A/N: First time writing Lelouch/Kallen in months! I missed it. (:
Warnings: Spoilers for the series's end.
Disclaimer: Yeah, no.
electric feel
The cell is lightless. Lelouch pulls his hat off his head, and discards it on the table, almost as if he's showing respect. She'll know it isn't.
"Kallen?" he calls her name into the darkness, and he imagines he can almost see her eyes snapping open, her legs scooting against her chest, her fingernails biting into the iron bars.
"What?" she says. Her clothes rustle when she sits up. He can see her outline, written against the night like chicken scratch. Her hair's grown longer. It brushes her collarbone, and he drinks it in so deeply he can pretend he's homesick for something he never had. "What do you want, Emperor?"
She's still angry. That's good, he reflects; better that she's angry than defeated, and even if she is she's not showing it. Kallen was always too proud to bare her wounds. He remembers her mother, sitting quiet and still the one day he met her, hands folded in her lap and lip curled between her teeth. She'd had the aura of a hurt animal. That must be where Kallen gets her tenacity: from not wanting to be like the woman she was raised by.
He doesn't know much about her home life. Lelouch knows that her father was rich; perhaps to the point of being an aristocrat, and that she had a Britannian stepmother. Her mother was Japanese. He could hardly tell Kallen had been raised Japanese herself, except for the slight slant to her eyes and her subtle accent. She'd had a brother; she'd loved him very much; and he had died fighting for Japanese independence.
When he thinks about it, there are a million ways he could apologize to her. He could tell her his plans for Zero Requiem. He could let her out of her cell. He could give the key to the rooms all the others are held in.
He doesn't do any of them.
"Nothing," he pulled out a chair and sat down at the interrogation table, staring at her form until his eyes ache. She's three feet away, and at least a foot of that is made out of metal. Her kiss had tasted like that—distance and separation, lightning and gunpowder, copper and blood. He can still feel the pressure of her lips against his. "I thought you'd want a visitor before you die, that's all."
Before I die. In thirteen hours, less than one hundred and twenty minutes after the sky breaks with dawn, he'll be dead. His body will lie bleeding on a self-made altar. The world will rejoice, and so will she. He's oddly at peace with it. It's his own way of repenting, and he's already making his amends.
"I'm so glad you thought of me." He can hear the snarl in her voice, the knot pulling tight in her throat, the sneer tugging the corners of her lips down. "What are you going to do, parade us in front of your empire?" She hits the wall with her fist. "I hope you do. I hope you do, and I hope they all see what a monster you are, that you'll kill people who are just trying to—who were trying to—who were fighting for a cause."
A cause that used to be his. Lelouch smiles behind his laced hands at the way she doesn't let her voice shake when she says monster. He says, all too politely: "But Kallen, these are the same people who conquered your island. Do you think they care for your cause? Do you think someone will stand up and fight for you—fight against me?"
She hunches her shoulders. There will be blood running down her chin from where she's bitten her mouth too hard, and blood on her hands from where her fingernails have cut in too deep. He knows this is the first time she realizes that she'll die.
"No," and all the fierceness he's missed is back, sowed through her like venom. "But one day they will. One day your people will hate you so much they'll stand up and fight you, and you'll hide, and you'll die. I wish I'd be there to see it."
"You'll die a long time before that." He stands, nearly laughing. Did he really expect her not to hate him? No, he did—just not with such vigor.
It's a good thing he's dying. He's losing his touch.
"Goodbye, Kallen," he says, fighting back the sickness that claws its way up his throat. "I'll see you at dawn."
He hears her spit under the pneumatic hiss of the doors.