"So," the young, child-bodied Lelouch chimed as he set a tablet with a live news report down on the desk before his mother, "on a scale of 'one,' to 'invading Russia in the winter,' how phenomenally, bafflingly idiotic was your idea?"
The newsfeed in question discussed mass confusion across the globe, as reports from the vast majority of the population arose of "memories from the future" of varying stripes suddenly appearing in peoples' minds. Then it mentioned the secondary panic from those who didn't receive memories, as it was quickly worked out that anyone who couldn't "remember" things yet to come had been dead before the furthest date anyone could recall over a decade from now. The overnight consequences of Ragnarok certainly left a bitter taste in Marianne the Flash's mouth, compounded by the outright scathing contempt in her darling little boy's tone as he delivered in that single sentence the fact that his opinion of her and the whole scheme could not possibly sink any lower. The worst part, though, was that she couldn't actually reprimand him for any of it without adding "hypocrisy" to the litany of things she'd done wrong by him... well, another count of hypocrisy, anyway. Because Lelouch was, infuriatingly, right; if this was the result, the whole plan was a damned fool's errand and everything he'd suffered, the injustices inflicted on him by the very parents who claimed he and Nunnally were their favorites, were for nothing. Less than nothing. So the Empress Marianne, former Knight of the Rounds, didn't answer her son's acerbic query at first, instead staring numbly at the muted live stream he'd presented and thinking very thoroughly about how she could possibly avoid giving him even more rope to metaphorically hang her with.
She settled on giving up the pretense. "How much do you hate me, Lelouch?"
"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies, mother." He deadpanned. Well, at least he still acknowledged her as "mother," cold comfort that was.
Marianne sighed, "I don't know." She said simply. "Pretty up there, for certain, but this was an utterly unexpected outcome."
"You were dealing with a plan entailing the metaphysical notion of collective unconsciousness being killed by a conceptual weapon assembled and proverbially wielded by two immortals capable of granting people supernatural powers ranging from prescience to mind control." He said dryly, and she winced at the coldness in his eyes. This was inconceivably far from the adoring little boy she'd known so long ago. "What exactly did you expect? For everything to follow some consistent ruleset with a logical and predictable outcome?" He scoffed, and there was the contempt still. "We should be thankful that the worst it's gotten has just been mass confusion. There could have been violent anarchy rather than the quiet—and hopefully temporary—collapse of social structure until everyone who lived deals with their new memories and everyone who died realizes they can change things. At least the therapy business will be booming."
There was a long, pregnant silence between them as the brilliant little boy housing a genius young man stared down the mother he had, once upon a time, wanted to burn the world to ashes to avenge. In that moment, Lelouch just felt tired. Spiritually, emotionally, mentally; he was exhausted in every way that mattered for an intellectual, a dead man walking in a child's body knowing what could only be the bleakest possible future for him. At least if he had won in the World of C he could have gone on to stomp out Schneizel and pull off one last grand manipulation, but that fool White Knight had to be disruptive of his plans to the bitter end. Now? Now he didn't know what to do. He knew now that his mother had never been truly dead, had never been worth the effort even if she were so in his opinion, and was by and large undeserving of the adulation he'd viewed her with as a child. A child he no longer was, physiology aside; he'd simply done too much for that sort of thing, now.
There was a knock on the door, and completely forgetting the situation he took charge on reflex, "Enter!"
Thankfully it was Jeremiah rather than someone else of the Villa staff, so the slip of social protocol went by without comment. Then again, most of the rest of the staff were probably unable to work at that moment, dealing with the same troubles as the rest of the world. "Pardon the intrusion, your Grace, your Highness," the guardsman bowed to Marianne and Lelouch in turn, reminding the prince that for everything, Gottwald had only been loyal to him as proxy for his mother. Which was fine, he supposed; all possible outcomes placed Jeremiah out of the way of whatever it was Lelouch decided to do. "But the Emperor has sent word that he will be arriving at the Villa within the hour. If I may be allowed to guess, it has to do with the... strange happenings of the morning."
Lelouch looked over his shoulder, back to the woman who'd birthed and raised him, with a perfectly flat expression that said nothing at all, and in that nothingness said volumes of just how unimpressed this whole ordeal was leaving him. Then he shrugged. "Unless he specifically calls for my execution," the once prince-turned-terrorist said simply, "or somehow thinks trying this Ragnarok thing a second time will work the way he wants it to, then none of this is my problem." The boy turned to who had once been his most fanatically loyal follower, "Jeremiah, do me a favor and see about getting me in touch with the Stadtfelds. Specifically Kallen." It was supremely unlikely his Red Queen had been left out of all the festivities, and unless Lelouch missed his guess it wouldn't be long before she started tearing up Japan looking for answers. After everything she'd done for him in the first round, he figured she deserved to know whatever he could tell her about the clusterfuck that had been events of that timeline.
As the knight-guardsman gave his assent and left for his task, the boy found himself turning back towards his mother. Hesitant, really; he knew now that this woman would never be as true a mother for Nunnally or himself as Sayoko had ultimately become, but... Well, she looked wounded enough by what he'd already said. "... Look," he eventually ground out, "If you and the Emperor abandon this hair-brained 'kill God' scheme and make the effort to actually be parents, be family, I'll be willing to let go of the last timeline. At least, in regards to you two." Scheizel, Suzaku, Ohgi and others had earned themselves much more permanent places on his shit-list, and oh boy would he take the greatest of pleasure in extracting his respective pounds of flesh from them. "It would be nice," he continued, "if we could just be a family this time around."
He turned and left when he saw Marianne's eyes begin to mist over. He didn't need to see her break down, didn't need the weight of that on his conscience to distract him; Lelouch vi Britannia had plans to set... and apologies to make. And probably a hiding or two to endure before properly making amends with two women in particular; thankfully they'd be spaced rather far apart by his calculations.
One of those women, well she was a girl again now but damn it time travel made for complicated semantics, was currently preoccupied giving her own exhaustive tongue-lashing to what was... would be... had once become the inner circle of the Black Knights. Herself included, really, hence her liberal use of the term "we" instead of "you," as she elucidated in fine detail just how utterly foolish they'd all been. Well, except for the segment she'd saved for last regarding a certain meeting on a certain Ikaruga.
"And what the ever-loving hell were you nitwits thinking?! Were you thinking?!" She snarled, surprisingly ferocious for a little girl—then again, all assembled knew what she could grow up to be, and those memories had imprinted a certain reflexive fear instinct in them all. "I wouldn't expect that level of blind stinking idiocy from Tamaki! And yet there we all were, the lot of you somehow buying into a deal offered to you by the chief diplomatic snake of the enemy, not only selling out your commanding officer for a deal you honestly should have known he'd never keep to, but you couldn't even be bothered to think for the eight seconds it would take for simple logic to utterly defeat your primary grievance!" Her jaw set, teeth grinding audibly as she took a breath both to keep her voice from wearing out and to center herself for the final nail in the coffin. "To wit: If Zero were using Geass to command your obedience, how the—" No, can't swear here; would cheapen the point. "... How did you suppose you were able to mutiny in the first place?"
The stunned silence and collective looks of abashed shame were answer enough for her. Really, she had just wanted to get that bugbear off her back, but seeing them actually take her criticism to heart made it both satisfying and cathartic. Ohgi, two-faced craven that he was, somehow found the nerve to speak up first. "Why're you so agitated over all this, Kallen?"
She folded her arms and glared her defiance at him as her initial answer, then sighed when he seemed suitably cowed to actually listen. "Shortly before the Shinkiro appeared to rescue him, Lelouch's last words to me were 'Kallen, you have to live on.' Knowing what I know about him, and about everything that was happening to him at the time, I've come to think that he was trying to save me. From what you idiots were about to do. He knew full well that I'd have followed him straight into Hell if he'd just asked—if he'd just let me. And since I was the only thing he had left at the time, he probably thought he could at least die content in knowing he'd spared me in that moment."
"But he was just using—!"
"And we were using him, Ohgi!" She snapped, "The entire god damn time, we were using him just as he used us! We wanted victory, Zero wanted soldiers. We wanted a free Japan, Zero wanted to strike at Britannia. We wanted to protect the world from the Empire, Zero wanted to wipe the Empire off the face of the earth! The Black Knights were Zero's tools to fight his battles, and Zero was our tool to win ours!" Impulsively, Kallen threw her hands up in a display of annoyance, "And after everything he did for us, did for Japan, and everything we put him through, you all threw him out like a broken toy and practically bent the entirety of the Black Knights—who at the time were the UFN's sole military asset, mind you—over the table for Prince Scheizel to dismantle, on the basis of an utterly empty promise. If the tables had been turned, if Zero had abandoned the Black Knights for a place back in the royal family, you would probably all be booking flights to try and take shots at Lelouch in some hair-brained scheme of meaningless revenge. The fact there hasn't been an advance on the Second Pacific War or something else done to ensure all of us are dead says a lot about who has the moral high ground here."
That seemed to shut them up awfully quick. Which she was grateful for, as she seemed to finally be running out of steam for the blistering outrage machine; now all she had left was a colder form of malice and distrust. Even if events conspired in the same direction, it was unlikely she'd associate with them any more than she had to to make contact with Zero. Even if Lelouch didn't have these memories of the first time around, she decided in that moment that she'd just give him new ones. Better ones, hopefully; memories that would let her save him from that unrelenting despair she'd heard in his final words to her.
And to that end, she needed to make contact with some other key players, starting with a certain Prime Minister's brat.
Charles got an inkling of how deep in the shit he might be when he saw Marianne, fresh from crying and clearly distraught in some fashion. His first guess was that Lelouch had, in fact, joined them all in the trip to the past and given the nearest target a very thorough deconstructing; he turned out to be right in that it happened, but wrong in thinking that was what had torn up his one true love so much.
"Family?" He said quietly, more confused than anything else. Was that not what they were already, tied by blood as they were? Sure, he'd never been very involved in any of his children's lives on a personal level, but he was still their father. But as he thought that through, he came to wonder if maybe that was Lelouch's entire point; his grievance in the World of C was being abandoned, nothing to do with bonds of blood. If anything, being related to Charles by blood had agitated the boy, if his disavowal of any claim to the throne prior to his exile had been any indication. "Family." He said again, still quietly but with a bit more surety, as if tasting the word on his lips. With the Ragnarok Connection most likely defunct, all his long years of planning going up in smoke with it, the Emperor was rather at a loss for a grand driving purpose in life. He would still pursue the Sword of Akasha if anything conclusive came up to assure the intended result, but between then and now there was a whole lot of nothing for him to do with his career or his country. Maybe he could give this "family" thing a shot in the interim, get to know his many children. He might even be able to get them to help, that way.
He was drawn from his musing by a hand laid over his arm. His Empress', his favorite bride's hand, and he found himself looking into her eyes usually so filled with ardent passion and vigor, now misty with tears and red with raw emotion in a show of weakness and vulnerability that was so unlike Marianne he wondered if this was even her still. "Charles," she said thinly, "maybe... Maybe this is a message. A peace offering from God. Let us try again and live good lives, so that we don't need Ragnarok." He balked at that. They'd dedicated years of their lives to the project, made so many sacrifices and drowned so much of the world in abject misery; started wars and ordered the slaughter of billions for Ragnarok, and...
And it had been undone. So much of that work, of all their sins and injustices and mistakes made for the sake of that grand ideal, washed away more-or-less. Not a clean slate, not with most of all the world remembering, but a chance to... what? Make amends and be better?
"I..." He faltered. The Emperor did not falter, but here Charles zi Britannia did as a man without direction. "... I don't know what we should do, Marianne. After... after so long in pursuit of this, I..."
"I know," she told him softly, drawing him into her embrace as she so often had before, "but it's not just us anymore. At least, it doesn't have to be." He blinked.
Family.
Notes:
Well, that was a turnout and a half for one chapter. Got me pretty motivated to continue, too!
I don't actually have a grand scheme for this story; just an idea that jumped into my head that I wanted to explore the ramifications of. If anyone has plot threads they'd like to see woven, my ears are open.
The takedown diatribes might be a bit much, but they're how I feel the characters would respond if given a neutral-or-better ground on which to argue the point. Very incensed, annoyed and thoroughly-reasoned, and probably what a lot of fans think or feel. I know Kallen's falls under that last one; it's in part inspired by things like The Whiskey Revolution. Which is fucking hilarious, by the way, even if it's dead as can be.
Also, this is totally unintentional but I just noticed this story's title can be shorthanded as R3. So I'm going to stick with that for my draft titles.
Reviews:
Xlerons: My thanks! There's a lot of time-travel in CG fan-fiction, but I can think of very few that go back farther than the Shinjuku Incident. I'd love to see more stories take this kind of approach, where an existentially tired and jaded Lelouch gets a chance to keep his family life from going to hell and thwart the impetus for the entire canon plotline while using his intellect and foreknowledge to do pretty much as he pleases.
McDucky: Well, ask and you shall receive!
Gur40goku: Well, Kallen and Suzaku were both members of what were formal military outfits by the end of the last timeline, and Kallen is widely considered one of the smartest people in the core cast when you discount the intellectual juggernauts she's surrounded by.
Titanfire999: Sorry to disappoint, but there are no breaks on this crazy train.
Patjeeson: Honestly I'm pretty sure Lelouch never truly forgave Suzaku in canon, and as this chapter has told you that particular best friend is in for a whole world of pain if he ever crosses Lelouch's path, but for the most part Lelouch won't actively hunt him down. He just doesn't give enough of a fuck at this point; maybe later.