While Pendragon was being rebuilt, the capital of Britannia had been temporarily shifted to the city of Angeles, so that Eden Villa, which had been the Imperial Palace before Pendragon was founded, could once more take on that honor. Of course, it hadn't hurt that Eden Villa had belonged for many years to Cornelia's maternal line, making it one of the few places no hostile nobles had been clamoring to reclaim, during those initial, difficult days of transition.
As prestigious as Eden Villa was, though, the best known landmark of Angeles, as well as the source of the city's name, actually lay just outside its official borders, where the largest royal graveyard on the continent could be found. The number of silently watching marble angels, merely from the bloody ascension feuds of Charles zi Britannia's youth, easily matched the population of a small village. The graveyard itself was like a city, and it was sometimes spoken of as such: the City of Angels.
It was in this city, whose living population was dwarfed by the dead, that Zero soon found himself. The air was cold and the sky dark as he and C.C. crept silently along, the chill, glistening dew of the unnaturally manicured grass soaking into his pants, as they hid from the guards in the deeper shadows of the graves. An hour of scraping moss and dirt from his knees had made him despair of more than just keeping Zero's uniform clean. Everything there was cool and motionless and slowly decaying, and now, skulking between painfully final dates and solemnly grieving epithets, Zero didn't know why he'd ever hoped to find anything alive in the City of Angels. It was a graveyard, after all.
Everything looked and smelled and felt like death, desperately covered over with deep marble etchings and unmoving stone. It only got more painfully quiet as they moved toward the center, where Lelouch was buried, and even Zero's own breathing felt out of place surrounded by the silent marble legion of angels, their cold elegance frozen as if in timeless eternity.
Free from any living distractions, for the first time, Zero began to worry about the wider circumstances. What would it look like, if they were discovered here? What would the people who were supposed to idolize Zero think, if he were caught skulking around a graveyard in the dead of night with the Demon Emperor's mysterious green haired courtier? What would Nunnally think? It had been a long time since Zero had possessed enough pride to feel embarrassed about anything, but this, this irrational, pseudo desecration...
A shadow at the entrance to Lelouch's tomb moved, and suddenly his heart was in his throat again, wild fears and hopes rushing through him. Then the dark shape moved into the weak moonlight, and Zero could just make out his face.
"Jeremiah!" he exclaimed, much more loudly than he'd intended. The mask hid his wince.
How am I going to explain this?
"Lord Zero. Mistress C.C.," Jeremiah greeted them respectfully.
In that moment, Zero found a painful understanding of the uncomfortable position C.C. had been in earlier, not wanting to outright lie and yet not wanting to give false hope to someone so clearly devoted.
"What are you doing here?" Zero asked the noble, stalling for time while he tried to get his scrambling mind to think of a way out of this predicament.
"Guarding his tomb, of course. After we had so much trouble keeping the rabble away before the funeral, I wasn't about to leave this task to the regular cemetery guards," Jeremiah told them disdainfully. "It's harmless if Ms. Stadfeldt slips through to leave flowers," he added, nodding toward a bundle of white lilies by the sepulcher's entrance, "but I've already confiscated two crowbars and at least a dozen cans of spray paint these past few weeks! No matter that I've chastised them to take their duties seriously, I notice the guards just carelessly let you two slip through, as well."
"Well, yes. That is, I...we were just..."
Jeremiah nodded sagely. "I understand."
"You do?" Zero asked, surprised and somewhat incredulous.
"Of course. You want to pay your private respects. It's impossible to be honest in public, these days," he said, shaking his head mournfully.
"Oh, right. Of course that's it," he agreed weakly, thankful that the mask covered his guilty expression, as Jeremiah trustingly opened the heavy door and allowed them inside, pulling the door shut behind them to allow them the privacy to 'grieve'.
Forgive me, Jeremiah, for disturbing our doomed master, one last time.
Some part of Zero hated himself for denying Lelouch peace, even in death, but no matter that the silence convinced him more and more thoroughly, with each passing ageless moment, that they were making a horrible mistake, some masochistic part of him refused to turn back. Besides which, he knew C.C. hadn't spent the better part of the past hour and a quarter crawling around on her hands and knees on the cold, wet ground (even dragging Cheese-kun along, against Zero's objections) just to turn around without completing their self-appointed mission. Consequently, they slowly fixed their eyes on the marble coffin in the center of the sepulcher.
A flashlight flicked on to illuminate their dark path, the only light aside from the small sliver coming in underneath the door, and Zero was ridiculously glad that C.C., at least, had come prepared.
I never think ahead, do I, Lelouch? I'm always charging in, relying on others to do the thinking for me. It was an easier that way, when he was filled with so much desperation and had so little trust in himself.
All too soon, Zero was faced with the carefully engraved lid of Lelouch's coffin. Taking a deep breath to fortify himself, he stepped forward onto the slightly raised platform the coffin rested on. Even though all he had to do was slide the lid to the side by shoving against the protruding edge, Zero found the effort almost too much for him, straining painfully just to move it a few millimeters, as every old injury he'd ever sustained protested.
It feels like the "death" of the Knight of Zero is still coming back to haunt me.
It didn't help that C.C. only stood back and smirked silently at him. "I thought you were supposed to be strong," she teased after half a minute had passed and he still hadn't moved it enough to allow a full view inside.
"I am strong!" he objected, almost under his breath, mortified by the slow, grating scrape of marble on marble in what should have been a place of eternal peace, and just as terrified of being discovered by Jeremiah as he was annoyed to have what was one of his few actual skills criticized. "But this lid is solid marble! It must weigh a ton!" Grumbling even more quietly, he muttered a few not so complimentary words about Jeremiah's funeral decisions. In fact, finally given time to more carefully study the coffin, Zero could make out a few suspiciously rounded shapes amidst the extensive decorative engravings around the edges.
Are those oranges?
The lid moved another few millimeters.
"Still having trouble? You've been letting yourself go soft these past few weeks, haven't you?" C.C. taunted.
If I weren't so busy pushing...
Another few millimeters.
"The commentary...is...entirely...unnecessary," he bit out between labored breaths.
A few more minutes of gasping effort, and he finally got it almost fully open on one end. For a long couple of seconds, though, he only stood quietly, letting the silence speak for itself. His own labored breathing was the only sound he could hear, and some small flicker, bright and painfully stupid, hidden so deeply even his best logic hadn't reached it, eventually died. Finally, Zero worked up the courage to look down and see Lelouch's face, caught directly in the beam of C.C.'s flashlight.
He looked...awful. His skin, on the pale side even at the best of times, was now a uniformly ghastly bone white, except for the ugly bruises beneath his eyes, which had expanded outward in an unnatural purple corona so deep it looked almost black. His dark hair was practically pasted to his face, his lips flaking nearly colorless chapped skin, his normally refined bone structure jutting out into the truly skeletal in the harshly directed light.
It hurt, to see him like that.
What did you think he would look like? Zero asked himself angrily. Like he was only sleeping? You killed him. He's been dead for weeks.
The smell, like rot and mildew and week old blood, suddenly made it through the mask far enough to hit him full force, and he took a step back in order to avoid immediately retching on the floor. However, just as the mask had shielded him from the immediate effects of the smell, it now trapped the scent against his nose, forcing a visceral truth on him that he hadn't been ready to face. That, combined with the bare, ugly sight of what he had reduced his once dearest friend to, finally drove home the full, brutal indignity of the sin he had committed.
"C.C., I think...I think I'm going to be sick," he whispered, fingers scrabbling desperately to wrench off the mask as the crawling horror in his body forced his stomach into spasms. That was when the corpse moved.
Actually, lurched would be more accurate. The corpse lurched for him, sitting up and reaching out with surprising quickness, and he screamed—or tried to scream, at any rate. He'd only just gotten the mask off and had still been gagging, so all that came out was a weak choking sound, before those bloodless, stone cold fingers closed over his mouth.
"Don't scream," the corpse said, and since there was no way he was biting into dead flesh, Zero did the only sensible thing he had left to do: he punched it.
A frail body collided heavily against the hard edge of a marble coffin lid, eliciting an uncomfortable crunch and a breathless sound of intense pain. "What...what was that for, idiot?" it gasped out, turning pained violet eyes on him, as it cradled its injured ribs with one thin arm. The expression on its face was so familiar, mingled pain and anger and betrayal, that memory finally hit, and then it wasn't a corpse anymore: it was Lelouch.
"I—Lelouch, I—" His mind sputtered uselessly in circles, skin tingling as if an intense electric current were running across it. "I didn't mean to," he stuttered out lamely. Of course, he didn't know what he'd actually meant, either, with his emotions chasing so fitfully into each other: relief and such guilt but still so much happiness. I can't take back all the horrible things I've done, but I would face up to any guilt, for the sake of having a chance to set things right.
He was pretty sure he was starting to hyperventilate a little, nauseous with joy and maybe a little horror, too, still, because really, Lelouch did look absolutely awful. Yet even weighed against that, the steady cadence of Lelouch's breathing was quite possibly the most beautiful thing Zero had ever witnessed.
All the things he'd ached to tell Lelouch during these past weeks of grief, all the regrets over what he should have said earlier, came rushing forward at once, but ironically, now that he had the opportunity, Zero couldn't find the right words. Luckily, C.C. decided to step forward while he simply continued to stare mutely, unable to form a coherent sentence past his intense and commingled emotions. Even if he had been able to think straight, though, it still would have been a surprise when Lelouch turned on her with a look of absolute fury.
"You!" he hissed, pointing an accusing finger at C.C., though his aim was slightly off, as he was no doubt mostly blinded by the flashlight pointed directly at him. "You did this to me!"
"You think I'm the one responsible for this?" she asked, for once looking genuinely surprised and perhaps even a little bit hurt.
Lelouch paused, mid-rant, obviously not having expected that reaction. "But, it...it had to be you!" he insisted. "Who else would force a Code on me!"
"I offered it to you. I did not force anything."
"I...then you're saying—but that's impossible!" Lelouch objected, pained. "You're saying I did this to myself? But I rejected it! I rejected it!"
"I know you did."
For a moment, Lelouch looked relieved, before retreating to his familiar brooding pensiveness. "But then how?" he asked, his voice small and lost in a way Zero hadn't heard in a very, very long time, reminding him of the young prince who'd struggled so hard to care for a newly crippled and blinded little sister.
"That's what we were hoping you could tell us."
"You're saying you don't know?" he asked indignantly, the ghastly state of his skin only making his expression look worse. "C.C., I'm sure you tried to give it to me. I know you did. Maybe after I rejected it, you came back later and forced it on me, and flooded my mind with memories at the same time, so I wouldn't be aware."
C.C. gave him a cross look. "So after all we've been through, you're going to doubt me, now?"
"I'm saying I want to know what exactly you did, the day I died!"
C.C. shot him another annoyed look, before grudgingly answering. "After I left your office, I went to speak to Suzaku, and by the time I came back looking for you, you were checking on the prisoners with Jeremiah at your back. Afterward, you were surrounded by even more people, as you left for the 'execution'. You know there's no way I could have had you isolated enough to attempt a Code transfer, with a simultaneous memory overload that would cause complete, but specific amnesia no less—if that's even possible in the first place."
"Then how do I know you didn't transfer the Code earlier, and you're just claiming I successfully rejected it?"
"Because I was injured," she told him, looking a little indignant herself. "When I was in Suzaku's room, he accidentally nicked my fingers, but the cut healed almost immediately."
At Lelouch's glace, Zero nodded, confirming, although he wasn't sure how well his friend could see the gesture, considering that C.C. still had the flashlight pointed toward Lelouch. "She's telling the truth about that, Lelouch."
Lelouch hesitated, giving C.C. a searching look. In response, she gave an annoyed huff, crossing her arms over her chest and thereby skewing the beam's angle, temporarily illuminating the silent faces of weeping marble angles engraved into the ceiling. Maybe it's just the lighting, but that looks pretty creepy, Jeremiah.
"If I did this for my own pleasure, Lelouch, I wouldn't have left you trapped for weeks without hope for rescue. I don't have that much patience in my amusements," C.C. insisted.
Lelouch nodded slowly. "But if you didn't do this, then how did it happen? Who could benefit from my failure to die?"
"Nunnally," both Zero and C.C. answered immediately.
He sighed, shaking his head. "I meant who had motive and opportunity. As a prisoner, she was very carefully watched. The same goes for Kallen and any other members of the Black Knights who could potentially have figured things out. Besides the two of you and Jeremiah, there's no one with both the motive to keep me alive and any means to act, and C.C. makes a good point: if it were done out of misguided loyalty to me, why leave me to suffer, trapped in total darkness in a small box for so long, not knowing if I would ever get out?"
Lelouch frowned. "Unless this wasn't an act of mistaken but benign intent."
"What do you mean?"
"I woke up, as the coffin was being moved, I assume from the viewing to the burial site."
"You woke up?" Zero exclaimed. "They why didn't you do anything? Why did you let us bury you?!"
"Think, before you ask," Lelouch answered, unerringly meeting his shadow shrouded gaze with sharp violet eyes that were every bit as clever and determined as Zero remembered, made all the more piercing as they reflected the harsh light of the flashlight's beam. "I accepted my death, in order to make a better world. But what would have happened if word had gotten out that the Demon Emperor had 'risen from the grave'? It would have completely discredited Zero, and people would have been terrified afterward, never feeling certain if I were really gone, no matter how many times my death might be reported. So for the sake of a better world, I had to keep quiet and not disturb my own burial arrangements. For the same reason, I played dead when you first pushed the lid off, until you spoke, and I knew it was you."
"But playing dead like that after the viewing—you must have known you would soon be trapped."
"Yes," Lelouch whispered darkly. "I knew."
"And you were just going to resign yourself to eternal imprisonment?!"
"I had hoped there would be an opportunity for escape later, when no one would be around to see."
"But Lelouch, you know the royal customs. You must have been aware you'd be entombed in marble. The lid is absolutely too heavy to lift, and even I couldn't have gotten out if I'd been trapped inside without any handholds to try to slide it off. No matter how hard you pushed..."
"Believe me, I was aware," Lelouch responded tightly, "but what would you have had me do? I couldn't let all the sacrifices made up to that point have been in vain!" Lelouch yelled, before bringing his arm back to cradle his ribs with a wince. "Perhaps this was all planned out by someone who would benefit from global conflict and so wanted the Demon Emperor alive; knowledge of my very existence will create strife." He paused for another moment, thinking. "Of course, it is also possible that someone hated me enough to attempt to consign me to eternal imprisonment."
"Lelouch," Zero began hesitantly, "seeing as you set out to make everyone hate you, that second group includes almost the entire world."
"Yes, that does complicate matters," he acknowledged, resting one elbow on the edge of his coffin, so that he could prop his chin on his hand as he thought, movements still graceful even as he looked well more than half dead. "But there are very few who would know about the Code." Lelouch frowned, considering. "Perhaps if Jeremiah found out that I was responsible for my mother's destruction in the World of C, he could have—"
"No, Lelouch!" Zero objected immediately, scandalized on Jeremiah's behalf, no matter what his taste in carvings was like. "I won't stand here and listen to you dishonor someone who served you so loyally. You didn't see what he was like at your funeral."
"You're right; I didn't," Lelouch conceded grudgingly. "But there must be someone responsible."
"Right, and with your help, I'm sure we can figure it out."
Lelouch scowled. "Suzaku, I'm supposed to be dead. I can't just go around investigating things. Our number one priority should be making sure that I die for good before anyone else finds out about this."
Zero froze, his knees going weak, as if a knife had been plunged into the base of his spine. The thought of having to watch his best friend die again was horrible enough that he didn't even bother correcting Lelouch for calling him by the wrong name. Instead, he objected desperately, making use of what little cleverness had rubbed off from their long association, "Lelouch, I know you left me in charge of being Zero, but I've never been a good detective. C.C. can't figure this out, either, so who else can we ask? Besides, since you're the one who was most affected, you might have vital information we haven't recognized yet. We need your help!"
For a moment, Lelouch just looked torn, and Zero felt his heart clench frightfully, afraid that his plea would be rejected. In the end, though, the former emperor just sighed wearily, for a moment looking very much like the corpse he had almost remained. "...Very well. We will put the plan for my permanent death on hold—though only until we can get to the bottom of this," he said, waving one hand in a gesture that vaguely encompassed himself, before taking a deep breath and levering himself up out of the coffin. Zero noticed with an uncomfortable pang that Lelouch winced sharply again as he put weight on the side that had impacted against the coffin lid.
He probably cracked a rib or two, when I punched him and he collided that thing.
It was yet another unnecessary injury to feel guilty over, and Zero wondered when he would ever be able to stop hurting people. Trapped in his own tormented thoughts, he could only stand paralyzed as C.C. went over to help Lelouch straighten, sweeping the flashlight casually over the most hated man in the world. "You shouldn't push a new Code so hard like this, Lelouch. Like a Geass, it takes time to develop to full power. If you had held your Geass for longer before taking the Code, you would be in a better position, but as it is... You were stabbed, then embalmed. You're dehydrated and starving. Did that coffin even allow enough oxygen in?"
Lelouch snorted bitterly. "No. I felt—I always felt like I was on the edge of passing out."
"On top of that, you've bled to death again recently, haven't you?" she asked, pointing the flashlight directly at a dark stain around his throat. He just nodded, tiredly, agreeing so easily to something so horrible that Zero felt his throat clench up.
"I just wanted it to be over. I had hoped it would be over," Lelouch whispered, leaning against the coffin and closing his eyes for a moment, as if he were very weary, before straightening to continue, "but for Nunnally's sake, I can't afford to leave any loose ends that will disturb our hard won peace."
Not wanting to look at Lelouch's unhappy expression and ashamed that things had gone wrong so quickly on what should have been his watch, Zero ducked his head, as if looking away from his problems could make them disappear.
"Don't!" Lelouch commanded, his voice suddenly desperate.
"What?"
"Don't look inside the coffin!"
It wasn't deliberate. The thing was, when someone said not to look, well, it was just natural for him to look to see what it was that he wasn't supposed to look at.
Now that Lelouch was out of the coffin, it was clear in the harsh glare of the flashlight that what had once been a white silk lining was absolutely soaked in blood, in various stages of drying. Resting on the bottom of the coffin liner were curved, translucent films of bloody...something, two bumpy convex disks, a bit larger than contacts, a couple of pieces of wire, and what that looked suspiciously like desiccating meat.
"What—what is that?"
Lelouch grimaced, shaking his head and burying his face in his hand. "I told you not to look."
"But saying that just makes people want to look before they even think about it!" he objected. "And you didn't answer my question!"
Fortunately for both their tempers, C.C. seemed content to oblige, even as Lelouch fumed silently for a moment over being disobeyed. "The dead are unable to hold their eyes closed on their own, so holders are inserted beneath the eyelids to keep them shut. Likewise, the mouth is wired shut, for presentation at the funeral," she told him emotionlessly.
Zero swallowed, looking at Lelouch and feeling his eyes and teeth ache in sympathy. "And the—are those fingernails?"
Lelouch shifted his weight and looked distinctly uncomfortable, wrapping his arms around his middle and turning his face away slightly, refusing to meet Zero's gaze, even though he obviously couldn't see his eyes when C.C. had the flashlight pointed directly away from Zero. "I—I wanted to get out. I was trapped for...I don't know how long. Even when I dug the holders out of my eyes, it was still completely dark. I had nothing but my own two hands, so I tried to—but of course I couldn't claw through marble."
"I thought I would be trapped forever," Lelouch whispered, and the quiet horror on his face destroyed any doubt, if it had ever existed in the first place, that he might possibly have planned this himself.
Lelouch always strategizes to the minutest detail. He would never have left himself in such a situation, if he had any inkling this could happen.
Part of Zero very much didn't want to ask and yet part of him felt that he fully deserved to suffer through the answer: "Lelouch, then what about that other..." He gestured toward the coffin.
"I couldn't be sure it wasn't just a case of miraculous physical recovery, so...I bit off my own tongue." At Zero's horrified silence, he elaborated, "It grew back, of course. That's why it was such a good test. It's possible to die of blood loss from biting off your own tongue, but it's also undeniable proof of having a Code if it grows back, since it's not normally possible for humans to regenerate like that."
Zero suddenly wished he were wearing the mask again, because Lelouch would no doubt take extreme offense at his disgusted grimace, if the flashlight happened to reveal it. No matter Lelouch's pride in his own cleverness, though, it didn't stop his plans from making Zero feel absolutely sick sometimes. It's an embarrassment if you do something emotional like trying to claw your way out, but if your logic tells you to do something repugnant like biting off your own tongue, you're fine with it? Zero shuddered with dread as he tried with all his will to get the image of the bottom of the coffin out of his mind.
"Lelouch, I don't know if I'm going to be able to eat, ever again," he complained, trying, for the second time that night, not to be ill.
"Until you came to rescue me, I didn't know if I would ever be able to eat again," Lelouch countered. "Well, unless I wanted to—never mind," he cut himself off, with a grimace. "Let's not even think about that. How did you know to come rescue me, anyway?"
"Arthur scratched me when I went to Suzaku's 'grave' to collect him," C.C. answered. "Since I was going to drop him off with his rightful owner, anyway, I was already on my way when I noticed that the cuts hadn't healed."
"Then it is your Code, C.C.!" he shouted, eyes narrowed. "You did—"
"Just because it's my Code doesn't mean I know how it happened," C.C. cut him off tonelessly.
"Wait," Zero whispered, mind still several sentences back, trying to process something. "You were bringing Arthur to me?" He had a sinking feeling about that vibrating case C.C. had left in his room, when they left to go check Lelouch's grave.
"Don't worry," C.C. said, smiling. "I made sure the case was open when we left."
"Then he's just running loose in my rooms, unsupervised, with no food or water? Don't you know how Arthur gets, when he's bored and hungry?" He took a moment to let the true horror sink in. "He's going to shred everything!"
C.C. smiled in obvious delight. "Won't that be interesting?"
