Title: Penance
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: PG (Lots of implicit deaths? Er.)
Length: 900 words
Content notes: Zagato pov? ER. LOTS of implicit death, mind-control and coercion, character contemplating how they are very much setting themself up to die...
Author notes: .......Yeaaaah. Zagato sat in the back of my head until I gave in and scribbled down something approximating his view of what he's doing in canon. Under an hour! At least it counts for a badge! I think really I would need to write the entire saga of Zagato's actions through canon to actually be happy with this, but writing a snatch of it serves to get it from my head without having to sit in that headspace or obsess about it as much as I would need to do that...
Summary: Zagato, and the price of his wish.

oOo

Daru LaFarga came to face him, backed by the Guards he led in Lantis's place, and Zagato stood before them and would not explain why he stood between them and the castle which held Emeraude. Would not say why he had abducted the whole of the building and brought it away, when she would not relent from her self-imposed exile.

He would not even mention or explain that exile to those before him. It was enough that they hated him, he would not let them hate the woman whose prayers were failing, letting storm and demon slip further into Cephiro with each day. He was to blame, and he could not be sorry that her thoughts turned to him; refused to be so. So they thought he had stolen the Pillar away and caused the failing of her power, and why not? It was just as much the truth as it was a lie.

But the Daru knew enough to ask questions. Zagato captured his heart through that hesitation, and turned him on his own people; that way some of them fled instead of fighting, disheartened.

(He pushed aside all thought of what that might mean to LaFarga, afterwards. There was no room for ‘afterwards’ in his heart, in his desperation, for all that it loomed inevitable. He would do what he could, but he was pitting his wish against that of the Pillar herself; it was plain who would have their way in the end. All he could do was delay the end, and hold on to each day, each minute in which she still drew breath.)

(And there hung at the back of his mind the terrible gratitude he felt for his brother’s abandonment. He could not have overpowered Lantis’s mind, not with Lantis’s control of magic. He would have seen him dead on the ground, and that would have been – no. No, that was something to leave back in the darkness, drawing a veil across it in the same way as he hid the future from himself.)

Others came. Some his own students, colleagues. He turned away as many as might be easily cowed, but others fell, more under his own hand than even to LaFarga’s sword, and that too he could not let himself care about.

There was only Emeraude, and keeping all the world from her.

Mages came, and priests, and spirits whose control of magic was as strong and instinctive as the urge to breathe: he stole breath and magic both from them all. He would face them down, bear their hatred, their anger, their blood. That was the unending price of his wish, to take this, and yet there were those he could only hope would not stand in front of him. His brother had left, but he did not know where Ferio was, and – then there was the Guru, who had been sent away even as Emeraude imprisoned herself, even as Zagato took hold of the castle and all within it. Clef had orders, Zagato knew it – orders he would obey, because Emeraude was the Pillar, and Clef would abide by her wish even if it tore him apart.

Just as Zagato would stand against her, though doing so tore at his sanity.

He knew what Clef had been charged with - who else would Emeraude send, to guide her assassins? By rights, he should hunt Clef down, but – but.

He did not know how far Emeraude could last, each new death at his bidding clawing into her, until the land shuddered far below them with her grief. To fight their mutual teacher, and the one she had bid help her in her plan…

It was an excuse, but one which held truth. And as the days passed, and he did not see the Guru step onto the field before him, he let himself hope that Clef was also aware of the danger in their meeting.

And perhaps… just perhaps. It meant that Clef understood what he was doing. Why the ground was stained red below his feet. Why he had twisted and corrupted a noble man, lured others to his cause with lies tailored to each of them. (After all, was it not the duty of the Soru to understand the hearts of the people before them? He would use that, now. He would use everything he had and was.)

One man’s understanding would not wash his soul clean of this sin. A thousand years could not clear his heart. But he found he wanted it anyway.

Perhaps because Clef was the only one who knew the truth who stood any chance, no matter how small, of forgiving him. His brother would not, he had seen that in the anger on Lantis’s face, before he left. As for Emeraude…

She would love him, no matter what he did, Zagato was more than aware of that. If she could have stopped loving him, she would have been able to stand as Pillar again, stop him. But how could she forgive him for the things he had done? For all he had forced her to watch, from her prison.

How could she forgive him for spending his life and those of so many others, so pointlessly, fighting this war he could not win?

She could not.

These days of her loving hatred were his penance, as the blood he spilled was his price. But he would not waver, and even when it all crashed down about him – when ‘after’ came, and he had to face what he had done, he would not regret what he had done.

Nor would he forgive himself.

oOo