Chapter 1

"Who sent you?" the young man inquired calmly, even as he realized that his back was against the wall of the alleyway. He tossed a lock of raven hair away from his eyes with a small jerk of his head to survey his would-be captors with as much pride as he could muster.

"That's confidential," one of the two men trapping him countered, clutching a gun that was being shakily aimed at his target's heart. Even as he was being forced into a corner, the dark-haired man – still an adolescent really, he couldn't have been more than seventeen with his slight frame and smooth, pale skin – noted that there was a tremor in his voice, one that betrayed his reluctance. Still green, he thought, his lips twisting in what could have been a smile. He hasn't killed before.

The captor's older companion, rolling his eyes, grumbled, "Crowley, we're not in an effing crime show. You can quit the theatrics. The guy has the right to know before we riddle him with bullets."

Crowley's Adam's apple bobbed as he readjusted his unsteady grip.

"The Geass Order," the older captor of the two said, watching carefully for a reaction.

The dark-haired youth blanched, his aura of indifference slipping away; that was not the answer he was expecting. "The Geass Order is dead," he spat vehemently, subconsciously clenching his hands into fists. He added bitterly to himself in a whisper that only he could hear, "I killed every last one of them."

"Some things never truly die," the older man said ominously, relishing his prey's agitation. "Actually, my previous answer was inaccurate. They now go by the name Order of Cornelia."

The cornered youth hissed. "Cornelia… to think she would go this far…"

His hunter dismissed the disconcerted mutterings with a wave of his hand and ordered flatly, "Crowley, kill him." He locked his eyes with his quarry's violet ones and smiled a grim assassin's smile. "Kill R2."

Purple eyes flashing, the young man threw back his head and laughed maniacally, an abrasive, dissonant sound that made Crowley bite his lip in discomfort.

"Kill me?" the man called R2 repeated mockingly, stifling a giggle. "Did the Geass Order –" he stopped to correct himself – "Order of Cornelia – really order you to kill me?"

"They said to bring you to them," the older captor said. "But they never specified dead or alive. I'm sure they'll be delighted when we go to them carrying your mangled body."

"Then the Order of Cornelia is a coalition of incompetent fools," R2 said scornfully. "You're wasting your time here." He took a few steps forward, now smiling in condescension.

"Stay back or I'll shoot!" Crowley squeaked, fingering the trigger.

"You know, you really shouldn't delve too deep into things you don't understand…" R2 cautioned, examining the quivering gun trained on his chest without concern. Before Crowley could react, he conjured up a hand grenade from beneath his shirt, released it, and threw it at his captors. "You could get hurt," he finished coldly.

Instead of an explosion, it emitted an odorless pink gas that instantly clouded the two captors' bodies. Crowley shrieked, his collaborator cursed, and R2 escaped into the night, wondering how long it would take for them to realize that it was just colored smoke.

Suzaku Kururugi traveled over the freeway dangerously fast, his knuckles white as he gripped the handlebars of the motorcycle. He struggled to keep tears from blurring his vision; an accident was the last thing he needed right now. Biting his bottom lip to keep it from trembling, he focused his gaze straight ahead as though his life depended on it – which it probably did, as he accelerated to the point of tempting fate.

He'd scrubbed and scrubbed at the harsh red letters painted in an untidy scrawl on his gym shirt, but none of it made a difference. The words wouldn't go away. It was the only shirt he had, and all of the others provided by the school that usually sat in a neat pile in the boys' locker room had mysteriously disappeared. He certainly couldn't play basketball in his school uniform.

He walked out into the gymnasium, still wearing his black pants and overcoat with its gold filigree. "Sorry, but I'm going to sit out today," he told Coach Villetta, grimacing in apology.

She stared him down in a way that made him want to crawl into a corner. "Do you have an injury, Mister Kururugi?"

"No, ma'am." He always called her ma'am. She reminded him of the drill sergeants he had to deal with at work.

"Are you unprepared?"

Suzaku's face flushed red with shame; he wanted to keep the situation as vague as possible. "I have my clothes, ma'am, but –"

"Then move your keister and get them on." The look in her eyes was dangerous.

And so he had changed into his gym clothes, refusing to let himself cry, and then gone back outside to meet the stares of his classmates wearing a shirt that was emblazoned with the crimson words "Jappy Go Home"…

Suzaku's tears, which had been quivering restlessly on the rims of his eyes, finally spilled, barely touching his cheeks before being whipped away by the wind.

He couldn't let what had happened dangle in the air neglected. He needed someone to blame. He only pitied the students who had written the hateful words, pitied their narrow-mindedness and blind prejudice… and so he chose himself.

He reasoned that he was basically asking for it, enrolling in a Britannian school, fighting in the Britannian army. But the reason he'd made those choices in the first place was to attempt to change things, rid the world of that very same prejudice. It was a ridiculous and idealistic goal, he knew that, but the childish part of him dreamed of it somehow being accomplished.

Instead he'd gotten his own people to hate him as well; they felt like he'd betrayed them.

Hated by Britannians for being Japanese… hated by the Japanese for trying to be a Britannian… maybe he was a masochist.

But if he was, then why did he have such a desperate yearning to be loved?

R2 ran, pumped his arms in time with his lengthy strides, gasped for breath; he knew he wasn't going to last much longer.

As he streaked past bewildered civilians moving in hordes on the sidewalk, his eyes darted back and forth, assessing his options, searching for an escape.

He looked briefly over his shoulder to find that the mercenaries were after him, as enraged as ever, and gaining fast with their much superior stamina. He cursed under his breath, knowing that the situation would soon call for something reckless.

His salvation came to him in the form of a student stopping at a street corner for a red light, sitting on a motorcycle that had enough room for two.

He made one last, desperate sprint, and in an implausible aerobic display made feasible by the adrenalin coursing through his veins, he was atop the motorcycle in front of the hapless young man, gibbering something along the lines of, "Sorry, but I'll be taking control of your vehicle for a while."

Suzaku suddenly found himself yielding to a lunatic who had done the unthinkable and seized his beloved bike for his own.

"What the fu –!," he spluttered before being cut off.

"Yes, there are bad men chasing me, they've got guns, and I'm probably initiating a car chase," the hijacker said dismissively. "It's all dreadfully cliché. Trust me, this isn't what I wanted to resort to, but I really don't see any other options at the moment, do you?"

Suzaku only gaped at him in outrage, his mouth refusing to close.

"I can't guarantee your life from here on out," the stranger continued. "Now's your chance to get as far away from me as possible. I don't want to drag you into a mess that isn't yours."

Suzaku made a strained noise in the back of his throat. Finally finding his voice, he retorted, "Like hell I'm leaving! This is… this is my bike!" It was the only thing he could think of; his mind was currently short-circuiting, unsure how to respond to the madman who was now revving the engine.

R2 stared at Suzaku as though he were observing a dangerous but particularly unintelligent animal. "All right, then…" he said dubiously. And then surged forward at a speed that made Suzaku's head snap back like a broken marionette's.

Eyes squinting ahead as he dodged much slower passersby, earning a great deal of affronted profanity, R2 commanded, "Keep looking back to make sure they're not following us."

"I don't even know what they look like!" Suzaku protested.

"The two sprinting men with the intent to kill visible in their every action."

"Ah." What else was there to say to that? Suzaku crossly complied with the stranger's order, his eyes alighting on said sprinting men. They did look quite furious. "They're still after us, but they're just on foot," he reported, wondering as he spoke why he had said "us". And then, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, they were suddenly fifty meters closer.

"What in the…" he breathed. They had moved instantaneously from one place to another; he was sure he wasn't hallucinating. But how…

Feeling ridiculous – and more than slightly panicked – he relayed, "I know this is going to sound insane, but it looks like they just teleported…"

R2 hissed, feeling his earlier rash confidence scatter with the wind. He uttered an unfamiliar word, one that Suzaku strained to hear. "Geass…" Though English was Suzaku's second language, he felt that his grasp of it was quite proficient. It was unusual for him to come across a word he didn't know the meaning of. No, he felt like this word was different. It possessed an air of… mystery… he had a feeling that only a select few knew of it.

Before he had a chance to ask what it meant, the hunted man turned sharply into a narrow side street and coaxed – no, coerced – the motorcycle to accelerate to its limits, in an attempt to shake off his pursuers. Suzaku heard him muttering to himself, caught bits and pieces of what sounded to him like nonsense, and there was that word again: "Geass… ward of absolute suspension… Rolo was the same… but there's a limit… just get out of range…"

The two men vanished, only to reappear alarmingly close.

"Um, sir…" Suzaku began uneasily, unsure how to address the man driving his motorcycle like a maniac. Sir? Why sir? He's the same age as you! he thought to himself irately.

"R2," the hijacker corrected.

"R2. They're closer… they're teleporting again. Or Geassing. Or whatever the hell it is they're doing to jump from one place to another like that…" He felt the first traces of hysteria creep into his tone but instantly suppressed it before it could damage his judgment, a reflex he'd honed through merciless military training. He simultaneously found himself wondering who on earth would name their child R2. It sounded like the beginning of a serial number, not the name of a human being. But it could just be a code name, he reasoned. He realized that he really knew nothing about the dark-haired youth being chased by armed men who had seemingly supernatural abilities. Nothing at all…

"Actually, they're altering our perception of time," R2 clarified, smirking as he heard Suzaku choke in disbelief behind him. "Keeping us frozen where we are while they gain ground, so it looks to us like they're traversing large distances instantaneously. It's really quite ingenious," He was frighteningly calm, with a trace of detached fascination.

Feeling as though his intelligence was being insulted, Suzaku indignantly exclaimed, "You expect me to believe that pile of –"

The motorcycle was suddenly stationary – when had R2 stopped driving? – and Suzaku felt a gloved hand clamped over his mouth, silencing his shout prematurely, and the cold, unflinching metal of a revolver on his temple. He couldn't turn his head, but from the sound of the brief struggle to his left, he inferred with a sinking feeling that R2 was in the same very compromising position.

"You didn't think I brought Crowley along for his skill with a gun, did you?" the older assassin rasped, his breath hot and pungent against the back of Suzaku's neck.

Crowley, apparently not hearing the slight directed at him, stifled a groan as R2 ferociously bit down on his fingers and stammered, "Glovitz! What do I do with him?"

"Throw him against the wall, and make sure he stays there," Crowley's companion commanded. "If he tries anything, use your Geass." Angling his mouth so that only Suzaku could hear, he added threateningly, "You hear that, Eleven? Try anything funny and you're frozen… and you might not ever thaw out."

Suzaku bristled at the racial slur; it should have been rendered obsolete when Japan had reclaimed its independence from Britannia over a century ago. But more immediate was the usage of that word once again. He'd heard it once, and now it was being thrown around every which way. "Use your Geass," Glovitz had said… was R2 actually serious when he had been prattling on about their perception of time being altered? Suzaku was a grounded man with a good head on his shoulders, and for the most part didn't take superstition seriously. He took comfort in normalcy and routine. For multiple people to suddenly talk about the existence of a paranormal power, whatever it was called, was a little more than he could handle.

But how else could his abrupt capture be explained?

His musings were brutally interrupted as he was hurled against a cold brick wall next to R2, who had already assumed the grim face of defeat. Two gun barrels were pointed their way, and Suzaku was possessed by the urge to plead, "This is a mistake! I'm not involved!" He suppressed the idea in disgust. He'd chosen to help R2 knowing full well the consequences that the decision might bring, and he wasn't about to abandon him like a coward. So went his altruistic moral code, one that he'd established to atone for his sins of seven years before…

Suddenly Suzaku felt a hand on his shoulder; he was whipped around and found himself facing R2, feeling as though those blazing amethyst eyes were examining his very soul. "Understand that this is necessary to seal the contract," R2 murmured.

He took Suzaku's face in his pale, slender hands and pressed their mouths together.

What was supposed to have been "What contract?" came out instead as "Wh–mmmphg!" Suzaku felt his face flush hotly when those soft lips touched his, and found that he couldn't pull away as R2 stubbornly held him in place.

As he slowly grasped the situation in its entirety – he was being kissed by a stranger who in the five minutes he'd known him had proven to be insane… and happened to be a man… in front of two assassins out to kill them – the blush swiftly crept all the way to the tips of his ears.

"Well isn't that just adorable," Glovitz cooed sardonically. "Crowley, shoot the fags and be done with it. I'm tiring of this chase."

Suzaku heard the click of the safety latch, and suddenly he felt a primal, all-consuming need to live. He hated his life, but he didn't want to lose it… he didn't want to die…

I don't want to die!

Whiteness.

His surroundings disappeared, and suddenly there was nothing there but whiteness, and him, floating in it without gravity there to hold him down.

"You wish to make a contract?"

That voice… it took a moment to place, but Suzaku recognized it. R2's voice.

But he was nowhere to be seen. There was just Suzaku, and that colorless nothingness.

"What sort of contract?" Suzaku demanded in bewilderment, speaking into the void. He began to wonder if he was dead. Was death an endless white abyss?

"A power that is yours to command however you wish."

"What kind of power?" Suzaku asked in suspicion.

A light, tinkling laugh echoed through the void. "Whatever it decides to be."

After a moment of contemplation suspended in the nothingness, Suzaku had a revelation. "This… this is Geass, isn't it." He said it not as a question but as a statement of fact.

"Correct." The voice was amused, but there was an undercurrent of surprise in its tone. It hadn't expected Suzaku to know that much.

"A contract has two sides. What will you ask from me in exchange for this… power?"

"A single, simple wish, which will make itself apparent as time sees fit."

The voice sounded wistful, sad, and Suzaku found the way it had worded its request strange in a way he couldn't quite place. He was hesitant to accept any sort of contract, supernatural or otherwise, when he didn't know what was expected from him in return. But he reasoned that if he really was dead, he had nothing to lose.

"Then… this Geass I do solemnly accept!" Suzaku cried.

The words served as a trigger, to what Suzaku didn't know; his stomach lurched as he was overcome with the sensation of falling an impossibly huge distance. He was in a tunnel of sorts, a column of rich, sapphire blue. Veins of every conceivable color weaved themselves into it like a great multihued tapestry, hissing and crackling as they traversed its immeasurable length. Suzaku suddenly felt very, very small, surrounded by something infinitely larger than he was, than any human being was. At that moment he felt like he was falling past fibers of the universe itself.

Images began to flash before his eyes, switching from one to another almost too fast for him to absorb: Two parallel gray disks, inconceivably vast, between which the cosmos stretched out into time without end; pure white feathers scattered before his vision, and then he was looking at an immense crowd of people dressed in the garb of an ancient, near-forgotten time, their foreheads bearing a bizarre sigil in the shape of a bird taking flight; then… was that Jupiter? Yes, there was the telltale red spot of a centuries-old raging storm. He saw what looked like a temple floating in the sky, white columns against the backdrop of a fiery sunset…

…And then he was wrenched back into the present, still cornered against a wall in a deserted side street, and still very much alive.

And his lips still pressed against R2's.

Perhaps sensing Suzaku's acute embarrassment, R2 broke away from the kiss, wearing a faint smile. Just as Suzaku began to wonder whether what had just happened had even been real, R2 said softly, "A contract has been made."

The sound of a gunshot reverberated through the alleyway.

R2's violet eyes bulged as his mouth opened and closed wordlessly; he looked down at the crimson spot blooming over his chest and croaked, "How inconvenient."

Suzaku felt his insides twist sickeningly as he watched R2 stumble backwards, watched him fall slowly, gracefully, his back arched, with as much dignity as he possibly could; he watched that dignity crumble away as R2 landed in muddy gravel that crunched spitefully under his weight and coated his back with filth, mocking him in his last rattling breaths. His eyes, now glazed over with the shroud of death, gazed sightlessly into nothingness. Blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth, gushed out of his mortal wound and accumulated in an unbelievably large pool under his lifeless, broken body; there was a dusting of it on Suzaku's cheek. When he reached up slowly to touch his face it came off on his hand, warm and sticky, and he suddenly doubled over, on the verge of vomiting. He found himself crying for a man he didn't know; he cried for a life unfulfilled, viciously cut short with the simple pull of a trigger.

"What about the Eleven?" Crowley asked.

Glovitz, smiling smugly at the death wrought at his hands, switched his focus to a trembling, weeping Suzaku. "What's the matter, kid? You've never seen death before?"

Suzaku had seen death before. It was an inevitable part of being in the military. But R2 had been… different, somehow. So vibrant, so full of vitality; the vividness of that subtle smile, his manic intensity as he'd struggled to escape his hunters… how could such an overwhelming abundance of life just suddenly die, vanish forever?

Glovitz, adjusting his aim, said, "You're next."

No! He wanted to live. Needed to live. For R2, if not for anything else.

"You know, I really don't appreciate the word 'fag,'" a voice said in irritation. Suzaku's heart might as well have stopped as he realized whom it belonged to.

"What?" Glovitz choked out, true fear manifesting in his face for the first time. Crowley wailed and crossed himself, the motion at odds with his occupation.

R2 pushed himself onto his feet, swaying a little before he planted them firmly on the ground. Eyes narrowed, he began to walk towards the two mercenaries, who shook as though they were seeing a ghost… which they pretty much were. "It's a coarse and ignorant term," he chastised, as he stopped inches in front of them and ran his fingers down Glovitz's cheek, leaving a moist trail of blood in their wake. "Worthy of two coarse and ignorant men like yourselves," he finished callously, delighting in the squeak that escaped the seasoned killer's throat.

"You're dead," Glovitz wheezed, beads of sweat trickling down his face.

R2 snorted. "Do I look dead to you? Besides, you said it yourself…" He smiled cruelly and quoted, "Some things never truly die." He examined the quaking assassins in disgust. "Now what am I going to do with you two?"

"Please… spare us," Crowley sniveled, even though R2 didn't possess any obvious weapon.

"I'm not going to kill you, you spineless waste of flesh," R2 snapped, repulsed by how pathetic the two men had become. "Putting an end to your sorry existence is much too kind. No… I'll let you crawl back alive to your Order of Cornelia." He knelt in front of them and placed a blood-spattered hand on each one's forehead. Smirking wickedly, he added, "But first I'll break your minds."

There was a pressure behind R2's eyes, a pull between his shoulder blades; and suddenly the mercenaries were screaming, curling into themselves with horror, trying in vain to rid themselves of the shock images R2 was streaming directly into their respective consciousnesses. R2 didn't know what they were seeing; he had simply willed whatever visions and memories haunted them the most to surface to the forefront of their minds, twisting them until they snapped.

When they had been reduced to cowering in the dirt, curled into the fetal position, he spat, "Leave, and don't come back."

As soon as they were able to regain their footing they hastily complied, whimpering and stumbling away with absolutely no intention of returning.

"Now then…" Smiling in satisfaction, R2 turned around to find Suzaku, who had stood frozen the entire time, staring at him with something that was not quite incredulity and not quite terror, but something in between.

"What… what are you, R2?" Suzaku demanded shakily. "You're not human."

R2, known in a different lifetime as Lelouch vi Britannia, replied, "Why, I'm an immortal, of course. And I've just given you a gift called Geass."

Author's Notes: In order to avoid any confusion, I'll make this clear right away. All of the events of Code Geass and Code Geass R2 still happened. They just happened without Suzaku. Suzaku is living in Japan 150 years after these events, and though the world has reached peace in the general sense thanks to Lelouch's efforts, prejudice is still inevitable. Britannians still live in Japan - they couldn't exactly all just disappear after Japan was liberated - and some still feel that what they see as simply Area 11 rightfully belongs to them. The result is racial tension and making poor Suzaku cry.

And as to how Lelouch, aka R2, became immortal... well, that'll become clear later on...

And the fic's rated T for now, because though I'm supremely tempted to submit to my inner fangirl and drift into M territory, I want to take time to build on Lelouch and Suzaku's relationship and make it complicated and genuinely loving. Not to mention actually having a plot. Those gratifying scenes of an intimate nature will come later, I promise! ^0^