Title: Memento Mori
Author: Lily
Characters/Pairings: Suzaku/Kallen
Summary: In the aftermath of the Zero Requiem, Suzaku and Kallen do what they do best.
Dedicated to my Yin Yin (AKA. Cat In My Fridge)
The anonymity of the cemetery is soothing; he traces his name on his gravestone, waiting.
"Fight me." Kallen says.
There's an itch in her hands that won't go away. A tugging— almost like a twitch. She feels impatient like there's something that she's missing or forgetting.
Suzaku pauses and briefly imagines the monotonous tick-tock of the clocks' gears grinding.
"I said fight me." Even in her own ears she sounds horribly whiny and desperate. She cocks a fist and throws a punch.
He catches it almost like an afterthought.
Kallen is full of contradictory feelings. She loves this new life of hers— loves her quiet mother and their small apartment, even if the windows are forever sticking and it smells perpetually of wet cats. At the same time, there is a terrible longing inside her. A wanting to do something, feel something other than this—this.
Something is pent up inside of Kallen—something she needs to release but she doesn't know what. She is happy here, in her apartment, taking care of her mother and attending school again. But it's an uneasy happiness. She guesses that maybe she's been fighting for so hard and for so long, she doesn't know what to do with herself now that she doesn't need to fight anymore.
Her hands cramp and itch. She can't stop jiggling her foot—so restless, so. Sullen and anxious and— she thinks of frayed edges and rabbits without lucky feet.
They grit their teeth—bite their tongues until they throb, spitting out mouthfuls of blood like chewing tobacco.
Dancing, that's what it is. She sidesteps his kick but is forced into a bend to avoid the sweep of his arm. Dodges the follow-up but gets an elbow slammed into where her ribs and heart join—knocked breathless and batty, staggers backwards, ragged—
"Is this the best you can do?" Kallen sneers.
Her right wrist is grabbed and he pushes her back in a rush until both of them hit the cold stone of an angel statue hard.
"Don't start unless you intend to follow through." He tells her and doesn't look down for the left uppercut. Her fist, bone hard, smacks into his jaw and he lets go. Zero's mask goes flying; bounces between headstones like a pinball in a graveyard machine—off death, off rock, off death again—rolls down a hill lined with grey angels and disappears behind flowers and freshly dug graves, BelovedFatherOf...InLovingMemoryOf...
Disembodied movement, every motion detached from the next; pain scorching her breath, huge and burning, she takes his damp head, quick as a flash, and slams it into the hard statue behind her shoulder. She knees him in the stomach, head-butts him in the mouth, kicks him in the chest, steps on his face and twists her boot heel into his crotch— looks at him crumpled on the dirt floor and thinks of loose ends and how zero is the loneliest number, the only digit which can't stand by itself.
There will come a day when the details of his face will fade from Suzaku's memory.
Someday but not soon, he will no longer spot Lelouch at traffic lights, in teenage boys strolling down the street or sipping coffee in outdoor cafés. One day, it will hit him, walking along some riverbank, or gazing out at a moonlit night, that he can't recall the way Lelouch used to curve a finger over his mouth when he was trying to conceal amusement and how sweaty wisps of black hair jumped against Lelouch's forehead and fell across his long eyelashes whenever he ran.
But every once in awhile, something trivial will set off a memory of their childhood together. The curve of a stranger's smirk, a couple of kids climbing tree-bark—and it will all come rushing back.
He can say it started with his father, but that would be traditional, stereotypical, and predictable, which is why he says it started with Lelouch. Or with Nunnally, which is almost the same thing.
The air buzzes as she raises her knee up to her chin and kick out. It catches him square in the stomach with a loud oomph. Falls back on one hand, f-e-e-t magnetic, h-e-a-r-t electric... The air buzzes louder.
He knocks her head backwards and kicks it back sideways. She socks him in the nose, and bites him on the junction between neck and shoulder— bites him because language cannot express; bites him until Suzaku slams them both to the ground and shoves his hand up her skirt, and Kallen lets out a ragged sound that could be a sob or a moan or anything at all.
Their eyes make contact.
Fingernails dig into her flesh, harder and harder. His broken nose bumps against her face, trailing blood-drops down her cheeks.
"Why?" She says shortly, her voice a measured dull tone of listlessness. Her eyes stare straight into his.
He leans in and whispers to her the secrets of their kind: "People are able to do anything when they really want to die."
The anonymity of the cemetery is soothing.