A/N: It's Christmas season, maybe I'll be gifted with the rights to Code Geass if I wish for it hard enough!

'v'

Things you didn't know about the ninety-ninth Emperor and the hundredth Empress
3. Of being the sister of Zero and not knowing it

'v'

In the wake of the battle of Damocles, I spent two months in solitary confinement. Yes, that is despite the special needs of a person who cannot use her legs for anything, and requires everyday assistance of some form as a result. That assistance was given by servants left faceless by their masks. They never spoke one word in those two months, and I wasn't so much assisted as manhandled.

I think I would have broken, if it weren't for the one breach in the monotony of those endless days spent without anything to do and without one word spoken to me. That moment came when I was visited by a young woman with green hair and yellow eyes. She never introduced herself, but I knew her voice; it was Miss C.C., the girl who had come to visit Lelouch the night Zero made his debut. A girl he had been afraid of when she'd claimed he had made a promise about their future together.

I still don't know what that promise was, but I now know Miss C.C. gave my beloved brother his Geass in return for that promise. And I learned of the part Miss C.C. played in the birth of Zero when she asked me a question I never saw coming. She asked me whether, as his sister, I thought Lelouch was lying when he'd said he didn't hate her for giving him Geass.

I'm not proud of the answer I gave her, knowing what I know now – that I was sure Lelouch had told the truth, but that I hated her, because it was her fault Lelouch had been devoured by Geass until there was nothing left of him. And in that moment, I hated her even more when she replied that it was true that nothing would be left of Lelouch before long, and she left me without looking back.

Now that all has been said and done, I can't decide whether I still hate Miss C.C.. But I'm certain she, too, loved Lelouch. Most people would have been fooled by her attempt at sounding uncaring – she was good at hiding her emotions, good at pretending she didn't care about my answer or about the notion of Lelouch having been ruined by Geass. But she was not good enough to hide her feelings from me.

I'm pretty certain I know the day Miss C.C. gave my beloved brother the Geass that would end up becoming his greatest curse: the day of the Shinjuku Massacre.

As far as the Britannian middle schooler I was knew, nothing out of the ordinary happened on that day. We weren't told anything on the day itself, and the day after, a story came up of a terrorist attack by Elevens who had used poison gas in the ghetto and killed thousands. Nobody knew Zero had been born on that day. But I do remember how Lelouch was when he came back home late that night.

Normally, my beloved brother always made sure someone told me when he was going to be back so late that I shouldn't wait for him before going to sleep. I wrote already about how I had made an uneasy peace with that; but that night, Lelouch had sent no further news, and I really worried that his luck might have run out as I waited for him to come back.

Obviously, Lelouch didn't tell me what had really happened – nothing out of the ordinary there – but what he let slip was that he'd been out gambling for longer than he usually did. It was an uncharacteristic slip, and it said something about how distracted he was that he didn't realize what he'd just admitted.

I didn't call my beloved brother out on it. Already, I had noticed the gunpowder mixed in with his sweat and some other unfamiliar scents, how tense he was when he kissed me in greeting, and how distracted he was that night, barely registering anything I said. Something had happened, something terrible enough that even someone as strong as Lelouch had always been had barely made it through the ordeal, but I decided that something must have had to do with an evening of gambling that turned violent in one way or another. And I already knew I was never going to get the real story, so I contented myself with the knowledge my beloved brother had returned alive from whatever peril he'd just been facing.

Had I known Lelouch had just received his Geass, I would never have said the words I spoke on the night after in a concealed attempt to make my beloved brother rethink about the risks he was taking. I said I wished the world were a kinder place, by which I really meant a kinder place for him – and I didn't realize that he took my wish seriously. I didn't know, then, that he had just been granted a power that meant his promise the world would be a kinder place by the time I could see again was one he now had the power to try and deliver upon. That the combination of Miss C.C.'s gift and of my words would set my beloved brother on the path that ended up claiming everything from him and left him with almost nothing when he died.

Maybe I should hate myself and Miss C.C. equally; after all, it took our combined efforts to destroy this one man we both loved. And in the end, instead of a world that was kinder to Lelouch, the world I truly wished for, I got the exact opposite: a world kinder to every single person but Lelouch – a world which Lelouch no longer even is a part of. In a way, you could say I got the most fitting of punishments for my selfish wants and deeds. And I think the same holds true for Miss C.C..

But let's get back to those early days. On the day after Lelouch made that fateful promise, we learned of Clovis' death. I know why Lelouch killed Clovis now; I got most of the story of what happened at Shinjuku out of Kallen, and it was enough to guess the rest. And I'll likely never tell a soul around me while I live, but today, I agree it needed to happen, if only to stop Clovis from sinking lower than a genocidal cover-up of his human experimentation project.

So no, I don't blame my beloved brother for killing Clovis, and before you think of telling yourself that I am wrong, that I would never wish death on anyone no matter how horrible their crimes, remember what I told you earlier: I tried to kill the person I loved the most in this entire world because I love him.

Back then, however, I only thought of Clovis as being capable of casual cruelty, pretty much like every other prince or princess of Britannia, and just that wasn't enough to forget the half-brother who had doted on me and Euphy when we were children. I was sad to learn of his passing; among our hundred half-siblings, he was among the few my beloved brother and I grew up with. But the news of Clovis' death wasn't what hurt me the most on the day his death was officially acknowledged. The real bad news for younger me was the announcement that his suspected murderer had been arrested, and that said murderer was Suzaku Kururugi.

Yes, it may seem callous that I cared less for my own half-sibling than I did for a boy I had, at that point, known for all of three months before being separated by war. But do remember: when I was lying alone and in the dark at the hospital, and then when I was exiled to a foreign land to serve as a hostage, Clovis was one of those who never visited and never tried to help. And when our father brought the war down upon Lelouch's head and mine, it was Suzaku who took turns helping Lelouch carry me through the fields of war and helped keep me alive. And even before that, Suzaku was one of a very few who dared and showed that they liked me, and made me smile.

I did love Suzaku, back then. Not as much as my beloved brother, of course, but I did love Suzaku, and so did Lelouch. Enough, I'm sure, that he must have debuted his Zero persona well before he'd intended to in the first place.

Of course, I had no idea that was why he wasn't home that night. He said he'd be out in town, which I assumed meant he would be gambling. And he certainly was; just not the way I thought he was.

I wrote earlier that I didn't realize my beloved brother was Zero for a very long time. But I'm not dense. I was always going to notice that whenever Zero did something big, Lelouch wasn't at the Academy. I first suspected he was involved with Zero when the girls of the Student CounciI explained how he'd saved them at the Lake Kawaguchi hotel – aside from Kallen, obviously, but it made sense since after all, she ended up exposing herself as a member of the Black Knights during the Black Rebellion. And a lot of what Zero said in public sounded a lot like Lelouch's musings in private.

As time and events passed, I became pretty sure my beloved brother and Zero were very close, but was convinced he couldn't have been Zero himself. I just couldn't believe Lelouch would have killed Clovis; just like, later on, I didn't want to believe he would have killed Euphy. And I thought, at the time, that he held himself responsible for the deaths of many civilians in the landslide Zero had caused about Narita.

How did I guess that? Because the night after we learned of the death of poor Shirley's father in that landslide at Narita, a day after my beloved brother had been absent for four straight days during which that battle took place, I heard him spend an impossibly long time in the shower, repeatedly banging on the wall in what could only have been anguish at what had happened.

And I'm sure Shirley puzzled that Lelouch had a hand in her father's death out somehow. I have no idea of how it went, but I'm certain one of them confronted the other about it. It would have been too hard for them to stand being in one another's presence after that, even if Shirley somehow didn't end up hating Lelouch for his deed. And that, I think, is why Shirley pretended she didn't actually know my beloved brother after her father's funeral. The poor girl had been in love with Lelouch for years, even if he never noticed. It's a miracle she managed to stay sane knowing Lelouch's role in her father's demise.

Poor Shirley. I have been told, not long after my beloved brother's death, that he had killed her in the middle of a terrorist alert he'd triggered to cover said murder up, and that he'd dressed Shirley's death up as a suicide, quite possibly by ordering her to commit suicide with his Geass. Maybe, in the end, she had realized somehow that Lelouch wasn't just working closely with Zero, but that he actually was Zero. And I'm afraid I could see Lelouch killing her if it was the only way he could protect that secret. But somehow, I don't think that's what really happened. It just… doesn't feel right.

And now, for the part I got completely wrong.

I was briefly abducted by one of Lelouch's enemies – I never knew who that was, and I never asked – and Suzaku and Lelouch worked together to rescue me. I inferred, from that event, that Lelouch and Suzaku had resumed their old friendship and were accomplices within the Black Knights. Lelouch's transparent efforts to try and tie Suzaku to me at the time were confirmation for me, and I was quite happy that Suzaku would be having my beloved brother's back in whatever he was doing. And they were both always absent every time there was a rumor or a report of a battle that involved Zero.

And then we learned that Euphie was going to create Suzaku as her personal Knight of Honour, and he was exposed as well as the pilot of a prototype knightmare that had caused no end of trouble to the Black Knights.

I never knew I could let out such a wretched and bitter laugh as the one that escaped me when I realized my beloved brother and Suzaku were bitter enemies and had no idea they were. Anybody who'd have listened to me at that time would have thought I was going insane.

Thankfully, I was alone. Then again, aside from Lelouch, there never really has been anyone who truly ever listened to me, has there?

'v'

A/N: A merry Christmas season to you all. Enjoy yourselves, and smile!