A/N: No, really, I don't own a shred of the CG universe. It's probably not a bad thing for Nunnally; I like torturing my characters.

'v'

Things you didn't know about the ninety-ninth Emperor and the hundredth Empress
1. Of why my big brother and I always lied to each other

'v'

Among the great many anecdotes left behind concerning my late father's reign, one retells how he once responded to a display of insolence from one of his children by telling that child they were dead, because nothing that they owned or were had been obtained through efforts of their own. It isn't an apocryphal story; the child at the receiving end of this proclamation of his ante-mortem death was my beloved brother Lelouch.

Let's get this out of the way now: by "my beloved brother Lelouch", I don't just mean how I saw him as a child; I mean how I see him now. And yes, from your point of view, you are reading the words of someone telling you they love the Demon Emperor himself. You'll know, before the end of these chapters, why you and the whole world got it all wrong. And I don't blame you. You were meant to, just like their ancestors'.

But I digress. Let us return to my tale, or rather, let us start with its beginning: the retelling on my birth.

I brought up how my father called his living, breathing child a dead person so that you'd realize the apple I am didn't fall all that far from the tree. Put plainly, I don't consider myself to have been alive for the first five and a half years of my life. Not because I agree with father's statement to my beloved brother, but because I wouldn't say the person I am today was alive during those years. I consider myself to have been born, not when my mother delivered me, but two days after she died. Before then, I'd been a carefree little girl, born and raised in obscene luxury, and who had no real knowledge of what it meant to be a princess of Britannia, much less about what life was really like for people not as privileged as we were. My world revolved around my mother, a few of my closer half-siblings like Clovis, Cornelia, and Euphemia, and above all, around my beloved brother Lelouch. That world, and that little girl's life, ended when someone attempted to assassinate my mother and ended up crippling me forever and blinding me for ten years.

I sincerely hope for you that you never have to miss either walking or seeing, let alone both at the same time.

I was lying on an examination table, when my body was woken by my doctors. I couldn't feel my legs, and I couldn't see; they'd woken me up so they could confirm I had been paralyzed from the waist down, and they forced my eyes open to confirm I was blind. They didn't say that to me, but to the only other person in the room – the only person who was in that room for Nunnally vi Britannia as their cold voices said the little girl on the table was useless, because she would never walk nor see again. And that little girl died on that table as her sanity shattered into a million pieces. Broken. Discarded. Useless. A complete waste of time, of effort and of valuable medicines. Those were the words they used as they addressed the only person in the round, the only person who was there for me. They told him he didn't have to stay behind and watch them dispose of the trash. He promised he'd ask our father to kill them all if his little sister didn't make it out of the hospital alive and as healthy as medical science could allow her to be.

That was how I came to be who I am now, holding onto my beloved brother's hand; his touch, his voice, his tears and his wrath were the reasons I had a chance at life at all. That moment when I grasped as hard as I could on my beloved brother's hand, that moment when I was a terrified little girl who suddenly realized all but one person in their world really wanted them there is the moment the Nunnally vi Britannia who writes these words was born. And the first thing I did with that life was tell Lelouch I loved him. It was all I could offer him in return for being there to save my life.

Lelouch never asked for anything back. He was, from that very moment, completely devoted to me, and I to him. And I knew, from that moment onwards, that he would always be the center of my world, the one person I would do anything for, even if I almost never could actually do much for him; and within days, I became the person who would always be the center of Lelouch's world, and the one person he would do anything for.

My long stay at the hospital only solidified both our mutual devotion and our shared realization.

I've already explained how the medical personnel that looked after me literally would have preferred me dead. What I need to insist on, however, is that for the two months of my hospital stay, aside from my beloved brother, I had no one. No father, no mother, no stepmother, no other sibling, no friend – no one but Lelouch.

That's a literal statement, by the way, not a figurative one.

True, at least, my father did give the order to treat me, but it wasn't out of love. I was to be sent with Lelouch as a political hostage for the Japanese government the moment I was healthy enough to leave my hospital bed. He was never going to visit "the weakling" – and in that, he chose to be the Emperor rather than my father.

My mother, of course, was dead; she was the only one of the rest of the family who had a good enough reason not to visit me at least once. But you'd think that with over a hundred stepmothers and nearly as many half-siblings, I'd have had at least one visitor aside from my beloved brother. There certainly was time after I was out of intensive care. You would think wrong; I was the discarded Princess, and anyone who would have chosen to visit me at the time would have been tainted by association. I can easily forgive those of our siblings who were too young to make the decision – although really, only Euphy would actually have wanted to visit but not have been given leave to. But for all their latter claims that they'd always loved me, the likes of Odysseus, Schneizel, Clovis or Cornelia, who were all old enough to make their own choices, deliberately chose to stay away. They, too, chose to be royals over being my siblings when I needed them the most.

And yes, both Schneizel and Cornelia have since confirmed that the stigma of associating with me back then was the reason why they never came to my bedside. Schneizel, of course, never actually loved me – it helps that he can't disobey Zero's orders when I want some truths from him – but I didn't know that at the time. In fairness, I have learned that Schneizel never really loved anyone, not even poor Kanon Maldini. I was just one person in a very long list of people he lied to about loving them, a list that included Lelouch.

Cornelia, however? She did love me. She just loved Euphy more, and didn't want to risk anything that might weaken her ability to protect Euphy, like associating with crippled little me might have. I can understand this now, but I couldn't have accepted it then; there was more than one night when I cried myself to sleep wishing at least one more person were there for Lelouch and me. We weren't just abandoned by our parents in our time of need; we were abandoned by our entire family.

At the time, whenever I cried about how our entire family had left the two of us behind, Lelouch made excuses for all of them, although of course he didn't really explain the real reasons why none of them were coming.

I didn't need him to. I'm not an idiot. I understood what being called trash that's barely worth being used as a tool meant, and with none of them taking the time to visit their hurting little half-sister, I thought that was how they saw me too. That was close enough to the reasons none of our family were there for me back then. And yes, I forgave them when I was a little older and I completely understood the picture, but back then, I already understood that Lelouch was really trying to hide that I just wasn't important enough to any of them for them to come. He lied to me out of love, and I knew he was lying.

And I lied back to him and pretended to accept the excuses he was making for them.

Again, I am not an idiot. I understood that what he was really doing was attempting everything in his power to protect his crippled little sister from further harm. Speaking up would only have made his own burdens worse - remember, he too had just lost his mother, and on top of that, he suddenly found himself the only person who would care for his five-years-old little sister. Lying with a smile and giving Lelouch at least one little reason to be happy in the middle of all his own suffering was all I could do, so lie and smile is what I did.

And like and smile to give him at least this one little reason to be happy was what I had to carry on doing when we were sent to Japan as hostages, and afterwards during the Britannian invasion, when we could just as well have been killed - and it's not outside of the realm of possibilities that we might have been assassinated by our hosts in revenge or even deliberately killed by Britannian invaders to make us into martyrs.

Of course, over the following years, Lelouch lied quite a bit more to me. I won't pretend I always found him out, but I did realize he was lying quite a few times, either when it happened or a while later. The beautiful home made for us in Japan that he described had a draft that shouldn't have existed with all the doors and windows closed. The cloying scent of putrid flesh being that of corpses instead of being that of rotting meat in the trash made more sense when I could also hear Suzaku's quiet crying. It didn't take me very long to figure out Lelouch had taken up gambling to provide for us both. And I did eventually guess that my beloved brother was Zero, even if it took me far too long.

Yes, Lelouch vi Britannia was Zero. You don't have to take my word for it – I get how unbelievable it is that the Demon Emperor and the Masked Knight who saved the World were once the same person. The best I can offer to try and convince you I am being truthful is this: the revelation that Lelouch was Zero is one of the reasons I hope these words haven't been read until the three generations born after ours have all died.

I can easily forgive Lelouch for hiding so much from me, because I know he only ever lied to me to protect me. Even when, in the end, he pretended he didn't care about me after all, he was still protecting me. And I hid my understanding and my worries from him because it was one of a very few things I could do to protect him back. I really had little else for my beloved brother other than my smile, and I hope that, wherever he is now, he can find it in himself to forgive me if not all of those smiles were genuine. I love him; that's my reason, exactly like it was his.

Understand this: the only truth both of us could absolutely rely on was our love for each other. The one thing we desired the most in the world was for the other to be happy. I'll explain why later, but for now, accept this as something I absolutely know is true: Lelouch gave up his own life for my own happiness. And when he tricked me into believing he'd been devoured by ambition during his time as Zero and then as Emperor, I knew the beloved brother who'd saved my life when he could have sacrificed me to save himself was still somewhere in there. And I believed the part of him that had once been my loving brother hated himself; so I tried to kill him so he wouldn't go on enduring a life in which he would keep hating himself more and more as he piled up sin after sin after sin.

Yes, we loved each other that much; we were both ready to die for each other. And to kill each other if it had come to it. I certainly loved him enough to try and kill him.

'v'

If, after reading all of this, you still can't understand why I will always love Lelouch, you never will.

'v'

A/N: It's been a very long time since I've written such short chapters. But for this kind of introspective story, I didn't want to put in too much embroidery.
I apologize for any mistakes; this is unbeta'd, English isn't my first language, and I have very little time to write for leisure.