Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cornelia stands strong in the doorway of the dimly lit room. The sun hasn't risen in the village of Locus, and Lelouch mindlessly gnaws at his lip as he looks over his notes again and again.

"Lelouch," she calls.
He hums, eyes still locked to the screen.
"Lelouch, look at me," the word brother threatens to fall from her lips, but she holds it in.
"Cornelia," he raises a brow and lowers the screen just a bit. "Is something wrong?"

She studies him. How he looks just like his mother, with slender arms and delicate fingers, dark hair that would be just as wavy as his sisters if he grew it out. It's pulled back in a ponytail, and the red mark along his collar bone creeps through the top of his white button up.

She takes a step in, becoming veiled in the darkness of the early morning.
"I need to ask you..."
She knows the question, it's on the tip of her tongue, but the thoughts come flooding down her throat with a deepening sadness - a burning rage.

Her grief and mourning turned to agony. She just craved to know why. Why had he done what he did - what had pushed him to such an extreme.
"Why did you make Euphie kill the Japanese?"
"I saw it as an opportunity for the Black Knights," he speaks easily, like he had rehearsed it.
She squints, purple eyes just like his, "You're a horrible liar."
"I'm not lying," he says. "I used her. Whole heartedly. You should hate me."
"You're a liar!" she shouts. "Tell me the truth!" Her voice is booming - it demands respect and attention.

Lelouchs fingers curl tight around the edges of his laptop, and he nearly looks away. "That is the truth," he says again. "I'm not lying."

With swift steps she goes towards him, he sets down his laptop as if he knows what's coming. She picks him up by the collar, his frail body hanging limply from her strong grip. She winds up, practically in slow motion. His face scrunched as he braced for pain. Her free hand flies, and in the blink of an eye, he's hit. Despite his regenerative qualities, he still feels pain the same. A ring she wears - one she matched with Euphemia - made a gash across his pale cheek.

"You will tell me the truth, Lelouch! Now!"
"I am!" he yelled back, grabbing at her hands to try and unclasp them from his shirt. "The truth is that I used Euphemia for my own gain - I shot her, I'm the reason she's dead, I know that!"

"No!" Cornelia shouted again. "That can't be true! A filthy liar, that's what you are!"

Despite how much he thrashed and shouted, a part of her just knew that that couldn't be the case. Lelouch loved Euphemia almost as much as he loves Nunally, he was her favorite older brother.
She's trying to find some kind of good in him, something to still tie them together as brother and sister. If what he says is the truth, then she can't justify it at all, when she can barely justify everything else he's done. She struggles to bare the thought, that her little brother is still the cold, emotionless thing that the soldier in her says he is.

"Cornelia," Guilford hands wrap around her arms, gently tugging her grip off Lelouch. Of course Guilford would come running when Cornelia yelled, she's almost glad. "You must stop this, what's done is done."
She glares down at Lelouch as he sits again, taking a moment to catching his breath and fix his shirt. His cheek still burns, and the blood from the gash threatens to spill down his cheek.

He recovers in seconds, and Cornelia watches with wide eyes as the cut sews itself back up, leaving no scar or mark behind. He pulls the laptop back to him, and continues typing away with a furrowed brow. Passively rubs his red cheek with his hand.
She begins, anxiously, but Lelouch cuts her off.
"I have nothing to say to you right now. I need to finish this."

She feels like she's going to start seeing red if he spits out some sick venom one more time, so with Guilford at her side, she storms away.
"This is not that end of this conversation," she says at the doorway. "Your sins of that day will be confessed, one way or another."
"Whatever you say," he grumbles in permanent teenage fashion.

Her fist hits a wall, but the material it's made of gives no way to her force. The sun has risen, as have the rest of their ragtag troop.
"Cornelia, please," Guilford sighs. "You must rest, you've been pacing and punching for hours."
Despite all her power, she feels helpless - helpless that she cannot get the truth from her very own brother.
"But he...!"
"With all due respect, I believe your brothers mind is beyond ours."
She looks over her shoulder to him, "What do you mean by that?"
Guilford looks to his feet for a moment to gather his thoughts.

"What he does, what he won't do... what he will and won't say, and to whom he chooses to do so to... I think he calculates all of it down to the grittiest details. And..." he looks up at her, almost sympathetic, "I think only a very small handful of people will ever be close enough to know that full truth. I doubt either of us will be one of them."

She bites her lip. He's right. She knows he is, deep in her heart. She can think back on the days before Lelouchs mother died, before he and Nunally were banished. How she grieved when the war started, how she grieved more after Euphemia was killed. How she loathed Zero - how she loathed him. Despite her feelings, the fight would continue, and she would have to come to terms with being in this familial limbo, whether she liked it or not.

It enraged her to know that Kururugi seemed to have passed whatever made up test Lelouch proposed to get his trust. He always hovered near, and she's certain there's much more to it then they let on. Somehow, this Japanese boy had infiltrated their family, first with Euphie, and now Lelouch and Nunally.

She watched with her tongue held back, frustration and jealousy biting at her gums, as Suzaku would crane his neck behind Lelouch to view the screen of his laptop, pointing to this or that as Lelouch would nod tentatively. It was strangely intimate, and it hurt. It stung an old, infected wound. The thought that he had done the same thing to Euphie, craned around her neck and nodded at her plans, and now he sits pretty behind the intelligent shield of her killer.

-

"Kururugi," she called him over after the last meeting of the night. In just a few hours they would begin their siege to save Nunally. Suzaku had approached her the way he always had, back straight and his chin held high, but now it lacked the formal greeting he used to owe her.
"Is something wrong?" he asks, pulling out the chair next to her as she offers it.

"I must know," she adjusts herself, "How is it you became so close with my brother."
His eyebrows rise. "With Lelouch?" he asks.
She wants to bite at it, who else would she mean? But she resists. "Yes. I find your connection to him to be... a tad bit unusual."

She can see Guilford in her peripheral, looking over his shoulder as he talks to a few of their teammates - the redheaded drunkard that seemed to always follow him around.

"Unusual?" he repeats with an airy chuckle. "I'm not sure I understand."
"Of all people, why would he choose you to be his knight during his reign? Why does your opinion seem to matter so much to him? And most importantly," the habit of her deadly gaze settles in, and she stares daggers across the table, "Why do you fold at his beck and call, despite what he did to Euphie?"
Suzaku responds within a beat, his face morphing into something she can’t quite put to words. "It's complicated."
"I'm afraid that answer just won't suffice," she leans forward, her brows creasing in frustration. "I order you, Kururugi-"
"Last I checked, you had no such influence over me, Cornelia," he matches her intimidation, straightening his back and folding his strong arms over his chest.

Maybe they're drawn together because of their heinous attitudes.

He looks away from her, out into the sky with clear stars. She watches as he bounces his knee, likely in irritation or anxiety, yet he makes no effort to leave. She falls back into her chair, trying to find the words to explain why she's so desperate to know the happenstance of their relationship.

"Apologies for the aggression," she shifts awkwardly. "I just..."
He keeps his head turned away, but green eyes glance toward her as she speaks.
"I want my family back, more than anything," she says. "And I understand that it's impossible for things to go back to how they were, but... When Euphie," several words threaten to fall. When she was killed, when she died, when she passed. "When she left, and when Nunally was returned to us, I thought maybe Lelouch would be found too. That way the three of us could mourn Euphemia together. But now he's here, and her blood is on his hands, and I just can't understand why he would do it."

Suzakus breath changes every time Euphies name is spoken, she takes important note of that.

"If your relation to him would give me anything - on why he did it, or why he changed... I would greatly appreciate it. That's all."

She watches as he mulls over her explanation, sighing and scrubbing his temple with his hand.

"Lelouch and I..." he struggles to find the words. "We're..." he slouches in his seat. "Confidants," he says finally. "That's the only way I can think to put it. We have been for years, even before the war."
"Yet you look past his crimes?" she feels desperate, she needs her anger to be justified, and at the same time she needs Lelouchs crimes to become null.
"Can any of us look past anything we've done?"
Cornelia doesn’t quite understand, and he seems to see it in her face, so he rewords it.
“What I mean is…” he thinks for a moment. “In retrospect, how many Euphemias have you or I killed? How many girls mourn their sisters - how many people loathe us?”
Cornelia is quiet. Angry. Sad.

He leans forward on his knees, staring down at his hands clasped together. “When my father died, my life changed. Not just because of the war, but because he was the only family I had left. There’s no one else with the Kururugi name alive. I understood very young that my actions projected onto our legacy, and what I wanted was peace. That’s why I joined the military. I thought I could fight from within - that if I was the one taking the hits, the people would hurt less. I realize now that my methods weren’t what they should’ve been - enlisting was a decision I made when I was 13.”

“So when I say Lelouch and I are confidants, I don’t mean I excuse what he did. I mean I know him well enough to understand why - why he thought he had to - the same way he’s able to do that for me. I accept him, blood and all.” He looks up at her, sympathy in his eyes, lashes like blades of grass. “We all make mistakes. Some greater than others. We can’t go back and change them, but we can plan for better.”

She feels like she’s going insane, being lectured by her brothers - her brothers something. She swallows the pride and looks down at her own hands. There’s a dry redish-brown stain on her ring. She picks at it.
“You’re very wise for someone so young.”
“I guess walking through fields of charred corpses changes you.”

As if on cue, Suzakus name is called. Lelouch stands at the boundary of the small building they stayed in, laptop in hand. Kallen Kozuki hovered behind him, as well as C.C..
“Could you come here for a sec?” Lelouch calls. “I need to check something.”
“Sure thing!” Suzaku calls back, his demeanor completely different from the one he just had. He pushes in the chair and nods to Cornelia. “Sorry for dropping all of that on you. It’s the only way I thought…”
“It’s alright,” she sighs, cutting him off. “I apologize as well.”

She watches as he walks toward the group. She feels something itch as Suzakus hand seems to hover for Lelouchs hip. She looks to Guilford, who seemed to have overheard the conversation. He smiles and nods to her, as if approved of the interaction. It warms her heart.

-

“You’re awake,” she muses. He seems unhappy with the fact.
“So I am.”
“What on Earth happened? You’ve been out cold for nearly a day.”
He squints, blinking and scrubbing at his eyes before falling back onto the medical cott. “I don’t think I could explain it. Even if I could, I don’t think you’d be able to understand.”
She isn’t exactly sure if it’s supposed to be some backwards jab at her intelligence or not. She gives him a pass, hoping he was too tired to play up the dramatics.
She just sighs, smiling at him. “Well, either way, I’m glad you’re back.”

Conversations bounce off the walls, and the only thing keeping Lelouch and Cornelia from the rest of their base was a heavy plastic curtain, the kind you see at a hospital. He closes his eyes again, rolling to his side to find the other cott empty.
“Is Nunnally alright?” He asks.
Cornelia lowers her chin. “Yes. She awoke a few house ago. I believe she left to get a change of clothes and get clean.”
He sighs. “I’m glad…” his body relaxes, and Cornelia stares at the designs in the back of his suit. It can’t be comfortable to lay in that thing. His hair falls to reveal the smallest bit of his ear, and she observes it quietly.

Lelouch shifts. He speaks up, a whisper in the curtained off room.“It was an accident,”
“What?”
“Euphie. I didn’t mean to.”
She watches as he slowly curls in on himself, his pale hands creeping to his sides as he draws his knees closer to his body. Cornelia isn’t sure how to respond. She listens as Lelouch begins to cry. The realization quickly settles that he’s being honest - for once, he’s telling her the truth. And it hurts him.

She has nothing to say to him. She stands, mouth agape in disbelief. Her heels click, the curtains his as it opens against the metal rod above them, and she leaves. He cries alone, clutching his stomach and a hand clasped over his mouth.

Guilford was the one to tell her he had left. He had also said they wouldn’t know when, or if, he would ever come back. She can’t even say with confidence that she would’ve wanted to expand on what he said. She doesn’t even know what she would say.

She decides to push it to the back of her mind until she sees him again.