Update! Have fun. I've read over this so many times I don't even want to do a pre-posting check, so please excuse me if there are more mistakes than usual. It is Friday, after all. (That's it.)
Chapter 5- Meeting on the Rooftop
Suzaku frowned as he composed a huge breakfast for Lelouch of his own will one morning before school would later begin.
"Shouldn't you start buying bigger clothes? You're starting to grow a little…" Suzaku asked his half-asleep lover.
Lelouch yawned as he poured the drinks for the two of them—he'd convinced Suzaku to at least let him set the table. "I know I should, but it's kind of embarrassing." He admitted, and Suzaku laughed softly at him. Deeming the pancakes finished to his perfection, Suzaku brought the pan over to Lelouch and flipped it onto his plate, which was already peppered with assorted breakfast foods Suzaku had considered necessary for Lelouch, who had been suffering from breakfast food cravings for the past couple of days.
"You didn't have to do this, Suzaku." Lelouch said, smiling into his warm green eyes.
"Yes, I did," Suzaku countered, "You've been asking for all of these things over the past two days. Every conversation that's come up over the past forty-eight hours has included some assortment of breakfast food items." Suzaku said with fake-annoyance in his voice, to which Lelouch lowered his head with a guilty blush and mumbled an apology.
Suzaku leveled Lelouch's gaze with his own with his pointer finger pushing up his chin and gave him a quick, tender kiss before unlocking and pointing at the untouched plate of food before the both of them. "Now eat." He commanded, and Lelouch voluntarily agreed.
The two ate in silence for most of the meal, one ridiculing the other playfully on occasion. When their breakfast was finally polished off, courtesy of the pregnant of the two, Suzaku laughed at the fact that every spot of food had been consumed. "Edible?" He asked, to which Lelouch replied,
"Very much so."
"Ah," Suzaku exclaimed before standing from his seat, moving over to Lelouch's side and reaching down into a passionate kiss. They both closed their eyes as their kiss deepened, and Lelouch moaned quietly just before Suzaku broke them apart, leaving them both gasping for air. However, before moving his face away from Lelouch's, Suzaku licked his lips before grabbing another sample, and concluding with, "Syrupy." Lelouch gave him a strange look that always managed to make Suzaku laugh in delight at the sight of it, and gave him one last peck on the lips before rising up and leaving Lelouch with a deep red blush planted firmly on his cheeks.
We'll be late if we keep this up," Suzaku said as he grabbed his bag as well as his coat, as the late November air was starting to freeze up over the past few weeks. Lelouch stuttered in his place at the table before Suzaku gave him a nagging look, as if he wanted him to hurry up.
"I-it's your fault if we're late! I'm not getting blamed for this!" He complained as he hurriedly threw on his uniform and coat. Although, when he went to button his pants, he found them almost too small for his slightly swelled stomach. "They were fine a week ago, I swear…" He muttered, and Suzaku laughed jovially before opening the door for his flustered lover.
"What? You're not the one with a spawn growing in your body." He growled, to which Suzaku merely snickered and pulled him close with his arm around Lelouch's waist. Lelouch had no choice but to comply.
"Lelouch," Shirley said with a sense of shock, "Do you have like, a food baby?" She said with her eyebrow raised in question. She was leaning over in her seat to catch a good angle of his seemingly-larger stomach with wide eyes.
"No, Shirley, you're crazy." Lelouch said with a straight face while Suzaku held in his snorts as well as he could.
"No, I really think you do! I thought that only happened to gi rls…!" Shirley said with a giggle, still a bit surprised over her discovery. Suzaku came from behind Lelouch with an obvious laugh hiding in his throat and snaked his arms around Lelouch's stomach, feeling the bulge that was definitely not just a food baby.
While Suzaku was having fun with this 'food baby assumption', Lelouch was most definitely peeved, and sighed with a frown as he muttered, "Suzaku, stop it, I know you love to humiliate me, but not today."
Suzaku made a noise that suggested disappointment. "Not today? Why, food baby's controlling your emotions?" He said teasingly, but this caused Lelouch to snap.
Lelouch angrily pulled Suzaku's arms off of him and stormed out of the room in exaggerated frustration. Shirley and Suzaku simultaneously looked to each other with questioning looks, when Milly came trumpeting in.
"What did you guys do to Lelouch? He looked to be about to spit fire and shoot molten lava out of his ears." She said with a confident tone, but when Shirley and Suzaku looked to each other and laughed ashamedly, Milly opened her eyes out of her previous pose and scanned the room. "Hey, where's Nina?" She asked.
Shirley and Suzaku both shrugged their shoulders.
Lelouch stomped out of the Student Council room with his eyes flaring in rage. Who was Suzaku to make fun of him like that? 'It isn't my damn fault Suzaku decided to put this thing into me!' Lelouch complained while preventing the angry tears from spilling from his infuriated eyes. He was obviously sending out a terrible vibe, because a huge pathway was made through the sea of people in the hallway as he wandered to nowhere.
The hallway seemed to extend for forever as he tried to make his way to the private boys' bathroom to calm himself down. 'It's just the spawn. The spawn's doing this to me,' He convinced himself as he took deep breaths to stop himself from overreacting too badly, but as he was concentrating on this he smashed into someone in his path and sent her almost falling to the floor.
He quickly grabbed for her arm and steadied her before he realized who it was. "Nina?" He asked, and pulled her completely to her feet gently. The timid gi rl looked down and straightened out her skirt.
"Lelouch. I, uh, I…" She seemed to be trying to tell him something through quiet stutters he could make out, so he made sure to listen intently for her soft voice. "Can you meet me on the roof during the lunch period?" She asked quietly, to which he nodded with a smile.
"Sure, Nina, but what's all this about?" She shook her head and made her way to the opposite direction he was headed, probably going to the Student Council room he had just come from in a fit of rage.
Lelouch sighed mostly to himself. 'I should go back and apologize…' He internally concluded, and turned on his heel for the Council room once more.
The door slid open much faster than he had anticipated, which left Lelouch standing there awkwardly in front of the room full of people. Suzaku's attention was immediately snapped to Lelouch as his head shot up. He rose from his seat in one swoop and strode over to Lelouch to pull him in.
"I'm sorry, Lelouch, that was uncalled for, I—" Suzaku started apologizing with his hand stroking his raven hair, but Lelouch pulled his hand from his head sternly.
"No, I'm sorry. I was uncalled for." He corrected with an apologetic smile.
"So, uh… how's the weather?" Shirley added, hoping to kill the awkward mood everyone but the lovebirds were encountered with.
"Pretty okay for near-winter, don't you think?" Rivalz said, and the whole company nodded in agreement.
Lelouch caught the nervous eye of Nina briefly before letting it go. He wondered what it was that the shy gi rl could possibly seek from him, up there on the roof in a few hours.
Lelouch slowly made his way up the endless stairs to the roof, the place he often went to so as to escape classes. He didn't want to be completely worthless and reach the top breathless from the effort, now.
He opened the door slowly, but was completely caught off guard when stern hands wrenched at his arms and pulled him through, causing him to yelp as he landed on the ground with his arms tangled behind him. His eyes widened when he saw Nina, scared but unstable-looking, standing in front of the group that had previously taken him out with their bullying.
"This is what you wanted me for?" He asked as calmly as he could muster, but as Nina nodded, two more gi rls came up behind him and held together his arms and legs. He was now rather terrified of what they were going to do to him.
"Lelouch… why are you dating that Eleven?" Nina asked, her hands shaking and eyes opened wide. Lelouch hesitated as he tried to think of an answer, but this only earned him a quick and painful kick to the back, sending him sprawling out onto the concrete flooring of the roof, face-first. He felt his eyes almost roll back as he felt extreme pain and dizziness wash over him after coming in contact with the hard ground at his head.
"Answer her, . Why are you feigning innocence as you that… that thing?!"
Lelouch winced as a kicked the back of his head, more pain into his skull than he thought was even possible. He wanted to scream, scream for Suzaku, but he couldn't. Something was preventing his voice from uttering even a sound.
Nina fell to her knees and looked right into Lelouch's pain-filled eyes with her wild ones. "He's just an Eleven! Couldn't you have found a better person? A Britannian, like you?!" She was slowly losing her sanity as Lelouch simply stared into her face, emotionless and a bit intimidating.
She continued. "You're so much better than him! How can you look at him like he's your equal?!" She asked desperately while Lelouch paled from the spitting headache and repeated winces as it came in strong waves.
His eyes suddenly went wild as he curled his body inward. He'd completely forgotten that there was more than just himself in danger here.
He shook off the notion (figuratively, physically doing so would have sent him into huge spirals of pain) and kept his position as tightly as he could, to save the spawn inside of him. The previous leader of the cult jerked his head up to hers by a handful of his hair, a swift motion that nearly made him lose his breakfast. She slapped him again, hard, across the face, twice.
Lelouch closed his eyes and wished for it to be over soon. "How can I persuade you… How can I get you to understand what problems you're causing yourself, Lelouch?!" Nina screamed, but once again received no answer. Because Lelouch could barely keep his surroundings straight from all the bashings his head had recently gotten, he could not properly form a sentence to counter the gi rls as he simply sat there, their victim.
Lelouch tried to sit up, but the same gi rl who initially pulled him in swiftly kicked him in the side, knocking him over abruptly and slamming his head once again into the ground. This actually did manage to knock him out for a few moments, before he opened his eyes bitterly and evaded the lead gi rl's fist in time to avoid a blow.
She straddled him and cupped a hand over his mouth before he could successfully yell for help. He started to yell into her fingers before finding it useless and smashing his eyes shut in pain.
"No, wait!!" Nina yelled, and Lelouch could successfully say that she'd just saved him from a great deal of pain. "Don't hurt him that badly, he still has a chance to repent..!" She said, and the gi rls gained looks of frustration and impatience as they looked to their new leader.
"But he ruined our lives! For years we waited for the day when he might ask us to a dance or festival or something, and now he finally decides to tell us that he's gay?! He deserves all the pain we can give him!" And with that, the grabbed for his throat. Lelouch desperately choked for air as the remaining s cheered her on timidly. He reached for her arms and tried to save himself by scratching at her arms, but to no avail.
She let him go just before he passed out from the lack of oxygen. The gi rl smirked in victory as she whipped out a pocketknife, showed it to her crowd and put it to his throat.
Nina took the chance she found to leap over to the gi rl and wrench the pocketknife out of her hand and push her off of Lelouch, who coughed multiple times as he gripped his neck, where a small unintended wound had begun to leak blo od. "Why do you have a pocketknife here? Isn't that illegal?! This is getting out of hand!" Nina argued as she struggled to hold the gi rl back.
While the gi rls argued over what they should do, Lelouch was desperately reaching for his cell phone with trembling fingers. Finally dialing Suzaku's number, he let it ring a few times before he was about to hang it up and try a different plan, when Suzaku's urgent voice greeted him. "Hello? Lelouch, where are you?" Suzaku's voice was troubled as Lelouch forced his brain into working despite the migraine.
"Suzaku, on the roof…" He said softly, barely above a whisper, his voice hoarse from the beating his throat had taken earlier. To Lelouch's dismay, he heard the empty dial tone ring in his ear. "Suzaku?" He pleaded, even though he knew he was gone. After closing his phone and putting it back in his pocket, Lelouch crawled his way over to the brick barrier surrounding the roof and rested his aching head against it. It was no pillow, but it was enough to lull him into a peaceful trance.
Suzaku had asked may surrounding people if they knew where his absent lover was. He was given many sympathetic no's, to which he nodded and thanked anyway. Though he was about to just call Lelouch and give up on his adventure, his phone, as if on cue, started to ring.
He grabbed the phone from his pocket and the device recognized the number to be Lelouch's, which he immediately answered. "Hello? Lelouch, where are you?" he asked, noticing the worry in his own tone.
In barely a speaking tone, from inside Suzaku's phone, he heard a soft, fatigued version of his lover's voice speak to him. "Suzaku, on the roof…" It said very subtly, and though he managed to only catch '-n the roof…' he could figure out the rest.
He smashed his phone closed and dashed through the hallway toward the huge staircase that lead to the roof he supposed Lelouch was telling him about, and glided up the stairs with ease. He noticed many gi rls leaving from the roof in question, some of which seemed familiar from the previous acci dent—
And it all hit him like a ton of bricks. His eyes widening, he managed to increase his speed to an even faster rate than before, now flying over two or three steps at a time. He threw open the door, only to find a gi rl, Nina, and Lelouch, all on the roof, as promised.
He promptly rushed over to Lelouch and scooped him up in his arms. Lelouch was so unfocused he'd barely noticed he'd been taken off the floor, but the cut in his neck made him flinch and grab for the open wound, hissing as his raw hand made it sting mildly.
Suzaku scanned over the unconscious boy's body, noticing the many welts and bruises, and suddenly, his mind went wild with assumptions. 'What if they kicked him just the right way? How did they get a knife into school?!' Suzaku leapt through the school with anger and worry burning in his eyes, a concentrated frown on his face. He paid extra attention to be careful with Lelouch hanging limp in his arms as he ran through Ashford Academy, desperate for the nurse.
"Suzaku?" Said boy looked down into Lelouch's eyes momentarily to find them open and looking right back. Suzaku hushed him. He was silently glad that the hallways had thinned out for lunch time and little to no people were in his way.
As he dashed by the Student Council on his way there, Milly caught the flash of brown and black as he blurred past the door. Shirley must have noticed it too, because she immediately jumped from her seat and ran for the door.
"Suzaku!" she yelled down the hallway, but when she was about to ask him where he was going, she caught sight of the Britannian boy in his arms.
"Lelouch…?" She breathed, and ran for the couple as Suzaku dashed into the nurse's office with a quick,
"Sorry, Shirley!" And delivered Lelouch to the nurse of Ashford Academy.
The nurse tediously wound gauze around Lelouch's neck as he sat up, leaning over from the pain in his back with a constant wince twitching in his eye.
Suzaku had later found the multitude of large bruises covering the boy's back when they'd taken his shirt off for a quick once-over and guessed that it was why Lelouch's regularly straight posture was so poorly slouched. A few of the blotchy black and blue marks had also been found on his upper chest and arms, but to his relief his stomach area was quite untouched.
When the bruises were found on the boy's arms, Suzaku had guessed that he'd been protecting his stomach with all his strength, which, had it not been such a discouraging situation, would probably have caused the Japanese boy to smile warmly at the thought of him actually caring about the 'spawn', as he often called it, inside of him.
It had taken Lelouch about fifteen minutes to snap out of his blank stare and back into reality, where he found Shirley and Suzaku chatting quietly at his bedside in the nurse's office. He was going to question his location and what was going on, but he suddenly felt the splitting tingle in his neck and grabbed for it with a moan.
Suzaku was quickly leaning over him with big troubled eyes, Shirley quite close behind him. Lelouch took a moment to focus into the light and opened his mouth to speak, but found Suzaku there instead, and accepted the hard kiss Suzaku was pushing on his lips.
When Suzaku had finally released him from the improper public display, he frowned and sent him a weak glare, which earned him a nervous chuckle emitting from Suzaku's mouth. "I'm sorry, I guess I was just so worried…" He said sheepishly, letting Shirley take over.
"Lulu, what did those gi rls do to you? Do you know their names? They need to be suspended immediately!" Shirley fussed, grabbing a notebook and pen to get down the delinquents' names.
Lelouch finally heard his own horridly scratchy voice answer, still a bit confused, "No, I don't know any of them, but I can tell you a few of their appearances..." He trailed off, trying to think back on what they looked like.
Unfortunately, when he attempted to sit up, the rapid motion made him dizzy and Lelouch swayed a bit, Suzaku catching him before he could do any more damage to his injured body. Lelouch sighed in an exasperated voice.
"I won't get better if you baby me, now let me go." He glared at Suzaku's strong hands on his shoulders, and they slowly removed themselves from his body, but Lelouch instantly felt badly when he caught Suzaku's 'worried face'. "Suzaku, can you please not look at me like that?" He asked softly, silently pleading with the standing Japanese boy. He ha ted it when Suzaku worried too much about him.
"They could have hurt you really badly, or rather worse than they already have, they could have hurt it too!" Suzaku nearly yelled, and Lelouch's expression widened before snapping down to the floor in slight shame.
"I'm sorry, Suzaku." He whispered. Suzaku sighed hard and rubbed his forehead with his hand to massage his headache and dispel the worry. As the whole display continued, Shirley gave Suzaku a questioning glance.
"What's 'it', Suzaku?" She asked inno cently, and Suzaku mentally cursed himself for slipping.
"Ah, it's nothing Shirley, don't worry about it. Shouldn't you get back to the Council and tell everyone what's going on? I'm sure they're wondering." He mentioned with a smile, which although going with a fake statement, was a genuine one.
Although she hesitated, Shirley nodded, and slowly walked out of the office.
Now finally alone, Suzaku kissed Lelouch once again, this time much shorter, and put on his serious face. "Lelouch, do you really not know who did this?" He asked softly with a hand on Lelouch's cheek, but after being asked Suzaku removed his hand from his face, discouraged.
"I'll report them if I feel it necessary." Lelouch said with an air of finality that almost made Suzaku want to obey. Though not fully convinced, Suzaku left it alone and kissed Lelouch on the forehead, pushing him back into his bed with his free hand.
"Rest, you need it." Suzaku now commanded, and Lelouch, though reluctant, eventually did fall into much- needed albeit rickety sleeping patterns.
I am so mean! Sorry, I wanted to do it. At least I didn't leave you on a cliffhanger? I don't think... Please review, for me! And for Lelouch! (I can't promise smooth sailing the rest of the fic, however, but that would make it less interesting, right? To me, anyway.)
Code Geass and all of its attributes (c) Sunrise/CLAMP/Bandai Entertainment/Goro Taniguchi.
