What is this feeling…?
Lelouch couldn't believe how black the world was. It was almost completely black, like space without stars or planets or… hell, light of any kind. Pure, unadulterated darkness, yet… he could still see himself. He could still make out the contours of his body, the folds of his clothes, the color of his skin… it was almost as if he was the only fixture of light in this world of black.
Spirits had been talking to him for what felt like hours, explaining that he was somewhere called the "Thought Elevator", where he was becoming part of the "Collective Unconscious", et cetera et cetera. All kinds of metaphysical jargon and technomagic babble that didn't interest Lelouch in the slightest. All he wanted to know was… how to get out. And he'd tried, for hours upon hours upon hours (or maybe it was minutes, he wasn't sure – time ceased to be an issue where he was) to escape, to make his way back out of the darkness, but it was endless.
It was impossible.
He was trapped.
The images that he saw from C.C. began to rush in again. The ghosts. The snow. The fire, spreading across the globe, completely engulfing it like a big, red blanket. Geass. In retrospect, he really should have paid more attention to that, or asked more questions, but at the time, he was too preoccupied with his revolution business to really ask.
And he'd meant to ask her, when he had the adequate free time. But now... all he had was free time. But there was nobody around him. Everything he'd been striving for was all for naught – completely and utterly useless.
And Lelouch had the sinking feeling that it was all his fault.
He thought of Shinjuku, the place where it all started, where he led those would-be terrorists, the seminal Black Knights, to victory. He thought of Clovis, who begged for his life, whose eyes sagged beneath the weight of Geass. He thought of the Student Council, how much it hurt to leave them. He thought of Ohgi, whose idealism was far stronger than Lelouch's. He thought of Jeremiah, the racist bastard with a permanent chip on his shoulder, who justified his racism through supposed guilt. He thought of Schneizel, fearless and arrogant even in the face of his potential demise.
He thought of Suzaku, misguided for all the right reasons… and yet, for all the wrong reasons. How much Lelouch wanted to kill him, yet spare him.
He thought of C.C., whose snarky wit and sharp tongue poorly disguised how legitimately sad she was.
He thought of Kallen, how she was completely willing to die for her hopes and dreams.
He thought of the Black Knights, who'd banked all their hopes and dreams upon… him.
He thought of the triumph he'd felt as Zero.
He thought of his mother, who'd always believed in him.
Always.
Always.
Lelouch's Geass flared to life once more. "Set me free!"
He shouted into the darkness, over and over again. His throat grew hoarse as he shouted, repeating those same three words over and over again, to the point where they stopped sounding like words at all.
"Please, set me free!"
Nothing.
"I demand to be set free!"
Nothing.
"I don't want to die! I refuse to die! They're depending on me! And I'm depending on them! Set me free!"
Nothing.
"I have to save the world!"
Nothing.
Exhausted and lightheaded, Lelouch stopped, his shoulders aching and his head swimming with over-exertion.
It's no use… sorry, Suzaku. Kallen. Mother… I tried. I really did. I'm sorry.
"I'm sorry," he muttered, just to get it out of his system.
And then the darkness began disappearing. The world around him began crumbling apart, and he suddenly realized he was standing atop the transparent, iridescent walkways of a grand, stately palace, bathed in stardust. It was breathtaking.
Oh my god…
Not wanting to waste time, Lelouch pressed forward—
"Yeah, no."
He stopped dead in his tracks.
Him. His voice.
"Not bad. You figured out the magic password."
Lelouch turned around, and he wasn't surprised to see… himself. "Time Baron". They were identical; the only thing that separated them was their body language.
Lelouch held himself like he was an old man in the body of a young man.
Time Baron held himself like he was someone who'd been alive for far, far too long.
Clenching his fists, tugging at his cuffs, Lelouch could only glare at Time Baron.
"How's it going, brother?" Time Baron asked, apparently amused by Lelouch's pissed-off mood. He reached out to his left, grabbed some stardust as if it was solid, and blew on it; the stardust scattered across the ground as he did so.
"I don't have time to waste with you, Baron," Lelouch proclaimed, turning around and walking forward once again, the palace's interior becoming clearer by the moment. "I have a planet to save."
"Take another step and I'll fucking kill you."
Alright. That's convincing.
Lelouch groaned and turned around, folding his arms. He didn't want to waste any time.
"Let's assume I let you go," Time Baron declared, slowly walking towards Lelouch, arms spread out. "Let's assume I let you return back to your sinful life. Then what? What happens to this planet of yours? Are you really gonna hold true to your promise or are you gonna go back to doing the same shit you always do, Mr. Ends-Justify-The-Means?"
"You're me. You should know the answer to that."
Time Baron laughed, flipping his hair back. "At least you're honest with yourself. Literally."
"Yeah. Goodbye. Hope you enjoy your life as a Prince in Britannia, getting your every need attended to. I won't shed a tear when you inevitably get assassinated."
"It's cute how you assume I've even real at all."
Lelouch snorted. "Okay. Nice try. Goodbye."
Time Baron quirked a singular eyebrow, raising a fist and punching himself in the face, square on the cheek. Lelouch was confused, and then he felt like laughing in pity for this incredibly strange individual, but then he felt a stinging sensation on his cheek, as if an invisible weight struck it—
What.
Time Baron's grin widened when he saw the look on Lelouch's face.
"I'm you, idiot," Time Baron said, his grin growing wider. "More than that. I'm a part of you. I'm a part of your mind."
Lelouch didn't respond.
"I'm an extension of you! I live inside you, dumbass!"
Lelouch couldn't respond.
"I know exactly what you're thinking at all times, exactly what you're doing at all times! Every single movement you make, every single decision you make, whether it be giving orders or brushing your teeth in the morning or deciding what to eat for breakfast, I'm there! I'm like an arm, or a leg! Even if you don't recognize it, I'm vital to you!"
"This is… a lot to take in, Lelouch."
"That sounds fucking stupid! No offense meant, man, but it totally is!"
"Come now, Lelouch. You and I both know how convenient it is to have friends in high places."
"No, I'm you."
"I mean, I'm talking to myself."
"In each and every single one of those worlds, Lelouch vi Britannia brings them to ruin."
Lelouch began laughing, and he laughed hard. It was a laughter that came from his core, the kind of laughter that cut off your oxygen. You couldn't do anything except laugh. And boy, did Lelouch laugh.
"Funny, innit?" Time Baron claimed, smirking.
"Not possible," Lelouch muttered, the enormous grin on his face hiding how broken he was at the moment. "No way you're me."
"I'm your creation!" Time Baron roared at him, smacking him senseless. "I'm the by-product of your guilt! The guilt that came from ending an entire planet! The guilt that came from sitting in the universe, alone, for months, pondering over your endless list of sins. The guilt that came from entering a second timeline, only to cause even more destruction because of your unconscious desire to destroy shit! You wanted an excuse to give yourself a makeover, so you wouldn't have to look at yourself in the damn mirror and recognize yourself as the murderer you really are!"
Lelouch just kept laughing. Laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing. It hurt to laugh, but he kept doing it regardless.
"I'm everything you wanna be. I'm everything you think the Ideal You should be. Flippant, immortal, all-powerful, not giving a shit about everything, willing to discard everything and everyone around me. I'm everything you literally cannot become, because of the way your mind works."
"Then what about the other Lelouches?!" Lelouch said, his throat sick from screaming and laughing and crying. "What about them?"
"Still extensions of you," Eyepatch-Lelouch stated, hovering next to Lelouch. "I'm the you that looks at life with one eye closed, the other one wide open."
Lelouch kept laughing.
"You're a savant. You can't see what's in front of you, even if it spit in your face," Eyepatch-Lelouch noted, pulling a magical orb out from his pocket. Images began flashing through the orb.
Ashford. "Your family. A safe place to live."
A tall, metropolitan building, with stars in the sky behind it. "An intelligent mind… no, an incredible mind."
Various royals, like Euphemia, Odysseus, Cornelia, Schneizel. "Brothers and sisters that genuinely cared about you, missed you."
"…You're wrong," Lelouch muttered, losing feeling in his body.
The orb disappeared. "You could have lived an incredible life. Maybe even have inherited the throne from your father if you played it right. But, no. You weren't satisfied with just playing politics, with playing it safe."
"You wanted to rage against the world," Purist-Lelouch mentioned, rising from the stardust, cloak flapping in the apparent wind. "Your whole philosophy was founded on you trying to justify everything you've done."
"You're wrong," Lelouch muttered, once again.
"No. The moment you killed Clovis was the point of no return."
"I didn't kill Clovis!"
"A timeline ago, you did," Time Baron proclaimed, smirking. "But, in a way, you still did. There's more ways to kill somebody than just destroying their body."
"You're aware of your flaws," Emo-Lelouch mentioned, stepping onto the foothold Time Baron was on. "But you're too nihilistic and depressed to even try to change anything about it. You want to change the world around you."
"Sound like someone you know?" Emo-Lelouch and Euphemia said in unison. Lelouch swiveled around, looking for Euphemia's presence, but she simply wasn't there.
"Everything I did was to change the world for the better," Lelouch weakly protested, the palace falling apart all around him.
"Nope," Time Baron exclaimed, shaking his head. "You wanted to live out your tyrannical wet dreams. It's why your Geass is the way it is."
"The only free will you cared about was your own," Purist-Lelouch said.
"Geass responds to the user's greatest wish," Time Baron said, echoing C.C.
"…" Lelouch couldn't answer.
"What a fine line to walk on. Oppressor versus oppressor. Criminal versus criminal. Evil versus Evil."
"…"
"You're just like Father," Time Baron smirked. "And you hate it."
The palace finally collapsed, and the other Lelouches disappeared.
Now, it was just Time Baron and Lelouch, alone in the universe.
"…So, that's it," Lelouch muttered, his very core shaking. "You never existed. You never have been real. You never touched down in Pendragon, never assumed my identity."
"Nope, that was all you. You wanted a reason to hide your identity. Partially because you didn't want to be caught by the military. Partially because you didn't want to look at yourself in the mirror and see Lelouch vi Britannia, the Killer."
"My brothers and sisters are still convinced that I'm dead."
"Absolutely."
"But that's impossible… the other chapters… I saw Clovis, Suzaku, Euphy, Viola Mancini, all of them, thinking and talking about me."
"Alllllll your imagination. You like to believe you're important. Thing is, the E.U. never needed you; Clovis never really needed you. Maybe Suzaku did, but he was going to screw up with or without your help, anyway."
"No."
"Hard to discern between fantasy and reality, huh? I wonder… how much of this story actually happened. To you, anyway."
"You're just a lie."
"You're the greatest liar I've ever known. You can't even be honest with yourself."
"…There are no timelines."
"Well, not entirely. There's only two timelines. Those other Lelouches are just extensions of your personality. Like me. But like I said… two timelines. The one you ended (the Prime Timeline), and the one you're currently in. You fucked up the Prime Timeline, enough to bring it to ruin. It all started when you used your Geass on God, on the collective unconscious… and then it all got destroyed the moment you died."
"…"
"But your desire for a second chance at revenge – and maybe, to atone – was so strong that you were reborn, in another world. The Gods of the Universe decided that you deserved a second chance, to do things over again."
"…"
"Under a few caveats… No. Only one. Nunnally. You had to learn… how to live without. How to live without her."
"Nunnally… that name… so familiar…"
"Unfortunately so."
"So… my guilt at ending the first timeline… made me forget everything about it?"
"Bingo… but not quite. You just stuffed it deep inside your subconscious. You compartmentalize. That's how you… we, work. So it was never really gone. Just lurking. But now it's coming back. With a passion. And let me tell you, buddy, all this guilt you're carrying… damn. It's a lot."
"…"
"Feels bad, doesn't it? Knowing you could have stopped? Knowing you could have prevented the world from getting destroyed?"
"…"
"It feels bad, knowing you have to live without."
And then Lelouch remembered. He remembered Nunnally, and her wishes for a gentler world. He remembered Suzaku, betraying everyone around him, staying true to only himself. He remembered Euphemia, who was tragically just like Nunnally. He remembered Jeremiah, whose guilt turned him into a killer. He remembered C.C., whose desire to die influenced every decision she ever made. He remembered Mao, whose desire for love influenced every decision he ever made. He remembered fighting Suzaku on Kamine Island. He remembered putting down the mantle of Zero for the last time. He remembered Rolo's sacrifice. He remembered feeling so alone when he trapped Charles in the Sword of Akasha, remembered how it felt to kill him, how it felt to see Marianne alive again, only to lose her in the same breath. He remembered how hollow his ascension to throne was. He remembered how difficult those last few months for him were. He remembered Kallen, her heavy heart, how betrayed she looked when Lelouch conquered the world. He remembered passing the mask of Zero to Suzaku, imprisoning him to a difficult life… yet freeing him at the same time.
He remembered dying.
He remembered not dying.
He remembered losing everything, only to be reborn in a tremendous, interstellar burst.
He remembered.
And it took his breath away.
"…"
Time Baron held out a pistol – a Heckler & Koch, Lelouch's favorite brand.
"I'm going to count to five. At the end of this countdown, you're dying."
Lelouch remembered unveiling Zero to the world for the first time.
"One."
He remembered the million Zeroes. A million people, who all put their hopes, desires, and dreams on Lelouch's shoulders, all because they believed in him.
"Two."
He remembered the halcyon days of the Black Knights. Success after success after success, when it looked like the world was going to change.
"Three."
He remembered C.C. He remembered Kallen. He remembered Suzaku. He remembered Nunnally. He remembered Milly, and Shirley, and Rivalz, and Nina.
"Four."
He remembered the promise he made to himself.
He remembered Marianne.
He remembered Lelouch vi Britannia, and Lelouch Lamperouge, and Zero.
He remembered.
And he knew he had to live on.
"…Fi-"
Lelouch pried the gun out of Time Baron's hands, and with a roar, pulled the trigger on Time Baron, without even thinking twice about it. It was instantaneous. The bullet ripped right through Time Baron, and he just sort of smiled, a big, twisted grin, as he fell to his knees.
Stardust engulfed Time Baron. He began fading away. A peaceful feeling washed over Lelouch.
"…So it's all come back to you, huh?" Time Baron asked, smirking.
"…I can't lie anymore."
"It's gonna be hard. If you fail here… no more second chances."
"I know."
"The odds of you even saving the world, saving yourself, are slim to none."
"So long as there are odds, I don't care."
"You may die. For good. No matter how much power you have, everyone ends up in the same place."
"…Already died once."
"You and me both."
Time Baron slowly began to vanish.
"I knew you could do it," Time Baron proclaimed. "Are you ready?"
Lelouch could only nod. The darkness began to disappear.
And then the world was filled with bright, white light.
He was filled with purpose. And it gave him the desire to live on.
Time Baron activated his Geass.
"So long, brother. I, Lelouch vi Britannia…"
Time Baron faded away, but the Geass sigil remained.
"Order you to live!"
[**]
"Are you going to be alright, Lelouch?"
"…Don't worry about me, Euphy. So long as there's stars in the sky… I can still hope. I can still dream."
"And what do you dream? What do ya hope?"
"…I hope for happiness, Euphy."
"You think you can live without Marianne?"
"…Even if I can't, I have to try."
"…Okay, Lelouch. Stay safe, okay? I love you."
"Take care, Euphy. I love you."
