He knew the value of empty words even before he became the king of rebellion — long before earth and heaven recognized him as a demon. Lelouch Lamperouge (or Lelouch VI Britannia, as his own skull reminded him at night) sat in the semi—darkness of his new residence, a stone castle on the border of old Europe, where he had fled after a theatrical death and a new resurrection. everyone around him called him dead again, and yet he breathed, albeit through pain and someone else's name. you lived nearby, silent as a hungry shadow (whatever you wanted; names lost their weight when eternity began to speak through your lips). your hair is lazily falling on marble slabs, your gaze is a bottomless bowl into which he repeatedly tried to drown his shame.

They rarely spoke. but if their conversation happened, it was always not about peace or war, but about what cannot be destroyed by either a nuclear bomb or a knight's sword: about what is born between a mortal and an immortal. He could have laughed. He could have hugged you. but instead, he locked himself in his library, where, among thousands of books, he hid pages with his own handwriting: new manifestos, new chess games, new decrees for the people who would never stop loving or hating him. He couldn't help it. The king cannot do otherwise. Sometimes you lay down next to me, right on the table, right among the pens and inkwells. and he forgot the words. his fingers slid over your wrist like a cold blade—for the witch was not a warm woman, you were time in a woman's body.

Servants whispered in the streets of the castle: he was alive, he was cursed, he was building a world that would never be. you just laughed through the walls: "fools, he doesn't build, he just breaks himself down so that you don't die of boredom." Months later, rumors reached the old enemies. The remnants of the Black Knights, the surviving British lords, and the new Geass fanatics gathered at the castle gates, a torch in one hand, fear in the other before his eyes, which could still command the universe to bow. and then he became zero again. The mask covered his face like a scar that wouldn't heal. You followed him, a barefoot witch, an immortal cross behind his back. The two of them went out to the crowd again, played out the "death of the king" farce again, and once again made the world believe that they could be killed. but no one understood the main thing: they were not about peace, not about revolution. they were about the eternal search for man beyond blood and iron. Lelouch Lamperouge was not a hero — he was a question to God himself: "who is right if everyone is lying?"

You watched him break their faith and build a new one. And I knew that this time, when his heart stops, you will stay. to remember. to tell someone again in the next century about a king who didn't want to be a god, but became one anyway. At the end, it's the middle of the night, the wet flagstones of the palace, an empty throne, and two silhouettes on the cold stone floor. He's sleeping or dead. you are eternal or alone. and only the world begins to breathe again, as if for the first time.