She is beautiful in the firelight. It is the first thing Kallen thinks when she sees her, tall and proud and so eminently regal it's a wonder they never picked her identity from the very start. It's not a jealous admission, not a longing of a lover, not even a friend's laughing compliment. It is raw, brutal fact: Leloucia vi Britannia is the most beautiful thing Kallen has ever seen. To admire her is entirely natural – it is like admiring the storm.

The fire flickers behind her high-backed chair, dappling shadows across the Empress' face; the quality of the recording is incredible, even almost two decades since it was made, and Kallen wonders if the darkness in her eyes, normally a bright, glinting amethyst, is merely a trick of the light. Leloucia is—was—a creature of illusion, and perhaps Kallen is merely imagining the despair that seeps in from the corner of her smile. It is a bitter thing, jagged and wrong - Leloucia's smile is a scar, and Kallen can't help but wonder which wound left it behind.

"I suppose you're wondering what this is," she says, her voice sinfully rich. Like blood. "Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure myself. A will? A confessional? The last, deranged ramblings of a madwoman on the day of her execution?"

It is testament to the power of her presence, even through the distance of a recording and eighteen years, that nobody thinks to speak in the wake of that admission - though the room is a gallery of shock, each face painted with a slightly different style.

Leloucia smirks, a slash of arrogance across her face. "Oh, don't be so surprised. Of course I knew what was going to happen. Do you really think I could die any other way than at my own hand? I have commanded God, and humanity is nothing but its children. I guess that makes you mine, in a way, doesn't it?"

Then, she sighs, too heavily to be just an expulsion of air, and ducks her head, staring at her hands as if she can see the blood they are soaked in. It's an expression Kallen knows well.

"Speaking of children, I suppose I should get to the point. I'm pregnant. Suzaku doesn't know. I'm going to die in six hours. And I don't know what to do."

If despair could speak, Kallen imagines it would sound a little like that.

"No." Zero's voice contains nothing. No rage. No despair. It is flat rejection, as if he can rearrange reality with a single word. Kallen suspects she is one of the few in the room who knows why. "No. No. NO!"

"Z-Zero?" Ohgi asks, and the man's only response is to rip the helmet from his head and hurl it at the wall, hard enough to shatter it into a thousand pieces. From the expression on Suzaku Kururugi's face, he probably feels just as broken. His whole body is shaking, and there is something in his eyes that cuts through Kallen like a knife, so raw and sharp that she doesn't even notice her soul is bleeding until the first few tears slip down her face. She's not sure who she's crying for—Leloucia, who is dead, or Suzaku, who is alive—only that it hurts.

On screen, Leloucia is not crying, instead still studying her hands, splaying her fingers as if she might find all the mysteries of the universe beneath her pale, flawless skin. They are the same fingers that have shattered armies, overthrown empires, and conquered the world - but it seems they lack the answers she is searching for. She looks up, over the camera by the angle of her gaze, and her eyes are like death; dark, distant, and unfathomable. Kallen would call it a thousand-yard-stare, but wherever Leloucia is, it's not somewhere anyone else could have possibly been.

"I've always wondered what it would be like to be a mother; always thought that, one day, I would be able to be everything my own mother never was." She laughs, in the way madness does. "It's funny, the things you think of before you die. I never knew how many children I wanted—how many girls and how many boys—or what their names would be - until the day after I killed Euphemia. My second-favourite sister, and I shot her in the chest because I could hear what remained of her mind begging me to do it. Since then, there's always been one constant in the back of my mind: I wanted a daughter, so I could call her Euphemia. Euphemia Kururugi, because Suzaku was always going to be the father, and no child should be tainted with my name."

Leloucia shakes her head, the dark silk of her hair shimmering as it plays around her shoulders. "Euphemia Kururugi, daughter of her namesake's Knight of Honour, and her killer. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when we first practise to deceive."

She falls silent again, her shoulders not quite slumping as she rests her hands almost unconsciously on her stomach, and it is in that silence that Ohgi speaks.

"I never knew she enjoyed poetry," he says, and his words are those of a man taking refuge in banality.

"You never knew a lot of things." Suzaku's voice punches through the crowd like a bullet – as if his pain is something that cannot be dealt with, only shared.

For a moment, it seems as if Ohgi is going to protest, but in the end he only exhales and rests a hand on Viletta's shoulder. "No. No, we didn't."

"I could delay the Requiem," Leloucia murmurs on-screen, staring at her knees. Her hair falls before her eyes, glistening like tears. "Suzaku would understand, if I told him why. Schneizel is mine, Xingke and Tohdoh are my prisoners, and Cornelia's too predictable to be a threat. I could have eight more months. I could have a life. I could have a child."

When she looks up, her voice is the quiet of the grave.

"But I won't. I can't. Suzaku would never allow our child to be deprived of its parents. I don't think I would, either. If I tell him, if I delay today, there will be no today. No Requiem. There will only be the Empire, and the Demon Empress. Even if I spend the rest of my life working to undo what my forefathers have wrought, the world will never trust me, or my intentions. That was the point, after all, wasn't it?"

Her laugh is bitter, like betrayal.

"I don't want to die," and in that moment the last of the Empress slips away, and Kallen remembers the Leloucia she is watching is just a teenaged girl. "I want to know if I could be the mother Nunnally deserved. That my unborn child deserves. But that's not what the world needs, is it? It doesn't need me, and it certainly doesn't need my children."

Suzaku is crying openly now, and half the room has joined him.

"What's one more innocent, anyway, after everything I've done?" Leloucia's face is like ice. The ice over the surface of the lake – the slightest touch will shatter it to pieces, and collapse it into the unfathomable darkness below.

She stands up, reaching over to turn the camera off, but the movement stills, and then she speaks again. The self-mockery in her voice is savage; it rakes through Kallen like the Guren's claw.

"I should look on the bright side, really. At least this way I can be guaranteed of going to the hell I deserve."

The recording stops, and all that is left is a blank screen. There is no sign that the Empress' last testament ever existed, except on the faces of those she has left behind.

And the empty space taken up by the only one she didn't.

This was a story I scribbled down on buses, on trains, in the half-hours between getting home and going to bed, over breakfast, and through those snatched minutes before my lectures began, because it just wouldn't get out of my head.

Leloucia is quoting Marmion, by Walter Scott, and the title of this comes from the lyrics of I Saw My Lady Weepe, by John Downland.

It's a Black Knights-only meeting - Nunnally isn't there, which is why she doesn't appear in this story.

Apart from that, I'm sorry. There's really nothing else left to say.