The Measure of Greatness
Author: Jusrecht
Characters/Pairing: Lelouch x Milly
Warnings: Future!fic, original character, emperor!Lelouch. And wordiness, possibly.
Summary: It takes more than great triumphs to be a queen. It takes greatness itself.
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Her footsteps were quiet, polished leather shoes on thick carpet, when she discreetly approached her queen. She hovered unobtrusively outside the circle of finely dressed ladies as they exchanged smiles and opinions on theatricals, music, sometimes politics glossed with a milder sheen of gossip to offer a more trifling appearance, all over cups of tea and dainty cakes on fine china.
It never took her long to notice her presence. She would raise her golden head, a slight tilt to the right, and then address her guests with the same cheerfulness that generously graced her bearing at all times. She would extend an invitation for another tea party at another time, or perhaps an informal dinner while their husbands locked themselves in a meeting with His Majesty. They all would laugh at this joke and then she would rise with a smile and excuse herself as gracefully as a queen would. By then, Anne, a perfectly trained lady's maid, would have retreated to the direction of the door and waited in the shadow of a heavy velvet curtain.
"The garden," she would murmur when the empress passed her with a quiet swish of her green dress. And then she would wait, until several paces had separated them before moving to follow her with her small, quiet footsteps.
They would find the emperor on the stone steps at the edge of the pond. Anne would station herself at a reasonable distance, far enough to give them privacy, close enough to observe. It was by now a ritual, happening almost every week as troubles brewed and threatened His Majesty's throne with alarming consistency. He would leave the audience chamber in a state of great agitation, sometimes fury, and no one would dare to approach him but his queen.
He had never smiled – sneered yes, but never smiled. Anne thought of how handsome he would look if he only smiled as she stood in silence, listening to his sharp, biting words and the empress's calm, measured replies. This was the second stage of their ritual.
Lord Rosenblum did have a point.
Like the shape of his pointed chin? I definitely won't argue with that.
He does not appreciate your treating him like a second-class noble.
I can bend him to my will.
A quiet laugh. You can. Your words are powerful enough.
There was a pause. My words are much more powerful than that.
I know. Her voice was too quiet, and he seemed to notice it too. He turned to look at his wife and Anne could see the tension written all over his face as her hand gently touched his cheek. The power of kings.
An expression of pain twisted his face. His eyes were now clenched shut. My words can be too powerful.
As long as the control is in your hand, what does it matter?
He moved away from her touch, his eyes sharp. You don't understand.
She didn't look away, but folded her hands on her lap in a resigned manner. You never let me to.
There was silence then. Anne didn't always understand, but she would feel that she did, or at least had to, when he eventually yielded and rested his forehead on the resigned pile of his queen's hands.
Do you think it's in my hand?
Her fingers moved to the back of his head and combed through his black hair. Of course it is. You know it's for you to decide.
.
The first time she had met her, she was a pretty princess in a white wedding gown. There was a veil covering her face, the colour of snow falling outside the window, and she pushed it up to reveal her bright blue eyes.
"What's your name?" she asked all of a sudden, and it startled the maid so much that she lowered her eyes from her reflection in the vanity mirror.
"Anne, Your Majesty."
The newly-crowned empress smiled. "Anne, Anne," she repeated with a quiet appreciation in her voice. "It's a nice, honest name. I'm Milly, but I guess you can call me 'Your Majesty' if you want."
There was a twinkle in her eyes but Anne didn't quite know what to say, so she settled with a silent, noncommittal nod. This was new to her, serving a lady of such high station, but almost everything was new after the war.
She retreated with her gaze deferentially cast down to the floor once she had finished helping the empress change her clothes. The emperor, still dressed in his full wedding regalia, entered the chamber and the last thing she saw before she closed the door was Her Majesty's beautiful long hair, golden waves cascading to the middle of her back covered in white satin.
The next morning, Anne found her sitting on the edge of their marriage bed alone.
.
She had been an only child. Her parents, nice, respectable citizens who had more kindness than money like so many nondescript others, had been killed in the attack on Pendragon two years ago. She had drifted from one family to another after that, between uncles and aunts who had more children than they could afford themselves, until her cousin who had been working in the palace household managed to secure her a job as one of the new empress's maids.
This country is dying, his father had said once when they had walked home together. The sky had bled crimson above their head and she had looked at him, her ten-year-old mind alarmed by the word 'dying'. Then he had smiled his usual staid smile, his strong hand clasping her smaller fingers, and she had quickly forgotten about the Number being beaten by a group of laughing young nobles two blocks earlier.
His father had been a journalist. He had seen and written things, but he had passed away when an exiled prince seized the throne and destroyed the empire to build a new one.
The empress was not a queen with a majestic appearance and aloof tones. She smiled and it was warm despite the jewelled crown on her head. She sat on the throne not like a ruler, but like a mother. She walked like a lady and yet didn't glide like a pompous swan. She was a young woman who loved to laugh and she spent her quiet afternoons leafing through an old album and sharing with her trusted servant.
"This is me," she pointed to a girl with a wide grin and an open face that looked like her and yet didn't. She had been pretty back then and she was pretty now, but something was decidedly missing.
Anne sat at her side and listened. She began with times, events, festivals, and then moved to names, too many of them to remember, and finally strayed into jumbled memories of details. Shirley's swimsuit. Rivalz's motorbike. Kallen's stepmother. Nunnally's paper cranes. Suzaku's laughs. Lelouch's scowls. There were pictures of moments and frozen times and people she didn't recognise, but they were about honesty and Anne felt like she could understand a little.
"Where are they now?" she asked then when they paused to look at a photograph taken in a room with bright floor-to-ceiling windows and the subjects, wearing cat ears and colourful costumes, posing in front of them.
"Ah," the empress murmured and her eyes gained this faraway look which made her suddenly seem so much older. "They died during the war."
They lapsed into a pensive silence. Her queen, Anne had discovered then, was the only one who had survived out of all seven happily laughing people in the photograph.
She and a black-haired boy with slanted eyes and three purple stripes on his cheeks, tied up on a chair in the middle of his friends' smiling face.
.
"It's an all-out rebellion."
The empress inclined her head slightly, allowing her maid to fasten a string of pearls around her neck, and then glanced at her husband. "I thought you said it was nothing to worry about."
"As it turns out, that isn't the case," the emperor said – snapped, perhaps, but then again he had never wasted his speech or manner with unnecessary friendliness.
"Do you know who leads it?"
He smiled and it was unpleasant to watch. "My magnificent fourth brother."
There were sounds of people running outside in the hall and for a moment they only listened to them, face set in wordless tension. "I guess everything must wear out in the end," she then said when the silence had gone uninterrupted long enough. He looked at her and the look on his face was enough to make Anne's blood curl.
"My downfall will also be your downfall, my queen."
"I'm aware of that," she replied mildly and dismissed her maid with slight wave of her hand and a little smile. Anne retreated with a small curtsy and closed the door behind her, but not before she heard him hurling another retort.
"If they want to challenge my authority, let them try. I don't need this power to win."
.
It quickly went from bad to worse. Anne had never seen the palace plunged into such a hectic mood. The servants whispered while they attended to their daily duties, wondering what would become of them if the crown changed hands yet again. Perhaps nothing would change much. Just a different master. They would remain servants regardless.
For Anne it wasn't that simple. The empress was her queen, this pretty lady who only laughed and patted her in the back when she dropped the paint palette and stained her new summer dress. She had heard things about the Fourth Prince, among others his many conquests, but she just couldn't imagine serving four or five queens and being devoted to them all.
There would always be blood and pain when one gave birth to something new. Many among the aristocrats couldn't accept the emperor's decision to abolish the peerage system. It was like plucking out deep-rooted weeds. Some of the soils would also be removed; something inevitable.
She heard many arguments now, sometimes hushed, sometimes not. The emperor rarely held back – he was all about power, domination, and absolute control – but his queen was a solid rock cliff against his waves of anger. Anne didn't miss the strain in her voice as they argued back and forth between the impending war and his desire to triumph
They disobeyed.
But you didn't discourage the war.
They provoked me first.
You shouldn't let them.
His voice rose. It's easy to say it, isn't it? There's nothing easier but talk.
You just don't know how to live. All you know is how to win.
Victory is the first step to everything.
Yes, it is. Anne could see her, sitting correctly in her high-backed chair, the gold wedding band glittering from her ring finger. But you don't know how to proceed. Because you never want to.
There were times when he left with a slam of the door, and there were times when he just sat glaring at her and let silence fester. Things had never been worse between then, but he always returned to her chamber at night. And when the morning came, he appeared the same invincible man he had been the morning before, only to sink once more as the day declined.
Anne was afraid when she came into the empress's chamber one night to deliver her nightly dose of warm milk and she heard her speaking softly.
"I am with child."
The tray made a loud noise as she set it down on the small, circular table next to the bed. No one noticed her, but she didn't dare to move as the atmosphere thickened, weighing down her stiff shoulders.
"That's wonderful news," the emperor finally said and his voice sounded deader than silence. It couldn't fool anyone, the way his face tightened and his lips thinned, let alone a wife he had married and shared bed with for two years.
The empress's smile had long since turned into a tacit understanding. He didn't need this right now.
.
His Majesty departed to war leaving only a kiss on his wife's brow and a quiet farewell. She accepted them, as graciously as always, and bid him good luck with an unfaltering smile on the curve of her lips.
Her mornings were now spent in the palace garden, in an effort to enjoy the sunlight and turn her mind away from the rebellion raging in the east. Anne would be there to offer her quiet company if required. They would sit down by the pond sometimes for hours, talking about many things but war and yet secretly waiting for news. She supposed it was what everyone felt, they who lived in these times, fortunately or unfortunately, with so many wars that it was hard to separate one from another.
The mornings grew colder as autumn drifted into winter. Her queen frequented the garden less and less, but one morning she abandoned the warmth of a fireside for a glimpse of the grey heavens. The sky was heavy with clouds, a pale winter morning, and her gaze followed the limitless expanse like a bird yearning to fly. She remained silent, one hand on her middle—her anchor to the present—until commotion rose at the north side of the palace.
Anne covered her mouth to stifle a scream when a palace guard staggered in, a gaping wound in his left arm. His eyes found them and he opened his mouth, but a shot pierced the normality of the morning as certain as the bullet which went through his chest. He fell in a bloodied heap on the lush carpet of grass as uniformed soldiers rushed in.
They came for the empress.
.
Her father couldn't live long enough to see the end, but she wanted to be there in his place, be a witness of change. It took her many years to realise that change was a slow transition, not the instant sweep of darkness once a candle burned out.
.
The summer palace wasn't a pleasant place during winter. Big windows with colourful damask curtains. Airy hallways. Well-ventilated rooms. Their small entourage resided in the east wing of the palace, all four of them. The rebels didn't care. Their only concern was how people would react if they dared to treat a pregnant queen badly or imprison her in an underground cell, and hence the summer palace. They were rebels; they knew everyone could be a rebel.
Anne had gone with her. She was bitter, angry of the changes and the small tight line which would sometimes grace her queen's mouth. They lived with only their most basic needs met, so scanty and spartan it was that sometimes she couldn't help but wonder if the rebels were not in fact trying to kill the baby, without having to actually dirty their hands with blood.
The Fourth Prince declared himself the 100th Emperor of Britannia three days after the Imperial City fall. Sometimes they heard news about Emperor Lelouch's army far in the east, but they were always news that would leave the empress sitting by the window the entire night. Living became waiting. She would have done something, Anne knew she would, but six months into pregnancy and she had more than she could afford to risk.
They waited and counted days, marking each night's passing with a story of their life as they sat huddled together in the bed to share warmth. Anne giggled and told her about her parents and the great things her father had had in mind. The empress listened, a hand caressing the small swell of her womb, looking so beautiful in the dim candlelight. Another night, it was her turn and she spoke about her school years. Anne hugged her knees close to her chest as she listened, enraptured by a world defined by free will beyond her understanding.
The empress just laughed and said that the school wasn't that great.
"But they are still the happiest days in my life," she added, her eyes closed in a spell of remembrance. Anne mulled over the words in her mind and couldn't help but think about weddings and how it was supposed to be the happiest day of one's life.
"He never loved you, did he?"
The empress looked at her with solemn, wistful eyes, but didn't reproach her for this insolence. "He is a broken man," she said at last, her fingers twisting the edge of her blanket. Even to her common ears it sounded like an excuse, but Anne kept her silence. They sat there in the growing darkness as the night deepened, looking at snowflakes dancing outside their windows. She remembered then, the first time she had seen her, a beautiful princess with a new golden ring on her prettily gloved finger.
"It is truly an honour to serve you, my lady," she heard herself saying. Who knows, there might not be another chance.
Her queen's smile was warm, as it had always been.
"Thank you."
.
She always smiled.
The guards sneered at her, at the fact that all she had now was an empty title and a fallen glory. But she always smiled in return and said good day to you all, gentlemen. Some would be baffled; the rest simply laughed and mocked her misplaced courtesy. One day, Anne just couldn't accept it anymore and decided to voice her protest – it wasn't a dignified thing to do, she was a queen. Her Majesty smiled and said that it was a proper thing to do; to smile.
Anne still couldn't accept it, until one day a guard came in, red-faced and looking frightened, and told them in a hushed, high-pitched voice that someone would come to kill them that night. Dispatched from the capital.
The empress, she noticed, wasn't surprised. She nodded her thanks, for once not offering a smile, and went into her bedroom.
It was one of the most bizarre days in Anne's life. She slipped into the kitchen and covered food in plastic and warm cloths. Things would get ugly. That night, hours before the clock struck midnight, they wrapped themselves in the warmest clothes they could find and braved the biting wind. There was a forest surrounding the palace, for it was alive and pretty with green during summer. Now it painted a desolate picture, with slush-slicked ground and dead twigs dangling from naked branches.
Anne felt tears on her face when they finally stopped walking for a moment's rest. Her queen was kneeling on a patch of dead grass, hand warm and comforting on her shaking back.
"It's all right," she murmured, her small voice almost lost in the thick silence. "We'll be all right."
.
Their journey was aimless. They roamed the forest as if trying to run away from their own shadow, and they were still counting days; waiting for the baby, waiting for help. Their absence would have been discovered by now and neither of them dared to go to the nearby village to look for news. They would be recognised; everyone knew that the empress was pregnant.
Everything felt surreal to Anne. She was a city girl her entire life; she knew nothing about nature. She was afraid of the idea that the queen would give birth here in this middle of nowhere and there would be no one to help her but this city girl, pathetically inexperienced and terrified to death.
"Maybe it would have been better if we had stayed," she just blurted out one day. She couldn't think of anything else but this cold, on her skin, in her bone, inside her nose, around her eyes, no longer sharp but a dull ache that throbbed along with her heartbeat.
"Maybe," the empress answered. Her eyes were now sunken, her lips cracked and dry, her hair dull and dirty. She was just another woman now and the thought made Anne want to cry.
"I'm sorry," she whispered and kissed her queen's hand, hot tears too quick to become cold and dry on her cheeks.
"I'm sorry too, for dragging you into this," her fallen queen murmured, her smooth, clear voice had long since turned raspy and ugly, and held her tightly in the circle of her thin arm.
Things would get ugly.
.
She was not a queen who rode to war and won her people's heart by winning the battle. She would not be written down in history as an empress who established great things, or even abominable ones. She would not be recognised in books as the root of an epic war or the bringer of a long-waited peace.
She was a woman who slept curled on the moss-stained floor of the forest in an almost hopeless effort to keep her baby warm.
To Anne, it was so much more remarkable than any great deed written in the yellowing, almost forgotten pages.
.
Their saving arrived when the empress came down with a fever and Anne had no choice but to risk a visit to the nearby village. She slipped in at sundown, hood tight around her grimy face, and purchased some fever medicine from the local apothecary. The woman behind the counter, she realised, was looking at her suspiciously. It might be because of her unsavoury appearance, but the piercing stare scared her nonetheless and she quickly paid her purchase and rushed out to safety.
"Excuse me, miss."
Or not. Anne almost screamed when she felt a firm hand clasping her left shoulder. They had gotten this far, had survived this long. Once the empress had given birth, they would be able to search for the emperor's army once more.
"Miss Anne."
She started, and would have really screamed to attract people's attention – no matter how sparse the number was around – and use the chance to get away, when she recognised him as one of many gentlemen of the emperor.
She slumped into his arms and wept. They were saved.
.
She cried when they finally met again, a queen and her beloved king. It was beneath the great light of his majestic ship, under the eyes of too many soldiers. And yet it was silent, only her harsh breathing accentuating the night as he held her.
Neither of them spoke.
.
"Why did I marry you?"
Anne stiffened, and she was certain so did the emperor. She glanced at the queen who was reclining on the long divan, her husband sitting close to her with a hand gingerly rested on her swollen belly. They seemed to have all but forgotten of her presence in the private chamber, quietly preparing Her Majesty's bed for the night. It was only two days after their reunification.
"Why did you?" was his flat reply, tension evident on the curve of his mouth.
She looked at him. The lustre in her eyes, Anne noticed, had dimmed, as if drained by the baby in her womb. "I thought I could help you," she answered, nothing but frankness. "You were so young. So… lost."
"Then it was pity?"
"It wasn't love," she said plaintively in her faraway voice that everyone had grown accustomed to since her return. "Not the kind it should have been for a proper marriage."
There was a hint of contempt in the emperor's face that might have been some crude, distorted manifestation of pain. "You aren't supposed to look for that kind of thing from a king," he said haughtily. The empress's gaze remained heavy on him, as if she hadn't heard his reply.
"Why did you marry me?" she then asked, quieter than before. Time tiptoed past but he didn't answer, not even when she sighed and lifted a graceful hand to cup his face, a smile of empty dolls on her face.
"Forget that I asked," she said softly. "You have a war to win. Don't concern yourself with me."
They stayed that way for a long moment, her fingers on his cheek, tickling the end of his hair. And then his hand moved away from her belly to trace the length of her thin, pale arm.
"Do you think we're a mistake?" he asked – and looked like he didn't want to hear the answer.
But she, ever the queen of queens, gave it to him. "Even emperors make mistakes, Lelouch. They're only–"
He silenced her with a kiss.
.
They had a daughter, a pretty baby girl with soft dark hair of her father's and a perfect little upturned nose of her mother's. She looked like an angel; everyone who came and visited the mother and daughter always said so.
Except the father.
The emperor had visited them but once in the entire week after the birth. He stood there, one reluctant step away from the beautiful antique crib, a gift from a rich, devoted general of his army, and smiled and talked to his wife in a strained voice. And then he was gone and Anne observed with anxious eyes as her queen lost a shade of her smile every day. But an empress stayed true to her words. She carried out her queenly duties and stood next to him, but never questioned him as they steadily climbed back to power.
And then came their defeat in California. Anne had been hearing things the entire day, and then the next as officers with sullen faces trotted past. The empress remained in the nursery that day and Anne saw the look of determination that came into her expression as she listened to her breathless account. Then she wrote down a note on a piece of paper and kindly asked a guard to deliver it to His Majesty.
The emperor didn't come until late that night.
"I'm not afraid," he said once he had entered and seen his wife and their baby in her arms. He lingered at the door before deciding to step in further. "It's just… these last few days have been incredibly busy."
"We haven't discussed a name," the empress said then, her voice holding no accusation.
"Ah." He paused, swallowed, and then gingerly approached mother and daughter. "Why don't you decide. You're good with that kind of thing."
She waited until he was reasonably close enough, and then reached up to touch his elbow "What are you so afraid of?"
His face hardened. "You don't understand."
"I want to," she said quietly, firmly, "if you'll let me."
He stared at her. And then he reached for her hand and held it close to his lips as his body trembled with quiet sobs. Anne didn't think she could ever forget that, or the look on his face when his daughter's tiny fingers wrapped around his thumb.
They named her Nunnally.
.
It was easy to win then, when the people's favour had returned to the imperial couple.
The princess was a marvellous gift – and a tremendous help. Everyone sympathised with her as she blinked from the cradle of her mother's arms, a Crown Princess without a crown to inherit. The Fourth Prince with his philandering habits had never really appealed to the public much, not compared to this imperial family of three, of true lineage and respectable conduct.
It was people that made a king, a king.
Anne found 'change' then, but not when emperor and empress returned to their rightful palace and sat on their rightful throne; not even when they announced total equality among all Britannians and released the Areas from the empire's clutch.
She found it when she, by accident, discovered the imperial couple at the palace garden, the emperor leaning toward his queen, smiling at their daughter in her arms.
.
What they did was building a castle from scratch, until it was strong enough to hold the scattered empire together. It was a helpless infant, born from a country too old and too broken to last, and Her Majesty had been right when she had said that the emperor knew nothing else but how to win.
But they learned – humans had to, if they wished to survive – learning to forgive oneself, learning to live again, to love again. And then to build a family. Families were the foundation of a country, husband and wife and sons and daughters, the place that made most people.
And this, she thought, was worth so much more than winning the war
.
You don't understand.
Because I don't want to. You must remain a mystery to me, Lelouch, or I may get bored with you soon.
Now when he laughed, he sounded like he truly meant it.
End