He is getting ready to get high as fuck.
When everything is going all wrong and the world is moving right along, the needle of the gun is steadily poised over a vein in his arm, and he is so, so ready.
Apparently, all it takes is a single setback to break him and tear him down and rip him right apart. She never thought she would ever have to see him look so desperate. Lelouch—or could it have been Zero, or could it have been both—isn't supposed to be someone who gives up on the world first. He can't.
It probably doesn't even matter anymore. The world is on the edge of giving it all up, blatant terrorism isn't really working out, and everything is just so oh, what the fuck now anyway. He just wants to get so fucked up that he doesn't even have to think about anything anymore.
And now, and now he is so close now too—less than inches away from anticipating the roll of dopamine and the corners of a beautiful lie that doesn't involve murdering king fathers and mass-murdering princess cousins and painfully blissfully blind sisters. He is less than centimeters away from Kallen when it vaguely occurs to him that Refrain is so ironically and inappropriately named.
In that almost instant when his empty lung breaths almost touch the chapped curve of her mouth and the skies are smoked somewhere between tangerine and blue, he is touched with a stroke of euphoria.
He can live like this.
But the trick with Refrain and refrain and refraining is in almost.
Lelouch never actually apologizes and Kallen never really does either. Sympathy doesn't suit an arrogant leader, and Kallen has always been more of a bigger picture and immediate results kind of person anyway. This will just another one of their almost nothings.
So this passes without incidence, like a secondhand secret, like a back alley affair, on the brink of almost but never moving past either way. He continues to mastermind, and Kallen delivers just as dutifully.
They bond over the bittersweet aftertaste of the tangerine skies they've created together—over the closure, the confessions, the angst, the flashy designer drugs they never ever take, the roll they never ever feel, the things that just aren't meant to be, and the infinite side of almost, because almost is the only thing that ever lasts past infinity.
Kallen is entirely willing the first time she almost tries Refrain.
That is a blatant lie.
She is screaming and kicking and hysterical and adamant and vehement and oh my god she already knows firsthand how hard this can hurt her, how much this drug can ruin her, and there is no one to save her today. Her lips are already chapped with blood from biting down too hard for too long.
Even when Suzaku drops the vial and even after he gives it up, she is still panicking more than she'll ever admit to. Refrain is the last thing she could have ever wanted.
Her mouth tastes like salt and citrus and metal. This, she thinks when she sucks on the blood wet on her lower lip, must probably be what desperation tastes like.
Dehydration is supposed to be all that it takes to kill a person.
It is supposed to be all, but Refrain has killed so many more too. Emotions can fuck a person over pretty badly.
She had watched the boy who had scaled the imaginary axis—who had climbed and lied and climbed and so very calmly removed all the people who had been in his way, even if they had been family. Especially if they had been family.
She had admired it when he had read lines of script in a programming language she'd only partially understood, coordinated attacks with mathematical precision, and differentiated multivariable instantaneous rates of change in Greek alphabet letters. She had liked to think that she could trust him. She'd really wanted to.
And she had collected his littered promises in her Guren's fist too: watched them curl and explode high in the sky like liquid orange origami. Things are more beautiful, more dramatic, more apparently meaningful, when transient. Harder to touch, harder to reach, harder to stop.
It is the opposite of desperation.
This is probably a different sort of refraining. Probably not, but the skies have lost their tangerine luster now and it is blue, so blue, when they meet again.
The sky is swept in brightest shade of crisp blue when he declares himself Emperor of Britannia, when he turns his back on the Black Knights and the whole world, and when they are almost strangers again. Of course they are almost strangers again now. They are still, always, stuck—on the brink of almost but never moving past either way.
They are back at where they started from now, on that infinite side of almost again. When did we start to move so far apart?
Or maybe it is more appropriate to ask when did we start to move so close? They are fixed somewhere between never happening and always lasting. When she kisses him for the first and last time, she is so close and yet still so very far from understanding.
She kisses him on the mouth, and her tongue is tangerine against his—moist with the lemon edge of goodbye and sharp with the acidity of almost. She imagines him to taste like December.
He tastes like salt and citrus and metal.