Hello.

The plot of this story is roughly based on the anime Zangkyou no Terror, but you don't need to have watched it to understand it. But it's a brilliant anime, so you should watch it for that.

Hope you like it!


Euphemia likes the new boy in class. He seems guarded but his smile is warm, and she believes you can tell everything you need to know about a person with just their smile. Suzaku Kururugi is a genuine person, even if he seems a little bit sad.

She sits in the seat behind him in class and tries not to stare too openly, but all her thoughts keep coming back to him. He's an Eleven, for one. The racial slurs have already begun, about two weeks after he transferred. What's fascinating is that he doesn't take it to heart – either that, or he is just so used to it by now. Euphemia has tried fending people off. She sticks herself firmly to his side whenever she can, and people like her, so her appearance is generally enough to shut them up.

She watches him now, how his eyes are glued on the teacher, frantically taking notes – practically the only student doing so.

The other reason Suzaku's become such a big deal is Lelouch Lamperouge.

Lelouch hasn't been with them for long either – two months at the most. He is already one of the most popular kids, which is a miracle, because as polite as he seems his smile is so fake.

Euphemia doesn't really like him. Lelouch is a whole different level of uncaring. They have a couple of classes together – calculus and chemistry lab, and she's only ever seen him dozing, texting under the table, or, in the case of lab, exploding things and pocketing chemicals that Euphemia wants to call him out on but doesn't want to seem like a snitch.

His only friend is Rivalz, who has a knack for dealing with people who don't care about him, and who, she has heard, takes him gambling on occassion for extra pocket money. She doesn't know why he's popular – except that he is sort of pretty. She'll give him that.

Even if his shady surgical eye patch makes him look...well, shady.

What took everyone by surprise was that Lelouch and Suzaku seem, by all accounts, to be friends.

Proof of that is here, right now, in the fact that Suzaku's phone in his desk keeps lighting up with text messages. One after the other in rapid succession. Euphemia doesn't mean to spy, but it is hard to miss that the sender ID is Lelouch.

Suzaku ignores the messages with profound determination. When his phone blinks faster, he pushes it to the back of his desk so that he doesn't have to see it anymore. He waits it out till the end of class, never pausing in his note taking. When class is over, he throws his books into his bag and stands to leave, pocketing his phone but not answering it.

"Hey, Suzaku!" she calls, before he could leave. "Do you have plans after school?"

He looks surprised for a moment, but then he smiles. "Yes, sorry," he says. "I have to meet someone."

Lelouch, no doubt. "Don't be," she says, waving him away. "What about tomorrow?"

He nods hesitantly. "I guess so."

"Wonderful! We'll go out somewhere then?"

Their conversation doesn't go unheard, something that both of them are terribly aware of. The murmurs have started, dark looks turning towards Suzaku.

"Alright," he says. It isn't rare for them to go out together, but it is strange for her to ask in front of the whole class. She internally apologizes for the awkwardness of the situation, but she really believes that being forward about befriending an Eleven is the only way to make people realize that he isn't worth any less than themselves.

When Suzaku leaves the room, her friends instantly huddle around her, hesitant to broach the topic but making loud hints that they want it explained. Euphemia shrugs.

"You're too innocent," one of the girls says. It's the kind of thing her sister says, day after day.


It is absurdly easy to break into the nuclear fuel facility. All he has to do is lift his helmet at the right time, ask if he could please enter, and before he knows it he's in and out, clutching the container that's just almost too big for him to carry, and running towards the gate where Suzaku is waiting for him. Suzaku is impatient, drumming his fingers on the handle bars of his bike. Running and carrying stuff is more his job – Lelouch would much rather be the one at the bike. But Suzaku never would have made it inside the facility. Actually he could have, but it would have been a great deal more...messy.

Suzaku takes the container from him and puts in on the bike, pulling out a can of red spray paint from his pocket. Lelouch looks at it incredulously.

"Did you have to wait until I was out to do this?"

"It signifies a job well done, Lelouch," Suzaku shoots back. He sprays the paint onto the wall near the gate, in the shape of the Geass sigil that occassionally glows in Lelouch's left eye. "It would have been awkward if I sprayed it and then you ended up dead."

Lelouch scoffs. "As if I'd fail." He jumps onto the bike behind Suzaku and the machine whirs to life. They speed away from the scene of the crime well before anyone realizes that something's gone wrong.

Suzaku's phone rings when they are halfway home. He reaches into his pocket (letting go of one handle, making the bike swerve dangerously) and hands the phone to Lelouch without looking. Lelouch squints at the caller ID.

"It's Euphemia," he says, somewhat annoyed.

"I can't hear you!" Suzaku shouts over the wind.

"It's Euphemia!" he shouts back.

Suzaku doesn't respond. He knows Lelouch won't pick the call up, and he knows he's going to get a lecture about this later. As well he should know, Lelouch thinks.

He starts the moment they get back home, right when Suzaku jumps onto the ground and takes his helmet off, shaking his hair out. "I told you not to get too involved with anyone," Lelouch says, glaring at him.

Suzaku throws his arms up. "What can I say? She's persistent."

"You know what'll happen if we drag her into this. If you have to be rude to her, be rude to her, damn it. Or you'll just end up getting her killed."

Suzaku bites his lip, hefting the stolen container to take indoors.

They don't talk much at home. Actually neither of them talks much in general. Lelouch spends his time tinkering away with wires and explosives, while Suzaku lies sprawled across the couch, sometimes reading, often going out to buy groceries and more questionable materials. It's also his job to watch the news – which is actually important and not just something he does to pass the time.

Late at night, Lelouch can see him texting someone from the corner of his eye, and he flings his screw driver at him. Then he has to pause working until Suzaku finishes grumbling and feels nice enough to hand it back. Suzaku also slams a plate of sandwiches down in his desk, which Lelouch deems unimportant.

They go to bed around midnight, Suzaku on the top bunk and Lelouch on the lower one. Lelouch tosses and turns but can't sleep, his hands twitching with the temptation to return to making his bombs.


The stench of the corpses was overwhelming. There was no place to hide from them, the entire city was trashed. Corpses leaked onto the streets and lay in pieces along the sidewalk.

Suzaku was behind him, not even breathing. They were trying to step around the bodies but there was no where to walk, no place to step that wasn't covered in blood and gore -

"Nunnally!" he kept shrieking, the only sound in the gloom. "Nunnally, Nunnally!"

They each held a gun, two large for their bony ten year old hands. Lelouch's fingers shook over the trigger, but there was no one to fight. The enemy lines seemed to have retreated, leaving the entire city dead in it's wake."Nunnally!"

And then he saw her, in the middle of the street, broken wheelchair and mangled body, her eyes wide open and screaming -


Suzaku wakes up to a loud thud. He's a light sleeper, and being Lelouch's roommate doesn't make sleeping any easier. He peers over the bed frame, and sure enough, Lelouch is on the ground, sitting up and blinking disorientedly. He'd fallen out of bed again.

"Nightmare?" Suzaku asks, with none of the grogginess of sleep. He isn't a stranger to nightmares either. It's the sort of thing that kids like him and Lelouch are used to by now.

"Yeah. I'm fine," Lelouch says, pushing himself to a standing position. He makes to leave the room. Suzaku knows that he'll spend the rest of the...night? Morning? A quick look at the clock tells him that it's four AM, so he'll spend the rest of the morning working with his explosives.

He doesn't sleep after that, either. He lies awake and stares at the ceiling, trying not to think. That's always been something that he's good at.

At 6:30 AM he climbs down the ladder, to take a bath, cook something, maybe if he's lucky get Lelouch to eat something as well. When he crosses Lelouch in the living room he looks up from his work.

"I think it's time," Lelouch says. He never wears his eye patch at home, he says it itches something terrible. "I think we're ready."


The rebels base is not particularly impressive, but the pride that they all have in owning their own base makes up for it. It was Ohgi who had found the spot, hidden near the outskirts of the Shinjuku ghetto, and they'd happily made it their impromptu home for the past three months.

"So you see," Tamaki is saying to Ohgi, who looks just about as fed up as Ohgi can look. "I need more money."

Kallen points and accusing finger at him. "Don't give it to him! He used his allowance entirely on liquor!"

"You traitor! What about all the times I paid for your meals?"

"All the times you paid? Don't make me laugh!"

Ohgi takes their bantering as the opportune moment to sneak away from the conversation. Kallen lets him.

Their group is dying. Their motivation has disappeared long ago, and they are now a rebel group in name only, their recent accomplishments nonexistent and their old ones gathering dust. Soon they will be forgotten, dubbed another 'group of kids with big ideas and nothing else', and Kallen would do anything to stop that from happening.

"Hey, Ohgi!" Sugiyama calls. He's sitting in the corner of the shelter that passes for a room, leaning against a wall with a laptop in his lap. Their group has one laptop in total, and connecting to the internet is pure hell. Most of them don't use it because they're all bad tempered people who can't be trusted not to punch the screen. "I think I found something interesting."

The group instantly huddles around him – anything on the internet that has already loaded is very cool. For having loaded, if not for anything else.

Sugiyama is looking at a video on a popular social media site, titled Zero Requiem, Part I. There are two male figures wearing black masks, hiding their identities.

"Good day," one of them says. "I am Zero."

"And I'm Lancelot," the other boy pipes up. "We're here to tell you something important."

'Zero' holds up four fingers. "At four PM tomorrow, Tokyo will fall into darkness."

"And then the darkness will light up with a boom!" Lancelot mimes an explosion with his hands.

"We'll see you then," Zero says. He reaches out to turn the camera off, and then the video goes blank.

There is a moment of silence. "Well," Kallen says at last. "That was pretty lame."

"The masks were cool," Tamaki says as an afterthought. "Maybe we should get masks?"


Suzaku seems distracted in class today. He looks like something's bothering him, and Euphemia has even tried asking what it was, but he had smiled tightly and said that he was just fine in the way that people tell you to please leave them alone. She bites the end of her pencil, frowning to herself. Maybe she could cheer him up after school. She could take him to her brother's art museum. Art could cheer anyone up, especially Clovis' art.

"Hey, Suzaku," she starts, once the teacher leaves at the end of the day. "Do you - "

"Sorry, Euphy," he cuts her off, looking a bit harried. "There's somewhere I have to be."

"But – but you promised!" It sounds so childish, even to herself.

Suzaku looks a bit guilty. "I'm really sorry. I'll make it up to you next time."

'Oh my god, did he just blow her off?' The mutters start. 'Like she isn't doing him a favour?'

Suzaku doesn't even look at his haters. He seems in a real hurry. Hopefully he hasn't gotten into trouble of some sort.


"These plushies look hideous," Lelouch says, scowling. He and Suzaku are standing in an abandoned aisle of the shopping center, which, as required for their plan, sells horrible looking plushies.

"I think they're kind of cute, actually," Suzaku says. They are shaped like mini television sets, with too wide eyes and gaping mouths. They look more like victims of electrocution than huggable friends. Lelouch turns one over, examining it. He's checking to see which of the plushies have a small mark near the heads, which he'd placed himself before packaging and selling to show which of the plushies had explosives in them. The ones that do he hands to Suzaku. The ones that don't, he places back on the shelves with some excuse or the other.

"This one is too ugly," he'll say for one.

"This one is way too ugly," for the next.

"This one is way way waaay to ugly."

"You're a natural," Suzaku says under his breath. "I could swear you aren't pretending."

"That's becaause I'm not, you idiot. They're all ugly! Why do you always like the weird stuff that no one else does?"

"I ask myself that every day when I see you."

Lelouch can't decide if he wants to take that as an insult or a compliment. He tilts his head, considering. A second later, the lights go out and the building is enveloped in pitch darkness.

He looks at his watch, the fluorescent numbers glowing ominously in the dark. It's 4PM. Right on time.

The people around him are unusually loud, complaining about the store and the government and God and anyone else they can think of to blame. Suzaku has disappeared already with an arm full of plushies. He needs to get them to the sprinkler system.

When the emergency power doesn't turn on, people start to panic. Employees are lining up at the aisles, directing the customers towards the emergency exit. "Everyone please remain calm, everything is under control," is what they're saying. It makes Lelouch want to laugh, but he lines up behind the customers anyway. His eyepatch is itching like crazy.

It takes quite a while for them all to get out of the building. As soon as he's out he steps away from the crowd and pulls out his phone. Suzaku is late. It should have taken him only a minute to make it to the sprinkler system and back. He should have caught up with Lelouch by now.

Where are you? He texts, trying not to panic. He fingers the spray can in his side bag. He can't spray anything until he knows Suzaku is safe.

It takes Suzaku a full minute to respond. Sorry, I've been delayed.

What? He texts back, worried, but Suzaku doesn't reply. Did he get caught? Did he get into a fight? What was wrong?


Euphemia recognizes him instantly.

She actually recognizes Lelouch first. His eye patch makes him conspicuous – he is easy to pick out in a crowd. And wherever Lelouch is, Suzaku is never far behind. They seem to be looking at plushies together.

It hurts a bit. Suzaku had promised that they'd go out together, and now here he is, looking at plushies with his friend, when he'd made the situation seem like an emergency. She sort of wants to go over and scold him (good naturedly) about it.

Before she can make it to their aisle, the power goes out, and there's a collective chorus of noooo and daaaamn around her.

In the darkness she can't be sure of anything, but she thinks someone runs past her, deeper into the building. When her eyes start to adjust to the dark, Lelouch is alone.

Suzaku has surely made a run for it. The staircase behind her is labelled under maintenance. Her heart beats loudly – she is more than suspicious – but she runs in the direction that she thinks he's gone – down the stairs.

Down one storey. Down the next. Down one more and she finds him, kneeling next to the wall, arranging something a she can't see in the dark.

"Suzaku?" she calls, hesitant.

For a moment he is absolutely silent. He doesn't look at her, doesn't move. He just stays there, very much aware of her presence but making no move to acknowledge it. Finally he stands, turning towards her with what she hopes is a smile. "You shouldn't be here," he says gently.

"Neither should you," Euphy points out. "What – what are you doing?"

Suzaku hands her a plushie. "Taking care of this guy," he says. "Whatever you do, don't let go of him." He sounds deathly serious. "Stay here and I'll be right back."

"Suzaku, wait!" But he's gone in a second, taking the stairs five at a time. He's always been freakishly fast.

Don't let go of him. It was a creepy thing to say given the situation – no power and with him doing suspicious things in the dark. She's actually scared to let go. What if she doesn't know Suzaku after all? What if he is in more trouble than she'd thought?

She starts up the stairs, stops, starts back down, stops. Then she pulls at her hair. Cornelia would have known what to do in such a situation.

Her phone rings. The number on the screen is blocked.

"Hello?"

"Euphemia. This is Zero. I need you to tell me if you still want to live."


Lelouch looks like he just about wants to kill someone. Preferably Suzaku. "This is why," he hisses, as he copies Euphemia's number onto his phone. "This is why I told you, every day of my life, not to get too involved - "

"I'm not a complete idiot," Suzaku argues. "I had the sense to leave the plushie with her. You can get rid of her in a second if you want."

Lelouch gives him a look of pure venom. They both know that they don't want any fatalities on this job. He holds his phone to his ear, still giving Suzaku a death glare. "Euphemia. This is Zero. I need you to tell me if you still want to live."

There is a horrible silence at the other end of the line. "...Lelouch Lamperouge, is that you?"


The voice doesn't answer her question, but it does pause uncomfortably. That tells Euphemia more than she needs to know. "If you want to live," Lelouch – she is sure of this now - continues, "you need to follow my instructions carefully. Otherwise you will die in the next few minutes."

"What are you up to, Lelouch?" She eyes the plushie, fear starting to rush in. What has she gotten herself into?

"Are you willing to cooperate?"

"...yes."

"Good. First, place the plushie next to the others that you see there."

She puts it down gently, alongside the line of plushies Suzaku had arranged earlier. They look even creepier in the darkness.

"You're on the fourth floor now," Lelouch continues. "I want you to come down to the first."

She goes down three flights of stairs, breathing hard into the receiver. "I'm here."

"Open the window. Do you see Suzaku?"

He's standing there, near the base of the building, smiling at her encouragingly. It frightens her that he can smile in a situation like this. The window is large enough for her to easily jump through, something that Lelouch appears to be counting on.

"There is going to be a huge explosion on the floors above you. In the midst of the distraction, jump out the window. I can promise that Suzaku will catch you."

Her heart is racing. This is terrifying. She doesn't know if she can trust either of them anymore - they've been hiding behind too many lies. But Suzaku holds out his hands, urging her to jump, and his smile is still so genuine that she wants to trust him...

She hears the explosion above her, and she closes her eyes and jumps. She doesn't want to look, she's sure she's jumping to her death, but some part of her still wants to believe.

A warm body stops her fall, and they both tumble onto the ground. Fire roars somewhere above them.


Their secret base is even more miserable without any power. Tamaki is whining in a corner. Kallen is playing cards against Inoue. It is Ohgi who realizes the importance of the situation first.

"4PM," he says slowly, somewhat doubtful and somewhat in awe.

"Ohgi?"

"Tokyo will be enveloped in darkness. At 4PM. That's what the guys on the video said."


"You two are in so much trouble," Euphemia says, glaring at them. This is why Lelouch has always hated her. She believes, for some reason, that she has a say in things. He reaches for his eyepatch, intending to pull it out of the way. One word from him and she'd leave them alone forever.

"No, wait!" Suzaku says, grabbing onto his hand. For about the thirteenth time today Lelouch wants to strangle him.

"What, you want to talk this over?"

"I'm not talking over anything!" Euphemia announces, crossing her arms like a spolied rich kid. Which she basically is. "You're terrorists and you're going to be arrested."

He gives Suzaku a look. Please let me Geass her, he hopes the look says. I want to make her shut up.

Suzaku shakes his head firmly. He turns back to Euphemia. "You wouldn't say this if you knew who he is," he says lowly. Lelouch's eye widens. This is a risk, a huge one...but, well, if it doesn't work he still has the Geass.

"I don't care who he is."

"No, Euphy, he's...he's Lelouch vi Britannia."

It takes a while for that to sink in. At first Euphemia looks unconvinced. Then her eyes widen, probably remembering stories of him from when she was younger. Stories of the family that was thrown out of the kingdom, maybe even memories of him as a five year old, if she had an exceptionally good memory...

"Lelouch vi Britannia," she repeats, in wonder. Euphy had never been one to hurt her family, no matter what they'd been accused of. This was maybe something they could count on.

He lets his smile widen, aware that it looks more insane than he would hope. "Yes," he says. "Your dear older brother."


Reviews would be nice!