a/n: prompt linked in profile
Nunnally doesn't speak at all to him that first day. Nor the next. Nor the day after that. Mostly she just sits in silence, sequestered away in a room within the Viceroy's Palace. Occasionally, she'll accept the food that Kallen pushes towards her, eyes bright with concern. Rarely, she'll sleep, in short naps snatched between moments of leaden consciousness.
Schneizel and Cornelia are a great comfort in those days. Cornelia sits with her and holds her hand. Cornelia tells her the stories about Euphemia that Nunnally would have been present for if she hadn't been in Japan, and they exchange tales of one lost sibling for another. Schneizel deals with the outside world, and in the periphery of her consciousness she is vaguely aware of Kanon ferrying information to and fro.
(Nunnally pretends not to notice how Cornelia holds her tighter whenever Schneizel comes near. There's an unspoken animosity between them, but Nunnally has had enough of looking at her siblings with suspicion.)
Schneizel offers her the throne. Cornelia will not accept it, and any other siblings that may have once contested it are dead, forever consigned to the annals of history as the unfortunate victims of a F.L.E.I.J.A. warhead. Nunnally accepts, because she has no other way of honouring their deaths, and because this is the legacy that her brother has left her. She knows her duty.
There's a coronation that she is half lucid for, and she hears whispers of admiration from the galleries of journalists commending her on her beauty and her calm. And then it's back to the Palace, where Schneizel and Kanon begin pushing papers at her for her signature of approval: press releases; royal pardons; the reinstatement of the parliament.
The nightmares don't start until a week in.
–
In hindsight, she thinks bitterly as she sits up, gasping, she should have expected the nightmares long before the funeral.
It's less a funeral and more a media parade, in truth. The journalists and ranks of ex-nobles swarm, each in colours louder than the last, in a desperate bid to attract her favour. Those of her friends that she does manage to spot are dressed either in tasteful pastels (Nina; Milly), or school uniforms (Rivalz; Kallen). Nunnally herself wears a thin black choker around her neck, and dresses in blood red. It's the most she can do for her brother without raising suspicion. Her siblings wear their dress uniforms.
Nunnally keeps her head high and eyes forward throughout. It's all she can do to not throw up when a black cape flutters into the corners of her vision, and when she blinks she sees purple and gold looming over her brother.
There's a cheer when the project managers announce that the Damocles, with her brother's body on board, has been successfully launched and is on track to burn up in the sun's atmosphere. She thinks that maybe she'll be sick anyway.
–
They leave Japan for Britannia the moment it's been confirmed that the Damocles has been destroyed. She had hoped that in Britannia she'd be free from the lingering effect of her brother's geass, but the occasional rim of red around Schneizel's eyes tells her that it is not to be so. More telling is the fact that he accompanies them to Britannia, constantly by either Schneizel's side or Kanon's. She despises the geass, but when Schneizel speaks to her under its influence, in a twisted way it feels like her brother's speaking to her through Schneizel. She ignores the urges to request that Sir Jeremiah breaks the geass, as he had done for her friends.
They settle by degrees into the newly reconstructed Pendragon. The military and security fall into Cornelia's hands. Schneizel takes care of the areas of government that she cannot, and she in turn begins to score a line in the carpet between her rooms and her office with her wheelchair.
–
He approaches her in her office. He says so very awkwardly, "I am sorry for your loss, you majesty."
"I know what you are," Nunnally answers. She's staring at a newspaper, one of many that Kanon collects for her and Schneizel, mentions of her brother meticulously highlighted. The words begin to blur beneath her fingers. She takes in a shuddering breath, and whispers, "I know you're a liar, and I know you're a murderer, and I know your name, Suzaku Kururugi."
She hears the rustle of fabric as he bows in acceptance of her words, and then he is gone.
–
Suzaku does a lot of accepting.
Nunnally invites him to every lunchtime function. At night, she requests his presence at the court dinners.
Suzaku accepts every single time, even though each appearance means a long, isolated silence. He can't eat or drink, because to do so would require him to remove his mask. He can't speak, because symbols do not offer opinions on the banalities of the weather, and any words he has to say on politics would be scrutinised viciously. He sits or stands in the shadows, still and statuesque, the court skirting around him.
It's more spiteful than she thinks her bones can stand, but she continues to do so anyway.
–
The breaking point comes a fortnight after her brother's death. She wakes up, shivering at the sensation of cooling sweat on her skin. She takes one look at the bedroom, large shadows pooling in the empty gaps between the furniture, and decides she needs to be elsewhere.
She clumsily pushes herself off the bed to drop into her wheelchair, and silently thanks Cornelia for leaving it right by her bed. She fumbles with the motor controls, and does her best to not careen from wall to wall as she rolls down the corridors. A clumsy swipe of the fingers has her rolling into an occupied room before she can reverse its direction.
Suzaku sits alone in the darkened lounge, turning the Zero mask in his hands. His head raises at the sound of her wheelchair. He looks at her too-wide eyes and he rises, laying the mask down carefully with a whispered, "Nunnally."
Something in the fact that it's the first time in so long that he's heard him say her name without a title, and the fact that reliving her brother's death in her nightmare had her feeling so alone, has a part of her breaking. She chokes and finds it becomes hard to breathe. Suzaku moves to kneel in front of her, and she let her head fall onto his shoulder. Underneath her cheek, the fabric of Zero's uniform grows damp. She falls asleep as her well of tears dry up, with Suzaku stroking her head.
When she wakes up, she notices that Suzaku has moved them onto the couch. Suzaku is dozing, and even from upside down with her head in Suzaku's lap, the change in his face between waking and sleeping is obvious. She reaches up to touch the tips of her fingers against the bottom of his jaw, and he starts awake.
"Your majesty," he says, voice thick still with sleep. His eyes have already begun to dull with the strain of living.
"Nunnally," she says quietly. And, a little louder, "Zero."
"Yes," he says, and Nunnally watches as he blinks tears from his eyes.
–
It becomes a ritual of sorts. Nunnally will wake up in the middle of the night and call for Suzaku on the intercom. Suzaku carefully cradles her out into the lounge, where they sit until Nunnally is relaxed enough to sleep. Most often than not she falls asleep in the lounge, and wakes to find that either Suzaku has carried her back into her room, or he has fallen asleep on the couch alongside her. She doesn't say anything on the nights Suzaku is still in the Zero uniform when Nunnally calls for him in the dead of night, long after the rest of the Palace have retired for bed. Suzaku derives as much comfort from her as she does from him, she thinks.
Cornelia knows. Nunnally is vaguely aware of a whispered, heated discussion between the two, held behind the corners of a corridor where they think she cannot hear, but Cornelia doesn't attempt to dissuade her from anything. If anything, she begins to pull back, deferring more and more of Nunnally's care to Suzaku. It could be because she's finding herself being ensnared further in the intricacies of the military and bureaucracy, but Nunnally would prefer to believe that it's because Cornelia too has put her trust in Suzaku.
The third morning they wake up together, Nunnally says, "I'd like to plant a tree for my brother."
"Okay," Suzaku agrees.
–
It's a small ceremony. Schneizel procures a tree, and she and Suzaku alone attend its burial in the shadows of a walled garden, hidden within the depths of the palace. Nunnally watches Suzaku carefully digs the hole for the seedling to go into, fingers clutching tightly at the Zero mask in her lap (Suzaku should mourn her brother as a friend, she had reasoned, and Suzaku had agreed).
They await the rising of the sun in silence, Suzaku at her feet with his head resting against her knees, and her hands untangling his hair. She listens to the sound of their breathing as the sky lightens, and thinks that it will be okay.