Work Text:
“Whoa, look at that footage of all those dead Elevens!”
“Ugh, don’t show me that!”
The student body twittered like excited birds, exclaiming how horrible the attack on Shinjuku was- those terrorists are monsters, killing all those people! How little they knew, Lelouch thought. All their information being fed to them through an unreliable media, fronted by talking heads as malleable as wet clay. Of course, it wasn’t their fault, and Lelouch’s ire was directed at the ones pulling the strings behind the screens.
He was practically trembling in anger. They didn’t even know that their Viceroy was dead. Clovis had been shot in the head barely hours ago-- the gun had a silencer, making only a soft, sharp pwip when Lelouch had fired. His eyes were so scared, pleading with him to spare his miserable, worthless life-- where was his compassion when he ordered the slaughter of dozens, if not hundreds, of Shinjuku residents? The amount of blood that spattered onto the wall behind his brother’s head was almost laughably disproportionate to how easy it was to pull the trigger.
Suddenly he felt sick. A gag forced its way out of his chest, and he smothered it with a hand over his mouth. He took a breath, and then another-- he couldn’t get enough air. Why couldn’t he get enough air? No, this couldn’t be what he thought it was.
“Hey, Lulu, are you okay?” someone asked him.
He turned around and saw Shirley, mouth pulled into a frown, reaching for his shoulder. He quickly sidestepped, accidentally bumping into the wall. All of a sudden there was too many people in the room, too many dangers.
“Yeah, I’m fine, just- that’s a lot of people,” he managed, thinking quickly. He motioned vaguely at the television screen, which was displaying a shot of unmoving, lifeless bodies, spread across the ground. “I need to use the restroom. Excuse me.” And he was out, walking as slowly as he could manage away from his classmates.
As soon as he was around the corner and out of sight, he broke into a sprint. Run, his body screamed, and he obeyed. The bathroom seemed miles away, although he knew it couldn’t be more than a couple dozen meters. The door swung open before he could enter, and a boy- it could have been anyone, for some reason Lelouch had lost the ability to recognize faces- exited, stepping aside for him as he rushed inside, giving a brief apology when they knocked shoulders.
He locked himself inside a stall, glad to be alone with his abysmal loss of control. This could not be happening. A fever had consumed him, a red-hot ball that shoved out everything else but itself. It left no room for thought, and pressed down on him with immense weight, shoving him to the floor. Fingers scrabbling on the wall for purchase, he grabbed the bar next to the toilet and sunk down, managing not to totally collapse. His chest was rising and falling rapidly, his heartbeat a sledgehammer inside of his ribcage. This was supposed to be behind him. He was Zero, he wasn’t allowed to have such weaknesses-- and yet.
A mental projection played out across the stall door in front of him-- blood, spattering over and over again, ejecting from the pale, flaxen head of his brother and then rewinding, repeating, until he had to close his eyes to block it out. He curled into himself tighter and tighter, more and more tension collapsing him like a folding chair, a building mountain of raw emotion threatening to explode out of him.
A fist squeezed his mind like a sponge, trickling out random, disjointed thoughts. He killed him. He killed Clovis. Am I dying? Why won’t it stop? It was what he was supposed to do, but had he-- should he have wanted to do it? Had he wanted to do it? This is hell. He was a killer, but he wasn’t a-- was he? Was he a murderer? It just keeps going. God, he had been so angry. He still was, except now, he felt-- he felt-- like a storm, electricity careening into itself, spiking outwards in all directions, huge slabs of air churning up the atmosphere into an unstoppable force. This will never end. This was what his existence was now. Sheer, utter panic.
He felt the storm subside just slightly, the wind changing directions for just a second. Breath came more easily to him, the vice around his chest releasing, and he sat up slowly. Breathe. It’s over. It’s over-- and then it was back, slamming him into the ground with full force. He would have cried if he had any air to spare-- all that escaped him was weak, shuddering gasps.
It could have been minutes, hours, days until it stopped. You are in control. You are in control. You are in control-- the mantra repeated, until, gradually, he was. The waves subsided, and he was back. He stood up, and the tile was warm from his body heat. How long had he been here, lying indisposed, losing his mind over something that would be one small pebble in the greater mountain of sins he’d have to commit in Zero’s future? He truly was pathetic.
He checked under the neighboring stalls for feet, and was relieved that there was no one else in the bathroom, before exiting the stall. Idiot, he scoffed at himself. You fucking useless idiot. He turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on his face, staring at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t help it-- a sardonic smirk tugged up one corner of his mouth.
“I guess that affected me more than I thought it did,” he told his reflection.
Lelouch dried his face, unrumpled his clothes, and went back out to reassure his friends that he was okay.