The screams had stopped weeks ago. That was the first thing Prince Johann vi Britannia noticed when consciousness clawed its way back through the morphine haze—the blessed, terrible silence where his voice used to live.
Months had crawled by since Lelouch and Nunnally were ripped from their beds, dragged away as political pawns in Japan's desperate gambit. But the terrorists hadn't stopped there. They'd saved their cruelest gift for last.
The package had arrived on a silver tray, wrapped in diplomatic silk and tied with ribbons that screamed respectability. Inside: enough concentrated acid to strip flesh from bone, triggered by a mechanism so elegant it would have been beautiful if it weren't so perfectly, horrifically effective.
Johann's face had taken the brunt of the chemical kiss. The acid had eaten through skin, muscle, and cartilage—consuming everything soft and leaving behind only the hard, unforgiving truth of bone. His eye sockets had collapsed inward, creating caverns where light went to die. The flesh that remained clung to his skull like melted wax, a grotesque parody of human features.
The breathing apparatus covered his mouth now, a mechanical heartbeat that reminded everyone within earshot that something unnatural was keeping him alive. Each breath was a wet, rasping symphony of damaged lungs fighting for purchase in a world that no longer wanted him.
His siblings had fled. Oh, they'd tried to maintain the pretense at first—awkward visits filled with forced smiles and eyes that looked everywhere but at his face. But revulsion was honest in ways that royal protocol wasn't. Soon, only the nurses remained, and even they wore masks that had nothing to do with medical necessity.
The hospital room had become his kingdom—a realm of sterile white and the constant beeping of machines that measured his continued existence in digital increments. He'd learned to move through this space like a ghost, his every gesture now calculated, theatrical. Pain had been an excellent teacher; it had shown him the exquisite value of patience.
Tonight, he stood before the bathroom mirror, studying his reflection with the detached fascination of a scientist examining a specimen. The face that stared back was no longer human—it was something else entirely. A death's head given terrible life, eye sockets that burned with cold fire, bone structure that suggested predator rather than prey.
"Magnificent," he whispered to his reflection, his voice carrying the cultured tones of nobility despite the damage. Each word was precisely enunciated, savored like fine wine. "They have given me such a gift."
He raised his hand—fingers that had once been soft now sharp with surgical precision—and placed his palm against the mirror. The glass was cold against his skin, honest in its reflection.
"You see what they refuse to acknowledge," he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that somehow carried more menace than any shout. "That beauty was always the lie. This—" he gestured to his ruined face, "—this is truth."
With deliberate slowness, he drew back his fist and drove it through the mirror. Glass exploded outward in a constellation of sharp-edged stars, each fragment catching the light like crystallized screams. Blood welled from his knuckles, but he didn't flinch. Pain was an old friend now.
Returning to his bed, he noticed the book—leather-bound, heavy with the weight of secrets. The doctors had left it, probably thinking literature might soothe the savage beast they'd created. How wrong they were.
The pages fell open to a section that made his pulse quicken. Not fairy tales or philosophy, but something far more intoxicating: the history of organizations that understood power in all its raw, unvarnished glory.
Hydra.
The name itself was poetry. The accompanying symbol—a skull wreathed in tentacles—spoke to something deep in his reconstructed soul. As he read, each word was a revelation, a prayer answered by a god he'd never known he worshipped.
Cut off one head, and two more shall take its place.
The ideology was breathtaking in its elegance. While others concerned themselves with crowns and thrones—visible symbols that could be toppled—Hydra understood the true nature of power. It lived in shadows, in whispered conversations, in the spaces between official words. It grew not through conquest but through infiltration, corruption, and patient cultivation of influence.
They believed in order imposed by superior will, in the fundamental weakness of the masses who begged to be led. Most beautifully, they understood that the greatest victory was to make your enemies serve you willingly, to smile as they handed you the keys to their destruction.
"Hail Hydra," he whispered, and the words tasted like copper and possibility. They resonated in his chest, vibrated through his damaged vocal cords, and emerged as something between prayer and threat.
The burned prince—no, that creature was dead, had died screaming in the chemical fire—smiled beneath his breathing apparatus. The expression was invisible to the world, but he could feel it stretching his ruined features into something that might have been beautiful if it weren't so perfectly, terrifyingly wrong.
His family had abandoned him. The kingdom had forgotten him. They'd left him here to rot, to become a ghost story whispered in the servants' quarters. But in their mercy, they'd given him the greatest gift of all: time to evolve, to shed his weak flesh and emerge as something far more dangerous than they could imagine.
He would return to them, of course. He would play the role of the grateful, recovered son, the tragic figure who'd overcome his disfigurement through sheer force of will. They would welcome him back with relief and pity, never suspecting that the creature wearing their brother's name was something else entirely.
And when he had wormed his way back into their hearts, when he had positioned himself at the center of their power, when they trusted him completely—that's when they would learn the true meaning of Hydra's promise.
Cut off one head, and two more shall take its place.
In the sterile silence of his hospital room, surrounded by machines that measured his heartbeat and breathing, Julius vi Britannia ceased to exist. What remained was something far more patient, far more dangerous, far more beautifully terrible than any prince had ever been.
The transformation was complete. The real work could now begin.