You're slouching against the wall, surveying the party with your usual mixture of arrogance and disdain. You know these poor, plain, ordinary men and women are merely drifting around the dance floor like the dust between your feet. They can't challenge you, not anymore; you're the Emperor, and the only reason you're even here is because you're waiting for someone.
You're about to turn and leave, like you always do just before you find her, when you sense a presence, a sudden intensity in the world, like dark clouds parting to reveal the sun behind them. Turning around, you do not smile as you see a young woman where you know there was no young woman before; she is beautiful, so beautiful you know you would remember her even if you'd glimpsed her in passing, or seen her at the other end of a crowded street. You never were quite that lucky.
She bows, and again you do not smile. It's too hard. Especially today. Her bow reminds you of the way the river caresses the stones, soft and smooth, wearing them down as inexorably as a glacier. As she straightens, you hear your name and a greeting, two words that echo in your mind just as she does. Just as she always has. Her voice is lyrical, alluring, and you've memorized it the same way you've memorized everything about her.
But still, you must always remind yourself, and for a moment as brief as a hummingbird's heartbeat but a moment you know she notices nonetheless, your eyes sweep her body up and down. She is slim, crimson hair drifting around her skull like blood, deceptively fragile like a flower formed from steel.
She takes a step backwards, like she's trying to escape your attention, but the movement highlights the way her bare legs flit through the velvety red of her dress, and you know, as you always have, that she is mocking the way your body betrayed you. You can tell it in her eyes, glinting like sapphires and more glorious than a thousand gemstones; for all their beauty, they dance with the amusement of one laughing at some cosmic joke. You hate people laughing at you. You always have. But you don't hate her. You can't. It's too hard.
She is elegant and graceful, as beautiful as the sunset and as mysterious as the stars, and the galaxy will burn to ashes before you ever, ever forget her name. She offers you her hand and you almost, but don't quite, take it, as has been your ritual for twenty-three years. She never changes, even as the decades spin time away like a weaver on a loom; she can't and to you she never will. Not now, not ever, not even until the day you die.
As you press a kiss to the air above her fingers, she smiles before thanking you; her smile is radiant, radiant enough for the two of you because you still haven't smiled and you both know you never will. The dance begins; the party has stopped, and all turn to face the two of you, as you dance to a music only you can hear.
You spin through the movements, a thousand and one perfect positions, replaying a dance you know as instinctively as she does, as instinctively as you know each other. There is no noise amongst the crowd; silence reigns, as it always does at this time, this hour, in this room. The room where emperors die and messiahs are crowned, where, for the space of a single dance, the ghosts of the past haunt the future of the present.
You're silent too, and so is she. It's not that you've ever really needed to talk out loud to talk to her; you can feel the strange, dual tonality that is your one-sided conversation echoing in your mind as it always does. You dip her down into almost a lover's caress, but you don't kiss her and she doesn't expect you to. You both know you won't. You can't. Not any more, not ever.
The dance is almost over; you can hear the music slowing. If anyone else could hear it, they'd wonder why you were dancing to a funeral march. Well, almost anyone else – you know as well as she does that there are those in the room who understand. You almost wish they didn't, because then, perhaps, this would be easier. You wouldn't have to feel their gazes on you, ignore the soft sympathy that can only ever come from those who were once the enemy. You hate people being able to see right through you, even though you know she always could.
The music fades away; you've stopped, in the exact same position that you began, one hand hovering just underneath hers but never, ever closer. You don't smile, or thank her for the dance; she can see it in your eyes, and her smile flickers across her face as her eyes blaze like an inferno, fiery and passionate and for a single, exquisite second, alive.
Then the smile fades and so does she, as the ghost of the woman who should have been Kallen vi Britannia vanishes before your eyes, dying like she did almost a quarter of a century ago. Your only consolation is that at least this time you don't have to hear her scream.
The room is still silent as you, the ninety-ninth Emperor of Britannia, turn on your heel and leave, moving with the impossible tension of one who will never, ever stop mourning. The only sign that either of you had ever been there was the floor, the floor covered in dust and never cleaned, the floor where a single pair of footsteps has traced out the same dance in the same place for twenty-three years.