Shin OK Number 33 - Achilles And The Tortoise

The phone call came at five a.m.

Lelouch, groggy and in the lingering afterbirth of a memory, tried to roll over to gauge the time from the December light outside, only to remember he couldn't roll over. He had lost that control over his torso, the only world in which his body remained under his control was in the sweet comfort of the past, available at the easy price of 275€ per millilitre.

He couldn't even get it himself; even that was out of his control. While the first few highs were earned courtesy of a quiet conversation at the side of a city street, increasingly he was having to send CC away with cash to pick up black bags from musclebound teens. He refused to tell her what was in them, but it hardly took a genius to figure it out.

And yet, the phone continued to drill into Lelouch's skull like a jackhammer, digging through the pre-frontal lobe and down into the small fatty part of his brain. With any luck, it would give him a lobotomy and he could go back to sleep.

Alas, his cognitive destruction would have to come another day, and with some effort he raised himself and tended to the phone, which continued to blare demanding the attention of whoever might be foolish enough to fall for the trap. He recognised the number. This was bait, just waiting for Lelouch to bite.

And Lelouch was nothing if not a hungry fish.

He scooched off the bed and down into the chair ahead of his desk, grunting as he used his arms to slowly lower himself into a seated position. He groaned, before picking up the phone.

"What do you want Reuben?"

It was a tired dance by this point. Lelouch knew what he wanted, and Reuben, as he always did, awkwardly danced around his question like he was waiting outside the toilet, busting for a piss. Ordinarily, Reuben would regale Lelouch as to all Lelouch had done for him, and how grateful he was for all of it, and how he really wasn't in any sort of position to ask anything of Lelouch, but he was in a bit of a pinch, just a bit of a bind really, and all the other British filler-phrases which had to be blasted with a self-effacing humour into any slight hint towards a request for help as if it were a tic.

However, this time was different. Rather than launching into an apologetic prelude to some manner of request for a loan, Reuben caught himself, seemingly aware of the pattern, and sighed. Lelouch sat up, as Reuben audibly shook himself and let out what was on his mind.

"They're coming tomorrow." he admitted. "I'm… I've done all I can, but this sport is poisoned, there's nothing we can do, I don't-"

"Calm down." Lelouch, who wasn't fully awake yet by this point, objected, before taking a breath and asking "Reuben, what is happening."

"One of the debtors has had enough." Reuben explained. "He'll have solicitors around tomorrow, and if we can't satisfy our liabilities then we'll be shut down. We thought we could keep going, but this isn't like the old days, I… I can't do this Lelouch."

Lelouch's eyes widened, blazing in purple. It was as if Reuben had hooked his blood up to a supercharger, injecting oxygen into and then revving up his heart. He felt the hairs on his body tense up, as he suddenly became intensely aware of every micron of his being. Time, for a moment, stood still, as Lelouch recognised who he was, where he was, what Reuben had just said, what it meant, and all the possibilities he stood at the door of.

"Reuben…" he whispered, taking a swallow as his mind moved at a million miles per second through the cavalcade of potential. The malaise of the recent past was forgotten; now, he had a task, which he could gleefully be consumed by, he had something he could completely subsume himself into and forget all of his anxieties, his worries, he could just focus on what was required of him.

"Even if I ask you for money, it'd just delay the inevitable." Reuben bemoaned, clearly trying in his words to look for a solution that wasn't there. He knew what he needed from Lelouch, but could never be so direct as to ask for it; a miracle. After a pause, Lelouch heard Reuben, trembling, admit "This… I look at what happened to Rosenberg, and we're next, these old independent teams just aren't viable anymore, unless you have some big industrial backing like Rebellion or Camelot where you can spend your way out of problems, you can't compete, there's just no hope of getting any sponsors, which means you just stay at the bottom. Lelouch…"

Lelouch's eyes stared out across the room, directed at the shut doors of his wardrobe, gripping onto it to keep him focused as he pictured unhealthy possibilities. It was… this was…

This could be it…

He had been trying to fight against this hope ever since he had met Xingke, he hadn't wanted to get stars in his eyes, but he could now, with what Reuben was saying, get over his feeling of helplessness, could sense that maybe, just maybe, this moment might be the beginning of the beginning of a chance for Lelouch to potentially approach the levers of destiny.

He had been aware of the problems Reuben was talking about for a long time. Charles ruled the FIA with his own vision, but for the longest time Lelouch had watched him dictate ever more hostile rules for teams which increasingly alienated the smaller factory teams with a degree of remove, feeling as if there was nothing he could do to change it, and so no reason to spend any time or energy concerning himself with it. For the first time…

Not just with Reuben's team, not just with his own team, but with a genuinely collaborative, social project of leveraging power together, the sort of dependence on the support of other that Lelouch instinctively despised, that was just the opening of the door. Lelouch, even if he recognised the opening of the door, even if he understood himself as just a single part in the structure of a response which had many parts which each needed to turn together, would have to walk through it. He would have to stand, with absolute conviction, with absolute clarity, and self-consciously pass through the door, with absolute and unshatterable faith in more than himself. Having faith in himself would not be the problem. He would need to believe in everyone around him.

If he could do that, there was a chance…

For the first time, he saw a vision of Charles which was not one of implacable invulnerability. What he saw was a crag jutting out from a previously flush rock face, a spot where he could grab onto and climb up from. There was a way.

"Oh, Lelouch…" Reuben continued, ignorant of Lelouch's divine inspiration. "I don't know what to do. L… Please… owner to owner, I need you to tell me what I can do, my time where small teams could make in this sport it has clearly ended, and I don't know what to do."

The crisis Xingke spoke of dovetailed with the crisis Reuben spoke of. They were symptoms of the same disease. Until now, Lelouch had a vague sense of the shape of the illness that lay over the sport, everyone did, but as he stood, not only did the contours and profile of it reveal itself to him, but also the remedy.

"Reuben…" he whispered.

Could he… could he do this? Did he… could he do this to his family? They were just now, after a lifetime's effort, secure, and he could be putting all of that in danger by exposing himself to all of the risk that came with taking on the titan that was the FIA.

Could revenge be worth it?

"I'm sorry…" Reuben sighed, no longer sure why he was even calling Lelouch. "But… unless you have any ideas, this place will have to close, it's-"

"No."

A snap decision. No. Ashford could not be allowed to close. Lelouch would not allow it. He leapt out in front of moving traffic, deciding in the speck of an instant that this was the moment. The blood drained from him, settling in the pool of his spine as his jaw steeled into solid rock, clenching in sudden resolve while his breath, for a moment unsteady, calmed. He knew in his heart that he had to do something with as much clarity as he knew the amount of mortal peril he would place himself in by doing it.

"Lelouch?"

There were moments in Lelouch's life, he felt, when he was in moments of tension and difficulty, that he would fall into a brief stupor, where the path ahead became clear, and he would hare after the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, fixated, envisioning the sequence of goals in his minds eye like the most juvenile of fantasies. Lelouch turned from a human being into a lizard, and he spoke to Reuben with a sudden authority, as though God himself had bestowed his grace upon him.

"Ashford must not be allowed to close." Lelouch said with a brutal conviction. "If you are in as much trouble as you are, I am afraid I will need to intervene more directly. I want you to listen very carefully to what I say next."

Reuben was suddenly quiet, and Lelouch took a deep breath. This was the moment. This was where Lelouch took control. This was the start.

"I will pay you for the full and exclusive rights to your team's sponsorship profile, with all associated benefits which a sponsor might be expected to enjoy, with certain conditions."

This was what Xingke would have wanted. To make a structure less hostile for young drivers coming up without financial support, to make a structure less hostile for teams without industrial support.

"For yourself?" Reuben questioned, not seeing the logic in Lelouch buying out advertising space. "You don't have anything you need to promote, what good will sponsor space do you?"

"Let me finish." Lelouch replied. "You will, in selling these right to me, agree that I can rent these rights out to third parties for my own profit. You get my money guaranteed, and I can pocket the margin on any sponsorships I am able to sell for that space you have sold me. You get guaranteed money, I take the risk."

Lelouch had accumulated many skills in his long career as a professional bastard, one of which was an ability to sell people on a concocted vision of what their brand could look like on his go-kart, then his F3 car, and then his F1 car. While Reuben couldn't get enough sponsors, Lelouch at least had a hope of recouping his losses. There was a pause, before Reuben affirmed "I see, that makes sense."

The Frenchman narrowed his gaze. If Reuben had run out of money running his team in the old style, then if he were to continue running his team in that way he was almost guaranteed to run out again. He would just be delaying the inevitable. In order to secure his investment, and ensure that his upcoming campaign would have allies, drastic action had to be taken. While he knew that he couldn't accomplish his goals alone, keeping Ashford afloat would take his careful oversight.

"I will, in exchange for taking this risk, be consulted on any executive decisions made by Ashford RT in the course of its operations." Lelouch stated plainly, to which Reuben, in shock, could only shout his reply down the line.

"Lelouch!" was the simple answer. The man himself was unmoved.

"These are my terms." Lelouch replied. "Sell to me, and your team is saved. Do not sell to me, and you know what will happen."

There was a pause down the line, before Reuben asked "How long will you give me… to think about it?"

As he saw CC enter the room from across the way to find out what the commotion was all about, Lelouch looked down at the clock resting on his desk, before noting "By your own admission you have until… whenever those solicitors arrive tomorrow."

"Lelouch…" Reuben quivered, realising what this meant. "Please, this is my team, it's been independent for forty years-"

"This is not a negotiation." Lelouch, growing impatient, sternly insisted. "Nor is it a donation. I am not a charity. This is a bailout. Bailouts are not without terms."

There was another pause down the line. Lelouch wondered if the line had gone dead, before Reuben eventually said something.

"Will you have the money?"

"Yes." Lelouch confirmed.

It wasn't a lie; while he had satisfied most of the liabilities that came from the construction of Li Xingke's oval by way of long term contracts with local racing serie, it had left him without much in the way of cashflow. However, he could parley his stake in that track as security against another loan, which would, all going well, pay for itself.

But that was not the end goal. It was important to prevent the destruction of a team, but it could not be denied that it was more advantageous to control one fifth of the teams than one tenth when considering potential leverage over the sport.

However, Reuben was still grieving, and he muttered over the line "So this is it… the last privateer team…"

"Not quite." Lelouch replied, as CC, who had been watching Lelouch since she had come in, sat down at his desk as she waited for him to finish. "You'll be kept on, as an advisor."

There was no reply, and eventually Lelouch forced the issue and concluded "You know my terms. I'll await a call."

With that, he hung up and sighed. Shaking his head, he looked across to CC, who had raised an eyebrow in surprise at Lelouch's curtness, and explained "Had to hit him with a bit of tough love."

CC raised her eyebrows, before, noticing a mixed expression on his face, smirking and asking "And how is all of this making you feel? Taking over another team, soon you won't have to worry about the FIA, you'll just own all the teams. That's got to be the dream, what's got you moping?"

"It just feels… like a deer in headlights." Lelouch eventually admitted, clearly satisfied, but not overjoyed by what was happening. "This is the moment I've been waiting for, and yet the weight of it is still so imposing…"

Lelouch paused, before biting his lip and continuing "I feel like… do you know that maths problem, where you start with one, and then half it down to zero point five, then you half it again down to a quarter, then you half it down to one eighth, then one sixteenth, then one thirty-second, and so on?"

CC, not seeing the connection, admitted "That sounds familiar."

"The thing about it is that you never actually reach zero. With every new fraction you keep counting down, always getting smaller but no matter how small it gets, it will never reach zero. It builds and builds and builds, you get closer and closer, but there is no climax." Lelouch tried to explain, waving his hands to underline his point. "It's an eternal anticipation. I've… lived for decades at this insane sort of intensity, like… there's a bomb, strapped to my chest that's ticking closer and closer to zero without ever reaching it, two seconds, one second, half a second, a quarter of a second until detonation, an eighth of a second, a sixteenth of a second until it blows, it's ticking down but it won't fucking detonate to the point now it just feels… normal, to just be no more than a few moments from complete and utter destruction. Every day is the same, and… as more and more bullshit gets piled on, it feels like it should be building to some climax, some confrontation, but it isn't. Just a constant barrage of alarm bells with no beginning or end, alarm bells are just the ambient noise now, my whole life."

CC was completely silent as Lelouch sighed and looked down, clearly working through what all of this meant to him.

"And now… I get this phone call, and I'm… I'm trying… I don't want to try and believe that this might be some resolution, this might be an actual conclusion, an actual climax, that the clock might actually reach zero, it's just I've felt it too many times, so… I don't know if this is it, but… this might be it, this might be the chance. I've got to believe it is, or else I'll never escape."

"So what's next?" CC asked, not used to seeing Lelouch this vulnerable. Did this mean that he finally had a bit of hope?

Lelouch shook his head, drained even though he had been awake less than twenty minutes. After a moment, he shrugged "'Depends on whether you think the last twenty one years were an accident. Did an Occitan snot nosed brat kicked out of home at twelve end up right here right now at this hinge point by the roll of a dice, or are there reasons? Did all the things that've happened…"

Lelouch's voice trailed off, almost as if he was defeated. He just…

"Nevermind…" he eventually mumbled. "Who gives a shit. Let's just go."

Lelouch bent down to try and steady himself, before hobbling over to the wardrobe. He shook himself, unsatisfied by his explanation, before elaborating.

"I know… I have stuff to do, but it's at these moments when I get caught in… why?" he asked, rhetorically. "And I think… Xingke… he tried to show me why… brought it into sharp focus. And with that phone call, I know why I'm alive, connecting those two things, I know why I'm here, I know what I have to do. I have to destroy the whole thing, I have to take them down, the window is open."

"What did you mean by hinge points?" CC asked, uncertain how that connected to anything else Lelouch was saying, who for all she knew was still under the influence of narcotics.

"It's…"

He stumbled, before biting his lip, and slowly stuttering "There are big… forces, big moving parts, in history, that determine the direction it moves in, these different material circumstances come into conflict and resolve into the history we experience, it's like playing snooker and hitting one ball off another, how it's all determined as soon as you hit the ball. Institutions, power, wealth, historical momentum, all of these things determine history, but the direction these structural forces push in are always… contingent on the individual coin flips and dice rolls that determine the outcome of discrete events that together make up the whole."

CC, skeptical of Lelouch's meandering phrases which seemed to be scouring his mental landscape in desperate search of a point, said nothing, while he finally zeroed in on what he wanted to say, explaining with more clarity that "Some periods are so… intensely predetermined, sometimes the structural forces are so overwhelming, that looking backwards… it's difficult to imagine anything else could have happened. It's like a beach, take away one grain of sand and the beach is still there, but there are also times where so much of the weight which pushes on history is bound up in single individuals, or single events, that the seemingly overpowering economic and social structures fade away, and suddenly you recognise that you can… put your handprints in wet concrete, as it were, you have a rare, brief opportunity… to actually make a difference, any difference, in history as it ripples out."

"And right now is a moment like that?" CC asked.

"I think so." Lelouch replied, before quickly correcting himself, chuckling "I hope so at least."

He sighed, before reaching up and groaning. After a moment, he muttered "I need to go to the bank, can you get my paperwork ready? I think I'll be able to dress myself today."

F1 has a new champion. That finale was very sus amogus, but sure look, it's done. The one thing I've learned from all of this is that no one knows how judicial review works. Fortunately, I'll be able to talk more about that in Chapter 66, which I have decided to dedicate to the characters bringing each other to court, because I need to get something out of this degree.

God I'm tired. Please leave a review if you can.

~G1ll3s