One Bad Day
The screams had long since faded into memory, but the acrid stench of burning flesh still clung to the sterile hospital air like a vengeful ghost.
Months had crawled by since Lelouch vi Britannia and Nunnally vi Britannia were ripped from their gilded cage and thrust into the political meat grinder as hostages to Japan. But fate, that cruel puppeteer, wasn't finished conducting its symphony of suffering for the royal bloodline.
When the terrorists came, they brought with them more than bullets and bombs—they brought transformation.
The explosion had torn through the palace like the fist of an angry god, sending a cascade of industrial chemicals raining down from the shattered laboratory above. The fourteen-year-old prince never saw it coming—one moment he was flesh and bone and hope, the next he was dissolving, melting, becoming something else entirely as the caustic cocktail ate through skin and sanity alike.
Now he lay entombed in white gauze, a mummy of his former self, breathing through tubes that hissed like serpents with every labored breath. The bandages weren't just covering wounds—they were hiding a metamorphosis. Beneath the sterile wrappings, his once-raven hair had been bleached bone-white in jagged patches, as if lightning had struck his very soul. His skin, where it hadn't been seared away entirely, had taken on an unnatural pallor like porcelain cracked and reformed.
His siblings came when duty demanded, their eyes unable to meet what he had become. They spoke in hushed tones about recovery, about healing, about returning to normal. But normal had died screaming in that explosion. Normal had been dissolved by acid and reformed by agony.
The doctors said he was lucky to be alive. Lucky. The word tasted like poison on his tongue.
Weeks bled into each other before he could finally drag himself from his tomb of sheets and steel. His legs trembled like newborn colts, and the breathing apparatus strapped to his face wheezed with mechanical rhythm—a metronome counting down to something darker. Each step was a small crucifixion, each breath a reminder of what had been stolen from him.
The mirror in the bathroom became his confessional.
He unwrapped one section of bandage with ritualistic precision, peeling back the layers like skin from an orange. What stared back at him wasn't human—not anymore. Patches of white hair jutted from his scalp in chaotic tufts, framing a face that belonged in nightmares. The chemicals had carved new geography across his features, leaving behind continents of scarred flesh and islands of unnatural paleness.
But it was his eyes that had changed the most. They held a light that hadn't been there before—something wild and hungry and utterly, completely mad.
The old prince was dead. He had died screaming in that chemical baptism, dissolved like sugar in acid. What remained was something new, something born from pain and abandonment and the crushing realization that the universe was nothing but a cosmic joke with no punchline.
His reflection began to laugh—a sound like glass breaking underwater, muffled by the breathing mask but no less horrifying. The laughter built and built until his entire body shook with it, tears streamed down his ruined cheeks, and his lungs burned with the effort. But he couldn't stop. Wouldn't stop.
Somewhere in the medical suite, abandoned on his nightstand, lay a philosophy book the doctors had left behind. On page 237, underlined in fading ink, were the words that had cracked his mind like an egg: "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy."
One bad day.
His reflection grinned back at him through the spider-webbed mirror, all teeth and madness and terrible, terrible understanding. The chemicals hadn't just changed his body—they had revealed a fundamental truth about existence itself.
Life was chaos. Order was an illusion. Sanity was just a thin veneer painted over the screaming void of reality.
And he? He was the proof.
The breathing apparatus hissed its mechanical rhythm as he stood there, staring at what he had become, what he had always been destined to become. The explosion hadn't created a monster—it had simply peeled away the lies to reveal what was underneath.
In the distance, he could hear footsteps approaching. Doctors, probably. Or maybe his dear siblings, come to offer more empty words about healing and hope and other fairy tales.
Let them come.
After all, he had quite the joke to share with them.
The kind of joke that would make them laugh until they cried.
Until they screamed.
Until they understood that sanity was just one bad day away from madness, and he—he was living proof of that terrible, beautiful truth.