Spoilers for season one, don't own, stretching my writing muscles after years of disuse, etc.


He has a dream that goes like this, see:

He takes Euphemia out to an island, a favorite spot from his childhood. Driftwood litters the beach. A waterfall runs silver down the rocks and a stream burbles through a forest. She is not a princess and he is not a knight, and in the firelight she combs her long pink hair and meets his eyes shyly. Perhaps she kisses him by the shore and her mouth tastes of salt and he cups her face in his hands and drinks her in. Perhaps he holds her at night, his chest cradling her back, and listens to her breathe. Perhaps he shows her a nest full of speckled bird eggs and she laughs in delight, and perhaps he swims with her, and perhaps they are happy forever.

He has a nightmare that becomes reality. He is a knight and she is a princess and he fails, and she dies not quite in his arms, and he can feel her heartbeat and he can hear her dying breaths rasp in and out of her throat and it as if he is the one losing blood and losing life. Suzaku wants to scream. He wants his dreams back, but more than that he wants her to be alive - he doesn't care if they're together, he doesn't care if he always has to keep a step back from her, if he is just a sword and a shield, if they have an island and all the time in the world. His dreams would be a worthy sacrifice -

- but she is still dying, and there is so much redness, and this is life, and hers is gone. And he is still a knight, and he is still here, and his heartbeat is a din in his chest and hers is silent in hers and this is his punishment for wishful thinking.