context: code geass fanfiction
Suzaku meets him for the first time under a summer tree.
The boy is facing the sky, with his eyes closed. The softly shifting leaves create an ever-changing pattern on his cheeks, as if caressing the pale skin with their edges. He looks like porcelain, meticulously shaped, his features lovingly made by the hands of God.
Suzaku’s breathing smooths to match the subtle shifting of the leaves. His eyes can’t leave the boy’s slight figure. He keeps tracing the lines over and over, superimposed over this boy.
He might have made a sound, he’s not too sure. Perhaps he was too excited, moved by the scene in front of him. But the boy opens his eyes, and turns to look at Suzaku.
And his eyes are the darkest purple that Suzaku has ever seen.
“It’s you,” he says, almost like an exhale.
--
Suzaku grows up in a village close to the prosperous Kingdom of Britannia. Though small, the Kingdom has subjugated neighbouring countries many times its size. It operates as a supervisor, of sorts, receiving taxes in return for managing the Numbers.
Suzaku has been drawing ever since he was a baby. He’s honestly not any good at it, but he keeps at it for some reason. He draws birds, flowers, buildings, but there’s only ever one person in his drawings. It’s a boy, who ages along with him.
Sometimes he wakes up with his heart beating fast, a fading image of the boy in his mind. The boy has dark hair, that much he knows. But his face is only a smudge of light beige with a smiling mouth. He keeps at it, though. He scribbles tiny stick figures on his schoolwork, he sits alone on a tree every afternoon, tongue between his teeth and frowning as he tries to draw out the elegant lines of the boy’s face.
It frustrates him that his fingers aren’t delicate enough to draw the lines as smoothly as he wants. He’s seen real artists when they move through the village, giving demonstrations or displaying their art. Those are real drawings, made with proper ink. Those lines dip and rise as they’re supposed to, not clumsily like his own botched attempts.
He’s tried to give up time and time again, but when he’s sitting idly by the river or breathing fog on a cold window, his fingers start tracing the boy again. He looks down and there’s a reasonable facsimile of a boy in the wet soil, little downward strokes for his hair and wavering sideways strokes as his arms and legs.
Suzaku doesn’t know where the boy comes from, or how he came to know of his image. Sometimes he thinks he’s mad, for fixating on a fuzzy image of someone he doesn’t even know. Sometimes he wonders if he’s just losing his mind. But day after day, year after year, Suzaku keeps at his little doodles, and even manages to make them a little more refined, though his fingers remain as calloused as ever from working on the farm.
He still has an odd, irrational conviction that the boy exists, that he’s going to meet him someday. It comes from somewhere deep inside, deeper than his heart and more embedded in his mind than even his own name. By the time he’s fifteen, he’s given up all hope that the boy actually exists, but still he believes, in a way that he can’t even explain to himself. It’s like a reflex, like when his hands start catching a ball before his mind realises that there’s a ball coming towards him. He knows it like he knows the sky is blue, even when the sky is no longer in view. He’s never had a single shred of evidence that such a boy exists, but his body knows it. His mind knows it. His subconscious knows it.
--
Lelouch grows up as the 17th Crown Prince of Britannia. He has so many siblings, half-siblings, and cousins that 17th is pretty high up the chain of power, and so he grows up with the heavy understanding of just how important he is.
He’s left alone for most of his days, despite his importance. His father has no time for him, of course, and his mother is too busy being his father indispensable Right Hand that he barely sees her either. She’s a vibrant fae-like creature to him, a little capricious and sometimes frighteningly sharp, but he knows that she loves him, like he knows so many other things.
Lelouch has his daily lessons and a never-ending parade of royal tutors, but he finds those lessons incredibly boring. He dozes off as he pleases, secure in the knowledge that he likely knows the country’s operations better than his tutors themselves. After all, there are certain things about the country that no one tells academics, but lets slip to children with alarming frequency.
His days are stagnant, a slow-moving idyll of falling asleep in gardens to the sounds of songbirds and the scent of fine Britannian roses. When he closes his eyes, he falls into stasis, where there are no attendants hurrying after him, no tutors chasing him for homework, and no incompetent nannies crying about his contrary nature.
--
“Suzaku, it’s time for school!” Kaguya’s cheerful voice finds him halfway up a tree, sitting on the branches again, scribbling in a little notebook. He’s biting on his tongue and it sticks out of the corner of his mouth.
He scribbles for a while more, then shouts down at Kaguya, “Just a moment!”
Suzaku stares down at his childish drawings. They look like chicken scratches, like those chaotic marks in the ground that Old Man Kirihara’s chickens leave. They don’t look anything like what he’d envisioned, which was a young boy with dark hair and a sullen little mouth. Suzaku stares a bit more, and put the end of the pencil to his chin. The hair looks a little similar, he muses.
He tries to smooth out the hair with some extra strokes, to give it some texture, but it only distorts the shape to the point where he’s no longer sure it even looks like hair. Sighing, he closes his notebook and gives up. “I’m coming down, Kaguya.”
The sun’s up in the sky, bright and cheerful at midmorning. Suzaku puts up his hand to shade his eyes, and squints at Kaguya. She’s a tiny girl, two years younger than him at five, but much smaller physically than even a girl of five has any right to be. She barely looks like she can make her own way out of the house, never mind all the way to school.
He gives her a fond smile.
“Were you drawing again, Suzaku?” she asks, spying the notebook in his hands. She looks up at him with wide, curious eyes.
He nods, a little embarrassed. Out of all the people he knows, Kaguya is the only one who doesn’t laugh or sneer at his attempts to draw, or dismiss the drawings as pointless like his parents do. Kaguya is like an innocent little lamb, always pestering him to let her see his drawings and complimenting them.
He’s still a little embarrassed, though. The boy in his dreams is something private to him, something that he wants to keep close to his heart as if others’ eyes would spoil the dream-memories even more than his own inadequate drawings.
Still, he opens up the notebook to show Kaguya his latest drawing as they walk to the village school. Her friendly chatter becomes a pleasing background noise as he thinks about the boy, again.
He’d had another dream the night before. This time the boy had been lying in a bed of roses, dark hair framing his face, aligning perfectly with his sharp cheekbones. His nose buried in a rose, nudging its petals apart to show the deep burgundy centre. He’s asleep, as he frequently is in Suzaku’s dreams, long eyelashes grazing his skin, soft breaths coming from his parted mouth.
Suzaku had watched him sleep, captivated by how delicate the boy is.
Suzaku is used to calloused hands from farm work. He helps his parents out on their farm, just as every child in the village helps their parents. He plows the fields, feeds the animals, chops small pieces of firewood to stuff in the fireplace so that fire catches easily. He washes clothes by the river, cold water seeping up his trouser legs as he feels the rough edges of the washing board catch at his pruning fingers.
But the boy doesn’t have a single callous on his pale hands. In the dream, Suzaku’s eyes had fallen on the boy’s manicured fingers half-hidden by the grass. They’re soft, free from callouses, and very, very pale. The Suzaku in the dream had reached out to hold the lonely hand, and he had held it and watched the boy sleep until he had woken up from the dream.
--
In class, he listens half-heartedly as the teacher goes on and on about addition. He’s mildly interested because he likes maths, but his eyes are busy tracing the outlines of the boy from his dreams. Suzaku imagines the boy sitting next to him on the bench, his hands on the wooden table, his pencils scattered around his notebooks and rolling into Suzaku’s space.
He wonders how the boy writes. In his mind’s eye, Suzaku watches the boy curl his elegant fingers around a pencil, watches the muscles tense and move under his skin as painstakingly perfect cursive script flows from the pencil tip.
In the background, his classmates’ boisterous shouting is distant and removed. He can vaguely hear Kaguya scolding a boy sitting at the front of the class, but he can’t make out her words. She just sounds angry. His eyes are fixed on the imaginary boy beside him, on his starched white shirt, his impeccable posture, and his mouth that’s tucked into a pout.
“… … can answer the question? Suzaku?”
“Yes,” he replies reflexively. “Yes?” he says again, louder, dragging his eyes away from the boy’s white, unblemished hands. There’s a maths question written on the blackboard and the teacher is looking at him expectantly. He rouses himself from his daydreams, the boy beside him fading.
“Um,” he says uncertainly. His fingers move as he discretely counts out the answer. “It’s five?”
“That’s right, Suzaku,” the teacher praises him warmly. “Okay, everyone, how about this question? Does anyone … …”
She becomes background noise again, and Suzaku bites his lip, looking back at the space beside him reluctantly before trying his best to follow the rest of the lesson.
--
There’s a
The summer heat sets his skin tingling with electricity, the warm air heavy and stifling on his lungs as he lays next to Suzaku under the shade of an apple tree. Suzaku is warmer than the air, all tousled brown hair and sweaty tanned skin. Lelouch feels his skin burn where Suzaku’s arm is carelessly thrown over his.
He’s the one who makes the decision to place his fingertips on Suzaku’s arm, drag it down all the way to Suzaku’s hand and until he can place their palms together. He’s the one who turns to meet Suzaku’s eyes, a specific kind of certainty in their gaze.
It starts with Suzaku’s little open-mouthed, inaudible gasp. Lelouch feels it, though, feels it curling deep in his lower stomach as he stares as Suzaku’s pretty pink lips. z
“I don’t understand, Lelouch,” he manages to squeeze out of his chest, his voice rising in volume despite his attempts to keep it down. His throat feels tight. The frustration builds up in him, and anger pounds in his head, begging to be let out. His clenched fingers leave nails marks in the palm of his hand, little crescent indents.
His words bounce off the walls until he can no longer even understand what’s coming out of his mouth. “I just, why won’t you love yourself?”
It ends loud, the last of the echoes coming back to him as he pants harshly in the sudden silence.
Suzaku is acutely aware, now, of the grit of the stone floor imprinting its pattern on to the flesh of his hands. He’s been sitting on his legs and his ankles are rubbed raw on the rough stone. The anger recedes, waves drawing themselves back into nothingness, leaving his mind clean, empty.
“I wish I could love myself too, Suzaku, but that’s not going to happen.”
Lelouch smiles at him sadly, the curl of lips carrying a bitter tinge. In the soft light coming from the barred window high above their heads, Lelouch looks angelic, the light smoothing out the lines on his too-tense face. It makes his lips look soft, gentle, despite the words coming from his mouth. Suzaku fancies that he can see the dust motes swirl as Lelouch breathes and speaks.
The moment here, the two of them alone in this cell, feels to Suzaku like a suspension of time. He could spend years sitting on the cold stone floor, looking up at Lelouch’s face looking back down at him. Years could pass in between one blink and the next, the chill of the stones slowly creeping up his limbs and freezing him in place. His eyes trace Lelouch’s profile as they have done a million times before, lovingly, as leisurely as they had back in the apple orchards behind Suzaku’s house.
Lelouch hasn’t changed much, if at all. His jaw a little shaper, eyes a little more knowing. But Suzaku can still see those lines superimposed over the delicate face, his own painstaking pencil drawings that outline a straight nose and parted lips over a hint of teeth.
He thinks about his notebooks back at the farm, notebooks and notebooks filled with Lelouch’s face. Lelouch sleeping, eating, smiling. Lelouch being angry, sad, petulant. Lelouch half turning towards him, hair ruffled by the wind and lips almost forming a smile. He thinks about those notebooks, and how his crayon drawings have improved year by year until he could sketch a reasonably accurate facsimile of Lelouch on the fly.
The year before he’d been drafted, he had finally started on colour. He had could capture the essence of Lelouch’s face in a few light strokes at that point. It only took so many lines to give shape to those aristocratic bones, and he knew all those strokes by heart, by muscle. He had finally started to smudge colour into the pencil, spending hours huddled by the river, soaking his trousers up to the knee and catching pneumonia in autumn, searching for violets the exact shade of Lelouch’s eyes.
Suzaku wishes he could have drawn Lelouch like this before they both left Britannia, all pensive and gentle in the light. His eyes are almost thistle, half-lidded, placid. He wishes Lelouch could see himself like this, the tilt of his head catching the light on his cheekbones, casting shadows on the hollows of his cheeks.
Instead Lelouch is looking at him. Suzaku knows he’s hardly anything worth looking at. He knows his own face well; he can feel the dust on the rounded end of his nose and the dirt all over his face. He hasn’t had a wash in weeks, perhaps months. He wonders what Lelouch thinks of him, belligerent in his tattered uniform, the Britannia symbol still stitched over his heart. Does Lelouch find him pitiful? Helpless? Useless, even?
He drags his eyes away from Lelouch, shame climbing up his shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Lelouch,” he says into the quiet air. “I… I didn’t mean to shout at you. I don’t know what you’re going through – “
“I really like you, Suzaku,” Lelouch says frankly.
The words don’t carry in the wind. He says it like he does when he tells Suzaku about algebra, a little bored and like it doesn’t matter at all, because Suzaku will probably never find a use for it his entire life. What’s he going to do, algebraically calculate the rate of yield relative to rainfall per season? Lelouch says it like he couldn’t imagine it could mean anything at all to Suzaku, dropping those words as carelessly as blades of grass plucked by idling hands.
But it matters to Suzaku, so much. He feels the emotion swelling in his chest, growing bigger and bigger and filling up all the spaces from his lungs to his heart. He wants to say it out loud, shout it into the sky.
The Lelouch standing in front of him is as beautiful as a marble statue, all smooth skin and artfully tousled hair swaying in the wind. Completely natural, honest, eyes speaking straight from his soul.
Suzaku wants to say those words back to the boy in front of him, but his lips hardly know how to move, so blindsided by those words that it’s almost as if the nerves connecting them to his brain have been severed. He can only look at Lelouch, the soft wind dancing around them in a cocoon.
“I,” he starts.
Then he stops, because he knows that he can’t say it like Lelouch had, all casual. He wouldn’t be able to stop it from meaning too much, being too possessive, too presumptuous. Even in this small moment, he admires Lelouch’s ability to so finely balance his words.
He settles for a meek, “Me too,” knowing that it’s inadequate and so far from what he really wanted to say.
Lelouch accepts it anyway, with a kind of grace in his nod that makes Suzaku suddenly profoundly aware of Lelouch’s royal blood.
Lelouch thinks back to those times when he had been free to run around barefoot in the mud with Suzaku.
He’d envied Suzaku so many things, back then.
He’d been jealous of Suzaku’s peasant friends, with their healthy tanned skin the picture of vitality, and their wide, genuine smiles. They were always full of laughter, so innocent in the bright sunlight.
He had in turn envied those boys their sun-kissed days, picking fruits and feeding farm animals. He’d been jealous of their honest work, of how the sun would set the sweat on their brows glittering like jewels on a crown, each of them a prince in their own right, just for a moment.
He’d envied so many things about those boys, but he’d envied Suzaku most of all, for being so careless with his affections, so easily opening his heart to the sullen Lelouch that had fallen into his life. He hadn’t been able to fathom how Suzaku could have made enough space in his heart to love even Lelouch, who oppressed the peasantry with his every breath in his status as a prince of Britannia.
Lelouch knows, had known from the very first words that Suzaku had spoken to him (It’s you.) that Suzaku is a far better person than he could ever be. He wasn’t capable of being good like Suzaku, he lacks a certain indescribable something deep in his heart that precludes it. But Suzaku had always been so good, and Suzaku would always continue to be good.
Suzaku is good even now, dirty and humiliated in a foreign prison cell. His eyes still shine with that innate purity that saves Lelouch anew each time he sees it.
Today, Lelouch is aware that he’s here to dull that shine, to kill that light in Suzaku’s warm brown eyes. He hates himself for it, all the way down to the marrow of his bones. He’ll never forgive himself for this, he knows, but this is the only way that he can bring back those green meadows of their youth.
If only he could lie in those meadows again, barefoot and sticky with sweat, with the grass prickling at his neck and the sun warming his toes. He’s been fighting for that, in his own way, these whole five years. He holds on to that single pure thought when his hands tremble, when he’s convinced that he’ll die in this godforsaken country where no one would shed even half a tear for his passing.
He holds on to it now, when he looks Suzaku in the eyes
