Title: tomorrow
Fandom: Code Geass
Pairing: Gino Weinberg/Kallen Stadtfeld
Rating: PG-13
Summary: He taught her how to live again. ["I'm here to break you out."]
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for the end of R2.
Disclaimer: Code Geass and all other related works do not belong to me, no profit is being made off of this, etc etc.
A/N: Ahaha, my first fanfiction ever! This is Gino/Kallen, which I know is kinda strange, but I really like them together. Anyways, read, enjoy, and review!
When Lelouch died, he took a little bit of Kallen along with him.
It wasn't her first time witnessing death, nor was it her second, or third, and she had certainly seen more macabre forms of murder, but it still shook her, shook her so hard that when Cornelia and her forces finally arrived and everyone was released from their bindings Kallen couldn't move, couldn't stand, and all she could see was Lelouch's bloody body and his beautiful (ohsobeautiful) amethyst eyes closing for the last time and all she could hear was Nunnally's screams and the chanting of the crowd (ZeroZeroZero but Zero is dead! can't you see, he's right there, she wanted to yell) and the painful, jagged beating of her own broken heart.
And for a while Lelouch and Lelouch alive and Lelouch dying and Lelouch-in-heaven-or-hell-or-wherever-it-is-that-people-like-him-go were the only things on Kallen's mind and she thought she was going crazy, she really did, because everywhere she went she could see him and his eyes and his smile and his voice and his face when she kissed him and oh, she loved that boy-who-was-too-soon-a-man so much, she loved him so much and it hurt, it hurt like she was being torn from the inside out with needles laced with love-poison and she didn't get it, how could everyone else move on like that, and then she remembered that they didn't know Lelouch (Zero) like she did, they didn't go to school with him or eat lunch with him or throw themselves in the line of enemy fire with all their heartmindbodysoul for him and they didn't kiss him like that either, and she could still remember when his cold lips touched hers and the shudder that ran through her spine when they finally did and when she really thought about it, she had known then that he was already a dead man. Dead, and marching towards his funeral with his head held high like the idiot he was.
So she locked herself in her room and cried until she made herself throw up, and then she cried some more and she didn't stop until her tear ducts began to run dry and when they did she laid on her bed and cried on the inside, which was even worse. She didn't eat, she didn't sleep, she didn't go anywhere except for her bedroom and even then she mainly remained in the confines of her little bed.
Kallen truly thought she would stay like that forever, heartbroken, miserable, and quite honestly, in all senses of the word, dead.
They came and visited her, sometimes. First it was Ohgi, and then it was Ohgi and Villetta, and Milly and Rivalz and nearly every member of the Black Nights and the student council after that. They passed through her front door in the months following that day, carrying flowers and gifts and words of condolences rolling off their tongues.
Kallen didn't see any of them.
She told her mother to tell them that she was sick, she was sleeping, she wasn't home, she didn't want to talk to them, goddammit! and to tell them to please stop bothering her, she was fine, really, and no, she was not grieving, and she most definitely didn't need comfort or hugs or a shoulder to cry on.
They were all lies, of course, all of them.
Kallen lay on her side in the middle of her bed and absentmindedly raised her right hand in front of her face, watching as the sunlight filtered through the closed curtains and the shadows flickered across her room, like silent ghosts coming to swallow her up. She'd like that, she mused, disappearing from this world altogether. Death wasn't so bad, come to think of it. With any luck, you wouldn't experience any pain and for the rest of eternity all you had to do was lay in your coffin under the ground, sleeping. Living was so much harder.
A knock sounded at her door. Her mother had long since given up trying to drag Kallen out of bed, and so the only times she went to her room was when she came to deliver food or to tell her someone was looking for her. It must've been the latter this time, because it was early noon and Kallen had just had breakfast, swallowing her dry toast and orange juice and throwing it up right after.
"Kallen?" she heard her mother's voice ask, tentatively, "There's someone looking for you."
"Tell them I'm not home," the red-haired girl buried her face in her tear-stained pillow and mumbled. She could see her mother's silhouette, lurking near the outside of the door.
"He says if you're not coming down he'll come up and see you. He says his name is Gino."
Kallen raised her head up from her pillow a fraction of a centimeter. This was not good. What the hell was a Rounds member doing in her house? Slowly, she sat up in bed, and groped around for something decent to wear.
"Fine. I'll be down in a second."
Her mother left, and Kallen slipped on a white t-shirt and some shorts. She didn't even bother looking in the mirror, because she knew she looked like crap and it didn't matter anymore about what others thought of her.
She found him sitting in a chair by her kitchen table, sipping a cup of steaming tea and looking like the very epitome of relaxation.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
"Hello to you too, Red-head!" Gino remarked cheerfully. His clear blue eyes widened when he saw her, and Kallen felt a sense of twisted smugness as she took a seat across from him. What did he expect, a damsel in distress to come sweeping down the stairs, just waiting for him to whisk her away on his white horse?
The blonde knight whistled and stared at her. "Guess the rumors were true. You really have been rotting away in your self-imposed dungeon cell all this time."
Kallen scowled and poured herself a cup of tea. She raised the cup to her lips but thought better of it and set it back down on the wooden table, and instead settled to glower angrily at Gino.
He, however, seemed unfazed by her death-glare and only gave her a brilliant smile. God, he was like the sun or something. In a bad, overly obnoxious way. He leaned forward and she could see every outline of his face, thrown into sharp relief against the dull drabness of the kitchen. His eyes were shining when he spoke.
"I'm here to break you out," he took a sip of his tea and leaned back in his chair, looking mighty pleased with himself.
Either the stupidity of his words had yet to sink in, or Kallen was still too tired from an entire night of staying up and crying, but the most intelligent thing she could think to say in response to his proposal was a flat, monotone, "What."
Gino didn't look in the least bit disappointed by her decidedly anticlimactic reply, and smiled another one of his big, annoying smiles.
He leaned in even closer, and Kallen could smell the scents of outside wafting off his clothes. Fresh air, sunshine, green grass- god, she hadn't had fresh air in so long.
"You and I," he whispered conspiratorially, "we're going to go somewhere. Somewhere away from here. I'm going to take you."
Now that Kallen understood the meaning of his words, she felt like flinging her teacup full of scalding tea at his pretty Britannian face. What an idiot.
"Are you stupid?" she demanded, because she wasn't going anywhere at the moment, and especially not with him.
Good Lord, she thought, were all Britannians this dense? And then she remembered and realized that yes, they were.
Gino chuckled and scratched his head, as if the whole thing was really a joke. "Maybe," he replied, his long fingers tracing the outside of his porcelain cup. "Or maybe you are." And he looked up and for a moment Kallen was taken aback by his words, and his face, and the sad smile that graced his lips in place of his normally bright grin. He really was something else. But enough was enough, she thought, and she stood up, ready to show her unexpected visitor out.
He stood up too, and Kallen was amazed at how tall he was. She wasn't used to being dwarfed by other people, and he, he wasn't all that tall either, but this boy was and she looked up and was met with a pair of cerulean eyes only a few shades lighter than hers.
"Time goes on, you know. I know you loved him, but he's not coming back. And if you keep on doing this, you're going to be dead too."
Kallen bristled at his words and turned her head away. She told herself that she just didn't want to see his stupid face anymore, that was all, but his words hurt. A lot. And what hurt even more was that they were exactly right.
Gino took a strand of her dirty hair between his fingers and held it up to the sunlight shining through the windows. He looked terribly sad, Kallen thought, and then she wondered why because wasn't she the one who was supposed to be sad? she was alone in this world, all alone, and Lelouch had left her and no one else understood and they were all-
"You're a stubborn one, Kouzuki," Gino said, still holding onto her fiery red hair. "But I am, too."
And with that, he left.
She didn't hear from him for two weeks after that, but Gino's words repeated themselves again and again inside her head and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't get them out. She didn't go outside, but she did begin to move out of the self-confined fortress that was her lonely bedroom.
Then, one cloudy, gray day, when the sky was warning of rain and the temperature had dropped to a chilling low, a letter arrived in the pile of mail that was delivered to her house's doorstep every morning.
"It's for you," her mother had said to her as she was making her way downstairs to boil a pot of water for tea. She handed the thin envelope to her daughter and continued on her way down the hall with the laundry, glancing back at Kallen curiously.
Kallen was a little curious, too, and she flipped the envelope over to see her name and address written in neat, loopy cursive. There was no return address.
She walked into the kitchen and sat down on one of the chairs, quickly tearing open the letter and watching as something heavy and a slip of paper dropped down onto her lap. Kallen picked up the heavy thing first, and turned it around in the morning light in wonder.
It was Guren's key.
But it was definitely not hers. Hers was probably lying forlornly in some dirty dumpster at the edges of the city, thrown out in one of her mad fits at the beginning of her confinement, buried underneath piles of vegetable peels and whatever other gross things there were in dumpsters. This one was dangling on a slender black rope, like some kind of necklace.
Wondering who in the world could've sent her such a thing, Kallen looked at the slip of paper and saw that the same person who had addressed the letter wrote it.
It's been a while, huh? How about you take this baby out for a drive? You probably think it's in a scrap heap, but I know where it is. Come on, you know you want to.
Kallen grimaced and stood up, looking for a pen, the piece of paper still clutched in her hand.
Nice try, she wrote on the backside, and slipped it and the key into a new envelope simply addressed to Gino Weinberg, the Knight of Three, the Holy Britannian Empire, and left it for the mailman to pick up the next day.
He really was an idiot. And, like he had said, a stubborn one at that.
Kallen really thought that would be the end of her lopsided, mildly ridiculous, and not to mention short-lived relationship (if it could be called such a thing) with the Knight of Three.
But alas, it was not to be.
The red-haired girl cursed eloquently under her breath, her wide eyes scanning the piece of paper she was currently gripping in her hands.
I mean it. If you don't climb out of your angst hole right now, Miss Ace-Pilot-of-the-Now-Defunct-Black-Knights, I will personally go to your house in my Tristan and scare the shit out of the neighbors and the Japanese government. Not to mention trample a few buildings along the way. And last time I checked, they don't offer insurance for structures destroyed by awe-inspiring Knightmares like mine.
He really wouldn't quit, would he?
Kallen shot a furtive glance at the calendar hanging in her living room, futilely wishing that not that much time had passed ever since she first locked herself in her room. But it seemed like the entire universe was against her today, because it was already the middle of October.
Lelouch had died at the beginning of June.
Kallen's head began to spin, and she leaned on the arm of the sofa, staring at the calendar in disbelief. Had that much time already passed? Four and a half months. One-third of a year. Four and a half months, and the entire world was already over the death of Emperor Lelouch vi Britannia, the man who had single-handedly destroyed the mighty Holy Britannian Empire from the inside out in just the few days he was king. It was as if he had never existed, just a tiny blip in the ever-changing, forever-reaching, dark expanse of the universe.
Gino was right. Lelouch was never coming back. And he was right, too, about her. She was going to die if she continued on like she was, wasting away mourning for a dead man who probably only thought of her as a pawn to advance his own selfish ambitions. That was the truth. The cold, hard, ugly truth. But it was the truth.
Kallen pushed herself off the sofa and, for the first time in she could hardly remember, (fourandahalfmonthsfourandahalfmonths) she got dressed to go outside.
Oh, how she missed going outside.
The crisp morning air hit Kallen like a gale, and her lungs burned with the fresh oxygen that had been denied to her for so long. It was a beautiful day- the sun was shining, big puffs of white clouds floated lazily along the bright blue sky, and people were bustling up and down the busy streets. She went down the steps leading up to her front door and began to make her way up the lane, against the general flow of traffic heading towards work or shopping.
And then Kallen stopped. She pulled out the note stuck in the back pocket of her jeans and stared at it helplessly.
Stupid Britannian. He went to all that trouble to convince her to go outside, and he didn't even tell her where to meet him.
Oh well. It wasn't like Kallen went out for his sake, anyways. She had just reached a personal revelation, that was all. And even if Gino was responsible for part of it, ultimately, she was the one who had made the conscious decision to step out of her house and into the outside world once more.
She blew a strand of red hair out of her face and continued down the path, dodging morning commuters talking rapidly on the cell-phones and trying her hardest not to be whacked in the thigh by wayward briefcases. She really didn't know where she was going, except that it felt good, to be outside and walking and breathing and living again.
In the end, Kallen found herself standing next to the big stone fountain in the middle of one of Tokyo's largest parks, the exact same place where she had slapped Lelouch so long ago. She scowled bitterly, and stared at her reflection in the clear water below her. Even unconsciously, he was still on her mind. She was just mulling over the complete stupidness yet tragic poignancy of it all- that he would surface again when she was beginning to recover for the first time, when she spotted a familiar blonde head from across the fountain, turned away from her. The person was sitting on the exact same bench she and Lelouch had sat on.
Maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe it was fate. Maybe it was the inner workings of the universe, or the gods-that-Kallen-didn't-really-believe-in, doing their screwed-up, twisted magic and throwing two people together in the most unexpected circumstances, and then sitting back and watching the show unfold before them like the sadists they were.
Well, it wasn't like she had anything more to lose. And the gods or the universe or both had fucked with her long enough, anyways. She wasn't going to let them win this round.
Taking a deep breath, Kallen walked over to where Gino was sitting and tapped him on the shoulder. She then realized that her heart was beating fast. Really fast. And that she felt kind of nervous. And then she remembered that she was one of the best pilots in the world and could beat this idiot in a duel any day. For some reason, however, this only made her feel marginally better. Maybe because there were no Knightmares to be seen, and in a battle of words instead of weapons, the man sitting in front of her would probably win. But that didn't mean she wasn't going to try.
"Since when does a Rounds member have so much time to kill? If they give you this much sick leave, then I might consider joining too."
Kallen was lying, of course. Hell would freeze over the day she joined those idiots and their stupid little emperor protection club. See where it landed the last one? In the end, His Majesty's right-hand man had been to one to shove the sword into his stomach.
Gino whipped around and his aquamarine eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. It was quite hilarious, actually, and if Kallen wasn't trying so hard to beat the forces-that-be at their own little game, she might've started giggling. Hard. But of course, she had more self-control than that.
He quickly recovered, however, and soon the expression of shock was wiped off of his face, to be replaced by his trademark (annoying) grin.
"Ahahaha!" Gino laughed triumphantly, and pulled Kallen down so that she was sitting next to him, "I knew it! Did my miraculous methods of persuasion finally convince you to act like a normal human being again?"
Kallen rolled her eyes, and scooted away from her blonde companion as far away as humanly possible without falling off the bench.
"No," she replied, giving him a haughty glare, "I just felt like getting some fresh air, that was all. But clearly, that isn't going to be possible here."
Whatever happened to tempting fate and making a fool of the maybe nonexistent gods? Kallen slapped herself in the head a few times, and made a mental note to stay away from exuberant, Knightmare-piloting, blonde boys in the future. They brought nothing but trouble, she decided firmly.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Gino shaking with gleeful laughter, his blue eyes gleaming like jewels. God, he was so annoying. But his mirth was contagious, and pretty soon, for some indescribable reason, Kallen found herself giggling along with him in the middle of a park in broad daylight, looking just like another young couple spending a carefree day together.
Gino was the first to stop, and he held onto a stitch in his side, gasping for air as the redhead sitting next to him was trying desperately to quell the bubbling laughter that was pouring out from her throat. He swung a long arm across Kallen's shoulder, as if they were very close friends who had known each other for a lifetime.
"See, that felt good, didn't it?" Gino flashed her a bright smile and leaned back his head, basking in the warm sunshine and cool breeze blowing across his face.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Kallen managed to make herself stop giggling and shut up, if only for the sake of the rest of the poor park-goers, who were staring at her and Gino like they were lunatics who just broke out of an asylum and should be carted back immediately, preferably in strait-jackets.
But Gino was right, and Kallen marveled at how someone like him, who she had automatically assumed, upon first sight, was nothing more than a spoiled, rich Britannian royal who couldn't pilot a Knightmare to save his life, could be correct about so many things concerning her, a girl whom he barely knew before that day he first went to her house and declared that he was going to break her out, just like that.
It felt so good to laugh like that again, without sarcasm or bitterness or resentment, but like an innocent child with not a care in the world, or someone who had heard a hilarious joke, or just laughing for the sake of laughing, for the sake of being alive and breathing and not being dead, for friends and family and love and joy and happiness and beauty and the big, wide, wonderful world and all of the great people in it, like the boy Kallen was sitting next to right now, who fought and played and loved and laughed and who decided to pull her out of her own personal hell, and who she was so glad to have met, because without him, without Gino, she would still be in her room, grieving and crying and dying inside, little by little, everyday.
"Yes," Kallen said, and she looked into Gino's eyes and saw the entire world reflected in those beautiful blue orbs, and all of a sudden she felt light, as light as a bird, and thanked the gods and the universe and everyone and everything for sending her this person, this wonderful person, and she felt so happy and lighthearted she could shout, and she did, and after shouting until her lungs were sore in a not unpleasant way, she pulled Gino up and they walked, laughing and talking and smiling, down the path towards tomorrow.