A/N: Pretty sure my ownership of Code Geass' status hasn't changed in the past few days, so none of this is mine.
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Things you didn't know about the ninety-ninth Emperor and the hundredth Empress
2. Of being a blind and crippled child in Area Eleven
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I've talked about how Lelouch and I ended up only having each other to rely on in our family, but maybe I'm being a bit unfair to the Ashfords. Technically, of course, they weren't blood relatives, unless you wish to start counting twelfth cousins, but after Lelouch found us a way out of the battlefields of Japan, the Ashfords, and Ruben in particular, never let the risks of associating with us stop them from taking us in. And to tell the truth, they were more of a family to us than our closest blood relatives ended up being – except for Euphie. But I'll talk more about her in due time.
The Ashfords didn't just take us in, they hid us from our own family for seven years – something which could have very well cost them their lives at a moment's notice had the wrong people found us out. And the wrong people did find us, and the Ashfords very nearly paid for it. I'll also talk about that in due time.
What neither the Ashfords nor Lelouch or I realized was that someone knew where we were almost since the beginning. Somehow, when we turned up and asked for refuge from Ruben Ashford, there was already a young Japanese maid working for him, a young woman named Sayoko, who had ostensibly been hired to work for our friend Milly, and who happened to have the kind of qualifications required to become my main care provider along with my beloved brother. And that maid also happened to have impeccable training as an infiltrator and in martial arts, and I'm pretty certain she had been positioned so that she could serve as the most unobtrusive of bodyguards to us.
To this day, I still don't know who decided to assign Sayoko in the place where we were going to be finding refuge after the invasion of Japan; aside from Sayoko herself – and she's not saying – I don't know anyone who could say. And the only person I know was aware of where we were going is our father himself.
Oh yes, our Imperial father knew all along where we were in Japan. Don't ask me how he knew – he never said – but considering he left us to fend for ourselves for seven years, until he finally decided he had use for me (against my beloved brother…), he certainly wasn't the one who went through the hassle of putting at least one secret agent in the perfect spot to become our silent protector. And he certainly did nothing to make a little blind and crippled girl's life like me easier.
Hopefully you've never known a Britannia like the Britannia of my early years. I certainly intend to do all I can so there's no prospect of our society going back to what it was in the 2010s a.t.b. I would actually prefer having my readers find out for the first time that during my father's reign, the basis for Britannia's societal organization, and really, a doctrine of faith Britannians were expected to believe in, was social Darwinism. People, my father used to say in his speeches, are not all created equal; in his world, the weaker among us only existed to serve those stronger than them. There were no such things as mental health institutes or permanent care homes for the disabled. If you were too handicapped to fend for yourself and didn't have anyone to provide for you, no institution of Britannia existed to step in. In the best of cases, you'd be left to die on the streets. If you were really unlucky, you served as human experimentation material.
Mind you, the Holy Empire of Britannia didn't overtly hunt for its disabled; even in our dog-eat-dog society, there were limits that weren't crossed, and tearing families apart when they could take care of their physically or mentally handicapped members was seen as a waste of the state's effort. It was too much hassle for virtually no returns. In fact, showing strength while shouldering the burden of a disabled person was a source of respect for those who managed (the disabled person, of course, was worthless). And Lelouch being able to provide for me while acing school did earn him quite a bit of admiration from our fellow students.
Just like it didn't hunt for its disabled, the Holy Empire of Britannia didn't forbid people from caring for handicapped friends or relatives. But since state healthcare support was not a thing, nor disability payments, it meant, in turn, that there only was a rather small market for specialized equipment, and very few producers for it in Britannia itself. All of them also charged outrageous prices. For a blind girl like me, acquiring reading materials, in particular, was rather problematic.
I should point out I already knew how to read before I was blinded. In fact, I have no recollections of learning to read as a small child. Normally, a Princess of Britannia began to be taught their letters at the age of four, but I was a curious enough child to have somehow learned on my own before. I do remember my mother saying I taught myself to read in order to annoy Lelouch somehow, although, looking back on it, it may very well have been so I could curtail his options when he looked for a pretext to ditch Euphie and me.
My beloved brother Lelouch, and my half-brother Schneizel, were the only other two among our father's children who also had taught themselves to read before our lessons started. I was, however, far from proficient at writing and, of course, I couldn't write normally for nearly ten years. Which is why I need the exercise nowadays.
Reading and writing Braille? That's a different skill. You're reading with the tip of your fingers, for a start, which means the characters have to be large and solid enough to feel them properly. It also means a page of Braille holds a lot less information that an ordinary sheet of paper of the same size printed for the seeing, is considerably thicker and weighs considerably more. A two-hundred pages textbook for a seeing person was four thick volumes for me. Typing a physical document requires a specialized machine, and then it has to be transcribed for most seeing people; in Britannia, only a handful knew Braille.
Fortunately, I went to school in a time when considerable advances were being made in the EU to allow a blind person to have access to much better, electronics-based reading and writing aids. These advances trickled to Britannia, and they were obtained for me and allowed me to actually follow an almost normal school regimen. Which wouldn't have happened only ten years before. Britannian schools considered the two-way transcription process required to teach a blind person to be a waste of time and money, so homeschooling at great personal expense used to be the only option. Nowadays, at least, computers handle the transcriptions.
The equipment I ended up using just to read and write wasn't cheap. I've just had my office run an estimate of what giving me access to reading and writing must have cost over the time I went to school; it fell just shy of a million pounds. Which is also the range for the cumulative cost of my successive wheelchairs and the adaptations to our home environment.
Early on, I believed my beloved brother when he said the Ashfords were taking care of all the costs - Lelouch lied to me a lot when he wanted to protect me. I didn't really know what those costs were, after all, and at first, I was too young to grasp them. I do have ears, though, and it didn't take me too long to hear Lelouch had earned himself a reputation for never accepting assistance from others. It's a reputation that stuck, and got me to wonder exactly why my beloved brother's attendance records were anything but sterling. He had to be making money for himself while he wasn't in class. But then the question became: was he also providing for me?
So I asked Sayoko one evening who had just paid to get my motorized wheelchair refitted. She said it was my brother. Of course, I asked her who paid for everything else I got, and her answer was the same. And then I asked Sayoko how much all of it cost.
Let me tell you it was quite the shock to learn my thirteen years old brother had been spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to support me, and that he'd been doing it from the start. It certainly explained why he was frequently missing classes – something else my beloved brother was infamous for at the Academy.
The only plausible ways he could have earned so much money from the age of ten were selling his body, selling somebody else's, or gambling. Lelouch was far too proud to do the first, and far too kind to accept the second (and yes, my beloved brother was kind). So he had to be gambling, and taking large risks in the process, as he had to find rich marks to win all the money he spent on me off.
I never told Lelouch I knew just how much he was spending on me, or of the risks he took to earn that money. But I loved him all the more for it. Also, I lied to Lelouch a lot when I wanted to make him believe he was successful at protecting me.
I also wished Britannia was a place that provided for its disabled to begin with. But I knew better than to hope for it back then. And I intend to make sure Britannia will provide that support in the future. I spent too many nights waiting for a tardy Lelouch and worrying that his luck might have finally run out, worrying that he'd have gotten hurt as a price for attempting to take care of me himself. I want a Britannia where not a single little boy or little girl with disabilities have to depend on their loved ones taking risks to begin with.
Hopefully, the Britannia that cares for all its own is the one you've always known. And if it isn't, you'd be probably justified in blaming me. I am the Empress.
I've said earlier that Lelouch being able to provide for me while acing school earned him a good deal of admiration. There was a flipside: I was perceived as his burden.
It wasn't very consequential, mind you. There won't be too much truth to be found in future historical accounts about the wrath of the Demon Emperor, but when I was bullied in primary school, whether by pupils or staff, Lelouch certainly was wrathful, and he always found creative and painful ways to convince my bullies to stop.
Oh, he didn't tell me a word about what he did. But I found out about quite a bit - kids tattle - and within the first year we spent at the Ashford Academy, everyone got his message and learned not to bother Nunnally Lamperouge. It didn't make me any more liked, though; it just made me feared by proxy. Making friends, or at the very least, establishing cordial relations? That was on me.
I had two special powers for that. First, I had one of the most disarming and devastating smiles of Britannia – and you need that kind of smile if you want to get anything out of other princely siblings. I was very good at getting things out of my siblings, as Cornelia and even Schneizel can attest to. I also used to have devastating puppy eyes, but you don't use those as a blind person. Keeping your unfocused eyes open isn't cute, it just freaks people out. So I learned to keep them closed. But I digress.
I used my patented princess smile on many occasions and to great effect. It certainly made my life a lot easier among a population educated and predisposed to look down on cripples. But my smile wasn't always a tool. It was also an expression of gratitude. Being blind and confined to a wheelchair, there was a lot that ordinary people could manage which was impossible for me. I simply couldn't have lived autonomously, and I required quite a bit of assistance just to learn to get around the campus, and for quite a few other things. And a warm smile was the simplest and the best way to show gratitude for others who did for me what I no longer could. It was how I could be thankful to those who were kind to me.
Of course, my beloved brother Lelouch and dear Sayoko saw my grateful smile more than anybody else. Even when I guessed they were lying to me, or omitting things. They both did that to protect me, and that deserves gratitude. Besides, I've already told you that I lied back to them.
Learning how unkind other people can be from a position of weakness also led me to wish people were kinder in their lives. Not just kinder to me, but in general. I loathed the dog-eat-dog mentality that was drilled into the Holy Empire's subject.
I still loathe that mentality, but at this point, everybody remembers the dog that ate them all. And I will use that experience to make people become kinder to one another.
If I can't have my beloved brother, I at least want a better world. It's what he died for.
My other special power was being a human lie detector – which in terms of developing relationships is also a double-edged sword, but it was one way I could be useful to others, and something nobody else around me could do, therefore something that made me uniquely valuable. It mattered a lot in Britannia under my father's rule.
I'll explain a bit how I gained that talent. Unless you've lost your sight too, you probably have no idea how much information you learn to collect with your other senses when you are blind. Hearing, smell, touch, those three are what you have to read your environment and the people around you. And touch, in particular, provides interesting clues as to an interlocutor's truthfulness. There are many ways someone can do a gesture as simple as holding hands with you. You can feel tension. You can feel surprise. You can feel the difference between someone who shows affection and someone who just engages in a perfunctory motion.
And after you've felt the truthfulness of your interlocutor, well, it's no different from any other secret information you might have, and the principles of using or withholding a secret applies just the same way. I should also point out that, from a very young age, Britannian royals were taught the power of secrets. And Lelouch and I, we were naturals at acquiring and keeping secrets.
I got a lot of mileage out of my "special power" as I grew up in Area Eleven, and it earned me some respect of my own. But it was later on, in the time of Zero, that I truly grew to appreciate just how useful being capable of perceiving lies with a handshake could be.
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A/N: Gah, writing in ten minute increments is painful. So is trying to figure out what a Britannian healthcare system (or lack thereof) would be like. That's not the type of worldbuilding I ever suspected I might get interested in x)
Aminta defender, I'll save blaming Canada for another occasion (I love you, Canadians, I just also like South Park ^^ ). And yes, this Nunnally is a bit spicy - but she does have reason to be, doesn't she? Plus, someone who shouldered the burden of killing tens of thousands isn't exactly an innocent anymore. Also, fully agree on how unhealthy their codependency grew to be. But they really didn't have anybody else when it counted the most - aside from Suzaku, but we'll get to him before long.
Headcanon says the fate of the doctors who called Nunnally trash was the same as the rest of Pendragon. They'd have been excellent samples for "object lessons" in the final stretch leading to Zero Requiem, but FLEIJA tends to be a tad indiscriminate.
OceanicEternity, thank you! And yes, Nunnally breaking down when Lelouch dies also hit me. But in the end, she, too, is one of the great sinners, and she, too, is punished by Zero Requiem...
ELinkA, nice to see you around here :)
Ash the Aura Guardian, agreed! More dark Nunnally! And it takes so little stretching... :)
Thanks for reading!