Title: Safe and Sound

Pair: Suzaku/Lelouch

Rating: M

Warning: implied sex, blood, violence, war, grief, betrayal, distrust

11/27/12 2:59 pm

White Apple

Lelouch had known Suzaku since they were small children. They had lived on the same street and gone to the same school since they were both five or so. That was when the housing regulations still let them still stay within the same neighborhood, despite their race or income. That came years later, when school regulations and segregationist were implemented as well.

At the very least, as fate would have it, they were allowed to meet. In hand-me-down cloths and bare feet they were allowed to still be friends.

But the government had intervened. The regulations and laws had all stacked aging them and by the time that they had reached middle school they were torn apart to face the world alone.

Somehow that made it all the better when they both were assigned to the same platoon. Scrawny little Lelouch and thick-headed, broad Suzaku, officer and soldier, and friend finnaly allowed to be with friend. It may have been fate again that intervened on their behalf yet again. With the foundation of their friendship it wasn't a stretch to become the only two soldiers there always standing back to back. What they couldn't do alone, just maybe they both believed that they might just be able to do together.

"Do you think it will ever end, Lelouch?" Suzaku asked. His face was dirty, as always. His voice had that unusual kind of melancholy. "I mean the war." He went on. "Do you think they'll ever let us go home?"

It was another cold night in the trenches. The meager amount of them left in the quickly depleting forefront platoon were all huddled under tarps and remnants of tents to keep out of the rain. The storm outside raged on and on. The bombs going off around blended in with the thunder rolling all around them. In the end if it was the bombs or the thunder it was easier for everyone to just try and ignore the roar of sounds all outside their tent.

Lelouch paused, his lighter in hand and poised at the cigarette already in his mouth. He looked down, finishing his task before dousing the lighter and pushing it back into his pocket. He needed the time to think anyway. What was he to ever to say to Suzaku?

The truth? That was laughable. There was no way that they were going home anytime soon.

"We might." Lelouch settled upon. "Maybe someday, we might just see home again." He glanced up then, looking to Suzaku's face for confirmation if his decision to go vague was the right one.

Suzaku nodded. He gripped the rifle in his hands a bit more firmly as he nodded again, this time probably to himself.

Lelouch knew he was lucky to have a friend like Suzaku. When the rain had first started, Suzaku had been one of the few to help make sure everyone had at least something to huddle under. There were enough wounded among them for a risk of pneumonia to be a threat. The least they could all do was try to stay out of the cold rain. The nearest medical team was a good fifty miles or so away.

Survival of the fittest was Britania's general rule after all. Most of the wounded died that way, broken and despairing and lying in a pool of their own blood. Not a speck of effort wasted on those that were already proven ineffective in war.

Suzaku had been one of the few to recover a few soldiers from the muck of no-man's-land. They'd patched them up as good as a bunch of boy without any medical training could, before retreating back to their trenches to try and wait out the horrid conditions. The boy was a great soldier. If he'd been born Britannian he would have been a great officer.

It was just tonight, huddled close together under the tarp barely big enough to keep them both dry, Lelouch could see that look of Suzaku's creeping back in. If a man like that was losing hope here, now-Britannia was full of fools. They raise soldiers ripe for slaughter. What was the point of fighting this endless war when stepping in front of a bullet was so much easier?

Taking his cigarette out of his mouth to blow out a long warm breeze of smoke, he watched his lifelong friend. Suzaku needed to trust that they would go home one day.

The problem was Lelouch was nowhere near sure if they ever were going home himself. They were cattle out here. They would be used until there was nothing else to give, and then they would be tossed aside.

He leaned forward with a quirked smile. "You look like you've had a row in the mud." Lelouch said with a chuckle. He retrieved a handkerchief from his pack and tossed it to Suzaku. "At least clean off your face. How am I to keep you safe out there if I can't even recognize you?"

Suzaku caught the handkerchief, looking down at it for a moment. He held it in his hand delicately for a moment more. He didn't look up even as he spoke. "You always take care of me, Lelouch." When his eyes did lift, they were with that same sad smiling expression Lelouch was so deathly afraid of seeing.

It was silent for a moment, neither wanting to take the moment any farther. Suzaku looked back down at the wash cloth and Lelouch took another drag from his cigarette.

"We'll, I can't take care of you very well if I can't tell the difference between you or the enemy," He looked away. "Now clean up! That's an order, Private Kururugi!" Lelouch growled out as he replaced the warm, burning cigarette in his mouth.

As he raised the cloth to his face, Suzaku smiled, this time more his normal overly annoyingly, optimistic self. "Yes, sir."

It didn't escape Lelouch's notice that Suzaku still treated that handkerchief with delicate care, and when he went to hand it back Lelouch just waved it off. He pretended not to notice as Suzaku neatly folded the thing and tucked it into his own pack.

It had always been war. When they were small children they would watch it from their homes. On the TV, yes, but more from watching it standing off for the side of the street.

In the bigger cities they had a whole parade of boys walking off to the war effort. All in grey suits of the empire, there were thousands of them that went every year, marching through the streets. It was supposed to be a celebration, all those men reaching the age of manhood and serving their empire. Their service to their empire would last ten years.

In their slums though, it was a meager amount of boys that left every year. As the desertion rates rose, more boys fleeing the authorities in hope of some sort of freedom instead of the certain death of the front line, the parade of tall, boys, still very much just kids, grew more pathetic with each passing year.

They still held the parades in the bigger cities, the cities that actually saw a good portion of those boys returning. But now in the slums and the outskirts, the authorities just came to whisk a boy away. There was less that could make a run for it that way.

Lelouch had been older so he had left first. He was good at every kind of strategically test they threw him, and he was a pure blood Britannian. He'd been promoted easily. But he was still common scum and so had been putin charge of a few lesser non-Britannian soldiers.

Or at least Lelouch thought that he had been the first to go. He'd found out that regulation long before had been passed under the rug. All non-Britannian's were being called to service at fifteen. Of course, those boys never got parades, so no one noticed, and if they did they we disregarded.

By the time Lelouch saw his first real battle, first real struggle to keep his own life and the lives of several other boys alive, Suzaku had been doing it for three years.

"The officers in Bulgaria are all talking about the new women's mandate." Ohgi, said as he hungrily devoured the rations in front of him.

Lelouch would have let him have more but it was weeks before anyone could count on another shipment of supplies. It was easier to ration from the very beginning than to have banquets only followed by nigh starvation.

He handed over a canteen of water though. With the ever present storm looming over their heads, there was plenty of water to go around.

All huddled around the meager fire, a large majority of the platoon listened for any news that Ohio could give of the outside world. Since the mail service has been discontinued (official reports all claimed it was an utter waste of valuable resources) none of them had heard a thing beyond the ever present thunderstorm mixed with scattered showering of bombs.

"They're running out of soldiers." Lelouch stated. More to himself. Whatever information he could glean from their regulations and laws, he learned could be very valuable in the future.

"They say it's all for equality of men and women." Ohgi said as he shoveled in another mouthful. The road had clearly been harder than they would have guessed. "It's going to be implemented at eighteen like for boys."

Lelouch watched carefully. He had to keep his tongue in check. He just knew Britannia must be desperate to start sending young women out as well. He had thought that the drop in birth rates were at the forefront of their minds. Then again maybe it was... What was the point of providing for fruitless brides when they could always be used as targets in the battlefield instead?

It was worth a few minutes thought at the least. But it was thoughts for another time.

"It will go into effect in about a week and they'll start shipping them out to the front lines." Ohgi said.

Lelouch nodded. He didn't like the idea too well. Knightmares were being issued less and less all the time leaving them with only the blunt force of infantry to hold already established lines. Sending out woman in to those lines just sounded-brutal, and wrong. They already practically sent children. What would be next the old and the ill? Why couldn't they just keep the women in the office positions? Keep them safe there. Besides that, a minority of women in a sea of desperate men, and completely intentional ignorance by all police efforts-that would only lead to worse consequences.

Suzaku slid in next to Lelouch, on his haunches as he spoke. "They're issuing them just like us. With only three weeks of training and a gun?" He sounded as saddened by this news as Lelouch was disturbed.

"It sounded like that. One of the officers there was even telling me that they're not going to make anything different for the women, no different showers, nothing." Ohgi said as he finished off his bowl of food. "They're not even changing uniform production at all."

Suzaku just looked down. Lelouch could see it again, flashing into those features, that saddened look that was appearing more and more. It was when Suzaku got up and left that Lelouch shifted his position marking that he wanted to do the same. This talk was unsettling. It was purely unsettling. Were there no rules to anything? Lelouch huffed.

He already knew that answer. This empire had been on a quest for ages to destroy any traces of God left in society.

It had started with the right to religion revoked. Praying had become unpopular, then frowned upon, then it had simply become illegal. Church's, mosques, synagogues had all be searched and striped, remade into some public building for the government.

It was a stripping, taking the ideas of any supreme being from out of their lives all together. It started with the young. In schools they taught that logic outweighed all else. That it was the strong that would, survive. There was no hope for the weak. That very Christian idea of pity or mercy was only taught further in context that they were emotions purely, something to be ignored.

By the end of it all, Lelouch had gleaned enough information to know exactly what the intended message was. There was no God. There was only man. And because there was no God there was no such thing as a higher law. Consciousness was a thing only thought up by weaker men. And because there was no consciousness, no higher law, then rules could be dictated by man, and only man alone. In other words, all sense of morality, kindness, right and wrong were all dictated by whatever human could assert himself over other humans.

Without any God there was no line between right and wrong. In this life there was only the empire. And an amoral, carnal empire at that. They deemed the slaughter of innocent boys and now girls to be just. And because there was no God, no morals to fight it, they were all stuck with in that warped sense of judgment.

Lelouch caught up with Suzaku as he was rounding back to their meager tarp. Lelouch walked close, choosing not to speak. Whatever was mulling around in Suzaku's head certainly wasn't good, but Lelouch didn't have any desire to have this conversation out in the open. There was enough whole hearted supporters of the empire around that Lelouch wouldn't doubt if he'd be turned in for the things he wanted to say.

He ducked his head in under the small space under the tarp after Suzaku in hopes that maybe just his company would have some amount of effect on Suzaku.

It didn't. They only sat there in silence. Lelouch watched Suzaku, and Suzaku watched everywhere but Lelouch.

It wasn't until several minutes later, when Lelouch had almost lost all hope of hearing his friend give any sort of attention, that Suzaku finally spoke.

"I think it's wrong." His voice was barely above a whisper. He looked fearful; knowing that what he was saying could get him arrested. There was that same sadness in his eyes now as he still refused to look Lelouch in the eye. "I think sending women out here to be as defenseless and as hopeless as us is wrong."

He looked almost angry then. "They don't care about equality. They don't care about us." A disgusted frown marred Suzaku's face. "They're just going to let those women rot and die out here, just like all of us." The emotions finally broke as a tear did. "It's wrong. No matter what they say, it is wrong."

What was there to say? Lelouch looked away, knowing there wasn't much else to do. But if nothing else he could at least validate his friend. "Yeah." He looked down at his hands. "I know, it is wrong."

And there wasn't a thing either of them could do. In the end, they just sat there, their knees barely touching and both looking down at their hands.

Love became just as irrelevant as faith around the time Lelouch was ten. He remembered it because of his best friend. He remembered it because he saw the pain it had caused in his best friend.

Suzaku's mother had never been in the best of health. Suzaku always told Lelouch that she was frail. He never said much more about it just that she was frail, and delicate.

When she finally collapsed, Lelouch had watched from his front porch as the authorities took her away. Suzaku had ran after the ambulance only to be chastised by his father.

Later that night, Lelouch had asked when Suzaku was going to visit his mother at the hospital. The only answer was more tears as Suzaku shook his head.

Lelouch never saw Suzaku's mother again, and Lelouch was pretty sure neither did Suzaku for that matter.

When he was older he learned that the sick were institutionalized. But really that was a nice way of saying she was sent away so that they could pretend to care for her and in the end just let the ill and useless die. Non-Britannians weren't allowed visiting hours at these health institutions. It was a hard realization but Lelouch came to the conclusion that Suzaku's mother was probably put on a starvation path after finding her situation chronic. She was probably dead within a couple days.

A bit of news always got through. The necessary news to keep the war going. Letters were banned, not that anyone would carry them. There was no access to anything electronic so anything along those lines was impossible. But orders still needed to be relayed. And occasionally there was some news to come through.

"Kururugi!" Tamaki hollered, holding up the small envelope as he sorted through the meager little official news to just come in with the supply shipment.

He held it there for a moment with no answer before Lelouch looked around enough to know that Suzaku was nowhere in ear shot. It had been a long time since Suzaku had stood in the circle of others eager boys, hoping for any amount of news, despite the fact all common sense told there would be none.

Lelouch realized how-odd that was for just a moment. Suzaku always had hope. He was Mr. Ever-Smile after all. It was annoying, his look on the brighter side of life attitude and yet... Furrowing his brow, Lelouch didn't like the direction this was headed in.

He stepped forward to Tamaki. "I'll take that to him." Lelouch said as he took the small letter.

Finding Suzaku was easy enough. He was knee deep in mud, helping a few other men raise a tent that had come through the shipment. It wasn't new, a few holes, tattered edges, but it was better than anything they had there. No doubt it was so they could move the wounded in before the next thunder storm hit.

Catching his attention, Lelouch waved Suzaku over to him. Lelouch also noticed that Suzaku wasn't smiling. At least up until he pulled that fake smile on as he approached Lelouch.

"This is for you." Lelouch handed over the small letter. Making sure to be discrete, Lelouch watched for Suzaku's reaction.

Surprise, and confusion crossed over Suzaku's face first. He starred down at the letter for a moment, saying nothing, before he unceremoniously tore it open. He unfolded the one page letter and held up for him to read. He read it quickly it seemed. Because the next minute he handed it back to Lelouch.

There was change in that stoic face, slight, but the way that those eyes shifted down. How all presences of even a faked smile fell away set Lelouch off. "What is it?" Lelouch persisted.

Suzaku just shook his head. His hands fell limply to his sides. He studied the ground for a moment more before he swallowed hard, seeming to gulp down all emotion as he lifted his chin. "You can read it." Suzaku looked back to tent. "I have to go finish helping."

By the time Lelouch's eyes we down on the piece of paper, Suzaku was jogging back to help the others raise the tent.

Lelouch's mouth fell open as he read. He looked up, not sure what else to do or say, just standing there. How could Suzaku just... This was... "Your father's dead..." He finally verbalized. Just to say it, just hear it and let it be said.

What was wrong with his Suzaku? What had happened to the golden boy he once knew? Where was he? And what on God's earth was Lelouch to ever do to get him back?

Lelouch was still standing there, frozen, when the subordinate soldier approached.

"Sir?"

Startled, Lelouch looked over to see another boy soldier holding out a letter to him as well.

"This came for you, sir." The boy said .

"Uh, thanks." Lelouch mouthed as shaky hands took the letter.

The boy raced off back to the supply truck. It was no surprise, supplies at the very least meant more food, a comfort often not available out here.

He opened his own letter slower than Suzaku had torn through his. He lifted the paper out slow, unfolding it with carful fingers, before he lifted it to read.

When he looked up he swallowed as well. His eyes went straight to Suzaku. Even in the mud and the muck he was still slaving away to help others. They were having problems planting the center beam, the ground was too soft.

"Bloody hell." Lelouch breathed. His eyes wide as his arms dropped with letter clutched in hand.

Five shot anyone? Okay so this story is—sad? Depressing? All that and more! By the way, the title is from Taylor Swifts, Safe and Sound, for the Hunger Games movie. Yeah, it's one of those guilty pleasure songs I hide best I can on my iPad whenever friends are around… Hey! We all have those songs, okay! We all freaking have them!

~Reviews are Awesome!~