The Demon King

by ShadowCell

Post R2, AU, rewritten. After the war, Kallen Kozuki embarks on a project to understand evil, and to understand Lelouch.

The Demon King

—

Author's Note: This is a more thought-intensive and longer reworking of the previous version of this story, which has become somewhat more expansive in scope. It was written before Lelouch of the Resurrection ever became a thing, which I did not find interesting enough to watch but something tells me it would not play nice with the entire premise of this story. Oh well.

—

Lelouch vi Britannia was evil.

Such was the consensus of history. Lelouch was the Demon King who conquered the world and bent it to his will. He killed and enslaved with impunity, and everyone who did not bow to him tasted the searing wrath of the FLEIJA. He was the perfect tyrant, unassailable on his bone-white throne, protected by an army of inhumanly devoted slaves and the terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation, all directed by his dark intellect. He was the perfect object of hatred; everyone knew the sting of his oppression, and everyone was powerless against him. Only a miracle could overthrow him—and only Zero, the man who made miracles, made it happen. It was no surprise that, for all the world's lingering problems, at least everyone could agree that the Demon King was the very personification of evil.

But not everyone did, and for Kallen Kozuki, that was a wound from the war that had yet to heal. For what made someone evil? Evil thoughts? Evil acts? Evil intentions?

And for that matter, which Lelouch was it that was so evil? The world knew only the Demon King, exulting in their terror and gorging upon their suffering. But Kallen knew so much more. He was brother, he was Zero, he was Vice President of the Ashford Academy Student Council, he was even the man she loved. Were those men evil too?

And deep down, whenever she pondered that question, the image would rise in her mind of Lelouch caring for his blind and crippled sister. That man could not be evil. His zeal to protect her and his despair when he thought she had been taken from him…no, the monster had to be a mask. And if Lelouch was anything, he was a man who wore masks. But under every mask was a true face. So what was Lelouch's true face?

The war was over. The world was beginning anew. And so Kallen Kozuki embarked on a project to understand evil—and to understand Lelouch.

—

They called the new calendar the United Era, although it kept counting from the same date as the old Britannian calendar for convenience's sake. There was some grim irony to it — that even though Britannia no longer ruled the world, everyone would continue to measure their lives according to Britannia's yardstick. But the world had so many practical problems that inconveniencing everyone by making them all learn a new calendar and start renumbering years and relabeling memories seemed rather unnecessary.

And so it was in the spring of UE 2020 that Kallen Kozuki finally graduated from Ashford Academy. Taking a couple years off to be a globetrotting terrorist hadn't set her grades back too badly.

But as she hugged her mother with her diploma in hand and mortarboard under her arm, Kallen felt a twinge of fear. She had fought so long just to have a future, and just to give others a future—but now the future was here, she was part of it, and she had no idea what to do with it. Ohgi had helpfully described her once as a "problem-solver," but for the life of her, the only way she could think of to solve problems was the vigorous application of a radiant wave surger. And Lelouch had died a couple years ago to create a world where none of her problems called for a radiant wave surger.

None of them! Not even that asshole Daniels, who'd tried to get a little too grabby one time after biology class. No radiant wave surger there, she'd had to just kick his ass the old-fashioned way.

With her hair upturned and the Guren's activation key on a chain around her neck, she was no longer sickly and demure Kallen Stadtfeld, but confident and strong Kallen Kozuki, the woman who had slain the Knight of Zero. It sometimes stuck in her craw that the woman who had slain the Knight of Zero still had to do, like, homework and midterms and stuff. But while a great many men were afraid of Kallen Kozuki, the looming specter of adulthood was not. And now, with the universities either lying in ruins or overcrowded, the future had arrived in all its starkness. It was time to put away childish things. Work or starve.

So Kallen, the Ace of the Black Knights, took on odd jobs. She worked at Pizza Hut for a while and tried not to let the irony get to her. There was the lifeguard job, where she quickly wearied of the many boys—and more girls than she expected—who would choose her lifeguard station, out of all the lifeguard stations on the beach, to conspicuously find themselves in mortal danger, from which only Kallen Kozuki and her wet, skintight swimsuit could save them. There was the bank teller job, the stint as a waitress, the grocery store cashier thing…and eventually she just wound up at Pizza Hut again, while teaching self-defense classes for women on the side. Someday the plan was to go to a university, get a degree in something really in-demand—engineering, for starters—and then get a job that would pay a lot more money, and even offer benefits. Benefits like dental, because she was starting to get a cavity in one of her molars and it was really pissing her off. And then it would all be figured out and her future would have a plan, and she could build a life that really reflected who she was and what she wanted. And that was the plan. In the future.

In the meantime, Kallen worked to keep body and soul together. Despite every horny teenager and rude customer she had to endure, she was grateful at least for that much. Because these jobs and their paltry wages required frequent travel between the gleaming Tokyo Settlement and the squalor of the ghettoes. And that was where Kallen first began to think about evil.

Certainly, Britannian viceroys could not be accused of paying too much attention to the welfare of the ghettoes' inhabitants. But the ghettoes, these crumbling shells into which a country's rightful citizens were crowded, were not made so by accident. This was what Britannia had intended. They meant the ghetto to be a prison without walls, where the Numbers would turn on each other in their squalor and fight amongst themselves for what pitiful scraps of civilization they could cultivate in the shadow of glimmering Britannian power. This was a place of suffering, where none could enter and none could leave, except to work as slaves to their conquerors. They would be trucked into the Settlements to build monuments to the power of those who had broken them, and they would be broken in turn. They would sweat and bleed and die for the greatness—or even just the amusement—of those that had stolen their country.

And they had something else to offer the shattered remains of an independent people. They called it the Honorary Britannian system, the way out of poverty and suffering, the way into the Britannians' good graces. For the price of your dignity, you could reach the lowest rung of Britannia's social ladder. But it was really the greatest cruelty of all. They would promise you could become like them, become one of them—but you could never be one of them. If you weren't sufficiently Britannian, they would sneer at you for "failing to rise above your lowly station," forever held back by what they deemed your lesser circumstances, lesser biology, lesser ability, lesser being. And if you were sufficiently Britannian, well, you still weren't. You had to be twice as good to get half as far, and every step you took was upon quicksand, because nothing would save you on the day your Britannian neighbors turned on you. And if you went back to your own people, back into the ghettoes as a "failed" Honorary Britannian…well, then you would see what the protection of Britannian society was worth. It was a blessing that Japan had only lived like this for a few years, and its people still had vivid memories of their former freedom and prosperity. In other places, whole generations had lived and died in Britannia's devilish society, and Kallen could not fathom the damage they had suffered.

But there was always Refrain. Yes, there was always that, to keep you nice and quiet, easier for Britannian authorities to control. For the price of your sanity and your body, you could grasp at the wisps of lying memories to distract yourself from the hell of reality. It was hard to tell which was which: whether the Honorary Britannian system was Refrain made into an institution, or whether Refrain was the Honorary Britannian system distilled into a drug.

This was Britannia's system: oppression, subjugation, and the cruel siren song of Refrain. This was what they spread across the world, to every Area, poisoning places that had once been prosperous and free. And this was undeniably evil.

But was Lelouch evil?

Perhaps the greatest evil in all this was the false hope within the Honorary Britannian system. And Lelouch had, it seemed, peddled false hope. As Zero, he had fended off Schneizel's attempts to annex China and wrested Japan from Britannia's grip. And as Emperor Lelouch, he had conquered the world and ushered in a new era of repression and terror. Zero had brought the Japanese to the precipice of freedom, and Lelouch had thrown them back into chains.

Only, he hadn't. Because now Japan was free, and at the head of a political order that held rampant militarism in check. Now Japan was a state on its way to making real Zero's promise of a state of justice. Lelouch had kept Zero's promise after all—just in the most convoluted and violent way imaginable. And the only catch was that the Japanese would never know that this was how Lelouch had freed them.

So he was overly manipulative, overly secretive, and he had a bewildering and bloody plan to bring world peace. But that wasn't evil.

Not in that way, at least.

—

In the fall of UE 2021, Kallen Kozuki finally got a steady job. She became the Knight of One.

It had not been her idea. This was the work of Nunnally vi Britannia, 100th Empress of the Holy Britannian Empire, who sought a premier knight of the realm. The Knight of Three, Gino Weinberg, was not keen to take up that noble station; neither was the Knight of Nine, a soldierly woman named Nonette Enneagram. Anya Alstreim had no apparent desire to leave the Gottwald Orange Farm and resume her seat as the Knight of Six anytime soon. Tryouts were ongoing for the other chairs of the Knights of the Round, because for as formidable a person as Nunnally vi Britannia was, she was still stuck in a wheelchair. But the Knight of One couldn't be just anyone, and Nunnally wanted someone she could trust.

Gino came to Kallen's meager apartment in Japan to deliver the news in person. She took it well.

"The Knight of One?! I—Gino—I can't—are you out of your mind?!"

Gino squirmed and looked around in search of cover. "It wasn't my idea—"

"I work at Pizza Hut, Gino!"

"What's wrong with Pizza Hut?"

The answer came when Kallen smacked him in the mouth with an oversized plush Cheese-kun toy.

"Look, you can't just come in here and ask me to pack up my life and go be something I'm not," she declared, and crossed her arms to let him know she really meant it. "I'm not Britannian, I'm Japanese. Nunnally knows that, right? She has to—"

"That's why she chose you," Gino spoke up. "She trusts you, more than she trusts me or Nonette or Cornelia or Schneizel or anyone else. She knows you'll keep her safe and you'll never lead her astray. And," his voice dropped, and Kallen could feel the dread welling up behind it, "and so does Zero."

Kallen's eyes darkened, and she opened her mouth to spit some venom about Suzaku Kururugi, but barely stopped herself. She had long since figured out who was inside that Zero costume, but if Gino hadn't…

"Well, too bad," she snapped instead. "I'm not Britannian, and I'm not joining Britannian high society. And that's final!"

Two days later, Empress Nunnally herself met Kallen in person at the Britannian Embassy in Tokyo. And two weeks after that, Kallen joined Britannian high society. In the end, she told herself, it was the free dental that won her over.

The knighting took place in Neo Wales, the new capital that replaced the smoldering crater that used to be Pendragon. The ceremony itself was quite simple and the reception afterwards was resplendent. Kallen asked for sushi, and later learned that while the waitstaff couldn't say no to the new Knight of One, they also had no idea how to make sushi, and a great scramble ensued in the kitchen to figure out how to make sushi before the Knight of One got annoyed. It made Kallen feel a little bad, until Nonette—a gregarious, no-nonsense woman that Kallen already kind of liked despite herself—let her know about the late Lord Bradley, the Knight of Ten, who had demanded his reception feature spotless white chargers, orchestral accompaniment including a battery of cannon, air force flyovers, a full honor guard of Knightmare Frames, and a handpicked selection of nubile young ladies from the waitstaff to be drugged, undressed, and waiting in his chambers afterwards. After hearing all that, Kallen still felt bad about the sushi, but she felt even better about being the reason why he was the late Lord Bradley.

And even so, throughout the reception, Kallen could feel the icy stares of the guests, the harsh judgment, the same impossible standard that met the Honorary Britannians. She was not one of them and yet she had risen overnight to the most glorious of their knighthoods, and their resentment burned all the hotter for it. She would never be one of them and she would never be good enough for them.

They hated her. They hated that she kept her hair upturned, in the same style she'd worn as the ace of the Black Knights. They hated that she carried a katana instead of the more traditional broadsword. They hated that she ate with chopsticks, and they couldn't figure out how. They hated that she made them call her "Lady Kozuki" and not "Lady Stadtfeld." And most of all, they hated that she had their Empress's complete and unwavering confidence.

Their hatred was there, but only one of them was brave or stupid enough to express it. An earl spoke for nearly everyone at the reception of his horror that an Eleven had profaned the holy name of the Knights of the Round with her inferior blood. The Empress serenely informed him that Kallen was half-Britannian. Even worse, gasped the earl, a mongrel as the Knight of One! This could not stand! He drew a sword and Kallen tensed herself for a fight—but then Zero came flying out of the shadows and dropkicked the earl across the room. Nobody seemed to have a good comeback for that.

And yet even as the guards took the earl away and the resentment went from "open" back down to "muted but ambient," Kallen knew from Nunnally's apologetic expression that this was what she had really signed up for. Because that man who had drawn a sword on her was not really supposed to be an earl.

Empress Nunnally had faced a daunting task when she took the throne for her late brother. Lelouch had formally abolished the Area system and the aristocracy, but after his death, the aristocracy had reestablished itself, in fact if not in name. They had a reasonably compelling legal argument, in that the titles and properties Lelouch had confiscated were rightfully theirs under Britannian law, going back generations, and Nunnally could not say with a straight face that the work of her reign would be to heal the Demon King's victims through the equal application of law except for the nobles. Britannian society had been built for centuries around the aristocratic hierarchy, and it could be rewired only through either sustained tyranny or sustained, firm benevolence. The Demon King's reign, terrible as it was, had been short, and Nunnally was no tyrant.

So when Nunnally found herself on the throne, she also found herself looking at a reconstituted aristocracy. Though always wielding a gentle hand, she tried to complete her brother's work and re-abolish the peerage, for surely a new Britannia could not be born in a society that placed some people in a higher stratum of worth simply because of who their parents were. The result was nearly civil war. Only when Zero arrested the ringleaders and Field Marshal Cornelia led a force to smash their burgeoning troops did the threat subside, and yet the resentment towards the Crown still simmered fiercely under the surface.

Or rather, it was towards the man they all assumed was behind the Crown. Schneizel el Britannia—the man with those glassy eyes, that empty stare, that brilliant mind lashed forever to the service of Zero—had served his master by becoming Nunnally's astute political adviser and her tireless Prime Minister. Almost to a man, the nobles believed it was Schneizel and not Nunnally who really called the shots. And they all assumed that if they could take Schneizel out of the picture, the Empress would be an easily manipulated puppet through which they could return Britannia to the good old days of rapine and genocide.

Instead, Schneizel warned Nunnally against alienating the nobles further, because like it or not, they were the educated elite whose support—or at least lack of obstruction—she would need for her much more radical reforms. And so she would have to tolerate the existence of an aristocracy that hovered on the border between de facto and de jure, all while waiting for her opportunity to abolish the whole peerage and bring true equality to the people.

And it was here, from all this, that Kallen had her second taste of evil.

Prime Minister Schneizel had so many threats against his person that for a time, Nunnally ordered Kallen to simply protect him as she would protect the Empress while Zero hunted down the malcontents. It was a solemn duty, and the implications of failure boggled the mind, but on a day-to-day basis, it was often insufferably dull. The aristocrats were not the most inventive bunch when it came to trying to kill the Prime Minister, and it occasionally reached the point where Kallen wondered if she could disarm and subdue would-be assassins in her sleep.

And Schneizel himself was just so creepy. His eyes were vacant and glowed with the tell-tale light of Geass. He had that same lifeless subservience around Zero, and it did not take Kallen long to figure out how Lelouch had finally defeated him. And like Geass's other victims, he could not seem to recall the times he was under the Geass's spell. When his mind was his own, Kallen could tell he knew what he had become. Whether he really believed in the mission to which he was now dedicated was anyone's guess. But it wasn't his choice to make; when his eyes glowed and his mind was Zero's, he was the most powerful man in Britannia, and yet he was a slave—and no one could see his chains.

Kallen regarded him one day as they traveled back to Britannia from a trade summit in South America. He sat in the private lounge of their stately airship as it cruised back to Neo Wales, and he paused his diligent work only long enough for Kallen to describe yet another foiled attempt on his life. And he smiled appreciatively and thanked her for her faithful service and returned to his work. And Kallen tried not to let him notice her shiver in terror.

The ghettoes were slave camps. The Honorary Britannian system was slavery at its cruelest. Lelouch had enslaved people to his will, both with conventional means and with the sinister power of Geass. And this man in front of her, unswervingly loyal to Empress Nunnally by Lelouch's design, was surely a slave. And surely this was evil.

On the other hand, this was the Second Prince of the Holy Britannian Empire. He was the author of much of the world's suffering before the Demon King came along. He'd nuked Pendragon off the map, and most of his family with it—although if his family was anything like these insufferable nobles, Kallen couldn't quite blame him for that. She had eventually pieced together his master plan with the FLEIJAs and the Damocles, for which he'd tricked the Black Knights into becoming his army. His idea of perpetual world peace enforced by the FLEIJA sounded an awful lot like the Demon King's reign, except there was no bloody self-sacrifice at the end. Now Schneizel was being made to use his talents in service of a better world, because his brain was more valuable as one of Nunnally's assets than it was sprayed across a pockmarked wall. Surely he deserved this.

But then that raised a question that always made Kallen's stomach turn. What did evil people deserve? It made her think back to crass, cruel, arrogant Lord Bradley, the Knight of Ten that had mocked and threatened her in captivity. She'd had no qualms with obliterating him as soon as she had the chance. And from what Nonette and Gino told her, he was even worse than she knew. Surely the world was better off without him in it.

And yet Lord Bradley had been struck down as a soldier on a battlefield, ultimately no different than the many others who fell to the Guren in battle. Schneizel…well, this was different.

If Schneizel's invisible imprisonment was evil, then so too was everyone who benefited from it, knowing what it was. Nunnally seemed to know, but the thought of Nunnally as evil was preposterous. And Kallen knew.

And that thought made her stomach turn even more.

—

It did not take long for Kallen to discover that if the Britannian nobility had one overarching talent, it was finding excuses to throw parties.

It was not just the obvious holidays. They threw parties for anything and everything. Religious holidays for faiths they did not practice. Festivals from cultures they had long since destroyed. Weddings, graduations, promotions, retirements, anniversaries, departures, returns, and everyone had a birthday. And although the monarch was invited to each and every one as a matter of course, the Imperial Chamberlain had long ago established a complicated hierarchy of which occasions were important enough that the monarch would actually show up to them.

And it didn't help that Nunnally, seeking to make more friends and allies among the aristocracy and the people, had decided to toss the Imperial Chamberlain's complicated hierarchy and start attending more of these damn things. To get away from the stultifying nobles and start leveling the playing field of Britannian society, she spent a lot more time hobnobbing with the commoners outside the palace, and she invited a lot more commoners to the nobles' various parties. And the nobles, of course, did not like that one bit, which made for a tense and unpleasant atmosphere at most of these things—the sort of atmosphere that meant a show of force in the form of the Knight of One at the Empress's side was always a good idea. So, if the Empress was there, the Knight of One would be too. And Kallen hated every minute of it.

They weren't all hostile, of course. Some of them were perfectly polite, some of them were pruriently polite, and a few of them were actually interesting people to talk to. One of them chattered on about opening a mobile medical school that would travel through the former Areas, dispensing basic medical training and education to the people free of charge in places that might never see a doctor. Nunnally was so delighted she gave him an imperial grant on the spot. Kallen liked that guy, so naturally he went off to go do good in the world, and she was stuck with the snobs and jerks. Little wonder that, when she wasn't guarding Nunnally, Kallen spent most of her time with Cornelia and Nonette.

But the aristocrats did a great deal of business at these parties, lightly lubricated with alcohol and the anonymity of a crowd. And if there was a crowd of Britannian aristocrats, Kallen had learned, there was probably going to be some evil to be found.

One incident stood out. Shortly after the mobile medical school guy decamped to Argentina, there was another party for some occasion or another, of just barely sufficient gravitas to warrant the Empress's presence. And so present she was, along with Prime Minister Schneizel. A duke was off in the corner preparing to speak to him, probably seeking some governmental favor. A dark-skinned servant moved to hand him a sheaf of documents, but they slipped from his hand and spilled onto the floor.

"You fool!" roared the duke, and he struck the servant across the face and sent him tumbling over. The party came to a stop, as they tended to do when things like this happened, and all eyes turned towards the unfolding scene. Nunnally's hands moved towards her wheelchair controls, ready to zoom over and intervene.

"I-I'm terribly sorry, sir," the servant stammered, as he clutched a hand to his bloody lip. "Please—"

"You Threes are all the same!" thundered the duke, and he kicked the servant over with a sharp jab to the head. The terrified servant backed himself up against a table, and the incensed duke seized a candleholder. "Lazy, clumsy dogs, the lot of you! I ought to—"

When Kallen saw things like this, she completely forgot all of Nonette's lessons about courtly etiquette and aristocratic honor and all that crap. She marched right over and broke his jaw. He never saw it coming. Neither did anyone else—especially Cornelia, who laughed so hard champagne came out her nose.

A terrible uproar ensued. The press bellowed in rage that the mongrel Knight of One should dare lay a hand on a man of high birth. Empress Nunnally officially described the incident as "an unfortunate overreaction to an otherwise clear and contemptible violation of the imperial criminal code," and to make it all go away, she ordered Kallen to go to the duke's hospital room and apologize to him…right before serving him notice that he was charged with assault and battery and would be due in court to explain himself to the Empress's newly independent judicial system.

His jaw was wired shut, but Kallen knew she would treasure the memory of the look on his face for the rest of her life.

There was nonetheless an evil in this episode, and Kallen knew it well. It lurked all over the world, sometimes in less overtly destructive forms, sometimes not. It followed her everywhere, in the Britannian policymakers who turned the ghettoes into hellholes, in the soldiers who easily turned their guns on the Japanese when their brainwashed princess told them to, in the retail drudgery where some customer was a jerk to her, and in this episode here. The refusal to appreciate one's common humanity was inescapable. And even if it might sometimes appear in trivial forms, they were merely the thinnest and most distant branches of a poisonous tree.

And if there was any group of people who had mastered the art of manifesting this form of evil perfectly, surely it was the Britannian nobility. Overall, and with precious few exceptions, they were all horrible little troglodytes. They lied, they cheated, they stole, they happily stabbed each other in the back, and that was just how they treated each other. The evil lurked in their contemptuous looks, their dismissive voices, their refusal to see not just their hierarchical inferiors but even each other as fully human. That duke's outrage at his servant's mistake, a mistake he had surely made himself in his pampered life, came from a refusal to see his servant as fully human, as fully the same kind of being…the kind of being that might make the same kind of mistake. And that was evil, without a doubt.

If this form of evil was so pervasive it stretched from retail to Britannian grand strategy, surely it was there in Lelouch. And at first glance, this one was obvious. "The world belongs to me" was not the sort of thing one said if one had a great appreciation for one's common humanity.

Kallen could only recall three times ever feeling that Lelouch saw his friends and allies as less than human. And two of them were obvious enough. But then there was that time on Kaminejima, blood trickling down his face, the shattered remains of Zero's mask at his feet, and the face of Lelouch Lamperouge before her, his left eye blazing with the light of Geass. Everything stopped. That irritatingly pompous boy she knew from school was the same person as the brilliant leader that she knew would free her people.

It could not be, because he had lied—to her. To Kallen Kozuki, to Q-1, to the Queen that he could entrust with any mission. To the one who would give him anything—even her heart. And when the Black Knights turned on him, he threw her away and told her that she was just his pawn, and that too had been a lie. He had thrown them all away in his quest to bring peace to the world by sacrificing himself.

Kallen idly thought back to another story about a man who sacrificed himself for the betterment of humanity. But comparing Lelouch to Jesus Christ just seemed wrong. Nobody had to grapple with whether Jesus was evil.

And there was the difference. In every version of that story, it was clear that Jesus loved humanity and sacrificed himself, and only himself, for everyone—even the bad people. But what about Lelouch? He was a military commander, so surely at times he had to suspend his appreciation for their humanity, to send his soldiers into battle. But he had thrown them all away on his lonely quest…and yet the survivors now enjoyed a peaceful world with hope for the future. But had it all been for them? Or Nunnally? Or himself? Or was it the ultimate act of revenge against his father—to unmake everything his father had made and create a world that would stand as the absolute, eternal repudiation of everything his father ever stood for?

Perhaps that question was simply unanswerable. But at the very least, it didn't seem like refusal to acknowledge his common humanity was one of Lelouch's problems. So that wasn't the answer either.

—

The first thing Kallen did following her ascension to the Knights of the Round was to get that damn cavity in her molar filled. The second thing she did was move her mother from their cramped and dingy apartment in Tokyo to a somewhat palatial medical complex in Neo Wales.

Part of Kallen deeply regretted uprooting her mother from their homeland, not in the least because it meant her mother would once again be surrounded by nothing but Britannians. And part of her was galled that her mother, surely a victim of Britannia's evil, would have to go crawling to the empire for the medical care she needed to repair the damage their recreational drugs had done to her. But Kallen knew that fuming about the injustice of it all wouldn't keep her mother off dialysis. And when she accepted ascension as the Knight of One, it had gone without saying that Britannia would provide her mother the very best medical care it could offer. Kallen faced prejudice and disdain everywhere she went, of course, but her mother met with only professionalism and compassion in her new home.

No doubt that was because they all knew if they offered the Knight of One's mother anything other than professionalism and compassion, they would answer to the Empress.

The elder Kozuki, unfortunately, was what her Britannian treating physician described in technical terms as "a mess." Long-term exposure to large doses of Refrain had ravaged her central nervous system, not to mention her kidneys, liver, and circulatory system. Her memory was patchy at best, her motor skills were degraded, her speech had deteriorated, and she needed a complicated cocktail of medications to manage the ramifications of her declining organs. Kallen could never quite be sure how much of her mother's perception was influenced by residual effects of Refrain and its resulting brain damage. There were moments where she seemed to be reacting to things that weren't there, inhabiting a world no one else could see. Her doctor had explained to Kallen that she should think of her mother as a dementia patient and offered her coping mechanisms and advice for dealing with elderly loved ones whose minds were failing them. She'd had friends and acquaintances who had experienced this particularly cruel form of death in a grandparent. For Kallen, it was her mother—and a hard thing to watch at the tender age of twenty-one.

But the part of her mother's mind that remembered and loved her daughter endured, and in whatever world she slipped into when her moments of lucidity ended, she seemed to be happy there. It wasn't a world Kallen could ever know. Her mother's doctor had explained, as compassionately but as firmly and matter-of-factly as he could, that there was no telling how long she would still remember who Kallen was, and between all the organ damage and all the difficulty in keeping an invalid alive, her mother's remaining life would probably be measured in years rather than decades—so Kallen should make the most of them while she had the chance. While her mother still remembered her. While it was still her mother in there.

It was a common destiny for a child that she would have to bury her parents someday, but Kallen wished it wouldn't be so soon. And it was crueler still to know that she would be burying her mother's body long after she would bury her mother's mind and heart.

Still, Kallen knew she had seen to her mother's care and shielded her from the prejudice and hate of Britannian high society. The nobles knew—they seemed to know everything—but they wouldn't dare go bother the mongrel Knight of One's crippled Eleven mother. Some of them expressed sympathy to Kallen for her mother's condition, and among those that did, a few actually seemed sincere. But generally, they didn't care about the Kozukis. Instead, they struck through the Stadtfelds.

Naturally, it was her step-mother—for lack of a better term—that Kallen heard from first. Lady Stadtfeld had traveled from her husband's posting in Area 11 all the way to Neo Wales to visit her illustrious daughter, the Knight of One, Kallen Stadtfeld. By now the gate guards at Kallen's residence knew better than to allow the Knight of One to be addressed as "Stadtfeld," even outside her presence, but Lady Stadtfeld would not be deterred and caused such a scene at the gate that Kallen herself felt compelled to personally investigate. And when Lady Stadtfeld laid eyes on Kallen, in her spotless white uniform as a Knight of the Round, suddenly the woman who treated her with nothing but contempt as an unworthy half-breed was all sweetness and light, bursting with pride at the accomplishments of "her beloved daughter" and eager to see her again, just for her own motherly gratification and certainly with no expectation of any sort of reward, stipend, payment, support, or anything else of a pecuniary nature.

Even Kallen's gate guards, who had known Lady Stadtfeld for all of five minutes, could see through that.

One fiery screaming match later, Kallen's gate guards were escorting a fuming Lady Stadtfeld off the property and puzzling over the meaning of the Japanese profanities Kallen started using when she ran out of English ones. Lady Stadtfeld struck back by going to the press to spin a very embellished and carefully edited tale of how a proud and loving mother had gone to visit her illustrious daughter and been treated with nothing but cruelty and contempt. Naturally, the press and the peerage took the Britannian's side and raged about their wicked unworthy mongrel Knight of One. Nonetheless, it quickly became apparent that Lady Stadtfeld's newfound interest in "her" daughter had decidedly pecuniary motivations—especially when the big flaming row in the press led Kallen to reconnect with her father.

Lord Stadtfeld, as it turned out, was no longer such. His aristocratic holdings had all been in Area 11, and since Area 11 was once again Japan, Lord Stadtfeld had little left but the lordly name of the Stadtfeld family. Once he was unable to supply her with an upper-class lifestyle, Lady Stadtfeld quickly abandoned him and went running back to the homeland in hopes of getting into "her" daughter's good graces, and thereby "her" daughter's pocketbook. They were not divorced yet, but only because at this point neither of them could afford the lawyers it would take to do it.

Lord Stadtfeld arrived sometime later, with far less fanfare. Kallen's gate guards braced themselves for another multilingual throwdown, but Kallen's thoughts about her father were far less volcanic, and they were surprised when her voice came through the intercom telling them to let him in.

For a long time, Kallen had regarded him as some sort of predator, eagerly sampling the carnal pleasures of her mother's flesh, then enticing her into his household to continue his indulgence, with not a care in the world that he had deposited Kallen and her mother into a hornet's nest of prejudice and abuse. It didn't even escape her notice that this was a painful blow to Lady Stadtfeld as well, taunting her over her own infertility by impregnating some Japanese woman and then bringing her and his half-breed children into the Stadtfeld home to pose as Lady Stadtfeld's progeny. And when Kallen realized her mother had endured all this and sought out the help of Refrain when her own strength failed, all to stay with her daughter, it made her resentment of her father burn even hotter.

But time had cooled the embers and now, with a little more age and a lot more wisdom, Kallen felt bad about those harsh feelings, even if she had never expressed them to him. The heart wanted what it wanted, and Kallen knew all too well now that there was no use arguing with it. Perhaps her father was simply an idiot—as he'd have to be if he thought moving his Japanese maid and half-Japanese children into his Britannian aristocratic home wouldn't cause any domestic strife with his unhappy and infertile Britannian aristocratic wife—and perhaps he was away so much he didn't realize the extent of the abuse. But if he loved Kallen's mother, and if her mother loved him, then that was really all there was to it. People could do stupid things when they were in love. Kallen hadn't grasped that at the time. Then she fell in love with the man who would become the Demon King, and now she understood.

Kallen didn't know how much her father knew about her many lives, but if he was bothered by the fact that she'd been a Japanese terrorist personally responsible for killing countless Britannian soldiers, he didn't show it. He was just sorry he had been so absent from her life, and proud that she had turned out so well anyway. And since he never asked her for anything but forgiveness, Kallen took it upon herself to find him a lawyer and help him get divorced from Lady Stadtfeld.

The Britannian press and the peerage were blisteringly furious when they found out, and Gino joked about having Cornelia put the military on high alert. But there was nothing they could do about it, and Nunnally closed the book on the whole saga by stating, in response to some reporter's direct question about the whole affair, that this was all none of their business and it was idiotic and insulting that they were devoting any attention to it whatsoever, much less asking the Empress of the Holy Britannian Empire to do the same, and they all needed to grow up and find something better to do.

Of course, Nunnally put it more diplomatically, but the press and the peerage took the hint, and the Lady Stadtfeld Scandal died a swift and quiet death.

Kallen felt some peace, but not much joy, in reconnecting with her father. She felt better about reconnecting her father with her mother. He was horrified by her current state, to be sure, and even more horrified when he learned of the elder Kozuki's grim prognosis. But he found work and an apartment in Neo Wales and visited her every day, and every day Kallen's felt a little better about it. The heart wanted what it wanted, and there was no use arguing with it.

People did stupid things when they were in love, and when Kallen thought about love, her thoughts would inevitably drift back to him—to Lelouch, to her first love, her most intense love, the one she still wasn't over. But she knew by now that she had no idea who—what—she had fallen in love with. Her mother and father were simple people. Lelouch was not. Her mother and father did not wear masks; they were who they appeared to be. Lelouch was a series of masks, underneath which were more masks, and after all this time, Kallen was no closer to finding his true face, or figuring out if he was evil.

And if he was, what was there in his heart? He had cared so tenderly for Nunnally, and he had seemed at times to even return Kallen's feelings. Was he that good an actor? Had he loved her? Was there a spark that had been snuffed out?

Kallen always stopped herself when her thoughts turned towards what Lelouch felt for her. That road would always lead her to wonder what could have been if he had let her stay by his side on his journey to damnation, if the Black Knights had trusted him, if there'd been some way other than the Zero Requiem. And then she would see herself by his side, somehow, in a world as good as this one, in a world better than this one because he would still be alive, and she would be with him, and nothing could come between them ever again.

But that world could never be and pining after it would drive you mad, so she always crushed those thoughts when they started to bubble up within her. She knew she would never know what was in the deepest and truest depths of Lelouch's heart.

All she could do now was figure out whether she would've wanted to be there.

—

Evil or not, there was one indisputable thing about Lelouch vi Britannia: he was a freaking genius.

This was evident to the entire world because it was his intellect that wove high technology and fanatical loyalty into a shield that only the miracle-maker Zero could pierce. But to Kallen it meant so much more. His was the genius that brought fear to Britannia as the Black Knights turned back their armies, foiled their plans, and stole away the crown jewel of their colonial system. His was the genius that managed to conquer the world, make himself the most hated tyrant of all time, and thereby bring world peace.

And his was the genius that realized that if he wanted to build a kinder, gentler world for Nunnally, the best thing to do would be to put her in charge of it and make her invincible. Sometimes it made Kallen angry, how goddamned brilliant he was.

Empress Nunnally, of course, had her fearsome Knight of One, Kallen Kozuki, to protect her. Kallen, in turn, had a resplendent ninth generation Guren born from the combined insanity of Lloyd Asplund, Cecile Crumey, and Rakshata Chawla, the last of whom had described their joint creation as "more powerful than God." And when that wasn't enough—as if—Nunnally could also call on Zero, not to mention the voluminous intellect of Schneizel and the fighting prowess of Cornelia, Gino, Nonette, and the other Knights of the Round. And Zero also answered to Kaguya Sumeragi, Chairwoman of the United Federation of Nations Supreme Council, who enjoyed a direct line to the vast sakuradite reserves of Japan, the Order of the Black Knights, and the military excellence of one Kyoshiro Tohdoh. Kaguya's domain stretched from Japan across wide swaths of Oceania, Asia, Africa, and South America, and many more nations were either applying to join the UFN or mulling over doing so. Over in China there was Tianzi, supported by the great Li Xingke, who enjoyed at the very least a new lease on life thanks to Britannian medicine to combat the baryon sickness the Shen Hu had given him, and perhaps the largest army in terms of raw manpower on Earth.

And lastly there was Europe, which was controlled by an adorable little blonde-haired, blue-eyed sixteen-year-old named Margaret Walpole. And in case anyone thought of picking on adorable little Margaret Walpole, she was backed by a cadre of powerful soldiers and politicians, including a former Britannian noble and a handful of exiled Japanese whose Knightmare Frame combat skills looked like kung fu movies brought to life.

By Kallen's count, this made four little girls who controlled pretty much the entire world. All of them were friendly, polite, compassionate, wise beyond their years…and, by all accounts, perfectly willing to break a foot off in someone's ass if that's what it took to preserve peace, stability, and justice. And if they couldn't do that themselves, they enjoyed the unwavering loyalty of the world's greatest soldiers and warriors to happily do it for them.

So Lelouch had essentially put Nunnally in charge of the entire world. It was maddening.

And what made it so fiendishly brilliant was that it was a rare and distinctly unsympathetic person who would pick a fight with an adorable little girl, even one who held mind-boggling political power. Kallen saw this for herself while accompanying Nunnally on a state visit to Paris. A group of fanatically ultranationalist terrorists attacked the proceedings in hopes of killing Walpole. Their clunking Panzer Hummel Knightmare Frames were no match for the Guren, or for those slender white European Knightmares, the Alexanders, which fought with blood-chilling ferocity. But what really did the terrorists in was their invective against Walpole. By the battle's end, Kallen and her troops had to protect the surviving terrorists from a vengeful mob seeking to defend the young Walpole's honor. Who on earth would say such vile things about an adorable little girl? It made Kallen want to go back in time and slap Lelouch for being so damn smart.

But for as brilliant as it was, there was something else lurking under the surface of all this. A whiff of something Kallen recognized well, even from before she had joined the court of Empress Nunnally: the foul stench of hypocrisy.

Only, it wasn't quite hypocrisy, but it sure felt close. The purpose of all this was a freer, more equitable world. Schneizel's political theory was that greater democracy—that thing Emperor Charles had always mocked in the EU—was the key, by giving more people a say in their governance and so giving more people a stake in making sure the world didn't go to pot. At the very least, it was supposed to create avenues other than war and assassination for removing unfit rulers and altering harmful, unpopular policies. There were so many changes necessary to society that not even Schneizel really knew for sure what all would need to be done. But after the Demon King, most people these days seemed at least a little open to trying to something new.

Except with those four girls. Those four girls wielded monarchical power. Kallen knew for a fact that Empress Nunnally had planned a whole raft of major, democratizing reforms to the Britannian governmental system, although Schneizel had counseled her to wait and take it slow. But for now, the word of Empress Nunnally was law, and that was that. It was the same in Empress Tianzi's China. And although Kaguya and Walpole's methods of control were more subtle, their results were no less complete; the UFN and Europe followed their leads and did as they said. They wouldn't be adorable little girls for long, and Kallen wasn't sure if it would be better or worse when they grew up. But for now, for all this democracy and power to the people, the world was ruled by four little girls.

So that was hypocrisy. Right?

Schneizel had his theory for that too: that the people needed a strong but benevolent ruler to impose the necessary changes on society that would pave the way for democracy. Kallen had heard that before. The end justified the means.

That was a familiar phrase too. It may as well have been Lelouch's motto.

It occurred to Kallen on the streets of Paris, as EU soldiers started clearing out the wreckage and the bodies of those terrorists, that this could have been her motto too. It described all the violence in which she engaged, from the battle in Tokyo in her old red Glasgow to her quick destruction of these terrorists today. She watched some soldiers deposit a charred and mangled corpse into a body bag and carry it away. Violence was a means to an end, and—in and of itself—nothing more. It was only as evil as the purpose to which it was put. Those terrorists put it to an evil purpose, as did the Britannians before them; she put it to a noble purpose in protecting Nunnally and Walpole, as she had before during the war. So what made it different when Lelouch did it?

Kallen frowned. Well, besides the fact that for Lelouch, "the means" included conquering and enslaving the entire planet.

But then, if the ends justified the means, and the means he used were monstrous beyond all description, it would take a truly great end to justify them. And isn't that what had happened? He had accomplished what could potentially stand as the greatest good in human history—and he wouldn't get any of the credit.

So that couldn't be it. Probably.

—

For as short as his reign of terror was, it was remarkable that the Demon King apparently found a way to leave a scar on everyone. Kallen wanted to be surprised but ultimately knew better. Lelouch had always been an overachiever.

Everyone had a scar, and it seemed everything had a scar too. Some were in the earth itself, like the crater Lelouch had made of the Toromo Agency in Cambodia with a well-aimed FLEIJA when they tried to hack into the Damocles's systems and take control remotely just after the Battle of Mount Fuji. Some were of the dictionary definition of the word, like the ridge of hardened skin on Kallen's right shoulder that she won in a failed escape attempt from Lelouch's prison. And some were invisible—except for when they weren't.

Kallen started dating Gino during the winter of UE 2021. It had been rather inevitable, as he was the closest man left in Kallen's life, and good-looking, and friendly, and interested, and available. He was a trusted comrade, a worthy friend, a sweet and giving lover. It could work, she had thought. Her heart was still with Lelouch, but Lelouch was gone, her heart would have to move on at some point, and she thought perhaps the immediacy of having someone else would help.

It didn't. There was no moving on, not yet. And even Gino—good-looking, friendly, open-minded, easygoing Gino—had scars. One night, Kallen snapped awake to find him clenched up, trembling, tears streaming down his face, locked into something worse than a nightmare. His body was in her bed, but his mind was back inside what was left of the Tristan, smoldering outside Pendragon amid the ruins of his friends and comrades in the Knights of the Round, wondering why he was the sole survivor, why he had let them all down, why he was still here, what he was supposed to do with the life that Suzaku Kururugi had for some reason allowed him to keep.

There was nothing to say to pain like that. All Kallen could do was hold him, as a lover and as a fellow soldier, and whisper soothingly into his ear until he could get back to sleep. Gino said nothing to her about it after they woke up, but by the way he made love to her that morning, she didn't need him to.

Gino had his scars, but so did Kallen, and she carefully never shared them with him. She had her moments of fear and pain too. There were faces she could only see as haunting memories, regrets for things unsaid to someone who died too quickly, sorrow for the losses she sustained and the losses she inflicted. But necessity had made her better at pushing aside the faces, swallowing the regrets, burying the sorrow. And they were both soldiers, and these burdens came with being soldiers—burdens only fellow soldiers could understand.

Worst of all, the Britannian nobles had scars too. Most of them were beneath Kallen's notice, as she knew their hatred was born from racial prejudice, arrogance, and upbringing. They had their scars from having titles and properties confiscated by Lelouch, but somewhere in the march of time their ancestors had probably obtained those properties through the same rapine and genocide they'd visited on the rest of the world, so Kallen merely laughed at those scars. But there were some who hated her not because of what she was, but what she had done. And there were a few whose kitchen tables had empty chairs, whose bedrooms had empty beds, whose walls had empty picture frames, because of what she had done.

Kallen made no apology for the Britannian soldiers she killed during the war. Empress Nunnally demanded none, and in any event, elevating Kallen to the Knights of the Round had also immunized her from any sort of prosecution—although not from any sort of persecution. The Britannian press thundered over the outrage of a mongrel Eleven war criminal in the pure white vestments of the Knight of One, until one day at a press conference Field Marshal Cornelia blew up on a reporter about what war crimes really were. Even though a lot of those Britannian soldiers Kallen had killed were Cornelia's, she was a soldier too. She understood, as only soldiers could.

But some of those dead Britannian soldiers were the family or friends of some of the nobles that now surrounded her in Empress Nunnally's court. And Kallen could not really blame those nobles for hating her. One of them stood out, a marchioness whose son was a Sutherland pilot that Kallen had obliterated at Narita. The Guren had not left enough of her son's body to bury; there was an empty casket in the family crypt back home. So it was not hard to see it coming when the marchioness laid eyes on the Knight of One at a state reception for the Brazilian president, grabbed a dinner knife, and lunged at Kallen with vengeance in her eyes. It was also not hard to disarm a middle-aged woman in formal wear and heels, which Kallen did with one hand in one fluid stroke. But what was hard was listening to what she screamed as the guards dragged her away. How angry she was, how humiliated, how powerless she felt, how unfair it was that this Eleven could take her son and then become the Empress's Knight. How her son deserved better than this. How she wanted her son back.

In the darkest days of Britannia's occupation, Kallen had dreamed of having a chance to make the Britannians feel this way. She had thought it would be exhilarating, making them feel the way they made the Japanese feel. Now it was here, and it was horrible.

Most of the nobles who hated her, she knew, latched onto the suffering of those like the marchioness to justify it, but they didn't really feel it for themselves. And there were those who did feel it for themselves, and in their eyes, she knew she was the evil one. The scars weren't of Lelouch's making; they were from the hand of Kallen Kozuki. But this was not the first time she'd had to look past the human quality of her enemies, and when her mind started thinking of things like guilt and remorse, she would remind herself that she did what had to be done and made the impossible, unfair, terrible choices that war demanded. If anyone was to blame for this, ultimately it was the Emperor and his minions, who had forced them all into situations that called for that choice. She had inflicted pain, made wounds, left scars, but she had not done evil.

The guilt and remorse still bubbled up, and Kallen still forced it back down with her justifications and rationales, because she knew deep down that she was a good person who didn't want to kill even Britannians. But she had to. That didn't make her evil.

For evil, after all, was intent. Kallen hadn't killed because it was amusing or expedient. She had killed because Britannia had brought her people war and devastation and rape and slavery and death, and to offer no resistance was to assent to her own rape, her own enslavement, her own death, and that of people she loved. She had fought back in a war against soldiers who knew they were risking death when they set foot on a battlefield. Kallen hadn't killed the marchioness's son to make the marchioness suffer; she'd killed the marchioness's son because if she hadn't, he would've killed her or someone else important to her. Britannian reporters might prattle on about Kallen's so-called war crimes, but crimes were violations of the law and the battlefield had only one law: kill or be killed. And that was the only reason Kallen killed.

But it wasn't the only reason Lelouch had killed. As the Demon King, he had overseen perhaps one of the bloodiest regimes in human history. He had launched a vast and sweeping purge of human society, striking out at what he called "enemies of the empire," and his mindless slaves had slaughtered so many people in two months that it would take years to identify them all.

And what was the result of all that killing, all that violence, but a world that had a scar for everyone. The pain in the marchioness's heart, the pain in Gino's heart, the pain in Kallen's heart, Lelouch had scourged the earth and planted that pain in everyone's hearts. Lelouch's plan had brought about a new, stable, peaceful world order, but the path to get here was paved with bones and painted in blood.

And yet…evil was intent. Kallen didn't kill because she intended for people to suffer. Did Lelouch? Perhaps he did. But if people hadn't suffered, they wouldn't have hated the Demon King. And by hating the Demon King, the world's barriers fell, the borders blurred, people joined hands in unity and started to see themselves in each other, because the Demon King saw no distinctions; he burned and stole and tortured and killed anyone, and no one was safe. And that was the whole point of the plan.

So for all the suffering that Lelouch caused, all the blood he spilled, it hadn't really been his intent. His intent in the Zero Requiem was this new, better world. There were just millions of people who wouldn't get to see it.

Whenever she reached this point, Kallen felt her flesh crawl at the path that presented itself to her. Were all those lives lost worth the world that was gained? Kallen had no patience for weighing out one person's life versus another person's opportunity, like some grand cosmic ledger that just needed to be balanced. It was enough to end the train of thought there. If evil was intent, then she could not really call Lelouch evil.

Not quite.

—

Kallen liked Gino well enough, but the person she got along with best was the Knight of Nine, Nonette Enneagram.

Nonette was something of an oddity in the court of Empress Nunnally. If history was a grenade, she was always somehow avoiding the shrapnel. It seemed like she had been present for the most important events of the war, but never actually involved. It was probably why she was still alive. Nonette had not joined the four Knights of the Round that attacked Pendragon shortly after Lelouch seized the throne. She never talked about it, and Kallen had enough sense not to pry. The memory of Gino in her bed, breaking down before her eyes as he found himself back on that battlefield surrounded by dead friends, was all the explanation she needed.

It was Nonette that guided her through the treacherous world of being a military woman in the Britannian imperial court. Nonette could relate to some of the struggles—like kind of wanting to flirt with some noble's hot son, but knowing better because you're supposed to be a stoic and chaste defender of the realm, and a woman, and all the confusing and frustrating intersections of societal and gender roles, combined with the fact that she was a Knight of the Round and realistically, as long as she didn't piss off Nunnally, she could do damn near anything—or anyone—she pleased. It was complicated.

And it was Nonette, in a way, who would introduce her to her next taste of evil.

Scandals among the aristocrats occurred with the same regularity and morbidly fascinating nature as car crashes. Gino and Nonette barely paid them any mind, but Kallen was as nauseated by their frequency as she was disturbed that anyone took this bullshit seriously. By and large, the nobles were just a bunch of assholes, and under the fine clothes and mannerisms, they were the same sort of assholes as anybody else. So why was it big news to discover that so-and-so was cheating on what's-her-face with whoever-she-was? Who the hell cared?

Well, lots of people cared, as Kallen would soon discover.

His name was Marcus Vanderhoff, and he was the newly instated Baron of Rossmere, in place of his late father and harboring grand ambitions on climbing the noble ladder. He had the movie-star good looks and easygoing, romantic charm to weaken the knees of nearly any lady in Empress Nunnally's court. And even Kallen had to admit when one of these otherwise repellent aristocrats had a particularly nice exterior.

But the good Lord Vanderhoff had eyes on far higher prizes up the Britannian noble ladder, and so he moved like a shark among prey at the upper class's incessant parties in search of an eligible lady of even higher standing, to whom he might attach himself like a lamprey in marriage and inherit ever grander titles. He had currently sunken his teeth into the comely young daughter of an aging duke, and she was clearly smitten—and amazed at her luck in landing such an eligible gentleman. And Vanderhoff had sealed the deal with fulsome speeches denouncing the carnal improprieties of fellow young nobles and upholding the virtues of chastity and fidelity, and that his impending marriage would show these lost souls the way to greater manhood. A less worldly woman than Kallen Kozuki would have been impressed.

As Gino had explained, this sort of thing was part-career advancement, part-sport for the court's dashing but relatively lowly bachelors. They had many hunting strategies: some preferred flattery, some preferred chivalry, one of them did something that involved subtly insulting ladies in hopes of undermining their self-esteem and making them more vulnerable to whatever his other charms were supposed to be, and some of them just cut to the chase and offered large sums of money. Vanderhoff's strategy was apparently to get up and pontificate about the virtues of chastity and fidelity, in hopes that any listening well-born females would actually believe him.

And as Gino had further explained, it was also sort of an unspoken rule among those same gentlemen that they should not pursue military women for either marriage or less permanent relationships, particularly those women among the Knights of the Round. The reason they gave to each other was something about not distracting the Empire's most hallowed knights from their sworn duty; the real reason, Kallen supposed, was probably much more insulting. But with a new world, a new monarch, and a new order, Lord Vanderhoff had decided to dispense with the rules.

The occasion was a state dinner in Neo Wales, in honor of Tianzi, Son of Heaven, Lord of Ten Thousand Years, the reigning Empress of the Chinese Federation. She looked profoundly embarrassed by the weight of all those titles, and her formidable bodyguard, Li Xingke, looked supremely annoyed that they even had to be there at all. The Britannians picked at the food they couldn't pronounce and shifted awkwardly as the two Empresses exchanged soaring promises of harmony and cooperation between their two realms. And then they sat back on twin thrones and watched as the Britannians began to mingle with the representatives of the thousand nations of East Asia. And that was when Lord Vanderhoff made his move.

Nonette had taken Kallen aside once to explain to her to never acquiesce to the romantic advances of any of the court's dashing young men, "no matter how hot he is." That conversation replayed itself on a loop somewhere in her brain as she found herself assailed by Vanderhoff's drinks and pleasantries. She deflected his advances with practiced ease and soon beat a hasty retreat to a secluded balcony.

Only it turned out not to be secluded enough. Once he believed himself free from prying eyes, Vanderhoff proved to be not really all that different from the horny teenagers of Kallen's lifeguard days. As he almost-drunkenly made lewd promises and lewder insinuations, it was all she could do not to strangle him with his own cravat. Unfortunately for the baron, he was not as free from prying eyes as he thought; his fiancée overheard it all and tore back into the ballroom in tears, where it took about ten seconds for the truth about Vanderhoff's infidelities to come out.

Kallen seized her chance to escape, but the damage was already done, and the nobles and the Neo Wales gossip rags screamed for a week about the wicked foreign Knight of One seducing and ruining a promising young noble. Half the peerage demanded an apology to the baron at the very least, as if he was the victim in all this; half the peerage was subsequently told by Nunnally, politely and compassionately, to go to hell. In the end, the only one who actually got an apology out of Kallen was the baron's former fiancée. And she sweetly told Kallen that she wasn't the cheating cur who deserved to have her genitals torn off by a Knightmare Frame. So that was that.

The whole sorry episode was ridiculous. Nonette was sort of annoyed, Nunnally just sighed, Gino cringed through it all, and Cornelia never quite stopped laughing. And yet, as ridiculous as it all was, it still brought a twinge of fury to Kallen's heart when one of those simpering nobles blamed her for the whole thing. And it was there that she found her next taste of evil.

It was a familiar foe, one that stung her in a variety of ways. She was a woman, she was Japanese, and she was of what the nobles called "low birth." And there was the voracious Lord Vanderhoff, a Britannian man of "high birth." He had started this whole ridiculous affair, for no other reason than wanting to get in bed with the Knight of One, and after all his silken speeches about virtue and fidelity. It was the barest hypocrisy imaginable. And yet this was all supposed to be Kallen's fault. She was supposed to…what, hop into bed with him? Quietly turn him down and pretend it never happened? Pretend that she'd been the one trying to seduce him? The double-standard made her want to rearrange their faces with the Guren.

But it was no surprise that the nobles would engage in the evil of hypocrisy. And in the grand scheme of things, Vanderhoff's dalliances were surely far less damaging than such atrocities as the ghettoes, but hypocrisy was just a lighter shade of the same color.

All easy enough. But what about Lelouch?

Try as she might, Kallen could only think of one thing she could call a principle Lelouch had ever said he lived by. On the deck of that yacht in Lake Kawaguchi, surrounded by the Japan Liberation Front's former hostages, bathed in floodlights, holding the world transfixed upon his every word, it rang out like gunshots.

"Those who kill must be ready to be killed!"

And goodness, how he had killed. Whether as Zero or as the Demon King, Lelouch vi Britannia was drenched in blood. He had killed people by his own hands, by the horrifying power of Geass, or by his soldiers, his followers, his slaves. He had killed brutal despots, dutiful soldiers, innocent civilians, and the warped and twisted creatures of the Geass Directorate. And that was all before he became the Demon King.

And there was Euphemia. Zero—Suzaku—had told her about that, unprompted, backstage at a memorial ceremony Empress Nunnally conducted for the victims of the SAZ massacre. Kallen's head swam as he explained what had really happened, why a princess preaching peace and harmony came out and started a bloodbath.

"Why are you telling me this?" she had asked.

"So someone knows," Zero had said. His mask betrayed no emotion, but there was no mistaking the pain that radiated from the broken heart of Suzaku Kururugi.

So Lelouch's hands were soaked in blood. But was he ready to be killed himself?

Ridiculous. Of course he was. Kallen's mind went back to that day when Zero drove his sword through Lelouch's chest. And when he finally died, in a pool of blood with Nunnally sobbing over him, she thought she saw a smile on his face. He had paid his price.

Lelouch was many things, but he was no hypocrite. So at least he was not evil in that way, either.

—

Intellectually, Kallen knew that her assignment as the Knight of One was a permanent one and she would spend the rest of her life in Britannia. But it was easy to know something intellectually. To truly understand it? To grasp it and all its implications? To meet those feelings and that knowledge in the moment of emotional impact and see how you'd really feel when you realized you'd never go home? That was quite something else, and the reality of Kallen's new life took some time to hit her in all its starkness.

When it did, the blow was not as hard as it could have been. Empress Nunnally understood what she had asked of Kallen, long before Kallen did, but the Empress did her best to sand off the edges. Kallen did not miss the fact that the Empress seemed to order a lot of Japanese food for her receptions. It was, she supposed, a sort of gastronomical apology to Kallen. She had fought for so long to free her homeland, and after only a few short years of breathing the free air of Japan once again, Nunnally had brought her here to this nest of vipers to serve as her bodyguard—forever, it seemed. Perhaps a taste of her homeland's food would help alleviate the homesickness, and whenever the Empress found an excuse for either travel to Japan herself or sending a representative with gravitas, it would be Kallen making the trip. But they were only trips, only tastes, only fleeting moments of communion with her homeland, and then she would return to protecting Nunnally from the wretched aristocrats of Britannia. To most, it would seem to be a most cruel fate.

And yet most people would not think serving this Empress would be a bad end. In public, Nunnally was the picture of imperial dignity and grace. She was not quite twenty years old, but she already had a statuesque beauty and regal bearing that Kallen suspected would only grow more intense with age. She relied on Schneizel's brilliant intellect, but decreasingly so; she had a keen sense of politics, a knack for diplomacy, and a gentle, disarming smile. And yet anyone who considered her a delicate, wilting flower that would yield to the slightest breeze would quickly regret it. When the situation called more for a stiffer spine than a softer touch, she would draw herself up in her wheelchair like a cobra and pronounce what the law would be—and that was what it would be. Her most resentful critics among the nobility could not figure out how to approach criticizing her. She knew exactly what to say, exactly when, exactly why. She could call down the lightning scorn of righteous indignation as surely as she could soothe and allay with her voice alone. All Kallen could do at times like that was stand back by her chair and marvel at what a woman Nunnally had already become, and how happy Lelouch would have been at all of it.

Well, almost everything. Lately Nunnally had been spending a lot of time with a handsome young fencing prodigy she'd chosen as her Knight of Seven. A lot of time behind closed doors. Lelouch would've been beside himself about that.

And so, as most people discovered for themselves, Kallen knew it was impossible to begrudge Nunnally anything. Everyone who served her, everyone who knew her, understood the depth of her need and her gratitude. Zero had said something cryptic once about her smile, but as far as Kallen was concerned, it was because Nunnally bore a burden heavier than any other—and not just the burden of the Crown. Here, in the pure and powerful figure of Lelouch's little sister, the one person in all creation he truly treasured, the person for whom he had destroyed and recreated the world…here there was evil.

Not in Nunnally, of course, that was preposterous; rather, in what she did, or more precisely, what she had to do.

Officially, the Empress referred to her older brother as only the 99th Emperor. Unofficially, she followed everyone else's habit of calling him the Demon King. And in private, she didn't talk much about him at all. In all public settings, she maintained the party line that Lelouch vi Britannia was a monster beyond all description, but that he had merely been the culmination of Britannia's centuries of evils, and it would be the work of her reign, from the moment the crown touched her head to the moment she breathed her last, to heal the damage that Britannia and its most terrible scion had wrought upon the world. Her rule would stand for all time as the absolute repudiation of everything her older brother stood for.

That was the plan, and everyone who knew the truth knew that Nunnally was honoring her brother by sticking to it. But everyone who knew the truth also knew that no one's heart broke harder than hers to say these things. Every word she contributed to the demonization of her brother was like a lash on her back. She bore it without complaint—she bore everything without complaint—but Kallen knew. Zero knew. Cornelia knew. For the loving sister who felt bad that her infirmities forced her brother to stay with her, who loved and appreciated him for his sacrifices for her, who just wanted to shut the world out and be with him, this was a most unkind fate.

Kallen had always assumed Lelouch could not have used his Geass on Nunnally, because she couldn't see. Nunnally revealed one night that that was not exactly true. On the Damocles during the Battle of Mount Fuji, she broke the hold of her father's Geass that had robbed her of her sight, which meant Lelouch could use his own on her, which he promptly did. It was perhaps a mercy that all he used it for was to make her turn over the Damocles key. And yet surely it was the hardest thing he ever did to callously mock her and then turn around and walk away, leaving her fallen out of her wheelchair and nursing a broken heart. He put her in chains and paraded her as a trophy on the way to her execution—and, as it turned out, to his own, because when Zero ran him through and sent him tumbling down his transport, he came to a stop in a bloody heap at Nunnally's side, as if sanctifying her ascension and the world's rebirth with his own blood. It had all gone as Lelouch had planned. Every blow, every stroke, every beat.

The only part that hadn't gone as planned was that Nunnally was the one person he couldn't convince that he was a monster. So there was no sanctification, no ascension, no rebirth. There was just Nunnally on that platform, clutching her brother's dead body, sobbing in a pool of his blood, as the world celebrated.

What kind of man would do that to his faithful little sister? It had all eventually led to something wonderful for the rest of the world, but not for her. He had made her watch him die, then elevated her to a position that would force her to tell everyone he deserved it. How could this all be anything but evil?

And yet when Kallen sat down and tried to think this out, every time she thought she'd reached the conclusion that Lelouch was evil after all, she would go back to the boy that Nunnally had known as her brother, and once again find herself unable to reconcile him with the masked men she would know later. He loved Nunnally. He had done this all for her. It was impossible.

But he had been Zero, the man who made the impossible possible, and his greatest feat was still unfolding around them. He had found a way to bring about world peace, to destroy and recreate the world. He had worked one last miracle. It was just unbelievably cruel to his beloved little sister.

So it was another thing to punish him for, but at least no one could say he didn't keep his promises. And Kallen still couldn't bring herself to call him evil for it.

—

Kallen had lacked a lot of things in Japan after graduation, like dental coverage, but most stinging of all was friends. She had no close friends during her last year at Ashford. Too much had passed between her friends on the Student Council, too few of them were left—it was down to Rivalz, pretty much—and she could no longer relate to the students around her. So after graduation, she promptly drifted away from what friends she did make. She spent so much time at work, making the money to keep body and soul together, that she'd had little time for a social life. And when she wasn't working, she felt a constant disconnection from her neighbors. She'd fought around the world in a war to free people just like her neighbors. They knew what to do with all that freedom. She didn't.

And worst of all, she'd drifted away from her friends in the Black Knights.

It was mostly natural, because they had all gone in such wildly different directions. Kallen had gone back to school, determined not to leech off her friends. Kallen Kozuki was her own woman now and she would make her own way in the world. In what she sometimes imagined was the universe's subtle rebuke of her independent spirit, she wound up at Pizza Hut while Ohgi became the freaking Prime Minister of Japan and Kaguya became an international powerbroker. And now Kallen was the foremost knight in the nation that had conquered her homeland.

Sooner or later, she would have to meet her old Black Knights comrades again, and she dreaded it. They wouldn't understand. Even if she brought up the free dental.

And then there were the other things that they had all left unsaid after Lelouch's death. Looking back with the full weight of understanding, it made her profoundly uncomfortable to think of how that had all gone down. Schneizel had waltzed in and told a neat little tale, and just like that the Black Knights turned on the man who had led them to the brink of victory. Lelouch was soaked in blood and wrapped up in intrigue and terrifying supernatural powers, sure, but even so, to think they had become pawns of the man who would have bombed the world into submission from the Damocles…

But it was a futile exercise, she knew, because Lelouch would've thrown the Black Knights away as surely as he'd thrown away everyone else—even Kallen. She could not believe Ohgi, Tohdoh, Kaguya, and the rest would've built the tyranny that his plan required, even if they were in on his plan.

Then again, if they hadn't betrayed him, perhaps he would've found a different way to world peace—a way that didn't involve his death…

Kallen stopped herself from that train of thought every time. Down that road lay only madness. And ultimately, that road was inevitable if she had kept the Black Knights in her life. So they had all drifted apart and for now, Kallen figured it was for the best. Someday she would find a way to forgive them, or whatever it was she would have to do, and they could all be part of each other's lives again. But not yet. First she needed an answer.

In the meantime, though, life as the Knight of One afforded her friends that she never could have imagined she'd have. When could she have ever expected to be drinking champagne with Cornelia li Britannia and two of the Knights of the Round?

And that's exactly what they did at yet another of these high-class parties, following a state dinner to mark Empress Nunnally's trip to Germany. At least this one was far from the Britannian nobility, where instead of being surrounded by stuffy aristocrats, Kallen found herself surrounded by grim soldiers, simpering politicians, and shark-like business executives. She wasn't quite sure which was worse.

During a speech by one of those politicians, Kallen paused to study the face of Britannia's most fearsome princess. It was perhaps the easiest decision Nunnally had to make to place Cornelia in charge of Britannia's military, and under her, that same military was lending its might and its unique logistical capabilities towards the task of gathering and disposing of now-unneeded weapons. And whenever someone rose up to threaten the world's hard-won peace, Britannian forces joined the fight in stamping them out. That it was Cornelia in charge of the military, Schneizel surmised, was probably why the Britannian military had not become a hotbed of opposition to Empress Nunnally. They might not like Nunnally or appreciate her peaceful and conciliatory nature, they might detest the dismantling of the empire that they and their forebears had struggled and bled and died to create, they might resent cooperating with their one-time enemies, but they knew Cornelia would not lead them astray.

Even so, Cornelia was a woman who, it seemed, would always be haunted by what had become of Euphemia. Kallen had never known her when Euphemia was alive, but there was a bitterness and darkness to her now that, for whatever reason, did not seem right. She wasn't completely ruined. Her old friend Nonette and her tireless Knight, Gilbert G.P. Guilford, whose eyes had finally healed from that FLEIJA detonation in Tokyo, did their best to make her life a little happier. They kept her from outright despair, it seemed. But even to Kallen's eyes, with Euphemia had died a piece of Cornelia.

And that, she supposed, was evil—and a way in which Lelouch had to be evil.

Zero had told Kallen the truth about Euphemia's death. She didn't know if Cornelia knew, and she really didn't know if it would've made things better or worse for her to know. Could she go on knowing that her beloved sister had died because Lelouch had done something so stupid, was too prideful to admit that the great genius Lelouch was even capable of doing something so stupid, and then took cruel and full advantage of it? That it would tear him apart so badly he would seek a death that would atone for it? Would it be better to think that it was just Lelouch's malice and ambition, and not his carelessness? Maybe it was easier that way.

In light of that, and in light of all the other terrible things Lelouch had done, perhaps his death was a punishment as much as it was a fulfillment of his own principle. And it had all been so unnecessary. His greatest sin at the SAZ had been negligence, and yet as always, the cover-up just made things worse.

And that felt strange to admit. Punishments like that were supposed to be for bad people—for evil people. And that brought her right back to where she had begun, trying to reconcile the man who so tenderly cared for Nunnally with the man who so cruelly, utterly, and worst of all, accidentally destroyed Euphemia.

Kallen watched Cornelia as she drained the last of her champagne and cast a steely gaze over the crowd. For all that pain and anger, she never made it clear that she still hated Lelouch. Perhaps there was just no use hating a dead man. Perhaps to her eyes, Euphemia had been avenged. But then, the history books still called her the Massacre Princess.

It was sobering to think about, but in the end, it still couldn't have made him evil. Lelouch did terrible things as a result of stupid things, and stupid things as a result of terrible things. And so many people were hurt, and so much damage was done that could never be undone. But he had submitted himself to the same fate as his victims and fulfilled his own creed.

So at least there was that. He made his mistakes, he did wrong, and he paid for it with his life.

Right?

—

Kallen's life settled into a restless routine. Schneizel warned her that as the nobles started coming to terms with the irrevocability of her existence, they would start to see her as a potential avenue of access to the Crown. Kallen did not like being thought of as an avenue of access. It threatened to embroil her in political problems, and political problems were very difficult to solve with the Guren's radiant wave surger.

Nunnally, at least, had an enviable talent for finding and promoting the best of the aristocrats. That made the crush of favor-seekers a little more bearable. But even so, Kallen found herself retreating ever more frequently into her narrow circle of friends. She tried to make her relationship work with Gino. It didn't—Gino said it seemed like her heart was always somewhere else—and they decided to just stay friends. And that was okay with Kallen, because Gino was a good man who deserved someone whose heart would be right there with him.

But he was right about her heart. It was the winter of UE 2022 now, and although Kallen understood evil a lot better, she was no closer to understanding Lelouch. But now she had the tireless and resourceful specter of doubt gnawing at her heart.

She had been there to watch Zero drive that sword through Lelouch's chest. She had watched him die and felt a piece of herself go with him—to heaven or hell, she still wasn't sure which. He was dead. He had to be.

But she had also seen someone else die, and yet return from the dead. C.C. had been shot who knew how many times, and always got up, cleaned off the blood, and went about her merry way. She had come back after being crushed by deep sea pressure. She had lived for centuries. And now she haunted Kallen's sleep. If she could defy death, what about Lelouch? And there was no answer to this question. No one knew—no one even believed it was possible. It tortured her, it ended her probably-doomed-anyway attempt at a relationship with Gino, and it threatened to sink her into despair.

Fortunately, as things began to grow dark, Nunnally came to the rescue.

It was the first of her many reforms, in accordance with Schneizel's sweeping political theories on how to create a more democratic and equitable Britannia, and it meant Empress Nunnally was there one snowy winter morning to announce the opening of the Imperial Archives to the public, in Britannia and abroad. Britannia could not truly move forward into the future, they said, until it had reckoned with the full enormity of its past atrocities, and the first step in that reckoning lay in the Archives. All manner of injustices were documented there. Lawsuits began to pile up in the court system overnight, from Britannian citizens and especially from former Numbers. Schneizel even warned that the Britannian economy would pay a price for the empire's past injustices for generations. Nunnally was undeterred.

The nobles, however, were horrified. That duke with the broken jaw would be sued into the ground by his former servants. The lustful Lord Vanderhoff would see most of his estate confiscated to pay for his family's use of slave labor in the manufacturing sector. Only sovereign immunity and the lifelong work of building a better Britannia would protect Schneizel himself. If not for Zero's watchful eye and Cornelia's legions, the nobility would have rumbled about civil war once again. But this time they had too many of their own problems for that.

One story stood out. A young man named Ramirez joined the military to gain Honorary Britannian status for his family, who slaved in the shadows of the glamorous Caracas Settlement in Area 6. He rose as far through the ranks as a man of his kind could, to the rank of sergeant in command of a squad of similar Honorary Britannians. The records approvingly noted his service and valor, enough that he was allowed to join a frontline unit in the conquest of Indochina.

His commander, a certain Colonel Hamilton, ordered his squad to clear out a particularly troublesome band of guerrillas. He sent them forth with explicit instructions not to stir up reprisals by inflicting too much abuse on the local population. The guerrillas took shelter in a village, and some of Ramirez's soldiers vented their many frustrations by massacring not just the guerrillas, but everyone else who happened to be in the line of fire. Ramirez tried to stop them, but the bloodshed only ended when he killed the shooters and took the rest of his unit back to base…where Colonel Hamilton killed him on the spot for having murdered fellow soldiers.

The Ramirez family used their Honorary Britannian status to sue Colonel Hamilton and press the Crown to charge him with murder. The case wound its way through the Byzantine judicial system until it reached the final venue of appeal, at the foot of the imperial throne…where Emperor Charles not only upheld Hamilton's innocence but revoked the Ramirez family's Honorary Britannian status as well. And so Hamilton got away with murder, Ramirez was posthumously branded a traitor to the Empire, and his family was sent to die in the sakuradite mines of Greenland.

It was a horrible story. It had every form of evil Kallen knew. And it was her salvation. Because although the Archives were open to the public, there were still whole floors and wings that had yet to open for various reasons. And it was that story that struck her with the idea to search the Archives for the answers she needed. Buried almost a mile underground, and shielded from a public that couldn't possibly understand, lay a vault that Nunnally would never open. And inside lurked the late Emperor Charles's collected works on the Sword of Akasha, C's World, the Ragnarok Connection, and the power of Geass.

Kallen didn't consider herself an idiot, but this stuff was way the hell over her head.

She had always been kind of disturbed at C.C.'s inexplicable indestructibility, and C.C. had never offered an explanation other than "the fortifying nutritional value of pizza." Now it was time to find the truth. Armed with coffee and the fact that she was the freaking Knight of One, Kallen descended into the vaults for some good old-fashioned research.

It did not take long for her to remember that despite her high marks at Ashford, she hated good old-fashioned research. Most of Charles's supernatural discoveries and musings were completely beyond her. But a week of miserable reading and rereading later, she had for herself a sketchy picture of the Code. It was an immortal power that passed from one bearer to another—rather unwillingly, it seemed—and with it came the power to make contracts with people, in which they would gain the "gift" of Geass. And generally, the gift of Geass would eat that person alive, one way or another. A Geass user who took a Code would lose their Geass power, in return for becoming immune to all Geass powers. But the Code would make its bearer indestructible, if not invulnerable to harm, for all eternity…or at least until the bearer managed to foist it onto someone else.

So that was how she did it. C.C. had a Code.

The evil in Ramirez's story was the same as the possibility that tormented Kallen now. There was a rule that one man applied to everyone else and escaped himself. Ramirez was killed for killing his own troops, but he only did so in accordance with his orders, and Hamilton escaped any consequence for the same crime. Why should the rules have bent for one man and stood firm for another? Surely to wriggle out of justice's grip, the grip of one's own rules, was evil.

So what about Lelouch?

He had but one rule. "Those who kill must be ready to be killed!" And he had appeared to fulfill its promise himself, in atonement for his sins. But with C.C.'s Code, he had wiggle room. He had a way out. He could have simply appeared to die, with no one the wiser, and then slipped away into the shadows to live forever and foil his own rule.

That would make him evil, beyond all question. He had set down a law, for himself and others, and he could not say he was really willing to be killed if he had an immortal magical power to rescue him from death. In this case, obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit was scarcely obeying it at all. Nor could he call this an atonement for his misdeeds. Euphemia didn't enjoy a Code. No one did. Only an evil man could have spouted all that talk about being ready to be killed and arranged this plan to bring peace by his own atonement, and then crept away a hypocrite.

So now it all hinged on this. Was Lelouch really dead? And if he was not, then for all the killing that he did, was he really ready to be killed?

There was only one way to find out.

—

"Zero, we need to talk."

It was rare to find Zero anywhere other than at Empress Nunnally's side when he was in Britannia. It was rarer still for him to speak when it was not necessary. And it was rarest of all for Kallen to initiate the conversation. But here he was in a quiet corridor in the palace, all alone, and Kallen was all too happy to pounce on the opportunity.

"Of course, Lady Kozuki," he said. "What about?"

"In private," she clarified. "Like, if you've got an office or something…"

Zero was silent for a moment, and Kallen momentarily feared that he would say something silly, like how Zero had no secrets and therefore no office…but only for a moment. "Right this way."

A few twists and turns later, they found themselves inside a dusty room that had a desk and a window with the blinds drawn. Kallen wondered if it even counted as an office…until her eyes fell upon the jewel-encrusted sword that she had last seen coated in Lelouch's blood, mounted on a plaque on the wall. And she felt her stomach tighten at the dark brown stains still on the blade.

And beside the desk, she noticed a fluffy round bed with a black cat curled up inside, fast asleep. She couldn't help but smile. Even Zero had to have a friend, and although he had hidden his identity from the world, he couldn't hide it from Arthur.

"Now then," Zero said, as the door swung shut and Kallen abruptly returned to the moment, "what can I do for you?"

"Take off the mask, Suzaku," Kallen said, with a look that would brook no disagreement. "I don't need to talk to Zero. I need to talk to you."

All was silent for a moment, and Kallen tried not to squirm at the sight of her dull reflection in his mask. But at last, he lifted a black-gloved hand to his face, the shell slid open, and Kallen found herself face to face with Suzaku Kururugi.

He was so different now. His skin was paler, his hair coarser, after too much time under that mask. His features were more distinct with age. But his eyes…they no longer had the vivid light of life, but the cold, polished luster of steel. Suzaku Kururugi was a dead man, and this man before her bore only his face, as much a mask itself as the one he had just taken off.

Kallen wondered if perhaps he too was being punished.

"So," Suzaku said, and his voice no longer sounded like it was trying to evoke the real Zero's booming baritone, "can I ask how you knew it was me?"

Kallen smirked. "There aren't that many people who can outrun Knightmare Frame bullets, Suzaku."

"Fair enough." His expression hardened. "Then I hope this is really important, because I don't take my mask off for just anything."

"It is." Kallen steeled herself. "It's about C.C. I want to find her."

Suzaku arched an eyebrow. "Good luck."

"Don't start that. It's about Lelouch."

At that, Suzaku's whole expression darkened, like a tornado forming in the sky. "What about Lelouch?"

Kallen shifted uncomfortably. "I…I want to know if he's really dead."

Suzaku blinked. "You watched me stick that sword through him and you want to know if he's dead? Is this some kind of joke?"

"No, no," Kallen exclaimed, and she briefly described her conundrum. But when she reached the part about C.C. and the Code, Suzaku put a hand to his chin in thought.

"They never said anything about that to me," he murmured. "I only knew of two Codes, and I watched one of them get destroyed in C's World with the Emperor. And I was with them both all the way from then through the Zero Requiem. The only way he could've gotten a Code is from C.C." A burst of bitterness flashed across Suzaku's eyes. "And that would be just like him, wouldn't it? To have some secret escape hatch."

"Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't," Kallen said with a shrug. "That's why I have to find C.C. So I can finally know."

Suzaku leaned back against his disused desk. "And what difference would that make? He did what he did, and it can never be undone."

"Maybe it only matters to me. But I just can't move on with my life until I know." She shook her head. "He wore so many masks. And I fell in love with him, Suzaku. I really did. I'm still in love with him. And I have to know what it was I was following, what I was giving myself to, before I can really pack that all away and move on." She looked back at Suzaku and searched despite herself for some spark of understanding in his eyes.

"Are you trying to forgive him?" he asked quietly.

"I don't know. Maybe." She met his gaze sadly. "Although…I guess I'm not the only one who has to wrestle with that, huh."

"That question doesn't mean anything for me anymore, Kallen."

They both went silent for a moment, and Kallen suddenly felt like she had done something wrong, that she had rubbed salt into wounds that had not yet healed.

"Anyway," Suzaku said suddenly, "I don't know where C.C. is now, but I can tell you where she was. After that day, she took off into the Japanese countryside. I kept tabs on her for a little while as a favor, to make sure she got out of it all okay. But that was a long time ago. Last I heard she was in Egypt, hanging out at the pyramids."

Kallen sighed. "I guess she's still weird."

Suzaku risked a smile, and Kallen felt as though she was truly privileged to see such a thing. "Well, you could always follow the Pizza Huts."

If nothing else, Kallen could say that she could share a laugh with Suzaku over C.C. and her strange obsession with pizza.

The smiles faded, and Suzaku's gaze fell towards the floor. "It…it wasn't really worth it." Kallen frowned, but he went on before she could speak. "Killing him, I mean. Or, well, I think I killed him." He shook his head. "I don't know. I thought it would feel like I'd done justice."

Kallen frowned. "Didn't you?"

"I guess. But once it was done, I realized what I wanted wasn't really justice. It was restoration." Suzaku's eyes flickered for a moment with a willowy reminder of the life that used to be there. "I wanted it all back. Euphie. Lelouch. Nunnally. Ashford Academy. All of it. But…"

"It can't be undone," Kallen finished.

"No," Suzaku murmured, "it can't." He looked back up at her, all business once again, the life gone again. "I'll see what I can dig up for you, but you know how she is, so I can't make any promises. And I won't go with you to find her."

"I know, you have a job to do."

"Not only that. I don't know her," Suzaku donned the mask once more, "and she doesn't know me."

Kallen dared to smile herself. "I understand, Zero."

—

Of course, Suzaku was right. C.C. was at a Pizza Hut.

The location was Stockholm, Sweden, but it had taken nearly a month of scouring the entire planet and discovering just how far the reach of that fast food giant really was. And as Kallen shambled through the streets of Stockholm like a frozen zombie, she came face to face with a green-haired woman exiting what appeared to be the northernmost outpost of the pizza delivery empire, a stack of five pizza boxes in hand. Kallen stared into the familiar golden eyes, dumbfounded.

"Um, hi," she said at last.

A few blocks later they were settled onto a sofa in C.C.'s cozy apartment, warmed by a crackling fire and a large supply of Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza. It was hard not to just melt in glee at the beautiful feeling of warmth, but it took Kallen only one look back at C.C. to remember why she was here.

"I presume I owe you money," C.C. began with a supremely bored look on her face, "because I can't imagine why else you would hunt me down like this."

In the flickering firelight, Kallen took the opportunity to get a good look at her. Aside from her well-worn winter clothes, she seemed just the same as she'd always been—as if she had not aged a day.

"I have a question about Lelouch—"

"If it's about his credit line, you can't have it. It's how I pay for my pizza."

Kallen fumbled for a comeback. "I, um, I'm pretty good on pizza, thanks. No, it's…" She sighed. "Look, C.C., you're the only person who can tell me. I want to know if Lelouch really died on that day when Suzaku, um, killed him."

Silence descended like fog and C.C. stared at her for the longest time before she slowly put down her slice. "And why would you think he didn't?"

"You have a Code."

C.C. leaned back and looked at Kallen with the most frighteningly neutral expression she had ever seen. "And how do you know about that?"

"The Imperial Archives. They have all of the Emperor's books about Geass and the Codes and all that. And since I'm the Knight of One now, it's not like they can stop me from reading them." She fixed C.C. with a knowing look. "And I know V.V.'s Code was taken by the Emperor. And the Emperor was destroyed in C's World, despite his Code. So the only one left that I know about is yours." Her strength faltered for a moment. "Assuming you still have it."

C.C.'s expression darkened. "And what difference would my having a Code make towards Lelouch?"

"Because it makes you immortal," Kallen sputtered. "And…and if you gave it to him, then he'd still be alive and all that talk about being ready to be killed would be meaningless." She frowned at the sight of C.C.'s impassive face. "I mean, he did terrible things, C.C. We both know that. And the only way I can make sense of what happened that day and still have any respect for him is if this was some sort of punishment for all that."

C.C. frowned. "The world he left to you is doing fine. Why would it matter now?"

"Because I loved him!" Kallen cried, and C.C. raised her eyebrows. "And…and who was it that I even loved? What did I know about him? He wore all these masks, and he threw everyone away and he did such terrible things, and yet he brought so much good, and if he was so bad, what does that make me? And…"

"And this is as much about you," C.C. added, "as it is about him."

Kallen shook her head and squeezed the tears from her eyes. "I have to know if he was evil, C.C. And I have to know if you let him cheat death with the—"

Kallen fell silent as C.C. stood up, took her hand, and brought the world to a stop.

It was almost terrifying. The fire still crackled, the snow still fell outside, but it was as if they were only looking in on all creation through a window. A cold wind surrounded them, and as it lifted C.C.'s brilliant green hair, Kallen saw the glowing shape of a sigil on her forehead.

She stared into C.C.'s eyes. Centuries stared back. Her voice echoed, not spoken, but still heard.

Since you've done your homework, I trust I need not explain this any further.

The wind ceased. C.C. released Kallen's hand, and they returned to the world, to the warmth of the fire, to the bracing breeze and cold outside.

"So," said C.C. "There is your answer."

Kallen was silent a moment, before she smiled and rose from her seat. "Thank you, C.C."

C.C. flopped back onto the sofa and returned to her pizza. "Close the door when you leave," she said. "You'll let the warm air out."

Kallen did not bother throwing back a retort on her way out.

—

Empress Nunnally herself greeted Kallen when she returned from Stockholm, and together they took a quiet corridor through the palace.

"Zero told me about your, um, project," Nunnally said. Kallen blinked in surprise; usually she had the clear and commanding voice of royalty, but here her voice was only barely louder than the hum of her wheelchair. She looked up at Kallen not with the calm and steeled eyes of the Empress, but with the warm and trusting eyes of Nunnally Lamperouge. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Kallen smiled. "You could say so."

The doors at the end of the corridor slid open and together they made their way into the imperial garden at the center of the palace, bathed in the morning sunlight, with a mighty oak in the center reaching regally towards the heavens.

"I apologize for not telling you about this sooner," Nunnally began. "I wasn't sure if you really wanted to know, but now…" She extended a hand towards the oak. "That's where Lelouch is buried."

Kallen's mouth fell open. Nunnally took the hint to explain.

There was no monarch in recent history more beloved by the overwhelming majority of Britannians than Empress Nunnally, and in return, she honored their esteem by never using the awesome powers of the Crown for her personal benefit. Almost.

No memorial was possible for Lelouch vi Britannia, because the people who wanted one could be counted on one hand. It was a miracle that his body hadn't been torn apart by the crowd that witnessed his assassination; surely no one would have suffered to allow him any sort of burial. It went against the spirit of his plan to even have one. But Zero Requiem and reconstituted world order or not, Nunnally could not simply let her brother rot at the bottom of a river or something, even if that was the whole point.

Only a handful knew of this place. Nunnally had come up with the idea. In the dead of night, Zero had dug the grave, placed the unassuming wooden casket into the earth, filled it all in, and left the garden in pristine condition. Cornelia went there once, with Guilford at her side, to say things to Lelouch that she would never repeat to anyone else. Nunnally went there often. So did Zero. Even Schneizel went there once, although nobody knew why. And at one point, Kallen thought she had seen a flash of green hair in one of the hallways.

"I'm sorry for not telling you sooner and saving you the trip," Nunnally said, but Kallen waved her off.

"I would've had to dig him up to be sure," she said. "But now I don't need to."

Together they approached the base of the trunk. The wrinkled and ancient bark looked indestructible. No one would ever suspect the most hated tyrant of all time had come to rest beneath this magnificent tree.

Nunnally bowed her head solemnly. "I'd like to think he's pleased with all of this," she murmured, "and with me."

"He could never be anything but pleased with you."

"I know." She looked up sadly at the ancient tree, the tears welling in her eyes. "But after all that he did…the killing, the cruelty…maybe he was a monster after all."

Kallen shook her head and smiled. "It's alright, Nunnally."

Nunnally looked up in surprise, but Kallen's eyes were turned towards the sky.

"He wasn't evil."

—

End