Chapter Text
One of the more frustrating things about being blind, Nunnally had learned, was the way people often thought she was insensate instead of just unable to see. She could hear just fine - better, in fact, than most people, if those studies she had had Miss Sayoko read to her were to be believed. She could even move around without assistance, as long as she had her wheelchair. And yet, people still acted as if, well…
“I’m telling you, I didn’t join to kidnap crippled little girls! She goes to my school, you know, what if she recognizes me?”
“She’s blind , how is she going to recognize you? Is she even awake? We’ll just smuggle her back once we’ve got this thing. She won’t even know the difference.”
They were in the truck’s cabin while they had left her in the back with whatever it was they were stealing, but that wasn’t enough that she couldn’t hear her captors if they shouted at each other like that. She wasn’t stupid. She could feel the floor jumping around under her, could feel the round metal tank she was thrown against when the vehicle turned too sharply. Judging by the accent in the driver’s voice, he was Japanese. The sound of sirens and a helicopter outside, paired with the sudden turns, suggested that her captors were evading active pursuit. Apparently once they had gotten the truck running again after the crash, they didn’t feel the need to actively use her as a hostage anymore.
The door to the cabin opened and closed again, the sound of footsteps ringing against the floor approaching her. There was a rustling of cloth - maybe the girl was crouching down in front of Nunnally? “Hey, uh, it’s going to be okay, you know?” the girl said quietly. When Nunnally failed to respond, unsure how to address a remorseful kidnapper who insisted on lying to her, she heard cloth rustle again and the girl’s footsteps moved away towards the back of the vehicle.
Servomotors activated and a rush of air filled the truck. Along with the roaring of the wind, Nunnally could hear the sounds of their pursuers more clearly. Presumably, the other girl had just opened up the back of the truck for some reason that Nunnally couldn’t guess. She heard more sounds from a machine of some sort - it wasn’t the spherical tank she was huddled next to, maybe there was something else further back? Then there was a heavy thud and the truck lurched again as if it had just lost a lot of weight. Did they throw something out of the truck? They were talking about “using it” earlier and about how many people they would kill if they did that, so she hoped that they hadn’t used whatever it was they were worried about.
The truck closed back up again after dropping whatever the girl had let out. Nunnally could no longer hear the girl’s footsteps, and the chaos outside had gotten even louder. Had that been a knightmare frame? It was frustrating to be so completely unaware of what was going on. This was why her brother wanted her to stay inside all the time - at least at the Ashford Academy, she always had someone who could explain what was going on around her if she needed it.
There was an explosion outside and radio chatter from inside the cabin about splitting up, and then it got quiet again. The truck rumbled along on a straighter path than it had been going on before. There was a strange reverb to the truck’s engine - they must have entered a tunnel of some sort. After a long while, Nunnally’s fear began to wear off and curiosity filled its place. She pulled herself along the floor with her arms, hoping to find something she could use to call for help. Her phone was the first thing she found, lost to the other side of the truck when she had been tossed in here and forgotten. She dialed her brother - phones were one of the easiest devices for her to operate without her sight, what with the standardized button placement - only to get nothing but an out of service message.
Her next discovery was another phone-like device. It was made of hard, rugged plastic and had an antenna on the top. A communicator of some sort, but without help she had no idea how to use it. She could only be sure of what it was when it crackled to life with a voice panicked about a “Shinjuku invasion.” The thieves' communicator, then. And now that she thought about it, there were abandoned subway tunnels under the Shinjuku ghetto, weren’t there? That, paired with the conversation her captors had had and the clear accents in the voices she heard over the radio made it clear that these weren’t just any thieves. These were Japanese rebels, and whatever it was they had stolen was something they thought would kill everyone around them. Was she in the middle of a terror attack? But then, why were they under Shinjuku? Killing everyone in the ghetto would be the opposite of what the rebels would want, right?
The truck jolted violently, throwing her into the air and against the far wall again. She lost the communicator, but held onto her phone. A part of her still hoped that Lelouch wouldn’t find out about her little excursions outside the Academy grounds, and she couldn’t keep them a secret if she lost her phone. It had almost certainly been more than an hour and her brother’s ‘secret’ chess match must have ended by now, so it was surely too late.
As Nunnally tried to reorient herself, another door opened, on the wall behind her this time. Worse, she heard the strange tank make hissing noises as if it were about to open. A chemical weapon of some sort, perhaps?
Then, in the tunnel outside, footsteps, audible even against the less resonant cement ground thanks to the echoes in the subway tunnel. They were slow at first, as if the person making them was stumbling forward, and then they sped up into a run, and then -
“Nunnally?”
She knew that voice. It had been years since she last heard it, but she still knew who that was, even muffled by some sort of mask.
“Suzaku?”
“Nunnally, what are you -” something made a clicking noise and his voice became clearer. Nunnally guessed he had taken off the mask he’d been wearing. “It’s not safe here - why -”
And then the tank was hissing loudly and opening up, Nunnally assumed, because Suzaku had pulled her into his arms and jumped onto the concrete floor of the tunnel. She prepared for the sting of poison gas or the spreading numbness of a nerve agent, but only felt Suzaku tense against her and after a long moment whisper, “It’s not poison gas.”
Something soft and heavy flopped against the floor of the truck. Suzaku carefully set Nunnally down on the ground and then his footsteps moved away, back towards the truck. She pulled herself into a sitting position, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. Susaku climbing back into the truck and picking up...whatever it was inside the tank.
“Suzaku,” she called, “what is it? What happened?”
“A girl.” He responded, dropping down next to Nunnally. She reached out and felt her, long hair and strange leather restraints and - she followed the arms - was that a straightjacket? What was this? What was happening?
Suzaku set the girl on the ground right beside her and then moved to undo her restraints. Nunnally could feel his hands trembling under her own. He was wearing something that felt like armor, and that gave her pause for a moment.
“Suzaku, are you...a soldier?” Nunnally asked quietly.
He paused in his motion of undoing the ties, slowly pulling away to move down to the girls legs. He loudly unzipped some part of her restraints before answering. “Yes, Nunnally. I joined the Britannian army. What are you doing here? Isn’t your brother…” he trailed off, clearly unsure how to ask if Lelouch had survived the war.
“I’m sure my brother is very worried about me right now. He still doesn’t like me to leave the Academy and this…” Nunnally said. “Suzaku, what is this, what is going on?”
Suzaku’s hesitance was almost as loud as an answer. Finally, he sat down on the ground on the other side of the mysterious girl. “I don’t know. They told me we were looking for poison gas, but this isn’t -”
The sound of boots came from further down the tunnel. Too many for Nunnally to count by the sound alone, and judging by the speed they were approaching, they were running. The uniformity of the sound and the slight rattling of their equipment suggested they were either Britannian military or very well-equipped rebels, a deduction that proved redundant when they stopped and one of them barked out “Damned monkey,” in unaccented Britannian, “Even an honorary Britannian doesn’t have the authority to do what you’ve done!”
On the girl’s other side, Suzaku rapidly stood up and his footsteps hurried away from Nunnally and the girl. “But the briefing said this was poison gas!”
“You don’t have the clearance to know the truth,” the other man growled.
Beside Nunnally, the girl was beginning to stir. Unlike Suzaku, Nunnally knew what this was. Her brother might want to believe she was naive to the world, but in truth she was more familiar with the dark side of Britannian politics than he was. This was a Britannian black operation. Whatever the girl was, knowledge of her was as good as poison to anyone not cleared to know. The man said something quieter to Suzaku about “giving him an opportunity,” she assumed to kill her for him. Her heart sank. She knew Suzaku would never do that, and she called out to him, unsure what exactly she intended to tell him. It wouldn’t matter if Suzaku did agree to kill her, would it? He would be executed immediately either way.
It didn’t make a difference. Suzaku spoke over her protest, refusing to kill a young civilian girl. His vocal quality changed a little bit - did he turn back to look at her? She could already feel tears welling up, even before the gunshot cut off the Japanese boy’s speech. A body fell to the floor.
“You look like a Britannian student,” the man said as calmly as if he hadn’t just committed an extrajudicial execution. “Today is just not your day, is it? Kill the little one after you’ve taken the girl.”
To Nunnally’s growing horror, the other people in the tunnel responded with an enthusiastic affirmative. Their footsteps began to approach her. She thought she heard movement in the truck and then -
Something hit her like a train. Her ears were ringing. She thought she had been thrown, but she wasn’t sure. Something hard - a chunk of stone, perhaps - fell onto her arm and she screamed a little. An explosion. Someone must have rigged the truck to explode, and she had somehow survived at remarkably close range, but the ceiling of the tunnel wouldn’t have been so lucky. As her hearing slowly began to recover, she could hear the sounds of vast amounts of stone settling. Distantly, she heard voices, but she couldn’t make out any words. She tried to move and found that every part of her body hurt. She pushed herself up and was alarmed when her movements shifted some of the fallen stone she was lying against. She heard footsteps again, but they were distant and muffled by some sort of barrier. The tunnel had collapsed then - but it had saved her? For a while at least - there was always another way around in these old tunnels, and it wasn’t like she could go anywhere.
She didn’t know how much time passed, waiting in a collapsed subway tunnel for her executioners to find her. Her hearing slowly recovered, although she still heard the ringing. Every so often, something in the room would shift and she would worry about the roof collapsing on her. At some point, she heard human movement and tried to push herself up into a sitting position again, but froze when the footsteps were unfamiliar. The clicking sound of heels instead of the heavier stamp of boots. The unfamiliar person stopped right next to Nunnally and cloth rustled again - another person crouching down to get on her level, not that it mattered when she couldn’t see it. Nunnally turned her head to face where she approximated the observer was. She couldn’t open her eyes, but she could still give the impression of staring at someone calmly.
She jumped when she felt arms around her, but relaxed again when she recognized the fabric and the long hair she felt against her. The girl from the tank. The other girl pulled her up, and at first appeared to be trying to help her support her weight, but upon realizing that Nunnally couldn’t move her legs at all, switched to a strange half-side-carry, half-dragging position. Nunnally did her best to hold on, but also used the opportunity to study the other girl. It wasn’t often she got a chance to observe how someone acted or moved; without her eyes it required close physical contact. The girl was trembling a little, but seemed to get stronger with each step. She never turned to look at Nunnally, her eyes always forward.
“Thank you for carrying me, Ms. Poison Gas,” Nunnally said finally.
That, at least, provoked a reaction. Nunnally wouldn’t have been able to tell if she weren’t leaning on her, but she felt the girl’s footsteps falter and from the way her arm around the girl’s shoulder shifted she actually looked at Nunnally for a moment. Nunnally just barely made out her whisper, “she will do.”
Their journey was long, and multiple times Nunnally thought she heard the sounds of boots in the tunnels behind them. Eventually, they reached what Nunnally assumed was an exit to the subway system, as she was able to hear voices outside. She heard more than voices though - most prominently bursts of gunfire. What was happening out there?
The girl set her down on the stairs for a moment and then sat down herself next to Nunnally. She was breathing harder and clearly needed the rest. Nunnally heard the tramp of boots outside and tensed for a moment, but they seemed to be passing by instead of investigating.
And then her phone rang.
Nunnally fumbled with her phone to try to hang it up, but she was far too late. The soldiers stopped and began heading for their hiding spot at an unintelligible order from their commander. Beside her, the girl from the tank was pulling herself up, clearly preparing to bolt, but the Britannian soldiers were too fast, charging down the stairs and grabbing at Nunnally, pulling her away from her rescuer. Nunnally struggled and screamed, but she was thrown to the floor before she could try biting anyone. When the chaos had settled, one pair of footsteps moved toward her.
“It’s such a shame,” came the voice - the same voice from the tunnels, he had found them again, “a poor little Britannian middle-school girl, cut down by terrorists in the fighting.”
Nunnally didn’t grant him a response. If she was going to die here of all places, after surviving up until now, she would at least not beg. She could hear the glee in this man’s voice; he wanted to break her. If she could do one thing, she could make sure he failed.
“You did well, for a little girl. Goodbye.”
A scream. A gunshot. The sound of a body falling to the floor in front of her. A familiar warmth spattered against her face. Nunnally reached out with a trembling hand. The girl. The girl from the tank had saved her again. She had taken the bullet meant for Nunnally.
The leader of the soldiers was saying something again, but Nunnally wasn’t paying attention. The smell of blood - that was what she had missed. Once they had been pulled out of the tunnels, the air had been filled with it. How had she forgotten what it was like? The dust and blood and the smell of hot metal. She had been in a hundred places like this since that day. She didn’t want to die in this one.
The girl’s hand grabbed her wrist and suddenly Nunnally was falling. It was a dissociative sensation, like she was no longer in her body. Did she still have a body?
“You don’t want it to end here, do you?” She heard in a woman’s voice. Was she hearing it? Or was she thinking it? “You appear to have a will to live, even if your body is no help at all.” It sounded like...it felt like the other girl, though Nunnally was hard pressed to explain why it felt that way. “If you had power, could you survive? In exchange, you must make my one wish come true. Accept this contract, and while you live you will have power beyond any other.” She sensed something within her - or around her? Two vast bodies in a void, dark shapes approaching each other but not quite touching. Between, a light. “A different fate, a life unlike any other.” Flashes of sensation, from feathers on her skin to the rough silence of carved stone, to the susurrus presence of a waiting crowd. Then, a presence amidst the cacophony. “The power of the king will isolate you, if you are prepared for it.”
Her father’s hated voice, in a wide open space made of stone, large enough to echo. “The Ragnarok connection? The myth is beginning again?” Then he was gone again, swept away by the chaos.
Nunnally couldn’t think. She had grown used to the quiet safety of the Ashford Academy. She wasn’t prepared for this kind of pressure. What were the precise terms of this contract? What was this? How was the girl talking to her in her mind? But when she heard her father’s voice -
“I accept.”
- something just slid into place.
She had a body again. She was in her own body again. She was in her own body and she could see again .Not from her eyes, they were still closed. No, judging from the arm and the gun she saw from one perspective, she was seeing through the eyes of the soldiers, looking at her own body.
After all this time, she had forgotten what colors looked like. The shack they were in was a mess of rusty browns and dull greys, the only color the bright white and green of the strange girl’s body and the gold and maroon of Nunnally herself. Even the Britannians’ guns and uniforms were grey and brown. It was still an almost blindingly vibrant display after years of darkness.
She didn’t have time to enjoy her restored sight, though. The guns in the soldiers’ hands were weighing on her mind, and already the man in the lead was beginning to shift. She knew what her power was. How could she use it to survive?
She started humming, just quietly enough that she could hear it through the soldiers’ ears. She couldn’t see the man’s face, as he was in front of all her other points of view, but from the way he took a step forward and the breath in she heard from his ears, she guessed he was about to say something.
Through the others’ eyes, Nunnally saw the wall beside her explode outward, filling the shack with dust and debris. Through their ears, she heard the sound of a knightmare landing outside and peppering their shelter with gunfire as the men shouted and dashed for cover.
Only through their senses did she experience it, because it wasn’t happening. The men fled for the subway tunnels, forgetting her in their panic over the illusory combatant. As they lost sight of her, she in turn lost their perspective, until once again she was blind.
After a moment to make sure they wouldn’t come back for her, Nunnally started pulling herself across the stone floor. She couldn’t see, but she remembered which way the men had been facing, and she could guess that there was a door of some sort on the opposite wall. The scent of blood was stronger from that direction, and Nunnally allowed herself to acknowledge only for a moment that she still had very little hope of living through the afternoon without use of her legs. She didn’t manage to make it to any door that might be there before her arms began to ache - if her brother had been less concerned about her safety, she might have had the chance to develop proper upper body strength, like many wheelchair-users did. She felt bad about leaving behind the body of the girl who may have sacrificed her life for Nunnally, but there wasn’t anything she could do if she could hardly move herself.
She stopped for rest once she finally reached a corrugated metal wall. It didn’t stand in her way - it just ended a bit to her right - so she assumed she must have found the door. Based on the fact that she couldn’t feel the other side when she reached out, it must have been larger than person-sized; had this served as a garage?
She was getting flashes of vision. Some were passing through nearby alleyways, some were peeking out of windows. Whenever she entered someone’s line of sight, no matter how unnoticed she went, she saw what they saw. It was disorienting, but she eventually managed to piece together an idea of what was around her. When she finally understood what she was seeing it made her want to curl up in a ball and give up.
Bodies. The street was littered with corpses: men, women, and children. For all that she had experience living in a warzone, she had never actually seen death, not that she remembered anyway. Even now she couldn’t get a proper view, just stuttering flashes, always from different angles, a nightmare-like sequence of bodies so fast that she couldn’t properly make out any one face. She could only see one thing for sure. They were all Japanese.
She was putting together a picture of what was happening here, and it was making her sick. She was still trying to process it when she noticed a perspective that wasn’t fleeting.
Whoever it was, they were seeing her through a screen. It looked like a cockpit of some kind, with the person hunched over and close to the display. They were approaching her position quickly, their eyes occasionally flicking to the radar display right next to the screen. A knightmare pilot. A knightmare was approaching. Now that she knew what it was, she could pick out the sound of its wheels skidding towards her. She tried to pull herself back into the building, but the motion only drew the pilot’s attention. His eyes focused on her and stopped, staring at her on the screen. By now she could hear the crashing sound of the machine and the drone of the thing’s drive. It was close, from the other glimpses she was getting, it was only a few meters away.
It stopped. The pilot zoomed into her on the display and studied it. Then they turned away from the display entirely, pulling a latch to the side of the control panel, and she lost their vision. She was blind again, save for the flashes from other perspectives.
Her heart was beating hard against her ribcage. Once again, this was it. She would die here, even with the power of the king, only meters away from her last escape.
Another viewpoint appeared, the pilot’s, she assumed, as they slid down a cable from out of their knightmare’s cockpit. When they reached the ground, they seemed to stumble with each step they took. She didn’t dare move, even as they approached her, for fear of setting the pilot off. They drew closer, finally stopping in the midst of the Japanese bodies.
“P-princess Nunnally,” said a masculine voice, audibly choked with emotion, “you - you’re alive.”