Chapter Text
There was a difference between knowing and knowing.
Consider: Suzaku knew Zero's identity the moment the mask saved his life, but he did not know Zero's identity until the moment the mask cracked open.
Suzaku knew the Emperor would destroy Lelouch in some cruel and irreversible way. But he didn't know that Lelouch was gone forever until the Emperor held up the sigil etched on his hand and said, well, I suppose we will need to find a more permanent use for him, as there can be no further alterations.
Strasbourg was an odd place for the apocalypse to begin. Perfectly-trimmed flowering hedges lined the banks of the Rhine, kept alive by the unusual warmth of the year's early fall. The city's storied Gothic cathedrals still drew worshipers every Sunday, their stonework spotless and remarkable save for the holes blasted into it by Prince Schneizel's artillery.
Until recently, the city had been one of the ten cultural capitals of the EU. Until recently, its people had been kept safe from the fighting that plagued Europe's borders far to the east and west, until Britannia decided to launch a precision strike aimed at staking the heart of the union. Until recently, it had yet to suffer the presence of the worst person in the world.
But Strasbourg seemed cursed with bad luck as of late, which meant that it shared something in common with Suzaku, and this gave him a sympathetic appreciation for the city that he had been sent to destroy.
There was no open fighting in the city. The warfare was a quieter sort: twenty of Europe's leaders had organized a clandestine meeting within the city's finest cathedral, traveling by train and by car from territories throughout the region, half of them now under Britannian control. The EU's army and government had been pushed out of half of its territory in the span of ten years, France being its most devastating loss. Britannia's centuries-long dream of retaking the islands that were its namesake and lost motherland was close at hand, now that the Royal Navy was choking Britain from both the Atlantic and the Channel. Every day the media sounded the drumbeats louder, telling the people of the Holy Empire that the reclamation of their land was months, weeks, days away. Families that had left for the New World centuries ago excitedly made plans to claim a piece of England for themselves, dreaming of moving into their ancestor's humble homes, transforming their ancestral villages into places of prosperity and progress—regardless of what the people currently living there had to say about it.
And so there could be no delays on the road to conquest. If the Europeans were planning a move, then they would need to be struck down before they could so much as take a step out of the cathedral. But there was no need to resort to violence when Britannia had more elegant, diplomatic solutions available.
Suzaku and his charge, the most honorable strategist operating under the alias of Lord Julius Kingsley, were the only individuals involved in the day's operation. They sat in the tiny café outside of their hotel, enjoying chocolate croissants and coffee served while plotting the permanent subjugation of the city's people. Lord Kingsley had done the ordering, as was his wont; his French and German were both pristine, betraying a childhood learning the primary languages of the continent that Britannia no longer called home but still called theirs. As far as their kind waitress could tell, Julius was merely a handsome stranger from somewhere closer to Paris. His companion, quiet save for the occasional and strangely-accented hallo, was either his exotic bedmate or his foreign roommate. In either case the pair drew little attention.
The two of them were both in casual dress. Suzaku was, at least; he wore his standard jeans and old sneakers, which now felt like more of a uniform than his flight suit ever had. But Julius, like the dead man who shared his face, could not look like a typical teenager if he tried. Even wearing nondescript clothing, he still gave off the impression of a model, or an art student, or at least someone quite far up his own ass. Were they anywhere but Europe, this may have seemed more out-of-place. Happily, though, Lord Kingsley—using the alias-of-an-alias Julien in the hotel's books—fit right in with his surroundings.
Julius beckoned the waitress over once they were finished, shooting an angry glare at Suzaku for the pile of crumbs that had accumulated on the table in front of him. One of the rare pleasant things about their public outings, now that they were working incognito: Julius could not force Suzaku to listen to one of his insufferable rants, as he could not speak English without blowing his cover and Suzaku could not understand French.
That didn't stop Julius from going on such a rant, gesturing at the crumbs and at Suzaku's face and at the confused waitress all the while. Neither an artificial language barrier nor an impending mission nor magical lobotomization could stop Lelouch from being petty.
Suzaku tuned him out, letting the French babbling wash over him like radio static, and kindly handed the waitress their cash.
Café Montmartre was less than a five-minute walk from the cathedral. There were no obvious signs of increased security in the area, no men in dark suits, no cars flying diplomatic flags. It was only natural for their targets to keep a low profile, only natural for them to be wary of trouble. Strange things had been happening to Europe's best and brightest for the past two years. Defections revealed at the worst possible moment, patriots turned traitors, battles turned chaotic hellscapes by entire squadrons firing upon their own men. Few of the turncoats stuck around long enough for questioning or torture; most fled, some were picked up by Britannian agents, and the rest took their own lives.
Britannian bribes paid well, and Europe was losing the war, if it could be called that; conquest was perhaps the more fitting term. The high-ranking traitors who survived were given extensive landholdings in the Britannian homeland, meaningless but pretty-sounding titles, and the praise and adoration of the homeland media. Among their numbers were counted former governors, generals, celebrities, scientists. It was easy to understand why the leaders of Europe were frightened by the possibility that there were moles in their ranks, given the fact that none of them knew that their former colleagues' defections had been the result of a single man with an unusual eye.
Certainly the day's planned activities would not help their paranoia.
The unhappy pair made their way through the pleasantly-paved streets of Strasbourg, the city mildly bustling despite the blitz that had killed scores of their neighbors. There were still couples sitting beneath white awnings, enjoying a quick meal; there were still bicycles pushing past pedestrians, still retail workers dressing mannequins in blazers, still, impossibly, tourists flocking around the vicinity of the cathedral. Britannia's flag fluttered from a pole affixed to the city's storied bridge a half-mile away, the monument claimed and subjugated in the Empire's usual way. And the people of Strasbourg went on with their lives.
Suzaku had been twelve years old when he gathered up the courage to step foot in Tokyo for the first time since his father's death. He had clasped his hands together on the bus ride there, forcing himself to stop shaking, trying to will away his nausea at the thought of being confronted by the consequences of his actions. He had spent the past two years in rural Shizuoka, far away from any bombed-out buildings or mass graves; there were no ghettos in the forested lands near the camp, no colonies built atop ruins. The only Britannians he knew were the camp counselors and teachers, and the only Elevens he regularly interacted with were the other residents of the camp. Their environment was not the happiest place in the world, but it was entirely removed from the changes that had taken place in the country during its first two years of occupation, and Suzaku had dreaded seeing the missing pieces with his own eyes.
Their field trip had brought them to a recruiting office in a solidly upper-class neighborhood on the edge of the new settlement, which was still being constructed in those days. There were few signs of the war, and if that was because the neighborhood had patched up the damage or because they hadn't bothered to fight in the first place, Suzaku didn't know. What he did know was what he saw: people shopping, chatting, workers commuting, children playing, the world continuing to turn even under the enemy's banner.
He'd been invited on that trip by one of the staff officers, who knew that his status as the wide-eyed and optimistic son of Genbu the Last Samurai would prove helpful to Britannia's goal of getting the upper-class youth of Area 11 to sign up for the classes that would put them on the pathway to integration and conditional imperial citizenship. Suzaku would be a carrot dangled in front of his people in an attempt to get them to submit—and, he knew, to slowly strip them of their love for their culture, their fierce national pride, their belief, ingrained from infancy, that death was preferable to dishonor. He had allowed himself to be used as the poisoned chalice because he convinced himself that he had the antidote in his hand. Peace, the answer was peace, servility and obedience until the guard dog stopped baring its fangs. And then, slowly, over the span of years or decades, the dog would allow them to enter their masters' house.
There were children in the ghettos who would never be able to see the possibility of a better future beyond the smog and the suffering. There were grown men in the forests and villages too bitter and too entrenched to give up the fight. It would be Suzaku and these boys and girls, the sons and daughters of the old Japan's upper crust, who would have to lead the way. Once they got the door open, the others could come in after them. Perhaps not right away, but eventually, over the course of generations, the house would have room for them all.
Suzaku had not intended to live long enough to see that day, but he had intended on dying while the possibility still existed. Lelouch had taken both options from him. Area 11 had been pacified in the absence of its patron saint, its remaining resistance forces retreating into hiding, poking out of their caves only for minor and ineffectual attacks on guards and garrisons. But its people had seen the true faces of their occupiers when the order for slaughter rippled out from the stadium like a shockwave, and they would never try to make friends with the guard dog again.
It was Lelouch's fault that the door to the house would forever remain closed, but it was Suzaku's fault that the masters had moved into the house in the first place, and so it was his responsibility to find another entrance and usher his people inside. And that required some less-than-savory busywork on behalf of the landlord. The road to Damascus passed through a number of ruins and soon-to-be-ruins: Paris, the Balkans, the Alps, the front line pushing eastwards through Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary. The miserable winters of Eastern Europe awaited him further into the pages of his calendar, and Suzaku maintained his sanity by telling himself that at least he would be able to fight there. He was a glorified babysitter on this tedious trip to Strasbourg, here to ensure that no harm came to his charge and that his charge inflicted as little harm on his surroundings as possible. Julius was the star of the show here, and unfortunately for everyone involved, he liked to shine.
There was always something anticlimactic about the middle portion of Julius' plans. The strategist delighted in the payoff of his long setup, of seeing the pieces fall into place. The deranged grin that spread across his face was a familiar constant after years of the same routine. But Suzaku had quickly grown bored of the song and dance once he'd numbed himself to the horror of the visible destruction of free will. Julius walked past the plainclothes guard they'd marked earlier in the day, flashing him the hand signal that served to rewire the man's brain, and Suzaku felt nothing.
The dominoes fell quietly. It was imperative, the Emperor's men had insisted, that the operation was a quiet one. This instruction had been delivered face-to-face, with Julius scowling and rolling his eyes at the implication. When he and Suzaku had last worked together on such a sabotage mission, the end result had included exploding boxes of munitions, Suzaku blacked out and fistfighting men armed with machine guns, and Julius cackling over the roar of the fire. It was made clear to the both of them that there was to be nothing that could directly implicate the two of them in Strasbourg. In and out, three weeks of tedious observations and mid-afternoon plannings, ending with today's meeting.
Even in his brainwashed state, though, Lelouch had trouble obeying his father's orders. Suzaku followed him from a careful distance, and he followed the guard, and the clock ticked towards the inevitable fireworks.
The guard stopped in his tracks and subtly pointed to their right, his eyes glassy and devoid of emotion. There, exiting a nearby gift shop, a group of elderly and middle-aged men dressed as tourists walked towards the looming facade of the church. They were steely and unafraid, or at least trying to be, and that was admirable. It was stupid, too; their faces were devoid of the wonder or confusion that jolly travelers should have displayed while passing under the shadow of one of the continent's most storied landmarks. And their perfectly-groomed hair and stiff backs were likely unremarkable to the busy passersby, but even Suzaku saw through the act, saw the ghost of his father in them. All politicians held themselves in the same way, unwilling to make themselves look soft even when it would benefit them most.
Julius gave his unwilling helper a pat on the back and flashed the hand signal again, and wordlessly the guard turned around and returned to his post. Their new pack of targets continued their march towards the cathedral. Every few moments one of the men at the back of the group glanced around at the surroundings, either to ensure that they weren't being tailed or to give a performative impression of a tourist. His companions stared straight ahead of them and walked in near-lockstep. The one who strayed from the herd was always the easiest target.
There wasn't much to the party trick. Julius was walking around, map in hand, looking appropriately befuddled by his surroundings. His path happened to intersect with that of the lone non-tourist, and Julius looked up in mock-surprise as the two nearly collided. Suzaku leaned against the wall, blank-faced and arms folded, as he watched Julius brush his eyes as though he were removing an eyelash. Then some unintelligible German words were exchanged, a small item was traded, and Julius thanked the man and sent him on his way. The man's group of grim-faced colleagues turned around and realized that they were short a member. One or two of their faces showed visible panic before it was smothered into cautious neutrality, the tension dissipating as their comrade waved Julius adieu and continued on his way. The entire exchange took less than forty seconds.
Looking entirely too pleased with himself, Julius trotted up to Suzaku's sulking spot, extending his arm and cooing something in French that was doubtlessly obnoxious. He continued to hold his hand out to his beloved bodyguard, blinking at him sweetly, contact firmly back in place. Suppressing a scream, Suzaku linked their arms together and dragged the lunatic along.
The Frauenhausmuseum was located directly behind the cathedral, allowing the two of them to look at unsettling medieval sculptures as they waited for the signal to be sent. Fewer tourists visited the museum, which was overshadowed quite literally by its more-famous neighbor, but there were still a smattering of young men in backpacks and tired-looking couples with small children in strollers wandering through its halls. If there were employees beyond the ticket-checker at the entrance, Suzaku could not identify them.
All items in the museum's collection sat above small placards bearing French and German descriptions. Paper index cards, evidently recent additions, had been added with English translations. Suzaku squinted at the nearest one, the lighting casting odd shadows on it: The effigy displays an anonymous knight, one figure from a larger scene, the rest of the sculptures now lost... while the effigy's eyes appear to be missing, it seems the knight never had eyes in the first place.
The knight stared out at him, shadows filling the empty spots where its eyes should have been. He looked away from it, uneasy and nauseous.
"You have never been a cultured man," Julius said, coming to stand beside him. He tried to link their arms once more, but he backed off once he proved unable to dislodge Suzaku's arms from his side. "Though I do believe flinching away from art is a new phenomenon for you. Is it the subject matter that makes you uncomfortable? Is it too blunt of a metaphor? Hm. I must add this to my Sir Kururugi's Psychological Profile folder."
"It is unwise to abandon your cover so easily, my lord." Suzaku refused to take a step back, despite Julius invading his personal space; he would not allow Kingsley's eyes to light up at the thrill of forcing the knight to cede ground. "There might be surveillance equipment in this room."
"There is not. I politely asked the woman at the front desk to show me the museum's surveillance equipment while you were having an existential crisis. It's a single ancient monitor showing grainy videos from six feeds, none of which have audio and none of which are in this room." He turned on his heel, examining two female statues labeled Ecclesia et Synagoga. The blindfold over Synagoga's eyes represents willful ignorance, read the English text, and the broken lance, defeat. "It is quite too late for them to employ preventative measures, in any case. The grand finale will begin in under ten minutes. Please resolve your self-esteem issues before then."
Julius made his way around the perimeter of the room, examining each statue and commenting upon their quality and symbolism. Suzaku said nothing in response, and stared unblinking at the broken lance until his eyes went dry.
Two minutes before Kingsley's latest circus was set to commence, Suzaku and Julius made their way back to the entrance of the museum, walking past the blank-faced receptionist who looked at them without interest. Suzaku stared at the enormous clock that decorated the rear facade of the cathedral, its minute hand counting down towards the doom of everyone inside. His eyes traveled upwards, towards the triangle that stood between the two towers; the ghost of another clock was engraved there, a sundial rendered useless by a broken gnomon and bullet holes. If Julius noticed it, he would have babbled on about metaphors and art and fate. But the strategist was preoccupied with other matters and stared intently at the circular windows between the two clocks instead, waiting for the signal. Wordlessly, he handed Suzaku a cigarette and a lighter, keeping his eyes trained on the church.
Neither of them smoked. Suzaku was a soldier and needed healthy lungs to perform his duty; Lelouch was a hypochondriac who would never subject himself to lung cancer. The cigarettes were merely part of their disguise, a way of presenting themselves as average chic European civilians in case anyone happened to stumble upon them. Their lighters, by unspoken agreement, were not to be used unless absolutely necessary. Since they were alone at the entrance, the museum's few guests still ambling along its halls, they merely stood there in silence, unlit cigarettes in hand, staring at the windows.
The working clock struck 11:25. Instantly there were three solid red blinks from the right window in quick succession, dim in the sunlight, barely visible to anyone who was not looking for it. Most of the Europeans' security was over on the other side of the cathedral, with a few more by its sides to ensure that no visitors interrupted the meeting; back here, on this quieter side, there were only some overly-obvious lookouts sitting on the stone steps in the plaza that separated the museum from the cathedral. Pigeons poked around a puddle of day-old rainwater nearby. Beyond the murmuring of the few passersby, there was silence.
It must have wounded Julius' heart to plan it this way, for the lasers through the windows to indicate movement rather than a sudden explosion or a flood or any of his other typical tricks. Suzaku gave him a sidelong glance, studying the anticipation in his face, the impatience in his hands as he rolled the cigarette back and forth between his fingers.
11:27. Carbon monoxide, released in large-enough quantities in an enclosed space of the cathedral's size, would start being detected only when people started noticing their vertigo, their confusion, their headaches. It would take another three or four minutes before the symptoms started to set in, according to Julius' calculations. If they were smart, they'd catch on to the trap and head to the exits immediately—only to find them locked.
Then the panic would start, and the poor German laggard would direct the members of the French delegation to try ramming the front doors as the Germans tried the sides. He would retrieve the ancient key that Lelouch had slipped him earlier, shouting for his nearby colleagues to join him. Like a brave gentleman, he would shepherd his countrymen out through the door, waiting for all of them to exit before he slammed it shut and locked it back up, the key falling apart when it was snapped just-so.
Of course the Germans that had made it to safety would bang on the door in horror, confused and doing everything in their power to pry it open and free the other diplomats. How unfortunate, then, that the plainclothes guard under Julius' spell would be standing right beside the door when they exited; how unfortunate that he would tell investigators that he saw the Germans slam the door shut behind them as they pretended to care for those still trapped inside. The car with German plates that was due to speed through the streets and arrive at the precise moment the Germans were set to exit the cathedral—that, too, was highly unfortunate timing.
By the time someone managed to knock down the doors, they would find nothing but a pile of corpses, all of them dead from sweet-smelling nerve gas that was capable of killing within two minutes. The corpse of the Archbishop of Strasbourg, a kind man who Lelouch and Suzaku had met their first day in the city, would be found in beneath the east narthex; his last moments would be spent stuffing a laser pointer in the pockets of a dead Frenchman. The gas canisters he released would be tossed in a discreet corner, the Archbishop's gloved hands leaving no fingerprints on them.
All that anyone outside the cathedral would know for certain was this: a German delegation and a French delegation entered the church, and only one of them made it out. The missing German might exonerate them, were it not for the fact that Julius had ordered him to bang his head against the wall until he passed out. An autopsy would indicate that he'd been held behind and lynched by the furious Frenchmen in their final moments to punish the Germans' betrayal. If the Europeans turned to video footage to try and uncover the truth of the incident, they would find all relevant footage lost besides the feed from one camera: the poor-quality one pointed at the plaza between the museum and the cathedral, depicting three dim blinking lights that flashed at the German lookouts gazing up at the church.
A total death toll of eighteen, if all went according to plan. Quite mild by the standards of Lord Kingsley.
Suzaku lit his cigarette as the sound of muffled screams began.
"I will have you know that I exercised remarkable self-restraint in our mission today," Julius announced, ridding himself of the civilian clothes that he despised so much. Lelouch's prudish modesty had been a trait lost somewhere in the process of turning him into an imperial plaything. The black uniform of Britannia's strategists replaced the slacks and button-down shirt. He wore it well, preening at his reflection and wiping over any wrinkles he saw. Lelouch would want to break the mirror.
They had left the scene of the crime once the chaos started, Julius insisting that it would look far sketchier if they left before the extent of the catastrophe became known. And so they got to see the shocked crowds, the German delegates in tears, the angry mob forming, the geassed guard loudly proclaiming what he'd supposedly seen. They'd been shoved away from the cathedral by the city police, along with the rest of the onlookers; news spread throughout the city as they made their way back to their pleasant little hotel. The waitress who had served them croissants sat slumped in a chair in tears when they rounded the corner.
Three hours later they were in Nancy, farther away from the German border, safely ensconced in Britannian territory. Their disguises could now be melted off, and the monsters within them could be revealed to the blank walls of their room in the makeshift imperial quarters that had once been the city's social security building.
Keeping his jeans and shirt on for the moment, unwilling to part with the illusion of being a helpless bystander, Suzaku tried to block him out and focus on the news on the television. It was in French, but the parade of images and angry voices made things obvious enough. "Forty people ended up dead."
"I did not include the inevitable riots in my calculations. Crowd dynamics are too messy to get any accurate predictions out of them." He tugged on his boots, frowning at the scuff marks on them, and went to retrieve the polish he kept specifically for this reason. "And it is still quite a small number for the fantastic result we obtained. I had wanted to herd the diplomats into the museum, where I would be waiting for them at the entrance, and then I would inform them that they had fallen into our trap—in German, of course, and I'd practiced this speech for so long that I believe my pronunciation would have been perfect. And then I would direct you to kill them all, and we would bury them beneath broken fragments of statues, symbolizing the utter defeat of Europe at the hands of her exiled sons."
TRAHISON À STRASBOURG, read the chyron scrolling through the bottom of the screen, the news broadcaster (either genuinely hurt or a wonderful actress) weeping on-air. "I would not enjoy slaughtering people to prove some symbolic point, my lord."
"You could have fooled me, dear companion. What do you make of flattening enemy forces with that machine of yours? Is it a metaphor instead?" The scent of polish filled the room as Julius worked, rubbing at the boot until it shined like a diamond. "I merely felt as though your talents were underutilized in this exercise of ours. After spending so many weeks with you as my bodyguard qua bedmate, I hoped to give you a more thrilling role. But our play had a satisfying ending regardless, I suppose, and its ending does come with some benefits."
Julius examined himself in the mirror, changing the angle of his reflection as though he were looking for some defect. With a barely-audible huff, he reached back into his eye, retrieved the contact, and carefully placed it back in its container. The eyepatch, sitting neglected on the dresser, was picked up, dusted off, and fastened around his head. For no reason other than to be obnoxious, Julius shook his head back and forth, allowing his hair to fall in front of the eyepatch's straps.
"Much better. Gives me a certain je ne sais quoi, don't you think?"