The fate of the clock was still undecided.
On the way back to his office, hauling four sets of files and ledgers that needed his seal of approval, Suzaku knew he should be focused on the monstrous workload that dogged him. Even barring that, there were other, more pressing problems haunting his steps. Nunnally had successfully sealed the trade deal she'd been haggling over when Aurora came to visit, but now reports of violence burgeoning on the eastern edges of the EU were setting the world on edge, local leaders scrambling to silence the discord before the attention of heavier powers were drawn in tightly enough to intervene.
Still, though. Suzaku found his attention unwieldy and undisciplined, traits that would have earned him the strictest of punishments from any one of the teachers who irrevocably molded him over the years. It embarrassed him that he wasn't concentrating on the more pressing details of his myriad responsibilities, not to the brutal standard he held himself to. But every time Suzaku tried to find some sort of administrative rhythm to tackle the mountain that always awaited him, that damn clock distracted him again.
His feelings towards the ornament contained considerably less vitriol than they had nearly a week ago, but still. Didn't mean he wanted the thing. Did he hate it enough to banish, even kill it? And why exactly was he so tangled up over something that, if he was to be candid, wasn't even Suzaku's to begin with? Then again, the clock was the safest of his distractions – allowing his mind to wander farther afield didn't even bear examination.
He opened his office door with not inconsiderable reluctance, narrowing his eyes at that silly little silver box as if waiting for it to spring at him with a snarl. But it sat passive, studiously ticking away, and Suzaku's eyes slid to something on his desk that had not been there when he'd left. A flush of awareness prickled over him, and he stalked closer, immediately put on alert by something happening in his domain without his permission or control. Perhaps that's what irked Suzaku so much about the clock, a part of his brain pondered, even as he cautiously rounded his desk, moving abruptly faster when he caught sight of the note paper-clipped to a document folder thick as a brick.
Still working on our main objective. However, I remembered that you asked for this when you first returned. It's all I've got, and should make for an entertaining read. Happy hunting, if you're so inclined. She would certainly be a worthy target. Shame all the signs point to her being dead. If you're not the superstitious sort.
-Havens
Unwinding the cord that bound the thick folder shut, Suzaku extracted its contents, a dense sheaf of pictures, documents, news clippings, and social media screenshots. Slowly spreading them over his desk, it became very apparent, very quickly that Havens had provided Suzaku with an oblique, yet extensive, documentation of the career of one Rory Seven. Picking up one of the news clippings, a society article detailing a ball held by Duke Leveras some five years ago, he peered at the grainy, black and white photograph. She was just another face in a glittering crowd, but Suzaku would have recognized that curve of the jaw and that sweep of the cheekbone anywhere – Aurora stood to the side, stunning in a tight-fitting ballgown, her hair in a severe, yet elegant gather atop her head, a ruby choker three fingers wide sparkling around her throat.
Somehow, she managed to look both older and younger than the version he'd come to know so well; since he was familiar with Aurora as an adult, Suzaku could make out the hints of her adolescence on her face and frame in the picture. But there was something in the eyes. They betrayed the calculating sweep of a raptor watching the watering hole, ready and waiting for the first splatter of blood to leap into action. This was an Aurora who had been made jaded and, since it was an expression he recognized instantly as one that he often saw in the mirror, haunted.
The photograph was taken, no doubt, after the death of George Hampden. Nothing, he knew, carved up a person's heart like loss, and, masked though it may have been, Suzaku could see it in her. Had she met her doomed Russian lover yet? Had she'd fallen under the spell of a life lived in duality, of greedily grabbing what you could with both hands even as your mission and duty demanded you let it go, then viciously ripped it away regardless? Suzaku silently shook his head at the small, hissing curl of jealousy that flamed within, letting it just as quickly die in a cold, dark vacuum. It was replaced by an aching empathy he could rarely afford to indulge; Nikolai may have been a criminal, but he'd been important to Aurora, had found a place within her countless layers of armor. And her greater cause had claimed her relationship with him, much as Suzaku's greater cause had claimed all that made him human and good.
His curiosity unabated, Suzaku set down the clipping, then began to work his way through the reams of paper. A small bump caught his attention, and Suzaku unearthed a flash drive. Setting that aside for later, he dived into the pictures.
Some were the jittery, poorly focused shots captured by a phone. Others were clearly done by someone used to stalking elusive targets, and capturing them clearly on film. Either way, here Suzaku found a disjointed chronicle of approximately eight years of Aurora's life. In one, Aurora sat at the table of a run-down diner, munching lazily on a French fry while she listened to the man across from her as he gestured effusively. He was, if Suzaku were to hazard a guess, George Hampden, speaking to his apprentice who couldn't have been more than thirteen years old in this shot.
Whatever image he'd conjured in his head when Aurora had spoken of him, he'd never pictured the man this… homely. The closest thing Aurora had to a father was no taller than her, even at a younger age, with red hair that gleamed like a fox's pelt and a luxurious mustache. His ears and nose were a little large, his eyes, which gleamed like a terrier's, a little small. But there was an energy, a vibrancy, about him that was magnetic; something, absolutely, that he'd bequeathed to his pupil.
He knew Aurora had loved George with whatever she could manage for a father figure; Suzaku couldn't help but wonder if the sentiment had been returned. Had George seen the little blond urchin he groomed into a shark of the pearliest waters as something of a daughter?
Another picture captured them together again, this time at what appeared to be a polo match. Aurora sat in a lovely sundress of the palest pastel pink, her navy blazer echoing the satin ribbon that tamed her waving fall of umber hair back. George stood behind her, smart and dapper in a cream linen suit, hand resting lightly on her shoulder. Aurora was just beginning to look back at him from whatever action had occupied her on the field, but the look on George's face was apparent, unwatched as he'd thought he was. He'd cared for Aurora, allowing an expression Suzaku had never seen on his own father's face to manifest before Aurora could see it.
But not all of it had been elegant dinner parties and loving interactions with George.
Finally, he sat in his desk chair, and Suzaku took a moment to remove his mask and set it aside, wanting to be certain of exactly what he saw. Because when he loaded the flash drive and opened a folder at random, he found reams of police reports. Nothing so official as an arrest record, of course; Aurora had never been so careless as to get caught.
But the details regarding the break-in at a security firm, where one hundred seventy-four terabytes of sensitive client data had been spirited away, were linked to the society write-up of a soiree that had counted Rory Seven amongst its attendants. And while her presence was noted both before and after the break-in, handwritten notes in the margins of the scanned report confirmed that no one could account for her whereabouts during the time of the theft. However, further investigation had met a resounding brick wall, and dissolved entirely when two days later, a newspaper article detailed how the chief of police at the time was forced to resign amidst a cloud of scandal when proof of his soliciting paid sex from a male minor came to light. The security firm targeted had also quickly folded, the one-two punch of the break-in and the revelation that they'd been hiding the chief's sordid affairs impossible to recover from.
Aurora had worn a sparkling sheath of emerald green that night, and, peering at photos taken during the latter half of the event, Suzaku thought he could make out the mar of a bruise running from knee to hip on her left leg, revealed by the high slit of the dress's skirt as she descended a marble staircase when he zoomed in. Something, he knew, one might garner while dodging high-class security systems. Something about the pictures snagged at the fabric of his memories, and it took a moment for Suzaku to puzzle out what it was. The flaming drip of diamonds around Aurora's throat was familiar – it was the same necklace she'd apparently dug out of some secreted spot and worn to meet her half-sister who, a decade after their parting, wore a crown and wielded the scepter of an empire.
It was strange, Suzaku reflected as he continued to scroll through pages detailing the search for a missing witness after a deadly shoot-out, and the collapse of a powerful stocks trading company following the suspicious death of a whistleblower. To see the fragments of the Aurora he knew in these pages, and so many that he couldn't begin to recognize. To be fair, though, how many people would be able to reconcile the person he'd been before Lelouch, or even during Lelouch, to the man he was now? It seemed like each new artifact he discovered pointed to some small dividing linein Aurora's life, building to the massive ones that had sundered everything into Before and After.
The small beep from his comm link dragged Suzaku's attention away from the gripping details of Aurora's career, and he glanced at the clock on his desk with a wince. He was meant to be meeting with Nunnally in the Silver Parlor right now to discuss details regarding humanitarian relief needed by the recently hurricane-ravaged counties to the southeast.
Removing the flash drive and enabling the short-term memory wipe on his computer, Suzaku gathered up all the photos and documents, tucking them back into the folder and storing them in the small safe secreted in the bottom right drawer of his desk. It housed the more sensitive documents that lived in Suzaku's office, and since the moorings of the desk were rooted in the concrete of the floor, the only way to extract them was to use explosives – unwise when trying to remove paper.
One photo, though, slightly askance from the rest, small and a little tattered, fluttered free, and as he scrambled to tuck the massive folder into the safe and gather up the documents he needed for his meeting with Nunnally, Suzaku blindly reached for the rogue picture. Once everything was secured, he stood, reaching for his mask as he glanced at the photograph. The image, though, had him freezing, a fist closing over his heart with a single, brutal clench.
It was innocent and simple enough; Aurora had her hand hooked high around a flag pole, leaning away from it at a jaunty angle, balanced on one black pump, the other tucked back. Her free hand rested on her hip, and she beamed a laughing smile at something that caught her attention to the right. It was a pose full of sass and fun, and just a little freedom. Her hair was shorter than he'd ever seen it, ending in smooth, polished waves at her shoulders, not a strand loose or out of place. The mid-length checkered skirt and snappy black blouse she wore paired with a dashing ascot in bold red that matched the paint on her lips and a thick black belt were clothes from another time – how and why she came to wear an outfit that, while flattering and stylish, was patently something from sixty years ago, Suzaku could only begin to guess. Although, if he remembered correctly, she'd favored that style even in Ireland. When Aurora forewent the casual, she leaned heavily into vintage territory.
And while he'd seen her beautiful, lethal, bright, powerful, young, and gentle in all these pictures, this was the only photo in the entire monstrous dossier that showed Aurora happy. Moving on an impulse he didn't dare examine, Suzaku tucked the picture into his left breast pocket, resolving to secret it away with the trio Chandler had gifted him with during the Andrews's last visit. It was so little and innocuous, he doubted Havens would notice, or mind if he did.
Still blindly blinking his way around the aftershocks of the picture he could see in his mind's eye, Suzaku was careless when he replaced his mask. As it slid shut around his skull, it snagged hair at the base of his head, a wicked pinch that had Suzaku quietly cursing even as his eyes watered, hurriedly reaching up to dislodge the hair with the least possible damage. Aurora had cut his hair not dissimilarly to how he'd worn it during his school days; it was only now that he remembered the way he'd hacked it off not long after he first started wearing the mask on a regular basis, the longer strands at the bottom catching in the panels often. From then on, his hair was simply a nuisance to be tamed, with zero regard to looks or style. When it grew long enough to become annoying, he took unskilled scissors to it, resulting in an appearance that did little to diminish the suspicion that he was insane. That was, of course, until Aurora – his nerves at her insistence on a haircut had been more reflexive than anything else. After all, she couldn't do much worse than he'd done himself, and, in fact, far exceeded Suzaku's expectations. He'd have to do something about it now, but couldn't quite bring himself to destroy her good work with his own clumsy corrections.
There was, however, someone he could trust to see to his hair without sheering him like a poorly behaved sheep. As he left his office, Suzaku made a note to visit the labs in the southern quarter of the city; he needed to pay Cecile a visit.
Night had fallen into a thick blanket of fog, muffling the sound of the city into a suggestion of itself. Exhausted, sore, and entertaining serious fantasies about the newly washed sheets on her bed after an exceedingly long day caring for her wounded dog, Aurora was just heaving a trash bag into the dumpster when a slip of shadow sent a frisson of instinct down her spine. Without questioning it, she recoiled and tensed, hand reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. It was only a moment, though, before she recognized the figure and reluctantly relaxed.
"You're lucky I don't have a gun on me," she drawled, noting that her ex looked frustratingly well. She wasn't above such pettiness, she could freely admit. Durai Kapoor shrugged, lean and rugged in a battered bomber jacket and military cargos.
"I'm surprised, you usually do."
Aurora swung her tail of hair over a shoulder, his pleasant voice and handsome accent irritating her on principle.
"Not to take out the garbage. What do you want, Durai?" She wasn't exactly keen on encouraging further conversation, hence why her manners were this side of foul.
He stepped closer, muted light shifting over high, broad cheekbones and russet skin. His ink black hair was shorter than she remembered, something more akin to his current clothing. It was his expression, though, that was the biggest change of all. It was startlingly serious, nearly pleading.
"I wanted to talk to you. Maybe we could go out for drinks?"
Unprecedented changes in her second lover aside, Aurora had become immune to Durai's version of negotiation a long time ago.
"You know I don't drink. And we have nothing left to talk about." If her tone was any flatter, it would have been concave. But before Aurora could so much as shift her feet to return home, Durai stepped even closer, a sense of urgency now in those dark brown eyes.
"You owe me that much."
She should have turned on her heel and stalked away then and there. But insult reared its head at the sheer audacity, arching brows gone flat with remembered bitterness, lending a gleam of eye teeth to her rejoinder.
"Trust me, Durai. If there's a debt left between us, it's because you owe me for putting up with your egotistical bullshit.
Durai wilted a little at that, his voice going quiet as he tucked his hands into the pockets of his jacket.
"It's important, Aura. Please."
Aurora paused for a moment, calling herself variations of "sentimental idiot" in several different languages in her head. After all, it was just a goddamn nickname. And it didn't matter in the long run that the bastard had hardly ever uttered the word "please" in the entirety of their stormy relationship. So it shouldn't matter that he said it now.
Eventually, though, she strode to the back door of the clinic, cracked open the back door, and yelled out a sentence before slamming it shut and trotting back.
"Let's go. You're not going to want to stick around to see how Chandler feels about your return."
Durai cocked his head, comically confused.
"What'd I ever do to the senator?"
Leading the way to her Jeep, Aurora stared at Durai for a moment before releasing a disgusted snort and shaking her head.
"Jesus, you're dense," Aurora snapped, continuing before he had a chance to respond. "Well, let's get this over with."
She drove them to a small place in neutral territory called the Tuxedo Pub. No one would look at her askance if she ordered something nonalcoholic, mostly because she'd help stitch up more than a few patrons after they'd had entirely too much of something alcoholic. After waving off a few requests to hammer on the battered piano in the corner – which, to be fair, she'd set a precedent for in the past – Aurora found herself seated across from her ex-boyfriend, sipping a ginger ale like a child, waiting to be told something important.
Durai, of course, was hardly forthcoming, awkwardly quiet and sipping on pale ale before dragging up his weak version of an opener.
"You look good, Aura."
Tiredly, Aurora just rolled her eyes and scoffed.
"Oh, go fuck yourself, Durai. Flattery will get you nowhere, especially fake flattery. I know I look like garbage; I've been sleeping like crap for nearly a week." There was absolutely no reason to tell him about Ban, about Suzaku, about anything. "Get to the point."
He cleared his throat, and finally did just that.
"Alright. You know about the unrest cropping up out east?"
Aurora just shrugged, already mentally three steps ahead, trying to determine what Durai's angle in this could be.
"Sure. Shabti Uldavai led a coup against the local royal family, and nearly toppled the whole thing before they rallied, and now it's a stalemate. Why?"
"There's a situation developing, and I need your help to resolve it."
For an international, impartial investigative reporter, that was… odd.
"I don't do diplomacy, Durai. Besides, there's a slew of committees and alliances and treaty organizations who deal with that kind of stuff. What do you want me to do?"
He met Aurora's gaze with an intensity she hadn't expected, but began to remember.
"I know you're not a diplomat, but you do have a skill set that could prove vital."
She felt a brow quirk, unease now moving beyond a simple whisper to a cramping stir in her gut. Irritating vagueness had become ominous. Aurora bit out words that tasted like ash.
"Elaborate, or this reunion is over."
Durai took another sip of mediocre beer before heaving his breath and finally finding his way to some level of honesty.
"Fine. Shabti, the leader of the resistance, has been taken captive by the royalists, and I need your help freeing her."
A long silence followed, where Aurora could do nothing but stare at the man she'd shared her time and her anger and her body with, but nothing of her actual heart or pain.
"Yeah, you definitely asked the wrong person out for drinks. Shame Chandler hates your guts; otherwise he'd be much more helpful with this crusade of yours."
He actually bristled a little at that. Durai had always taken poorly to accusations of righteousness, self or otherwise. Aurora always suspected it was a symptom of the gentleman doth protesting too much.
"It's not a crusade," he spat out.
Aurora just glared at him balefully over the rim of her glass as she raised it to take a sip of slightly warm ginger ale.
"The hell it isn't. Since when do you get so invested in a story? As I recall, you like to travel light and tight."
Heavy, dark brows dove down into a scowl, and Aurora sighed internally, at both of them. In regards to keeping this conversation as short as possible, that had been the wrong comment to make. Almost like this argument was more of a compulsion than anything else at this point.
"Don't say it like you're not the same," Durai snapped with appreciable venom.
Spinning her glass in the ring of its condensation, Aurora sat back, trying to let the old vitriol wash over, then through her, before letting it drain away.
"I'm not. Not anymore. We made our choices, Durai. You chose the story; I chose to stay. I know the search for stability is anathema for you, but I still can't believe you're dragging all this up for the sake of some delusion of grandeur you've concocted."
The sneer that moved over Durai's face was as familiar as his scowl. Part of their incompatibility came from the fact that Aurora could see some of the worst aspects of herself reflected in Durai – mostly that they both had nasty, sneaky tempers and could be snobbish twats. It had been part of the initial attraction, and inevitably the comorbidity of their relationship.
"Condescension doesn't suit you, Aurora. If the resistance folds, then the royalists, who are backed by the Chinese Federation, are undoubtedly gearing up to start some shit that won't benefit anyone. Not even you, tucked away in your little hidey-hole here at the edge of the world." Durai had always hated England, hated how its provincial nature constricted his dreams. It was part of the reason why he couldn't wrap his head around Aurora choosing to stay. And even in her prime, these kinds of global stages had been above Aurora's pay-grade.
"Is that supposed to scare me, Durai?"
He growled under his breath. "Yes, goddamnit. It should scare everyone."
"And what makes you so special, charged with contracting the cavalry?"
For the first time since he'd emerged from the shadows like some awkward bad dream, something… soft, and inward, and real moved in his eyes.
"I've… been speaking with Shabti for some time."
Ah, there it was. Comprehension dawned.
"Speaking, or fucking?"
He may have met Aurora's eyes with zero hesitation and a cool collection, but even the crappy lighting of the Tuxedo Pub couldn't hide the stain of color across Durai's cheekbones.
"You forfeited the right to allow that to matter a long time ago." His arrogant, and accurate, response made Aurora's teeth grind.
"You idiot," she hissed. "Literally the only reason I'm still sitting here is because we were together, once. That kind of emotion changes everything – of course it matters. It makes you sloppy."
He angled his head, slanting a gaze at her that was miles from complimentary.
"Or ice cold."
Because there was a nugget of truth in there that stung, Aurora felt the whiplash of her temper sizzle out of hand.
"You seemed chilly enough when you walked away," she sniped back. Instead of rising to the bait, though, Durai turned regal, wearing his martyrdom like Gucci.
"I wanted you at my side."
Aurora sighed before pushing her prop of a drink to the side and folding her hands on the vaguely sticky table.
"Let's clear this up now, because apparently your memory has been fogged by the mists of time. Our relationship was going to end one of two ways; either the moment I had the balls to say we were done, or about two months later when we simultaneously shredded it to bloody pieces. We weren't going to last, Durai." Aurora swallowed the chunk of pride in her throat, struggling to reach for a little bit of grace. Somehow, it had seemed easier not too long ago. "Maybe this… thing with Shabti can."
His eyes became shadowed, and Aurora felt a shiver of premonition along her spine.
"Not if she dies."
"Fuck, they're going to execute her?"
He shook his head, the clench to his jaw something that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with devotion.
"I have to get her out before they commit to it. She's too much of a threat to keep alive, and they'll figure that out quickly enough. Please, Aura. If not for me, then for the world's balance of power."
This sigh was gusty, loosed more at herself than anything else.
"Even if I said yes, which I haven't, what makes you think I'm a suitable consult for a prison break, of all things?"
Clear-eyed, Durai finally looked at Aurora for her current merit, not their past muck of a relationship.
"Because you're the only person I know with the ability who hasn't already chosen a side. You're too remote to have declared sympathies, which I why I can trust you."
"There has to be a better way to do this."
He shook his head.
"Not one that's quick enough to get to her in time. Please, Aura. For the sake of what we once were together, and the futures we could have apart."
A little heavy handed of a plea, but not ineffective. Aurora looked at Durai for a long time before looking away, staring unseeingly out into the smoky confines of the pub. She thought about the past, and the future. She thought about Suzaku – how he made her a better person, simply by being who he was. The way the bone of her character strengthened and grew from the muscular pull of his influence. How she knew what choice he would make in this moment – how she wanted to make a choice she could be proud of herself for. Finally, she spoke without turning to look at Durai.
"You better hope to any deity willing to watch your sorry ass that you never see Chandler again. Because he will rip you limb from limb the next time you cross paths. And Kendra will probably help him."
"Because you'll help." Durai did a poor job of hiding the elated relief in his quiet voice.
Aurora glanced back at him and heaved a sigh tacky with resignation.
"Because I'll help. We leave in the morning." As she stood, he reached out a hand, not quite touching but making her pause and meet his gaze.
"Thank you, Aura." He may be an idiot, but at least he was sincere. Aurora just shook her head.
"You can thank me by leaving me the hell alone after this." With that, she walked out of the pub, leaving Durai to figure out his own way back to wherever he was saying. Aurora needed all the room in the Jeep she could get to try and work out some way to convince Kendra and Chandler that she hadn't taken complete and utter leave of her senses. That this wasn't about Durai, not really – that this was about her, and her own tattered sense of honor.
As she wound through the lacy fog, exhaustion ground over skin gone tender with memory like sandpaper, and Aurora threw a glance at the Jeep's clock. Unflinching green numbers blinked back, and as she rumbled to a stop outside the clinic, she thunked her head against the steering wheel. Clocks, unfortunately, didn't lie, and this unpleasant conversation was going to be that much more taxing in the bedrock of the Circadian rhythm. Reason was rare after two a.m.
She hated worrying them. The guilt was starting to eat at her like acid. In the end, though, she had an uncomfortable feeling that this had to be done. And for a woman that held all the chits, having even a species of her own called in was not to be borne.
When this was over, her slate would be cleared, and Durai Kapoor would be erased from her ledger, forever.
With a twist of the key, that damning green clock disappeared, and Aurora entered the complicated warmth of home.
*Dr. Frankenstein voice* IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!
Hi guys. So much to say, so little time, so we'll keep it brief.
No, this fic is not dead. It was in deep hibernation, a cryostasis, as it were, and will be going back there for at least the next few months. I'm starting my last semester of nursing school, so I won't realistically be able to work on the next chapter until summer at the absolute earliest.
Phoenix is about 2/3rd's of the way done, and I have every intention of finishing it. Someday. If the fic is ever forever dead, it's because I'm dead. Truly.
The support, as always, has been amazing, and I've had some astonishing reviewers come out of the woodwork recently. Know that I read every review, and when I was drowning in exams and clinicals, your kind words and love for this story made me cry genuine tears of love and joy. You all are, truly, the best.
If you've stuck around this long, you're an OG. If you're new, welcome to the circus.
And, as always,
Hope you like it!
Love, Tango