Please notice, this is a translation. The work is mine, I wrote it a long time ago, but only recently decided to translate it from my language. Hopefully it's decent enough to be understood, but may our Majesty Emperor Lelouch forgive me for any possible grammar mistakes or awkward syntax.
Since she can no longer see, Nunnally has learnt that colours have a sound.
Until not so long ago, green was the crisp rustle of tender blades of grass between her fingers, moist and bright in the early morning hours, then tending to ochre as the patter of soles on the lawn produced a drier noise. The iridescent, crystal-clear reflection of the sun was the chatter of the waves carried by a salty sigh on the beach, as every word died away in a white and foamy whisper around her ankles; blue was the dive of the hook of her fishing rod piercing the upside-down sky of the ocean, so that she felt like she were catching a star—the wish that that summer would not end, as Suzaku enjoyed teasing Lelouch who had only managed to tangle himself in his line.
Yellow was the buzzing of the bees, which then took on an orange tinge as the hottest hours of August began to heat up on their backs and their skin made a sticky, popping sound with every movement of their arms. The three-voice choir singing a nursery rhyme was the wooden colour of the planks and the browner one of the earth on the floor of Suzaku's secret base.
Then all the colours had a more vibrant hue, the way it was in her memories when she could still see them instead of just touching them, because in the background was again his brother's laughter that she hadn't heard for a long time: it'd been swallowed up by a sense of guilt, a very long minute of silence, since they no longer had a mother, and Nunnally no longer had sight or the use of her legs, and Lelouch no longer had anything he didn't want to give her without keeping anything for himself.
Now the unhinged teeth emitted a creak as the door opened, cautiously pushed by Lelouch after a long listen for the inner breath of the place... or rather, its absence. Nunnally gave him the okay, because under her palm resting on the outer facade she felt that that brick body had been cold for a long time. Uninhabited.
A hoarse hiss came from the back of the room, as of tired lungs that strained to get their gears going again by coughing up a puff of ancient dust.
That, the gasp exhaled by the gloomy depths of the house, like unintelligible words carried by the last breath of a dying man, the silent prayer mouthed on the lips with a last glance on the threshold by those who had run away to escape the bullets, perhaps leaving behind only that please, a small hope of coming back—that is the ash-grey sound the war has been making since the portable radio said it was over. Nunnally eavesdropped on the voice at a very low volume, because Lelouch listens to it secretly when he thinks she's asleep, just as she overheard his whispered words when he answered the news, growling, that the war is over only for those who won it.
Lelouch takes a silent, wary step inside. The house is empty, but Nunnally still feels tension in the armour of his back, his too-thin shoulder blades rising like shields and the jutting sword of his spine in the middle.
Often, after entering a new place, Lelouch carefully rests her on the first useful surface and then moves something heavy, making it crawl on the ground. At first he went to great lengths with the most imaginative explanations; now he always says it's a carpet. But Nunnally feels she knows that kind of heaviness, because it has the same timbre impressed by the memory of her mother's last embrace, something that burrowed inside her like a bottomless pit waiting for another coffin.
Now Lelouch withdraws the alertness from his less contracted shoulders, releases his breath, lowers his weapons. There are no carpets.
"Well, here we are." His brother sighs with the note of an encouraging smile that strains to widen his ribs, to break through the cage of breathlessness that clutches his chest—so his voice is as thin as he is, his body looking like it had thinned to pass between the bars, between the gaps in the wounded bodies of the buildings he sneaks into when he goes in search of food and between the fingers of the knightmare's iron fist that crushes them.
Soon they are sitting on the ground, Lelouch's back still pressed against her chest. Nunnally holds him close, as she always does, but each time she feels like she's wrapping him a little more: in the past she wished her arms were big enough to close around him completely, then her hands touched each others fingertips, and now that they've started to overlap she thinks it's one of those wishes she shouldn't have made... an unlucky star. Nunnally is seven, Lelouch must be ten, and maybe she's growing up, but he seems to have grown smaller.
The circle of her arms is already full of everything she wants, and while she promises not to want more than she can hold, Nunnally waits. She doesn't have to ask, it has become a ritual.
"It's a nice place," Lelouch says, looking around with audible satisfaction to make her appreciate it too. Nunnally trusts her brother blindly, because eyes are deceiving at times, but his spirit is purer and more transparent than any look.
In a convinced tone, Lelouch adds: "It's even bigger than where we were before!"
"Is it?" she spurs him on, inviting him to continue.
"Yes. It's very cosy. We just need to clean it up and then it'll be just fine for the two of us. Not like that barn!"
"But the barn was nice too!" Nunnally pouts. The barn where they had been a few days before – with strawberry-pink walls, a sloping roof, a honey-coloured wooden interior that looked like a beehive, blackberry bushes all around and a bed of straw to be thrown playfully at each other like goose feathers in a pillow fight, with no winners or losers, no injuries. "It was so much fun!"
Her favourite place, however, had been the pirate sailing ship, because it resembled the model they had in the salon at Villa Aries. It'd been like entering a forbidden place of her imagination, like falling into an adventurous fairy tale, one of those that Lelouch used to tell her to cheer her up when she was five years old and a nanny or her older brothers told her it wasn't made to be played with.
"There's tatami here!" Lelouch exclaims, full of a beaming excitement from which it seems even he has only just realised and is rejoicing at the discovery. "And rice paper walls!"
Nunnally lets out an 'oh' of wonder. She's never seen rice paper walls, but once Suzaku managed to sneak them into the shrine house and so she was able to touch that world made of silk, because tatami and rice paper in her mind spoke the language of a magic flute, of enchanted kingdoms, of fairies, bamboo and green tea with aromas of ginger and lemon. She felt the sun rising on her lips. "They're yellow, aren't they?"
"That's right," asserts Lelouch eagerly, brushing her cheek with his own as he tilts his head back over her shoulder. Nunnally knows he's looking at her with curiosity and that his eyes are fluttering with relief. "How do you know?"
"I can feel it," she tells him, because that flow of yellow has entered the circle of her veins and no longer makes her feel the cold down her back. "They're warm."
"I told you, it's nice here," he nods.
Nunnally wraps his shoulders, which creaks like leaves shrivelled by the first frosts, to infuse some summer into the dry twigs of his bones. She notices that her fingertips can now almost touch the opposite wrist, her hands entirely overlapped. Nunnally knows that when Lelouch divides the food he always takes the shorter half of the stick and that if one day he gives her less, it means there is no more; that he hasn't eaten.
Even in the taste of apricot jam there's a hint of yellow, as in the oven-warm golden of bread and the creamy white of butter, but taste alone doesn't nourish if you have nothing to bite.
"And then?" she urges him in his ear, to cover the rumbling of her stomach that's been gurgling with disappointment, as saliva dilutes all the colours.
Lelouch spreads his chest wide, seems to inhale deeply into a lush scent of May. Nunnally can feel it in turn, because she knows what he's about to say, she knows it as one who moves around his own house and, even without turning on the switch, sees by touch what he expects to find, the familiar contours of things he's not afraid to bump into and the peace of a quiet sleep in his own bed.
She understands this well since she no longer has switches to turn on and her familiar contours, her peaceful sleep in a bed that sometimes changes every night and isn't always a bed, have the shape of that certainty...
"There are flowers in the windows."
Nunnally smiles. Wherever they go, the flowers in the windows are always there, and every door opens onto a Euphie's room, a place where they'll be as happy as they were when they looked out the windowsill, all three of them, to see if the weather was nice and they could play in the garden.
Lelouch describes it to her, the garden, and it's a garden without wire fences, without closed and threatening horizons beyond which the lawns become the pothole-strewn asphalt of devastated cities, and when Lelouch takes a longer step, she knows he isn't jumping over a stream, nor the squares in the hopscotch game, because here he doesn't stumble... he doesn't have to step on the numbers.
There are no no man's lands, no unsafe places, no clouds casting shadows where the good weather ends and one can't go out to play.
Now all the colours have the sound of his brother's gentle voice, because the inside of her closed eyelids is a canvas and Lelouch is the artist who paints the world as others cannot see it, blind with their heads bowed and their eyes turned to the ground, where even the shadows of shining things are always an identical grey. His palette is the trust from which he draws all the wonders of a dream made while awake, looking beyond the glass into the frame of the flowers in the windows.
At that moment his voice is light blue when he gives a brushstroke to the sky, then it has all the shades of green of the woods, of the chirps, of the air that frizzes on the skin like pine needles prickling your arms, and she feels like she's running with the fingers of the sun in her hair, like being wind with the wings of his words at her feet. His voice even expresses colours that have no name, like the music of a party, the anticipation of cartoons when they used to stand ready on the sofa with a snack, the smell of the pages of the picture book she was learning to read in, before even characters as smooth as a plain, serene expression became the irregularities on the rough and sickly face of the world.
Instead, everything is lively, saturated with joy. Even black is not that of darkness, but the chattering of the night, when looking up at the stars they looked like bright flowers blooming among the branches, not the upside-down sky of the asphalt in which some fires still crackle, those same stars that, falling, explode on earth since the tail of comets is the hiss of the bombs.
And then there is white, the most limpid and precious colour because it contains them all, like lies do.
Nunnally walks her fingers over the plain of his sternum, she borders on the river flowing over the thin bed of his neck where she feels the rhythmic pulse of life, she climbs over the promontory of his face, over the ethereal sand dunes of his cheeks that she imagines slightly warmed by the hue of the sunset at the end of a day of outdoor laughter. Finally, after intertwining her fingers with the breeze of his breath as if to make garlands, she reaches his eyes. She feels the delicate quivering of the petals of the eyelashes framing his gaze, the glass of his iris. His windows on the landscape of a gentler world.
"Violets," Nunnally smiles in his ear. "Flowers... they're violets."
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"Violets" repeated Nunnally absorbedly, with that same smile and one hand resting on the window pane of the train, a few years later but only a few miles from that place of her memory. The skirt of her middle school uniform curled over her knees as she squeezed them together impatiently. Beside her she feels the confused gaze of her support teacher.
She's on a field trip with her class and, while they're headed to the Britannian Museum, a guide shows the highlights of what they encounter on the bright side of the rails that cut the country in half: the colony, all the splendours of the Empire, the proud flags rising like metal stems sprouted from the ruins of Japan.
"What's there?" asked Nunnally shortly before, turning to the opposite side to that indicated by the guide's voice; the shadow side, the discarded half of history.
On field trips, she's always accompanied by a personal teacher who describes to her in detail what she can't see. At that moment, the teacher stiffened with embarrassment.
"It's just the ghettos," she said whispering, in a faded tone, as if sorry to give her that discouraging answer.
Nunnally strokes the glass and instead smiles, albeit faintly; she would like to tell her that she's wrong, she would like to be the one to show those who turn the other way what they can't see. Even with her eyes closed, she knows that beyond that glass there's a barn with a strawberry-pink roof, there's a pirate sailing ship, there's an enchanted castle, there's a door carved into a tree by which one enters the realm of fairies, and there're forests, verdant hills, seas with waters so clear that two children, leaning out from the shore, once glimpsed the iridescent tail of a mermaid.
"Violets," says Nunnally, to the teacher who has asked her why she's smiling, though she doubts she can explain it.
Only Lelouch could, which is why Nunnally doesn't envy them at all. They've never seen walls made of light; they can't understand why that ash-grey world, through its frame of flowers, seems more colourful to her than their glittering shop windows.
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"Violets."
It's the only thing she cared to choose, when they asked her how she wanted to furnish her bedroom in the former imperial residence.
Now she can see them for herself, as she can see the blue of the sky and the green of the hedges in the immense palace garden, the clear gush of water in the fountains, and farther on the horizon, the distant glow of the rooftops, the glass towers of the skyscrapers, the silvery outline of the capital rebuilt anew from the bare ground of the destroyed city.
There really is a window, and it's the first thing Nunnally sees in the morning, when she wakes up in the sun-drenched room and already turns in the direction of the glass. There are no curtains, she has had them removed since that time a maid closed them in her absence, despite having given strict orders to leave them open at all times. Nunnally likes to think that those eyes are awake and, as long as she lives, no one will ever cover them with a cloth, no one will lower their eyelids; they'll continue to see through her what she only sees when her gaze passes through them. She still trusts her brother, blindly.
It's thanks to this that the colours seem more vivid from her windows, palpitating under the fresh paint that tries in vain to imitate them and in the smiling faces of the people because war is over now, really. There's peace.
Everything has the terse quality of a dawn, like a painting made by the whimsical imagination of a child who wanted to give it a grandiose, even a little naive title, of the kind that makes those who only believe in what they see rolling their eyes. A gentler world.
From that windowsill Nunnally really does feel as if she has arms so big they encircle the whole world, but when she close them over her chest they hold nothing. So she would want to sink her fingers into the heart of the earth, into her ribs, and she feels like she's scraping her knuckles and breaking her nails when she digs, when she twists on the bed, when she hits the pillows, when she would like to touch shoulders again, a face, hands to take in her own, because an ideal leaves your palms empty when you look for other arms in your sleep.
As a little girl, Nunnally had not yet learnt not to throw hooks into the sky, not to catch the stars. All her paper cranes had their wings burnt off, and now, on every anniversary of her brother's death, the explosions are those of fireworks, and for every cheer she would like to scream ingrates. But she wonders if it's ultimately more selfish to want something so much that you don't care if people hate you for giving it to them.
Since Nunnally sees again, colours are silent, they no longer tell her about adventures in dream places, but for this reason she tries to speak for them. Like every morning, she caresses the intense, vibrant purple of the petals. Like every morning, she turns neither to earth nor to heaven, nor to a bare cross that renews the memory of a sword, but to them. Like every morning, she smiles.
"It's all right, big brother. The colonies are free. We are now a constitutional monarchy, there's no more tyranny and we call people by name, not by number. Did you know that? Of course you knew, you predicted it. More states have joined the United Federation, your idea of a big parliament is working. Problems have not disappeared completely, but they're being discussed. Milly sends me postcards. She's dating Rivalz now and this is really unbelievable!"
Her lips tremble a little and then pale briefly when she bites the cry of a dull pain that sinks its teeth inside her as a chisel carving a name in stone; but Nunnally quickly tinges them back with the sound of a kindness that it's now her to return, which gives colour to her voice as she relaxes her lips to release an encouraging smile again.
Lelouch doesn't need to ask, even if he can't; it has become a ritual. Like every morning, Nunnally says:
"There are flowers in the windows."