Chapter Text
Mar 13th, 2009 a.t.b
Aries Imperial Villa, Pendragon
The gunshots stopped before Nunnally even reached the double doors.
She shoved them open, her heart in her throat, only to freeze on the threshold of the grand hall. The metallic stench of fresh blood hit her first.
At the base of the marble staircase, Marianne lay sprawled in a spreading pool of crimson. Half-buried beneath the dead empress was Lelouch, her little brother, his clothes soaked through with red.
The hall was already deafening with the thunder of combat boots. Imperial Guardsmen surged through the garden terrace, assault carbines raised to low-ready, their tactical boots tracking sticky red half-moons across the tiles.
"Clear the gallery! Check the upper clerestory!" an officer bellowed, his voice echoing off the vaulted plaster. "Perimeter Code Black! Seal the estate gates—no shuttles leave the tarmac!"
Nunnally didn't think. She dropped her training foil and lunged toward the stairs. "Lulu!"
Before she could clear the threshold, an iron-plated forearm slammed across her sternum with bruising force. She ricocheted backward against the doorframe, gasping for breath.
"Your highness, hold your position!" a sergeant barked, his face hidden behind a dark helmet, his free hand unholstering a sidearm as he shielded her body with his own. "The hall is unsecured! Escort team, get Her Highness into the sub-level bunker—now!"
"Get off me!" Nunnally snarled, her fiery temper flaring in her chest. She dug her heels into the floor, twisting against the sergeant’s grip, her fingernails clawing at the seams of his tactical rig. "Lulu! Lelouch!"
Two soldiers seized Lelouch by his shoulders, literally ripping him out from beneath his mother’s cooling corpse.
Lelouch didn't cry out. His clothes were soaked red with Marianne’s blood. His jaw was locked open, air hitching in dry, reedy clicks at the back of his throat, his chest heaving without drawing air.
His eyes were wide open. But the brilliant violet irises were unfocused, staring unblinkingly through the smoke and chandeliers into absolute, empty nothingness. A trickle of dark blood had leaked from both ears, staining his pale earlobes—his eardrums ruptured by the point-blank blasts in the enclosed stairwell.
Apr 8th, 2009 a.t.b -
It had taken the Imperial Court less than four weeks to discard them.
In the Holy Britannian Empire ruled by Charles zi Britannia, survival was the only currency, and weakness was a sin bordering on treason. Marianne the Flash had been their armor; she had justified their existence through martial supremacy. Without her, the court took one look at the remains of the Aries Villa and rendered its verdict: a boy deemed useless as a political tool, and a girl whose pride was an offense in a child who had failed to protect her own people.
Kururugi Shrine, Outlying Storage Shed
Lelouch sat beside the paper screen, staring at the ceiling, his small hands resting flat on his knees to feel the vibration of the downpour against the wooden floorboards. He had turned six a few months ago, his frame swallowed by an oversized wool sweater Nunnally had bought from the village market. With his violet eyes tilted toward the ceiling, he counted the rhythm of the drops.
"Eighty-four a minute," Lelouch murmured. "The gutter’s leaking. If the ground washes out, the back corner is going to drop."
"I'll shore it up with river stones before dark," Nunnally replied near the stove, trying to make rice for the first time for lunch. "Let's eat something first, Lulu. You hardly touched breakfast, and you're freezing."
The shed they were provided with had never been meant for human shelter; it was an abandoned storehouse perched on the overgrown slope behind the shrine’s main compound, raised on damp stone footings above the wet mountain loam. Decades of neglected clutter crowded the corners behind them—dusty festival banners, crates of chipped lacquer bowls, and bundles of dried bamboo lashed to the exposed ceiling beams. Rain rattled incessantly against the shingles above, drafts cutting freely through tears in the ancient paper screens that separated the faded tatami floor from the outer walkway. The damp chill smelled of aged timber, river moss, and the faint, bitter char of rice Nunnally had scorched against the clay brazier.
She had just reached out to offer her brother a chipped wooden spoon when the violent clatter of sliding doors tore through the quiet.
Suzaku Kururugi stood at the entrance, rain dripping from the hem of his hakama onto the straw mats. In his right hand, his wooden training sword swung low, spattering the water across the floorboards.
"You're the filthy Britannians?" Suzaku snarled, his knuckles white against the corded grip of the sword. "My father gave you my secret base? You think you get to hide here like rats because of some imperial name?"
Nunnally’s hand headed toward the brass pin tucked into her hair, her spine snapping rigid. But Lelouch didn't flinch. He didn't even shift his shoulders toward the entrance. His pale face remained tilted toward the rafters, cool, remote, and utterly detached.
"If you've come to demand a duel," Lelouch said softly, "you might want to find an opponent who can actually see how miserable your stance is. If this is an official greeting from the Prime Minister’s household, your protocol is lacking."
"Protocol?" Suzaku sneered, taking two aggressive strides forward, raising the wooden sword to point it squarely at Lelouch’s chest. "You think you're still in a palace?"
The casual arrogance struck Suzaku harder than an open palm. Blinded by childish fury, he dropped the wooden sword, lunged across the tatami, and fisted both hands into the loose collar of the woolen sweater. He yanked hard, bracing his hips for the inevitable pushback—expecting the foreign prince to dig his heels into the mats, shove his chest, and brawl like the village boys down the hill.
Instead, Lelouch came away entirely weightless.
There was no resistance in his hips, no tension in his knees. He spilled out of the low seat, his limp legs trailing helplessly over the edge of the mat. Because he couldn't see the floor coming, his arms never came up to break the fall. His shoulder struck the bare wood with a sickening, hollow thud, the back of his head snapping against the floorboards before he rolled onto his stomach, the air driven out of his lungs in a dry, violent wheeze.
Nunnally moved without hesitation. She lunged low, driving her full weight into Suzaku’s chest with sudden, ruthless momentum that knocked him flat. Before he could draw breath, she had pinned his shoulder to the mats, her thumb driving a sharpened brass hairpin so hard beneath the soft flesh of his jawline that the skin parted, a single bead of dark crimson welling against the polished metal.
"Don't you touch him," she hissed, her voice cracking into a raw, feral sob. Her face twisted into an expression so venomous, so stripped of youth, that the breath died in Suzaku's throat. "I will kill you. I'll kill your father, I'll burn this mountain to the ash—don't you dare touch my brother!"
Suzaku froze, paralyzed. It wasn't the sharp bite of brass against his throat that terrified him; it was the murderous, unblinking intent in her eyes. Beneath her grip, his wide brown gaze darted desperately past her shoulder to the boy sprawled on the floor.
Lelouch was struggling. His thin elbows shook violently as he tried to lever his chest off the wood, his face pale and contorted with strain. His clouded violet eyes drifted aimlessly toward the ceiling, seeing nothing, unmoored from the room. Beneath the tangled hem of the sweater, his bare legs lay crooked and completely motionless.
"Nunnally... stop. Please," Lelouch pleaded with a desperate whisper.
Nunnally didn't budge. "He brought a weapon, Lulu. He meant to hurt you."
His small hand reached out into the empty air toward the sound of the scuffle, patting the tatami blindly until his fingers brushed Nunnally's arm and grabbed it.
"I'm all right. Let him go... you'll only hurt yourself."
The hollow shock hit Suzaku all at once.
The arrogant foreigner he had stormed in to fight was an six-year-old boy whose legs were deadweight—a boy who couldn't even tell where his attacker was lying. And he, the proud son of Japan's Prime Minister, had just dragged a helpless, blind child off a seat and slammed him into the floorboards.
At the sound of his plea, the murderous tension vanished from Nunnally’s shoulders as if it had never existed. Nunnally shoved Suzaku away with a sharp, shuddering breath, scrambling back across the floor on her knees to gather Lelouch against her chest. She wrapped her arms tight around his shivering shoulders, her trembling fingers running frantically through his dark hair to feel for split skin or swelling.
"I'm right here, Lulu. Everything's fine," she murmured, utterly ignoring the boy on the floor.
Suzaku scrambled backward on his hands and knees, the floorboards burning his skin. The hot anger that had driven him through the rain had curdled into a cold, suffocating weight in his stomach. He parted his lips to say something—an excuse, a defense, an apology, anything to erase the sight of those limp legs dragging across the floor—but only a thin, dry rasp left his mouth.
He stared at the boy trembling defenseless in his sister's arms, then down at his own scraped knuckles. He had spent his childhood scorning cowards who preyed on the weak. Yet here he was, having done that exact thing to someone who couldn't even stand.
Suzaku scrambled to his feet, abandoning his wooden sword on the tatami, and bolted out of the shed into the freezing rain, running as fast as his legs could carry him to escape the shame burning in his chest.
A week after the scuffle, the mountain air hung heavy with the scent of rain-soaked bark and fallen leaves. Nunnally hadn't even been gone ten minutes—a quick trip down to the storage tank behind the main hall to haul back a fresh bucket of water. She'd wedged the small wooden chocks firmly under the wheels of Lelouch's chair, left him tucked against the sturdy wooden siding out of the draft, and set a scrap of carved pine in his lap to keep his idle fingers busy.
She rounded the corner, and the wooden bucket slipped through her fingers, splintering against the flagstones.
The chair lay overturned. One wheel spun lazily in the cold air, whining with a tiny, rhythmic squeak beside a raw gap in the wooden railing.
"Lelouch!"
The sound that tore out of her throat was ragged, ugly, and shrill. Nunnally dropped to her hands and knees, skidding through the mud right to the edge of the drop. "Lulu! Lulu, answer me!"
Nothing answered except the heavy drip of runoff from the canopy. Down in the hollow, the underbrush was a violent tangle of wet bamboo stalks and jagged shale.
"Lelouch!"
Footsteps came pounding hard across the temple courtyard. Suzaku skidded around the corner of the outbuilding, panting, his knuckles scraped from days of brooding in the woods. He had spent the last week hovering just out of sight, eaten alive by the sick memory of slamming a blind, paralyzed kid onto the floor.
Hearing her scream, he sprinted forward—and froze.
When Nunnally whipped around, there was no brass hair-pin, no icy stare, no elegant posture. She scrambled toward him across the wet deck on her knees, her muddy hands clawing desperately at his shirt, her face pale and streaked with tears.
"Kururugi Suzaku, please," she sobbed, her voice breaking into a desperate whimper. "The railing broke. He fell. He can't see where he is, he can't walk, he's going to drown in the creek—please, you know these woods. Please find him. Please, help me find my brother!"
Suzaku's chest tightened so hard he couldn't pull air into his lungs.
For the past week, he had watched her from afar. The servants spat when she carried the laundry down to the washbasin; the elders openly sneered at her accent, treating her like stray vermin dumped on their doorsteps. Yet she had never broken. She carried herself with quiet, unyielding dignity, brushing aside every insult as if it were simply beneath her notice.
To see her now—shattered, covered in mud, begging on her knees and clawing at his shirt like he was her only lifeline in the world—terrified him far more than the brass pin she had pressed against his throat.
"The runoff drains down into the weir," Suzaku said quickly, grabbing her upper arms to keep her from tumbling off the ledge herself. "Don't go down the mud, it's too steep. Follow the ridge trail on the left! I'll jump the bamboo slope—I'm faster. Go!"
He didn't wait for her answer. Suzaku threw himself over the lip of the embankment, sliding down the wet clay, using bamboo stalks to arrest his fall as he plunged into the ravine. The air down in the hollow was freezing, choked with the smell of stagnant water and rotting pine.
"Prince!" Suzaku yelled, spitting out pine needles as he hit the bottom of the trench. "Hey prince, where are you?!"
A few paces upstream, wedged securely into the dry hollow beneath an exposed tangle of cedar roots, sat Lelouch.
The small boy was shivering so hard his teeth rattled, his woolen sweater coated in muck, his pale knees scraped and bruised. Yet despite the cold, his posture was rigidly straight, his back braced against the root wall. Clutched tightly in his bleeding hands was a small, whittled wooden sparrow.
At the sharp crack of breaking branches, Lelouch’s head jerked up. His clouded violet eyes flared with pure terror.
"Nunnally?" Lelouch whispered, his voice thin and trembling.
"It's me," Suzaku panted, dropping to his knees in the muck, his breath pluming in the cold air. "Kururugi Suzaku. Are you hurt?"
Lelouch's narrow shoulders slumped just a fraction, the panic receding, but his small face instantly pulled into a defensive scowl. "Kururugi. Did... did Nunnally see the walkway?"
"She's searching the ridge trail right now," Suzaku said, reaching out to gently check Lelouch's forearms for fractures. "She's losing her mind up there. She was crying so hard she could barely breathe. What were you doing near the railing?"
Lelouch looked down, his unseeing eyes drifting toward the wet leaves around his knees. His knuckles went white around the wooden bird. "The wind blew it off the table. Nunnally carved it for me. It rolled, and I heard it hit the planks near the railing. I... I counted the floorboards. It was only three feet. I thought if I reached out, I could just grab it before she came back."
His lips twitched into a miserable, bitter grimace.
"She does everything," Lelouch whispered, his voice cracking with a fierce, burning shame. "She cooks. She stays awake until I fall asleep. She has to wash my clothes when I make a mess. She has to stand in front of your people so they don't hurt me. She's is an imperial princess, yet she spends every day acting as my servant. I just wanted... I only wanted to pick up one thing myself."
Hot tears finally spilled from his blank eyes, leaving pale tracks through the dried mud on his cheeks. He slammed his small fist weakly against his numb thigh. "And look what happened. I fell off a ledge like an infant. I hate this useless body. I hate being trapped in the dark. All I ever do is make her miserable."
Suzaku stared at the kid. The foreign prince wasn't some arrogant bastard that was sent to rule over them. He was just a little boy, smaller and frailer than him, trapped inside his own body and terrified of being a burden to the only person he had left.
Suzaku reached out and closed his warm hand right over Lelouch's freezing fingers, pressing the wooden sparrow between their palms.
"She doesn't care about being a princess, you idiot," Suzaku said softly, his voice thick with unpracticed warmth. "When she asked for my help, she looked like her whole life had just fallen off a cliff. She doesn't think you're a burden. She obviously loves you a lot."
Lelouch sniffled, his chin trembling as he tried to swallow his tears. He didn't pull his hand away. "You're absurdly sentimental, Kururugi."
"Yeah, and you're an annoying brat," Suzaku shot back, a faint smile breaking through his dirt-streaked face.
A loud crash echoed above them, followed by sliding rock and a frantic gasp. "Lulu!"
Branches cracked overhead, and Nunnally came sliding down the embankment on her heels, completely ignoring the briars catching her sleeves. When she saw Lelouch sitting there, her breath hitched in an agonizing sob. She dropped into the mud, pulling him into her chest so hard Lelouch let out a muffled wheeze.
"I'm sorry," Lelouch mumbled into her shoulder, his small hands clutching the back of her shirt. "Nunnally, I'm sorry. I have the bird."
"Be quiet," Nunnally wept, her hands trembling as she smoothed his hair. "Just be quiet. You're safe. You're right here."
The climb back was slow and quiet. Suzaku carried Lelouch securely on his back while Nunnally walked beside them, keeping one firm, protective hand clamped onto Lelouch's ankle the entire way up the slope.
By dusk, the outbuilding was filled with the warm, crackling glow of the charcoal brazier. Nunnally had washed the mud from Lelouch's limbs, bandaged his scraped knuckles, and coaxed him into swallowing a few spoons of steaming rice porridge. Utterly drained by the cold and the terror of the fall, Lelouch had fallen into a deep, heavy sleep beneath a mountain of futons, his breathing slow and rhythmic.
Out on the veranda, the rain had turned into a steady, quiet drizzle.
Nunnally slid open the screen door, carrying two small cups of steaming barley tea. She walked over to where Suzaku sat on the edge of the wooden deck, staring down at his bruised knuckles. She held out a cup.
Suzaku blinked up at her, startled, before carefully taking the earthenware. "Thanks."
She sat down beside him, tucking her feet beneath her skirts. The fierce girl who had threatened to kill him was nowhere to be seen;she was just an exhausted child.
"My mother was Marianne vi Britannia," Nunnally said quietly. "In our homeland, people called her Marianne the Flash. She was the greatest Knightmare pilot in the empire. She taught me how to disarm a grown man before I even learned how to write properly. But when the assassins came to the villa, none of that mattered. She couldn't stop the bullets from tearing through her and Lelouch."
She wrapped both hands around her warm cup, watching the steam rise.
"When she died, Father looked at Lelouch's ruined legs and blind eyes and said mother died for an invalid—a weakling unworthy of breath, let alone the throne," Nunnally murmured, her fingers tracing the rim of her teacup. "The only use he had for us was to ship us across the ocean as disposable diplomatic hostages. Living pawns to prove Britannia's good faith while the two governments squabble over trade agreements."
Suzaku looked down into his cup, the guilt sitting heavy in his stomach. "My father and the ministers talk about Britannia like it's a swarm of locusts. When you two showed up, I thought you were just spoiled royals coming to look down on us. I was mad. And I took it out on a guy smaller than me who couldn't even see my fist." He tightened his grip on the pottery. "I was an absolute coward."
"You weren't a coward today," Nunnally said.
She turned to face him and bowed her head—not with the practiced condescension of a court noble, but with deep, humble sincerity.
"You brought my brother back to me, Suzaku. If you hadn't found him before the runoff rose, he would have frozen down there. I will never forget that. Thank you, Suzaku."
Suzaku’s cheeks flushed hot, but the knot of shame that had sat in his gut for days finally began to loosen. He looked past her shoulder into the dimly lit room, where Lelouch lay curled under the quilts, holding the whittled wooden sparrow against his chest even in his sleep.
"I won't let anyone here hurt him," Suzaku said, the resolve settling deep into his chest. "Not my father, not the village kids. If you'll let me... I can carry him when you need to get up the paths. I can show him the mountain paths."
Nunnally studied his earnest, battered face for a long second, and for the first time since the blood had washed across the marble floor of the Aries Villa, a a genuine, soft smile crossed her face.
"We would like that, Suzaku," she whispered. "We would like that very much."
By July, the mountain was roaring with cicadas.
The cold hostility that had choked the Kururugi shrine melted away into long, sun-drenched afternoons. Suzaku had taken to hoisting Lelouch onto his back, locking the boy's thin arms around his shoulders, and trekking all the way up the steep mossy steps to the shrine’s lookout rock.
"What's on the horizon today?" Lelouch asked, his chin resting against Suzaku's sweaty shoulder, his pale face turned up toward the heat of the midday sun.
"To the east, the processing towers by the bay," Suzaku said, wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve. "Big, ugly smokestacks poking through the haze. To the west, just the terraced rice paddies and the river."
"The eastern approach is completely bottlenecked by the hills," Lelouch murmured, his tone sounding far too formal for a six-year-old. "The Emperor may be ruthless, but the Homeland Ministry cannot bypass supply logistics. If they ever attempted a naval blockade, Japan's domestic reserves could easily outlast imperial fleet deployments. An invasion would cost considerably more than the Sakuradite is worth. It makes no logical sense."
Suzaku snorted, setting Lelouch down gently against the trunk of an ancient pine. "You talk like the people running wars are playing a board game, Lelouch. Grown-ups don't do things just because they make sense."
"Then they're incompetent," Lelouch replied loftily, crossing his arms. "Any strategy that expends more resources than the objective yields is fundamentally flawed."
"Right, right, smartass," Suzaku grinned, tossing a cold, ripe summer plum into Lelouch's hand. "Eat your fruit."
Lelouch picked it up, sniffing it with mild suspicion before taking a small bite. "Did you steal this from the lower grove?"
"It's not stealing if they grow on my family's land," Suzaku retorted with a grin.
Across the grounds in the shrine’s open-air dojo, the sharp, hollow crack of wood against wood echoed up into the high cedar rafters.
Sunlight slanted through the open sliding partitions, illuminating dust motes that drifted over the polished floorboards. Nunnally stood poised lightly on the balls of her bare feet, an unadorned wooden bokken held in a low, disciplined guard. Across from her, Suzaku had spent weeks trying to land a single clean touch, only to find himself thrown onto the slick planks time and time again. Nunnally was lighter and slightly smaller than Suzaku, but her movements carried the terrifying, fluid elegance Marianne vi Britannia had hammered into her.
"Your center is drifting again, Suzaku," Nunnally called out, sidestepping his fierce overhead strike with an effortless twist of her hips. Her wooden blade caught his wrists, redirecting his momentum until Suzaku stumbled face-first into the wooden floor.
"How do you even move like that?" Suzaku groaned into the wood, rubbing his bruised jaw as Nunnally extended an effortless, polite hand to pull him up.
"Because you're swinging with your shoulders instead of your core," Nunnally laughed, resting the wooden blade lightly against her shoulder. "Mother always told me that if you rely entirely on brute strength, an opponent who understands leverage will simply use your own weight to snap your joints."
"Listen to my sister, Suzaku," Lelouch called out from his shady spot on the raised observation deck at the edge of the hall, split bamboo strips resting in his lap as he worked them into a woven hand-fan. "You sound like an overfed pup attempting to tackle a stone wall."
Suzaku scrambled up, brandishing his wooden sword toward the raised gallery. "Hey! Who hauled your heavy self all the way up the mountain this morning, you ungrateful brat?"
"That was an agreed-upon logistical transport arrangement, for which I remain moderately appreciative," Lelouch countered without pausing his hands, the faint trace of a smirk playing at the corner of his lips.
Nunnally giggled, the sound light and free. Setting her practice sword against the weapon rack, she stepped up onto the gallery platform and dropped immediately to her knees beside Lelouch's chair. She pulling a damp cloth from her pocket to gently rub off the sweat from his forehead. Lelouch instinctively leaned his temple against her hand, his haughty tone instantly vanishing into a soft, comfortable silence.