Mostly setup for the next one. And Lelouch being a bastard. But that's pretty much a given already.
---
Madame, Monsieur, bonsoir ...
The plans of mice. The plans of men.
The carefully laid out strings of action and thought.
My friend, are you a walker of the tightropes, or the spider lurking in the eaves?
Your fate, thrown as dice, into the maelstrom of history in potentia, is of your own devising. And mine.
Your journey of malice. Your desire for retribution.
What is the path to your justice?
Together, we shall find out, as we walk it.
One step at a time.
---
0^2:To sit upon the frozen throne
a Code Geass/Gankutsuou fic
by Griever
---
two: Road to Damascus
"It looks as though it's effectively no-man's land now," commented Lelouch, his handheld out and browsing through random newsfeeds at twenty second intervals. Shinjuku featured prominently in those, for one reason or another, none of which were close enough to being accurate to satisfy his tastes.
Not, he remarked to himself, that he'd expected anything else.
Allowing himself a momentary lapse and a brief sigh, he flipped the handheld closed and pocketed it, before gathering up the materials he'd need for the day's classes. Tedious. Still, the tedium could be a welcome respite from more serious, more relevant things.
The morning was crisp and clear, pleasantly chill without the outright cold, just the way he liked them most.
"Yo, boss, I'm done," commented Rivalz, falling into step beside him.
"That was fast," he nodded approvingly. "Any trouble?"
"No, no trouble. Just like any other drop and drive, though how we're supposed to profit from this, I can't see," the other teen grumbled.
"Not everything gives immediate dividends," Lelouch corrected.
"I know, I know, it's just that ... well, you'd expect something this big to."
"Patience is a virtue, Rivalz."
"Oy, I never claimed to be virtuous! It's one of the reasons this works out so well, so don't go putting words in my mouth now."
"Mm. Point. Still sometimes, all you can do is wait. Wait and hope."
"I hate it when you get philosophical, boss."
***
"Private First Class, Kururugi Suzaku, reporting for duty, my lord," the teenager saluted, somewhat stiffly.
Margrave Jeremiah Gottwald gave a disdainful sniff and shake of the head. Elevens. What was the world coming to, he didn't know.
Well, neither did he particularly care, but the fiasco was given to him to handle, and he'd well and handle it, distasteful as it may be.
"Well, Private, it seems that the injuries weren't as bad as we'd been given to believe. Or else, why are you here instead of recovering?"
"My lord, regulations require the completion and delivery of after-action reports as soon as possible," Kururugi replied. "I chose to take that as a literal definition."
Annoying brat.
"Fine, fine, but make it quick," the Margrave said irritably. "I have more important things that require my concern than the sniveling excuses of a rookie Number. Start with recounting exactly what happened, and how exactly you managed this stroke of _luck_ that let you live through the collapse, hmm?"
Blood and martyrs, but if he was going to have to suffer through this trite dreck, he'd sure as hell make the little twit sweat for it as well.
Rank, after all, hath its privileges. Twisting the knife on an Eleven was just one of them.
***
"Yosh! Sync-relays working within tolerances," she commented, having the manipulator of the recently replaced limb flex. There were still some twitches, but those would work themselves out during operation, as the replacement part integrated fully with the machine.
Just another design idiosyncrasy of most mass produced Knightmares.
Tuning, of course, would further sharpen response time, but it was a tedious and precise operation that couldn't be undertaken in battlefield conditions. Sadly, those were the only conditions their sort of warfare allowed for.
And now even that had been jeopardized. Their usual series of hideaways and safehouses was spread through the Shinjuku-ghetto. The one rented warehouse in the docks district was their only fallback in this situation, as the ghetto was being watched more closely than a pornographic vid in military barracks.
Ironically, since the Britannian forces had been repelled it was _more_ dangerous to try and work through there for the rebels. And for the ordinary citizens as well, not that all that many remained in the wake of recent events, either because of the obvious, or because they'd decided it was too dangerous a place to stay and chanced it with the rest of the city - a wise decision, all things considered.
Which didn't mean the ghetto was empty. Some people refused to bow down, even to this pressure. Some simply _couldn't_. The young, the elderly, those with sentimental attachment to what had once been a thriving part of Tokyo but was no naught but memory and ruin.
Karen swept a hand across her face, wiping beads of sweat off with the back of her glove. The kerchief she'd worn as a bandanna was soaked through, and had been for a while now, due to heat and the effort she'd been putting into making sure her Glasgow would be ready for the inevitable ...
"You know, you're not helping anyone by working yourself to death, admirable as the dedication is," she heard, and snapped a hand out to the side, catching a can of ice-tea after sparing a glance at the incoming projectile.
"So what, I'm just supposed to sit back and wait?" She popped the can open, chugging back on the cold beverage immediately, relieving her parched throat. "Ougi, you know this isn't going to blow over, right? We're finally getting serious here!"
"Maybe too serious," the man commented. He was tall and broad-shouldered in anyone's opinion, not just for a Japanese either, and had the sort of gentle temperament that one associated with someone who had to take care how he moved because of his height. "We're in over our heads here, you know?"
"No, I don't know! We ... Ougi, we beet the Britannian bastards _back_ there," she exclaimed.
"They'll have more," the man shook his head, sitting back against the Knightmare's leg. "We can't fight this sort of fight, Karen. We're no good in a fixed battle where they've got these sort of ridiculous odds against us."
"So we're just going to run, then?! Leave the people who're still here to their deaths?"
"Do we have any _choice_ in the matter, Karen?"
***
It started in his eyes. A burning, stinging sensation that reached out from behind the eyelids, stabbing back through the eyeballs and into his skull like an insanely sharp needle.
Geass flared.
"What are you doing here?" He hissed, panicked eyes flicking to one side, then another, up and down the street.
Somewhere beyond a corner, two approaching MPs were suddenly beset by a feeling of anxiety strong enough to have both dash to the toilets.
"Just come to see you," the reply was bland. "You left before I could say anything, after all. You find my company that repulsive?"
"Don't you have any self-preservation instinct?!"
"What? This is just a small, out of the way barracks. They're not told anything about this sort of thing," she cocked her head to the side, then suddenly stepped forward, pressing against him and turning to whisper. "You can pretend I'm your lover or something."
Suzaku stepped back out of her reach, keeping distance by virtue of putting his hands on her shoulders and holding firm.
"It's still too dangerous! You should have stayed ..."
"Stayed _where_, Kururugi Suzaku? In that _thing's_ home?"
"What?"
"Your so called 'friend'," the girl shuddered in his grip.
"Lelouch, you mean? What ... I thought you said he already had a contract. Doesn't that make him ..."
"That thing is nothing like me!"
The denial was so vehement that it genuinely took him aback for a moment.
"Well, then ... it would help if you could _explain_ it to me," Suzaku ventured. "Or am I now a _thing_ too?"
"No! That's ... that isn't it," for the first time since that morning, the green-haired girl was flustered. "The sleeper is like malice to our ambition. Like hatred to our hope. He is ... he is _anathema_ to what we would have, pulling all around him into oblivion."
"Meaning? What does this 'sleeper' have to do with Lelouch?"
"In the simplest terms ... when we make a contract, a power is granted. There is some connection, but not much of one," she replied. "_It_ contracts to one only, and takes them as host. Your friend, Lelouch? It festers within him like a cancer, growing in his malice and rage until there is nothing but an empty shell of a man remaining. Not living, not dead, just there. Or so we remember."
"... anger ... he's always had so much of that," Suzaku hung his head. "But he's still my friend, and ... and ..."
"And?"
"I'm no better than that either," he sighed. "For a long time, I've believed that you should ... you should work within the rules. That going beyond them would be wrong, that it would only lead to more death and pain. But then, just recently, what did I do?"
Blindly, he lashed out, his fist smacking against the concrete wall lining the sidewalk that separated street from the barracks area.
"I ran roughshod over them, just because it was convenient! I didn't even think about it at the time, only ..."
"People were dying," the girl said, her tone still dry, but somehow there was a glimmer of compassion in her eyes that hadn't been present before. "You made a choice. And it was not the first time that you did so, either, was it?"
Suzaku's breath caught in his throat.
She didn't ... she _couldn't_ know about that.
"We are bound by contract, Kururugi," the girl said. "I know. Your most precious person then, you sacrificed in an attempt to stop it. Stop the suffering. Stop the fighting. I do not _judge_, Kururugi Suzaku, but ... to do so required a tremendous fortitude. To still retain _yourself_ afterwards, more-so. Perhaps my choice of you to hold this burden was not faulty."
"How can you say that?! Isn't it ... isn't going against everything like that, in the end ... isn't it meaningless?!"
"What is 'meaning'? What are 'rules', but those things that a king makes or breaks on a whim?" She told him. "No action is without meaning, ultimately. And Geass ... perhaps it is the ultimate expression of meaning, more than anything else. Follow the rules you choose to follow. Break those which you do not. This is now your prerogative, as you walk the path of choice. Now, ask yourself, what do you _want_?"
Suzaku breathed. Deep breaths, one after another, as he turned and leaned against the wall, looking to the sky.
"I want to save them."
"Save ... who?"
"As many as I can."
"Then _do so_."
Silence.
"And you might rein those emotions in before you depress someone into killing themselves."
His eyes blinked, then widened, and the Geass he'd unwittingly activated faded away.
***
"Lulu, honestly, you need to stop being so irresponsible," the girl sighed, though more to herself and out of habit than out of any actual effort to get through the named individual. "Here, just don't lose them."
"Thank you," he nodded, taking the offered printouts of the class notes.
"That's all you ever say," Shirley Fenette had been Lelouch's classmate since he'd started at Ashford, and while the auburn haired girl's interest was more than strictly friendly, she was more often than not exasperated with the lackluster image he presented. She knew he was smart, bordering on scarily so in fact, but he never really applied that other than to scam money he didn't need from people he really shouldn't be in gambling games.
She huffed, stalking out of the otherwise empty classroom, missing the faint smirk that momentarily graced Lelouch's face then.
He stashed the printouts in his attache case, then zipped it closed.
"Why _do_ you do that, anyway?"
Lelouch turned to give the newcomer a brief look, then shook his head.
"Because Lelouch Lamperouge is a louse, unreliable most of the time, but somewhat canny and prone to gambling here and there. Unremarkable in the greater scheme of things, and only here because of nepotism. Consistency is important after all, Madame President."
Milly Ashford sighed. "You're really going to hurt her one day, you know?"
"Really," he remarked dryly. "It takes quite a bit to break a person, and ignoring an adolescent crush is hardly going to be it. Unless she's quite a bit more pathetic than I can tell."
"So cruel, Lulu."
"Noted," they exited the classroom. The hallways of Ashford Academy weren't too busy, students having already taken their leave after the last bell, so they could walk and talk freely for the most part.
"You should at least take her out one of these days."
"Please. Now who's being cruel?"
"Moi? How ever did you come to that conclusion?"
"Merely a lucky hunch."
"Pfft. Still, why not give it a chance?"
"With _my_ life? Short sighted, that. Don't tell me you're suddenly believing in that true love myth?"
"It's the prerogative of an innocent young girl's heart!"
"Innocent. Right, my dear. Right," Lelouch snickered.
"Quit that! I'm serious, just try it, maybe take a break."
He started a reply before being interrupted by his handheld and excusing himself.
It wasn't a long conversation. In fact, it wasn't much of a conversation at all. More an exchange, really, and quite an obvious one at that.
"I'm busy in the foreseeable future," he said as they fell back into step, heading towards the Student Council building and, incidentally, his lodgings.
"Oh? Doing what? Playing your games?"
"Playing games," he mused. "How very appropriate. Yes, I'll be playing a game. A sort of mix, really. Chess, go, poker, blackjack and Russian roulette, all rolled into one."
At his more serious tone, Milly slowed a bit and gave him a searching look.
"What's it called?"
"War."
"Oh," she was silent for a bit, mulling over that one. "You're going to win?"
"Win?" Lelouch looked more amused than anything else. "My dear, there are no victors in war. You're thinking politics. In war, it's just casualties. But ..." here he paused, "... well, I have more to do than that, so I suppose that means I'll just need to not become one."
"And you say that like it's so easy."
"Easiest thing in the world, really," he nodded. "If you know the trick."
"Trick?"
"Like in all games ... count the cards, stack the deck, and cheat like a right bastard whenever you can."
To that, she had nothing to say, so the rest of the walk was spent in companionable, if somewhat heavy, silence.
***
There was a number of things that drove Clovis La Britannia up the wall, but none had quite the same poignancy as this most recent ...
... well, let's just say it, failure. Although he refused to think of it as anything other than a setback.
Not only was the research project lost in the middle of that unholy _mess_, those damn Elevens had dared thumb their noses at Britannia's might and come out momentarily on top.
It was enough to drive a man to drink, really.
But more than anything else, it was something that needed to be _fixed_ and quickly. Perceived authority was, after all, as important as factual one, if not moreso, and this was working against his.
He didn't even want to dare wonder how losing control, even momentarily, of an area right off the largest city of Area 11 reflected on him in the eyes of his siblings. Worse yet, in the eyes of his father.
If there ever was a person to despise weakness in any and all forms, it was the Emperor of Britannia.
So Clovis wondered, and planned, and plotted.
This was no longer a question of fact and right. It was a matter of _pride_.
"We move at dawn," he said, composed as could be, but in a voice carrying enough ire for it to be nearly a physical thing. "And level it to the _ground_."
***
END road to damascus
***
---
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
---
Madame, Monsieur, bonsoir ...
The plans of mice. The plans of men.
The carefully laid out strings of action and thought.
My friend, are you a walker of the tightropes, or the spider lurking in the eaves?
Your fate, thrown as dice, into the maelstrom of history in potentia, is of your own devising. And mine.
Your journey of malice. Your desire for retribution.
What is the path to your justice?
Together, we shall find out, as we walk it.
One step at a time.
---
0^2:To sit upon the frozen throne
a Code Geass/Gankutsuou fic
by Griever
---
two: Road to Damascus
"It looks as though it's effectively no-man's land now," commented Lelouch, his handheld out and browsing through random newsfeeds at twenty second intervals. Shinjuku featured prominently in those, for one reason or another, none of which were close enough to being accurate to satisfy his tastes.
Not, he remarked to himself, that he'd expected anything else.
Allowing himself a momentary lapse and a brief sigh, he flipped the handheld closed and pocketed it, before gathering up the materials he'd need for the day's classes. Tedious. Still, the tedium could be a welcome respite from more serious, more relevant things.
The morning was crisp and clear, pleasantly chill without the outright cold, just the way he liked them most.
"Yo, boss, I'm done," commented Rivalz, falling into step beside him.
"That was fast," he nodded approvingly. "Any trouble?"
"No, no trouble. Just like any other drop and drive, though how we're supposed to profit from this, I can't see," the other teen grumbled.
"Not everything gives immediate dividends," Lelouch corrected.
"I know, I know, it's just that ... well, you'd expect something this big to."
"Patience is a virtue, Rivalz."
"Oy, I never claimed to be virtuous! It's one of the reasons this works out so well, so don't go putting words in my mouth now."
"Mm. Point. Still sometimes, all you can do is wait. Wait and hope."
"I hate it when you get philosophical, boss."
***
"Private First Class, Kururugi Suzaku, reporting for duty, my lord," the teenager saluted, somewhat stiffly.
Margrave Jeremiah Gottwald gave a disdainful sniff and shake of the head. Elevens. What was the world coming to, he didn't know.
Well, neither did he particularly care, but the fiasco was given to him to handle, and he'd well and handle it, distasteful as it may be.
"Well, Private, it seems that the injuries weren't as bad as we'd been given to believe. Or else, why are you here instead of recovering?"
"My lord, regulations require the completion and delivery of after-action reports as soon as possible," Kururugi replied. "I chose to take that as a literal definition."
Annoying brat.
"Fine, fine, but make it quick," the Margrave said irritably. "I have more important things that require my concern than the sniveling excuses of a rookie Number. Start with recounting exactly what happened, and how exactly you managed this stroke of _luck_ that let you live through the collapse, hmm?"
Blood and martyrs, but if he was going to have to suffer through this trite dreck, he'd sure as hell make the little twit sweat for it as well.
Rank, after all, hath its privileges. Twisting the knife on an Eleven was just one of them.
***
"Yosh! Sync-relays working within tolerances," she commented, having the manipulator of the recently replaced limb flex. There were still some twitches, but those would work themselves out during operation, as the replacement part integrated fully with the machine.
Just another design idiosyncrasy of most mass produced Knightmares.
Tuning, of course, would further sharpen response time, but it was a tedious and precise operation that couldn't be undertaken in battlefield conditions. Sadly, those were the only conditions their sort of warfare allowed for.
And now even that had been jeopardized. Their usual series of hideaways and safehouses was spread through the Shinjuku-ghetto. The one rented warehouse in the docks district was their only fallback in this situation, as the ghetto was being watched more closely than a pornographic vid in military barracks.
Ironically, since the Britannian forces had been repelled it was _more_ dangerous to try and work through there for the rebels. And for the ordinary citizens as well, not that all that many remained in the wake of recent events, either because of the obvious, or because they'd decided it was too dangerous a place to stay and chanced it with the rest of the city - a wise decision, all things considered.
Which didn't mean the ghetto was empty. Some people refused to bow down, even to this pressure. Some simply _couldn't_. The young, the elderly, those with sentimental attachment to what had once been a thriving part of Tokyo but was no naught but memory and ruin.
Karen swept a hand across her face, wiping beads of sweat off with the back of her glove. The kerchief she'd worn as a bandanna was soaked through, and had been for a while now, due to heat and the effort she'd been putting into making sure her Glasgow would be ready for the inevitable ...
"You know, you're not helping anyone by working yourself to death, admirable as the dedication is," she heard, and snapped a hand out to the side, catching a can of ice-tea after sparing a glance at the incoming projectile.
"So what, I'm just supposed to sit back and wait?" She popped the can open, chugging back on the cold beverage immediately, relieving her parched throat. "Ougi, you know this isn't going to blow over, right? We're finally getting serious here!"
"Maybe too serious," the man commented. He was tall and broad-shouldered in anyone's opinion, not just for a Japanese either, and had the sort of gentle temperament that one associated with someone who had to take care how he moved because of his height. "We're in over our heads here, you know?"
"No, I don't know! We ... Ougi, we beet the Britannian bastards _back_ there," she exclaimed.
"They'll have more," the man shook his head, sitting back against the Knightmare's leg. "We can't fight this sort of fight, Karen. We're no good in a fixed battle where they've got these sort of ridiculous odds against us."
"So we're just going to run, then?! Leave the people who're still here to their deaths?"
"Do we have any _choice_ in the matter, Karen?"
***
It started in his eyes. A burning, stinging sensation that reached out from behind the eyelids, stabbing back through the eyeballs and into his skull like an insanely sharp needle.
Geass flared.
"What are you doing here?" He hissed, panicked eyes flicking to one side, then another, up and down the street.
Somewhere beyond a corner, two approaching MPs were suddenly beset by a feeling of anxiety strong enough to have both dash to the toilets.
"Just come to see you," the reply was bland. "You left before I could say anything, after all. You find my company that repulsive?"
"Don't you have any self-preservation instinct?!"
"What? This is just a small, out of the way barracks. They're not told anything about this sort of thing," she cocked her head to the side, then suddenly stepped forward, pressing against him and turning to whisper. "You can pretend I'm your lover or something."
Suzaku stepped back out of her reach, keeping distance by virtue of putting his hands on her shoulders and holding firm.
"It's still too dangerous! You should have stayed ..."
"Stayed _where_, Kururugi Suzaku? In that _thing's_ home?"
"What?"
"Your so called 'friend'," the girl shuddered in his grip.
"Lelouch, you mean? What ... I thought you said he already had a contract. Doesn't that make him ..."
"That thing is nothing like me!"
The denial was so vehement that it genuinely took him aback for a moment.
"Well, then ... it would help if you could _explain_ it to me," Suzaku ventured. "Or am I now a _thing_ too?"
"No! That's ... that isn't it," for the first time since that morning, the green-haired girl was flustered. "The sleeper is like malice to our ambition. Like hatred to our hope. He is ... he is _anathema_ to what we would have, pulling all around him into oblivion."
"Meaning? What does this 'sleeper' have to do with Lelouch?"
"In the simplest terms ... when we make a contract, a power is granted. There is some connection, but not much of one," she replied. "_It_ contracts to one only, and takes them as host. Your friend, Lelouch? It festers within him like a cancer, growing in his malice and rage until there is nothing but an empty shell of a man remaining. Not living, not dead, just there. Or so we remember."
"... anger ... he's always had so much of that," Suzaku hung his head. "But he's still my friend, and ... and ..."
"And?"
"I'm no better than that either," he sighed. "For a long time, I've believed that you should ... you should work within the rules. That going beyond them would be wrong, that it would only lead to more death and pain. But then, just recently, what did I do?"
Blindly, he lashed out, his fist smacking against the concrete wall lining the sidewalk that separated street from the barracks area.
"I ran roughshod over them, just because it was convenient! I didn't even think about it at the time, only ..."
"People were dying," the girl said, her tone still dry, but somehow there was a glimmer of compassion in her eyes that hadn't been present before. "You made a choice. And it was not the first time that you did so, either, was it?"
Suzaku's breath caught in his throat.
She didn't ... she _couldn't_ know about that.
"We are bound by contract, Kururugi," the girl said. "I know. Your most precious person then, you sacrificed in an attempt to stop it. Stop the suffering. Stop the fighting. I do not _judge_, Kururugi Suzaku, but ... to do so required a tremendous fortitude. To still retain _yourself_ afterwards, more-so. Perhaps my choice of you to hold this burden was not faulty."
"How can you say that?! Isn't it ... isn't going against everything like that, in the end ... isn't it meaningless?!"
"What is 'meaning'? What are 'rules', but those things that a king makes or breaks on a whim?" She told him. "No action is without meaning, ultimately. And Geass ... perhaps it is the ultimate expression of meaning, more than anything else. Follow the rules you choose to follow. Break those which you do not. This is now your prerogative, as you walk the path of choice. Now, ask yourself, what do you _want_?"
Suzaku breathed. Deep breaths, one after another, as he turned and leaned against the wall, looking to the sky.
"I want to save them."
"Save ... who?"
"As many as I can."
"Then _do so_."
Silence.
"And you might rein those emotions in before you depress someone into killing themselves."
His eyes blinked, then widened, and the Geass he'd unwittingly activated faded away.
***
"Lulu, honestly, you need to stop being so irresponsible," the girl sighed, though more to herself and out of habit than out of any actual effort to get through the named individual. "Here, just don't lose them."
"Thank you," he nodded, taking the offered printouts of the class notes.
"That's all you ever say," Shirley Fenette had been Lelouch's classmate since he'd started at Ashford, and while the auburn haired girl's interest was more than strictly friendly, she was more often than not exasperated with the lackluster image he presented. She knew he was smart, bordering on scarily so in fact, but he never really applied that other than to scam money he didn't need from people he really shouldn't be in gambling games.
She huffed, stalking out of the otherwise empty classroom, missing the faint smirk that momentarily graced Lelouch's face then.
He stashed the printouts in his attache case, then zipped it closed.
"Why _do_ you do that, anyway?"
Lelouch turned to give the newcomer a brief look, then shook his head.
"Because Lelouch Lamperouge is a louse, unreliable most of the time, but somewhat canny and prone to gambling here and there. Unremarkable in the greater scheme of things, and only here because of nepotism. Consistency is important after all, Madame President."
Milly Ashford sighed. "You're really going to hurt her one day, you know?"
"Really," he remarked dryly. "It takes quite a bit to break a person, and ignoring an adolescent crush is hardly going to be it. Unless she's quite a bit more pathetic than I can tell."
"So cruel, Lulu."
"Noted," they exited the classroom. The hallways of Ashford Academy weren't too busy, students having already taken their leave after the last bell, so they could walk and talk freely for the most part.
"You should at least take her out one of these days."
"Please. Now who's being cruel?"
"Moi? How ever did you come to that conclusion?"
"Merely a lucky hunch."
"Pfft. Still, why not give it a chance?"
"With _my_ life? Short sighted, that. Don't tell me you're suddenly believing in that true love myth?"
"It's the prerogative of an innocent young girl's heart!"
"Innocent. Right, my dear. Right," Lelouch snickered.
"Quit that! I'm serious, just try it, maybe take a break."
He started a reply before being interrupted by his handheld and excusing himself.
It wasn't a long conversation. In fact, it wasn't much of a conversation at all. More an exchange, really, and quite an obvious one at that.
"I'm busy in the foreseeable future," he said as they fell back into step, heading towards the Student Council building and, incidentally, his lodgings.
"Oh? Doing what? Playing your games?"
"Playing games," he mused. "How very appropriate. Yes, I'll be playing a game. A sort of mix, really. Chess, go, poker, blackjack and Russian roulette, all rolled into one."
At his more serious tone, Milly slowed a bit and gave him a searching look.
"What's it called?"
"War."
"Oh," she was silent for a bit, mulling over that one. "You're going to win?"
"Win?" Lelouch looked more amused than anything else. "My dear, there are no victors in war. You're thinking politics. In war, it's just casualties. But ..." here he paused, "... well, I have more to do than that, so I suppose that means I'll just need to not become one."
"And you say that like it's so easy."
"Easiest thing in the world, really," he nodded. "If you know the trick."
"Trick?"
"Like in all games ... count the cards, stack the deck, and cheat like a right bastard whenever you can."
To that, she had nothing to say, so the rest of the walk was spent in companionable, if somewhat heavy, silence.
***
There was a number of things that drove Clovis La Britannia up the wall, but none had quite the same poignancy as this most recent ...
... well, let's just say it, failure. Although he refused to think of it as anything other than a setback.
Not only was the research project lost in the middle of that unholy _mess_, those damn Elevens had dared thumb their noses at Britannia's might and come out momentarily on top.
It was enough to drive a man to drink, really.
But more than anything else, it was something that needed to be _fixed_ and quickly. Perceived authority was, after all, as important as factual one, if not moreso, and this was working against his.
He didn't even want to dare wonder how losing control, even momentarily, of an area right off the largest city of Area 11 reflected on him in the eyes of his siblings. Worse yet, in the eyes of his father.
If there ever was a person to despise weakness in any and all forms, it was the Emperor of Britannia.
So Clovis wondered, and planned, and plotted.
This was no longer a question of fact and right. It was a matter of _pride_.
"We move at dawn," he said, composed as could be, but in a voice carrying enough ire for it to be nearly a physical thing. "And level it to the _ground_."
***
END road to damascus
***
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-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm