world is more beautiful to both of them than it has ever been.