Foreword
Warning: Massive Spoilers Throughout. If this matters to you, please have watched both seasons ("R1" and "R2") of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion prior to reading this story. This story also references the Code Geass Picture Dramas released with the DVD/Blu-Ray media, particularly "Turn 22.05". This story is set in the TV series continuity whose "canon" ends with the close of season two, and not the compilation movie continuity, which has plot differences and is considered to be an alternate reality/timeline. As of writing time (Sep 2019), the Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection [sic] movie has not yet been released formally in the United States; this movie occurs in the movie continuity, but I have used a couple elements from it for setting purposes based on limited reading of reviews of the movie. I have tried my best to present the characters as screen-accurately as practical, including hours of rewatching the series and reviewing scenes of how some of them interact with each other, but please accept my apologies in advance for any lapses or oversights. One other note is that I made some choices in the world events that occur between the end of R2 and this story that, while I think are reasonable, I imagine some readers may disagree with, both in order to make the plot arc possible and also to make the use of several of the existing characters plausible rather than inventing new, unfamiliar characters. Also, I filled in some of the blanks of how things work off screen with details from my own experience, which of course will differ from the experiences of others. For any of those with differences of opinion on the story, feel free to respond with feedback, and I also encourage you to be inspired to write your own version of how you would like things to play out, the way I was inspired by the show and by reading other writers' stories to write this one. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoy it.
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion and pre-existing characters from the series are copyright of Sunrise Inc. and/or Clamp. As a work of fan fiction, this story is written for artistic value only and shall not be used for financial gain. Any names, characters, and events appearing in this work are fictitious. Any real places are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
"The punishment for what you've done shall be this then; you will live on, always wearing that mask serving as a knight for justice and truth. You will no longer live your life as Suzaku Kururugi. You shall sacrifice the ordinary pleasures of your life for the benefit of the world, for eternity."
"This Geass I do solemnly accept…"
Suzaku looked out grimly through the window of the transport aircraft at the setting sun. He momentarily noted the irony that his reflection in the window was of the Zero mask he had accepted the mantle of bearing.
So much death. So many innocent lives lost. Friends lost. Princess Euphemia… His hands clenched reflexively. They were gone, and no amount of anger or will would bring them back now. He relaxed a bit as he again pondered whether things could have happened differently, whether peace could have been achieved with so much less bloodshed than how things ended up playing out.
Being Empress Nunnally vi Britannia's de facto head of security and senior military advisor, he had little time to himself. While Nunnally was like a sister to him, his acting in the identity of Zero severely limited his ability to be himself and be personable in the vast majority of interactions with her. Nunnally's role was more that of a figurehead, and many of the leadership duties were given to Prince Schneizel, though under Suzaku's direction through the Geass Lelouch had used on him. Suzaku often found that he had to manage the leadership team between the three of them while basically acting as the operations officer, and once in a while he had to try to interject what he thought was right if Schneizel drifted towards his amoral side or if Nunnally wanted to try something too unworkably idealistic.
While Suzaku in the role of Zero was still nominally the leader of the Black Knights, their reorganization after the end of Emperor Lelouch's reign and the subsequent overall peace had made them less active and less visible. Also, the spectacular command and control problems that occurred with the Black Knights at the Second Battle of Tokyo and afterwards convinced most of the United Federation of Nations that they needed to modify their approach to military structure. Lelouch, as Zero at the time leading the Black Knights as a contracted military force, was officially conducting a UFN mission to liberate Japan, but he suddenly deviated from it when it conflicted with his hidden agenda and real objective, to capture his sister Nunnally, then Viceroy of Area 11/Japan, to protect her.
After the confusion and allegiance-shifting that happened as a result, most of the nations realized it was reckless to cede so much of their sovereignty to a single person to the point that they would not have any military force, even for self defense if an incident occurred too quickly for a security council of the UFN to come to a consensus to act. The UFN military was restructured as a closely-knit coalition of partner nation forces, with the Black Knights becoming a unit used for special missions and as a lead force in larger combined operations, with personnel volunteering from the various UFN nations. Suzaku delegated most of the running of day-to-day operations to subordinate leaders, and only generally exercised command directly when they were called upon by the UFN for actual incidents, which thankfully was rather rare. This allowed him to spend more of his time protecting and advising Nunnally, which was what he preferred anyway.
Fortunately, after the political situation had settled down, and reconciliation between many of the nations involved had been achieved, Suzaku had been able to arrange to have Sayoko Shinozaki reassume her previous role as Nunnally's caretaker. He was glad that Nunnally had someone she knew well and trusted to assist her with her disabilities.
As he ruminated, his mind drifted momentarily to the one thing that had managed to give him a feeling of anticipation. The Empress was scheduled to conduct a morale visit at the Britannian Pacific Fleet headquarters, and that meant the Avalon. In many ways, home.
After the Battle of Mt. Fuji against the Damocles, Avalon had eventually been repaired and returned to service. As one of the few operational capital ships at the end of the war, she had been assigned to be the flagship and command ship of the Pacific Fleet, as well as once again becoming the home of the Camelot Engineering Corps' Advanced Special Envoy Engineering Corps (ASEEC). With the diplomatic efforts that Nunnally had been engaged in to restore international relations, it had been decided that using more conventional means of transportation whenever possible would encourage an image of reconciliation and détente for that mission, which made a massive airborne battleship and carrier like the Avalon impractical as Nunnally's main mode of transportation or base of operations.
In the mean time, Avalon had been going through the rounds of training exercises, presence patrols, humanitarian relief operations, and engineering field testing and evaluation that encompassed her varied roles. This meant that Suzaku had not had a chance to cross paths with the Avalon in about two years, let alone the few people left who felt like his true friends, and the one person left who really knew him and had been there for him through everything…
"…You shall sacrifice the ordinary pleasures of your life…"
Suzaku shook his head, feeling conflicted. Even small kinds of happiness?
He found the Zero mask to be particularly oppressive at that moment. Suzaku had been very careful that no one see his face since the Zero Requiem two years ago, not even having a real medical checkup. He had to wear the mask basically everywhere except in his own quarters or sometimes in a bathroom. He had learned that hiding his face also meant hiding all of the facial expressions used to communicate as well. As a result, he felt increasingly disconnected from people around him. Notwithstanding his childhood trauma with the death of his father and dealing with classified information for the military, he had been previously used to a general degree of openness in his day to day life, and all the secrets and hiding his thoughts had become wearing on him.
He had been prepared to sacrifice everything, even his own individuality, for Lelouch's plan for peace, but his mind was still human and sought human contact. It was easy to ignore at first, but, as time went on, he had started to notice he increasingly missed the people he had been close to before, and he would catch himself wondering if he could contact them again. There was so much he could make himself do through sheer willpower, but the small voice in his heart kept coming back to him.
Suzaku found his thoughts often wandered to the person who had been such a fixture in his daily life, but whom he only realized he should have appreciated more in hindsight, his colleague at ASEEC, Cecile Croomy. He had tried to suppress it, but the fact that she was a woman he admittedly found attractive hadn't helped in that regard. Sometimes as he slept, he would dream of being in more innocent times again, just chatting about daily life with her as they worked on the Lancelot together or their talking and laughing together navigating, sometimes awkwardly, another one of the functions he attended as a knight.
He tried to shake the thoughts away again, but the image of the kind, intelligent, beautiful woman and friend refused to fade away.
Hours later and half a world away, onboard the Avalon, Cecile was wrapping up her work for the day at a computer in an office off the main laboratory and hangar area. She had been rather busy the past few months, as she was the project manager for several of the ASEEC's flight propulsion and energy projection technology development efforts. Lloyd Asplund was up to his usual antics as the chief engineer and kept her on her toes with some of the more exotic innovations he came up with. Being a fairly skilled Knightmare Frame pilot herself, she had also started participating in flight testing.
It was a unique opportunity for her, as she got to see many of her designs go from an idea to actual use in a realistic environment in a short period of time. ASEEC was given a lot of leeway in the development process, which occasionally led to some dangerous oversights, with building experimental craft without ejection systems being one of the more notable ones, but it had been crucial during the war, as their ability to field new Knightmare technology and other advancements ended up saving the day or reducing losses in numerous battles. With their rapid manufacturing capability on board, she could come up with a design or improvement, prototype it, and fly it on a Knightmare herself within days.
Cecile was thankful for the relative peace that had come after the Zero Requiem, but as a military officer, she knew that, as long as humans were capable of evil, people who wanted to work for good had to be prepared fight those who might use force for nefarious ends.
Since the Avalon was not just a research ship but often the command ship in Pacific Fleet military training exercises, she got the chance to try to see how new ideas would work as close as they could get to actual combat. There had been a number of times where they had a difficult training scenario in which Cecile, Lloyd, and their team had been able to think of a technical solution that would give them an advantage or shift the tide of battle. They then would actually build it and implement it on site, and they would develop new tactics, techniques, and procedures to overcome the problems in surprising ways.
The Avalon and many of her sister airships and surface ships in the fleet had just participated in combined exercises with other United Federation of Nations partner forces, and she was glad they were finally headed back to Pearl Harbor. After a few weeks of being stuck in the ship, other than when she was flying a Knightmare, being able to stand on the ground and see grass and trees sounded very alluring to her.
Lloyd stopped at the door. "Miss Cecile, I noticed something in the message traffic that you might be interested in…," he said casually, but with a slight knowing smile. Cecile sensed something was out of the ordinary. He continued, "I forwarded it to you, on the high side that is… By the way, could you please make sure to send me the new test report summary before the staff meeting tomorrow? You know how those program office folks can be about making sure the funds are well-spent…"
"Thank you, Lloyd. And I'll make sure to get the slides to you first thing in the morning." Lloyd ducked back out.
She turned to one of the workstations near her and logged in to the classified network. Looking in her mailbox, near the top was the message Lloyd mentioned, and she opened it. After breezing through the large amount of header information, she started reading the main part of the text: "AVALON IS DIRECTED TO RENDEZVOUS WITH BRITANNIA ONE ON OR ABOUT…"
Her heart skipped a beat. That meant Empress Nunnally, and that meant…Suzaku. She remembered that Suzaku should be turning twenty in a few days, and she noted on the timeline that the visit would be about a couple weeks out.
She had missed Suzaku daily, but, after such a long stretch of not having contact with him, it had faded somewhat into the background, like it would be if every day was an overcast day. With this news, the feeling came back in full force.
The precocious and idealistic boy she had first met had quickly, too quickly, become a man and a hardened warrior in the short years she had known him, having experienced so much combat and so much loss. She last saw him shortly before the Battle of Mt. Fuji about two years ago, and she was afraid of how he might have changed in the time that had passed with the weight that he had been carrying.
She had to stand up and walk around for a moment, and she went to the window and yawned.
Suzaku had a gift as a pilot, and while she was an excellent pilot no one could match the operational efficiency rate he had. He didn't so much pilot the Lancelot as he operated it like an extension of his body. She often found herself thinking "if Suzaku were here…" or wishing he could be there to help her check out something. But more than that she just missed the quiet time talking with him about random things, whether it be when she was helping him with his schoolwork or tinkering inside one of the vehicles. Even after he lost Princess Euphemia, though he got into a much darker place, his personality, sense of responsibility, and natural instinct to care kept trying to shine through even in the worst of times.
She just hoped the man she had come to have so much affection for would still be there.