Unknown Location

It had been a year since they had been captured.

Nina could feel her eyelids drooping as she typed, fighting desperately against her survival senses to secure a few more minutes of sleep. The dull throb of her headaches, too, had been steadily getting worse every day – every minute – since she had been captured, to the point where they had become a constant in her life. It was almost more than she could bear. Her forced insomnia was steadily killing her – sending her spiralling down towards her breaking point. She knew it was coming, but she could do nothing to stop it.

Hours after Lelouch's execution, she'd woken up underneath the Settlement and far away from the execution site with a Britannian Prince in her arms and absolutely no recollection of the past few minutes – or had it been hours? The fact that it had been Schneizel El Britannia made matters even worse for her – the same Schneizel El Britannia she had fought a war against.

His clothes were torn and even more ragged than before, she remembered, with his legs covered in scrapes and blood. It was clear that she'd been the one who escaped with him: he was unconscious and they were alone. She tried to run, dragging Schneizel with her for no reason other than a vague suspicion that he would know what had happened, but barely made it a few hundred metres before she was captured by Odysseus U Britannia and a squad of guards.

The man had kindly thanked her for rescuing his brother, patting her on the head with a smile. Her first impulse had been to run, but the sight of a gun in his other hand had forced that from her mind instantly. Instead, she had crumpled to the floor and sobbed uncontrollably for a few minutes – long enough for the guards to confirm that Schneizel was alive and for Odysseus to walk her away from the main group to question her.

His questioning was more consoling than interrogative, she had soon realised: before even asking for her version of events, he had jumped to conclusions and asked if she had truly been the one to save his brother. He seemed prepared to happily give her the benefit of the doubt, so she'd played along. She spun a story about how terribly she regretted giving in to Lelouch's threats after Schneizel had done so much for her – especially after Lelouch had been so cruel – and how she wanted to save Schneizel because he was the only one who could fix what Lelouch had done. She told him that she had waited for a lull in the crowd after Schneizel's body had been taken down and slipped away with it.

Truly, she had seen through Lelouch's deception before her bout of amnesia. His motivations were too familiar to her and her mind too sharp to miss his true goals, even before Zero had revealed himself at the execution. She couldn't tell Odysseus that, however. If she was right about Lelouch – and she was almost completely sure she was – then the world could not know.

Her next few days were spent in a high-class hotel room on the outskirts of the Settlement, paid for by Odysseus and guarded by a pair of his troops. From inside, the lavish interior and well-stocked bar made it appear far from a prison cell, but it functioned as one would just the same. She was not permitted to leave under any circumstances, the windows had been sealed shut and any communications devices – including the television – had been stripped from the room in a manner which she doubted was sanctioned by the hotel management.

Part of her had wanted to forget Zero, forget the war, forget FLEIJA and forget Lelouch; to just relax and enjoy the quiet room for all of its luxuries. Luxuries which would more than likely have been enjoyed by Euphe–

The other part of her refused to cut herself off from the world. She had always had an insatiable curiosity – something that had only accentuated throughout her career as a scientist – and it was painful to not know what was going on in the outside world, knowing that there were bound to have been repercussions from Lelouch's actions.

It was more painful to know that she did not know than to know everything she wanted to leave behind.

She couldn't leave it behind now, though. She couldn't erase.

Eventually she had been moved to a research facility in an armoured and guarded car. There was no way to be sure of where she was going, but she felt it couldn't have been more than a couple of hours total. At any rate, she was still in Japan. Probably still in Tokyo, too; though most likely somewhere on the outskirts.

This time it had been Schneizel to greet her, looking nothing like he had when she had unintentionally rescued him. In fact, he had seemed prouder than usual; more accomplished, perhaps. He told her that Lelouch had died; killed by the very persona he created. Schneizel seemed to take a particular pride in that fact, as if he had somehow influenced Lelouch to do what he had done.

Maybe he had.

The facility was clearly brand new, she had immediately noticed during the personal tour Schneizel had decided to give her. He spoke often, telling her that he had commissioned it for himself over the past year and that it was to be her home for the next year or more. She had suspected as much, but to hear it had cemented what she had already known: she would be forced to work for him. Unlike Odysseus, he had seemed suspicious of her story, but knew that she would not be able to deny him without recanting it.

Immediately her thoughts had turned to escape. Surely somebody would come for her? Nobody would come for her. Why would anybody come to rescue the woman who created FLEIJA? Even if there was somebody out there who would, they wouldn't know about the place she was in. Schneizel had been building it for a year in the middle of Japan and right under Lelouch's nose; if Lelouch couldn't find it, nobody would be able to.

For a moment she had entertained the possibility of simply running, but Schneizel had, only seconds later, casually mentioned that a few dozen soldiers and half a dozen knightmare frames were guarding the building. That idea shot down, she had immediately begun to devise some sort of a plan involving 'working on' a knightmare and, taking the guards by surprise, using it to escape. Again, Schneizel, while explaining her duties, had managed to derail her train of thought by specifying that all machinery tests would be conducted under controlled conditions and scheduled in advance. It was as if he was reading her mind.

After her extended tour, she had been shown to a room which was fairly Spartan in appearance, although what little it contained was clearly of a high quality. It was to be hers for the duration of her stay and, while she could live in it comfortably in a physical sense, it was no more or less of a prison than if he'd simply thrown her into a cell. Of course, she'd be allowed – forced, even – to make the journey to and from her main laboratory daily for research purposes, but the constant presence of guards ensured that there would be little relief, save for the change in scenery.

The next morning she had arrived in the lab to find Cécile Croomy staring back at her from behind one of the screens atop the slightly raised platform on the far side of the enormous, warehouse-like room. Her two heavily-armed escorts had moved to the left of the room and taken up sentinel positions with seemingly no interest in what she did, leaving her free to run up to Cécile and let out a string of exuberant questions about why she was there.

The poor girl had been just as surprised to see Nina as Nina had been to see her, but eventually she had been able to explain that herself, Lloyd and Rakshata were all transferred by Schneizel's men during the execution. On the day, she hadn't understood why they weren't up for execution with everyone else, but now it seemed that Schneizel had been able to pull some strings in advance and keep them alive for capturing.

True to her word that Lloyd and Rakshata were in the same situation, both had entered the room within a minute of each other. Nina could quite clearly remember the agitation creeping into Lloyd's seemingly-serene visage as she told her story. He clearly had no intention of following Schneizel at all, but didn't explicitly make his thoughts known at that time.

For the next ten months, they maintained a steady work rate without accomplishing anything that might be construed as useful. A replica of the Lancelot Albion stood on the right side of the room, opposite the two sentinel guards, in a state as close to complete as possible without being operable. Schneizel had 'requested' that one be made and gave them no choice to comply, but Lloyd had been non-committal when asked for a completion date. The Core Luminous had become Lloyd's most useful ploy for setting back the completion date: 'important research' would often require the use – and usually the destruction of – Sakuradite, preventing the Core Luminous from being built.

Lloyd seemed to see it as some sort of game to push Schneizel as far as he could. Since they didn't seem to be going anywhere and the facility, despite being mostly off-limits to them, seemed to be specifically designed to house them, he assumed that they were indispensible and began making his own requests of Schneizel. At first it was for small things, excess materials here and there, but eventually he began to request more obscure and expensive items, some for his own private research and others to make sure that Schneizel couldn't follow what he was doing. Rakshata didn't seem to disapprove, occasionally joining him in his ventures, but usually restrained herself to making small, deliberately useless changes to the physical makeup of the Lancelot Albion. If nothing else, Lloyd's bubbly demeanour when trying to justify his requests to the guards in technical-sounding nonsense talk was a rare source of amusement in their comparatively dull lives.

Schneizel had only visited them once in the first six months, a visit which he spent reviewing their performance and calmly agreeing with Lloyd's reasoning for needing two Maser Vibration Swords fused at the tip – they didn't have the equipment to do it themselves – in the same way an adult would humour a child. To their surprise, the unorthodox dual-MVS sabre arrived a week later and was, as they had anticipated, completely useless. Cécile had positioned it horizontally across the front of the Lancelot, each hand holding a hilt, so it would at least look like they had done something with it if the perpetually silent guards were giving reports.

It was his second visit, soon after the ten month mark, which had changed everything. Lloyd had anticipated another easy sell and was in the middle of giving a full reasoning as to why he would require a cubic metre of solid gold, when Schneizel's demeanour took a complete turnaround. Far from his usual calm and collected façade, his eyes had narrowed during Lloyd's speech and his mouth had taken on a deep scowl.

Nina could clearly remember Schneizel silence Lloyd with a hand gesture and walk past him towards the main work area, flanked by the extra pair of guards he had brought with him. The room had been completely silent for almost fifteen minutes, save for the shuffling of paper as Schneizel looked over every one of the weekly reports they had been told to detail their research results in. He was less than impressed.

She wasn't quite sure of the specifics of what happened next. She remembered a lot of screaming – some of it quite possibly her own – and then something had knocked her unconscious, but the rest was a blur. Rakshata was sitting next to her when she had awoken, with Lloyd lying down on the other side of a dark room and Cécile nowhere in sight. Her first instinct was to shout in panic, but Rakshata had clamped a hand down over her mouth and pointed to the clearly unconscious Lloyd, signalling with her other hand for Nina to be silent.

Her memories of that conversation had been almost as hazy as her recollection of the night before it; she remembered Rakshata telling her that Schneizel had taken Cécile and Lloyd had been – she could barely even think the word – tortured. Rakshata and herself had been thrown into the sole room connected to the laboratory that they had never been permitted to enter – a small, cold and dark room with three wooden beds. The stone floor had merely added to the prison-like atmosphere. In all likelihood, Schneizel had planned this well in advance, right down to the number of beds required. He was certainly the type to do something like that.

Lloyd never spoke to her about what Schneizel had done to him – he had probably confided in Rakshata – but the injuries were there for all to see. Four fingers on his left hand were broken, as was his left arm in two places and a pair of what looked like cigarette burns were on his shoulder blade. A long cut ran from the top of his forehead, straight down the centre of his face and stopped on his chin. It would never be the kind of battle scar that you could awe people with, but it would be a constant reminder, regardless.

From that day forward, he had been a changed man. His cheery attitude had almost completely given way to a cold focus that had caught Nina completely off guard. This calloused demeanour faded after a few weeks, returning to his regular, serene attitude, but there was a hint of something else behind it. It seemed forced, even.

When they'd first arrived, he'd become the unofficial leader of their team – Rakshata had been more subdued than her regular self – and taken responsibility for their research projects. Originally he had been against Schneizel, encouraging them to spend the majority of their time researching more theoretical ideas to be used against him when they had escaped, yet to throw Schneizel a bone occasionally with a minor invention or enhancement; now he had told them that they would be researching anything that could be of military use, leaving nothing for Schneizel. Before, he had encouraged them to work at a deliberately slow rate; now, he was both working more furiously than she had ever seen him and expecting them to do the same.

He never mentioned the orders he had given them, but he never took back his words, delving deeper and deeper into his research.

Nina raised her head off the keyboard and half-heartedly deleted the string of letters she had accidentally typed with it. Lloyd was working them to the bone, tearing through resources and pages of reports faster than she had previously thought possible. Their funding had almost completely dried up and they were down to the last vestiges of their Sakuradite stores. Over the past few days, she had begun to worry that their usefulness was coming to an end; if they still refused to submit any of their results and were wasting Schneizel's money, he was likely to cut them loose and have them killed outright. She never voiced her concerns, however, but she did question the rapid dissipation of funding, despite their limited ability to use it for trade from their captivity. Lloyd had silenced her immediately, making it very clear that she shouldn't mention it again.

He had seemed odd over the past few days, she thought, turning around on her chair to stare at the back of his head. It was as if he was waiting for something, or anticipating it at least. Yet he continued typing away, seemingly immune to the exhaustion that was threatening to overcome her and, to a lesser degree, Rakshata. The other woman was sitting at the terminal next to Nina, both facing out towards the main floor of the room, while Lloyd remained captivated by the screen embedded in the wall a few feet behind them.

A barely perceptible rumbling in the distance caught Nina off-guard. Had she actually heard something, or were her ears fooling her? A quick glance at her companions revealed that Lloyd seemed to have heard it too, but Rakshata was still oblivious, taking a weary sip of her coffee. Lloyd went to speak, but was cut off by a much louder sound, this time along with the sound of knightmare fire.

"Oh? Looks like someone's here!" Lloyd commented excitedly, his bubbly nature genuinely showing through for the first time in weeks.

Another rumbling.

"Put everything onto a portable drive," he commanded, barely changing his tone at all despite the order he had given. He followed his own instructions his left hand and began to execute a particularly nasty code on the next terminal with his other. "If this is who I think it is, we need to work fast. If it isn't…" He left the sentence hanging.

The closest guard to them had his rifle pointed directly between Nina's eyes as she scrambled to complete the task Lloyd had dictated to them, while his partner trained his much larger weapon on the main entrance to the large facility, preparing to fire at the first knightmare through the door. Neither moved from their positions, despite the actions of their captives: their armour was several inches thick and built to resist knightmare fire, not for easy mobility.

Rakshata was the first to finish her backup, ejecting a disc and whirling around just as the others were finishing theirs. A few keystrokes from Lloyd later and every screen in the room flickered blue, before falling dark.

"Nina, I –" Whatever Rakshata was going to say was cut off by the sound of a slash harken piercing through the main doors and pulling taught like an anchor. Within seconds, the door had been blown open and a Vincent Ward sped into the room, flanked by two others.

The guard closest to the three scientists was moving immediately, taking advantage of his partner's focus on the invading machinery to stride over and press his rifle into one of the small gaps in the man's armour – their only vulnerable points. A shot later and he crumpled to the floor, the bullet to the back of his neck killing him instantly.

Nina screamed at the cold-hearted betrayal, while Rakshata acted instantly and pulled her two companions under one of the desks, for fear they would be the next targets. The knightmare pilots were yet to fire a shot, content to watch as the remaining guard – the one who had fired the bullet – pulled off his helmet and placed a pistol against his head.

Red-ringed eyes filled with sickly red blood as the bullet weaved its way into his brain.

Watching through gaps in the back of the desk, Nina flinched slightly as his body hit the floor, eyes wide in confusion. He'd killed himself? But that only…

Her thoughts were shoved aside as she felt Lloyd peer out over the top of the desk and begin to stand up. Latching onto his wrist in a panic, she tried to pull him back down; he could be killed! It was better to wait until they knew what was going on. She was about to say something to Lloyd – to tell him it was too dangerous – but Rakshata gripped her hand, urging her to calm down. Her eyes never once left Lloyd, staring at him as if she had just understood something. That look was enough for Nina to begin putting the pieces together and release her hold on him.

The two support knightmares spun around to fire upon an incoming frame, finishing it off with a slash harken from each that pierced through the cockpit. The pilot was dead even before the piece of machinery had slammed into a wall and exploded. Both of the intruders' frames remained focussed on the corridor, weapons at the ready to deal with the next wave of defence.

Their leader seemingly had no such concerns about security. Nina and Rakshata had crawled out from under the table and were now standing alongside Lloyd as the cockpit began to slowly eject. After an almost agonisingly long wait, a figure finally became visible to them, standing up at the back of the knightmare.

Nina flinched.

His presence was almost crushing in the lab, allowing silence free reign over the area. He stood to his full height, intimidating and reassuring to most, but not to Nina.

She could never forget the mask of Zero.

She knew exactly what it meant for them. He was here to take them away; there was no doubt about that. He would take them and force them to work on his technology – to be his own personal engineers – just as Schneizel had done. He would lock them away in a secret facility – just as Schneizel had done. He would check up on their progress and punish them if they didn't meet his expectations – just as Schneizel had done. And all the while he would present himself to the world as a bringer of peace and one who fights for the people's rights – just as Schneizel had done.

He sickened her – just as Schneizel had done.

"Ah, Zero!" Lloyd cried out enthusiastically, waving his hands around with a wide smile. "You got my message, then?"

So that was where their funds had disappeared to. Lloyd had used a bribe to get a message delivered to the Black Knights.

"Your retrieval had already been planned well in advance of receiving it, but I am grateful for your confidence in me all the same."

Nina shivered. It was the same voice Lelouch had spoken with when he was Zero. She'd watched him die, but it was still his voice coming from that terrifying mask.

Lloyd seemed to be somewhat taken aback, obviously not having expected that to be the case. He opened his mouth to respond, but was saved the trouble of formulating a response by Zero extending a hand and beckoning them closer. "Come. "

He and Rakshata immediately began to run towards Zero as the sound of gunfire echoed down the corridors and leaped into the open hand of his knightmare frame with the barest of hesitations.

Nina was not so quick to jump at the opportunity.

The man – no, the symbol – she hated more than any other in the world stood in front of her, offering her an escape to the life of servitude she was living. She knew that Lelouch had been Zero when he killed the one she loved, and so this Zero couldn't possibly have done the deed, but, in a way, that was no comfort. Lelouch had used Zero as a tool. All of Zero's goals had been working towards a 'greater good' as Lelouch saw it. This Zero was merely a shadow of what he had once been, yet he would still make sacrifices for a justice that fell well short of Lelouch's ambitions. If he…

Her hesitations cost her.

Dust swirled violently around the room, filling her vision before she could even identify where it had come from. Nina threw herself to the floor immediately as the gunfire broke out, yellow beams of energy flying over her head. 'They came in through the roof,' she realised, chancing a look up at the roof and seeing several holes that definitely hadn't been there before.

What was she supposed to do? She hated Zero, but she also hated Schneizel. At least Zero would fight for justice though, flawed as his sense of justice might have been without Lelouch. He may no longer have the right goal, but he had the means with which to accomplish something – and that was something that was useful to Nina.

That thought was louder in her head than any of the knightmare fire above her. What would it be useful for? What was it she wanted to do with her life? What would her contribution be, beyond the abomination that was FLEIJA? After so many years, the answer was finally becoming clear to her.

"I want to change the world," she whispered quietly to herself, drowning out sounds of the battle above her. "I understood Lelouch, but this Zero doesn't. His results would be meaningless if his justice is misplaced."

Nina slowly pulled herself to her feet and began to move towards Zero, ignoring the battle going on around her. Every one of her steps was purposeful. Every one of her steps was determined. Zero and his men had been pinned down by gunfire and couldn't get to her, but she could get to them, if only…

She spun her head to the side just in time to see the arm of a knightmare grab hold of her, almost crushing her ribcage.

It hurt so much that her head was spinning, but she had to break free – She had to reach Zero. 'I'll change the Order of the Black Knights from within! I'll change you…'

The knightmare holding her sped away, crashing through the back wall and leaving the Black Knights in the dust.

'I'll change you…' she told herself, fighting hopelessly with the knightmare's iron grip as she screamed desperately for her sworn enemy.

"…ZERO!"