Coup d'�tat

November 2nd, 2022 a.t.b.

They met Kallen and C.C. on the way back from the gardens. Somewhere along the way, the women had picked up Arthur. The cat had free rein to roam around the Palace--not that he would have accepted any boundaries at this stage.

“Lelouch had to handle something,” Kallen said when Kaguya and Suzaku rejoined them.

It was then that Suzaku felt the disquieting sensation of the Geass. This was important. Important to them, somehow.

Ever since he had discovered the particular nature of the power he had been granted and the involuntary self-defense mechanism that came along with it, he knew what it meant to be guided by his primary instincts. But it was too soon to see what the issue was and the possible ramifications that would ensue.

He caught C.C.’s eye and she nodded ever so slightly. Making his excuses, Suzaku got an attendant to bring his cousin and Kallen back to their quarters.

C.C., who elevated fading into the wallpaper into a kind of art, blended in amongst the staff and civil servants in the Palace as a member of the new emperor’s entourage. They made their way back to the privacy of his suite of rooms.

“You felt it too.” It was a statement of a fact. C.C. could sense a lot of things he did. Suzaku did not know if it came from knowing her since he was ten years old or another quirk of the Geass.

“I expect Lelouch is going to come in with a bundle of good news,” Suzaku said, trying not to sigh as he sat down. “Should I try to make more sense of it now?”

“If you want to.” They had a discouraging record whenever they tried to trace the chain of circumstances linked to him.

“Do it then.”

C.C. nodded and extended her hands to touch his forehead. Thumbs on his temple, fingertips light on his skin--and she reached in--

Follow the thread. Elusive. Hard to pin down. Crisscrossed with too many other threads. Too many possibilities--

Suzaku jerked backwards as C.C. broke contact, reflexively catching her as she stumbled.

“It wouldn’t let me see,” she said after taking several deep breaths. “That or everything’s too fluid to be certain.”

It usually ended like this. Attempts by both of them to find a way to use the Geass in a more proactive manner had ended mostly in failure. Tapping into Suzaku’s consciousness and sub-consciousness was something C.C. could do fairly easily by now. Tracing the effects of his Geass was a different matter.

The thing was, he could influence the circumstances of the present if he was in the right place or was around certain people. The future was out of his reach. Or as C.C. put it, too much in flux for the Geass to do anything.

He set C.C. on her feet. She shook out her hair and picked up Arthur, who had been drawn to investigate their activities. The cat purred in satisfaction as she scratched him under his chin.

“So it’s still not clear? Not an inkling of anything related this?”

“It’s worse than a game of cat’s cradle played with uncoordinated cats,” C.C. said, sprawling out on the bed with Arthur.

“Mrrr . . .”

“That’s not very good for almost twelve years of trying.”

“That’s about a grand total of two minutes for me,” C.C. reminded him tartly. She occasionally flared up at him whenever he got impatient with their scattered progress. Which was a lot better than the completely emotionless state she had been at certain stages in the time he had known her.

“Well sorry--”

Then the door opened to admit one intensely-focused prince. Lelouch did not bother with knocking when he was in a hurry.

“Something’s come up,” Lelouch said as they looked up expectantly.

“Should you cancel the holiday for the staff then?” Suzaku asked. There was to be a day-off for personnel before the coronation, starting from this evening. He had been looking forward to welcoming the Battalions back from the Gulf.

“There’s not much they can do at the moment. Just put your good friend Lloyd on call,” Lelouch said with a sigh. “And any other engineers he knows. We’re expecting an important package tomorrow morning at eight.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“Make preparations, then wait for that Geass of yours to reel in a whooper.”

Behind them, C.C. flopped back on the bed with an exasperated sigh.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

November, 2010 a.t.b.

“Have you made any friends at school?” Angela-san asked as they headed out to the school parking lot after the session with the counsellor.

“Not yet,” Suzaku said, resisting the urge to look at his feet. Angela-san had been rather adamant about that.

“Well, you don’t have to push it,” Angela-san said. “If you don’t want to, I mean.”

That was the other thing about Angela-san--very definitely not Nakamura-san. She had different ideas about fitting in that was not congruent with his former school experience and not always in line with the directives of the current school. Suzaku put it down to her overseas upbringing.

“Okay.”

“Should we get take-out for dinner?”

“Okay.” Angela-san was not that into home-cooking even though she could manage basic foods like rice and one-pan stir-fry. Fortunately for both of them, the settlement had a number of food delivery services that had sprouted up to service the growing expatriate population. In the recent weeks, they had had a selection of somewhat-edited Chinese, not-really-that-spicy Indian, pseudo-Japanese, too-bland-for-their-tastes Britannian and Italian cuisine.

“You decide what we’re getting.”

“Okay--” Suzaku had to check himself before Angela-san looked at him. “Maybe pizza?”

Later, after all the dishes were done and the leftovers put away, Suzaku took the rubbish out to the collection point. His real objective was the cat living behind the collection point.

Armed with the last of the milk and a bit of cheese and salami from the pizza, Suzaku tried to entice the tortoiseshell cat to come out.

He had obviously taken too long, for Angela-san came outside to find him. It was not a dignified position to be in, on his hands and knees while peering under the trash receptacles.

“Uh--”

The tortoiseshell chose that moment to dart out to flitch the cheese-encrusted salami from his slack fingers.

“Cats shouldn’t drink cow’s milk,” Angela-san said. “We’ll have to get cat-food from the store.”

Suzaku could not quite believe his ears as Angela-san turned back to the house.

“And litter. Which you’ll be paying for out of your allowance.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Angela--sometimes Kyoko and sometimes Shu Lin, depending on which family reunion she went to--was still single and thirty-one years of age. If asked, she would have said that her life had not changed that much asides from having to buy more food and ferry Suzaku to and from school every day. And the fact that very few men tried to chat up a woman with a ten-year old in tow.

The kid had been obviously in need of help. It would definitely take a lot more time than three months for him to adjust to a new school on top of losing, well, everything. And the school year had barely started. After the war, a lot of infrastructure had to be rebuilt and only some schools had reopened in October.

Suzaku had told her that he had problems with making friends in the past. She had been unable to get anything else out of him even though she could sense that this was not the whole story. She did not believe that the boy had been friendless--although she had heard things about the former Prime Minister and knew that it was difficult to live in the shadow of such a man. There were signs--like the thing with the cat--that indicated that he was not completely isolated and out of reach.

Being in a class of children whose parents had backed the winning side sounded like Chinese water torture on a daily basis to her. On the other hand, hosting a class of Japanese kids in a predominantly Britannian school could not have been a walk in the park. Angela could not pretend that racism was not there, that the long-held prejudices of both Japanese and Britannians would not spill over to their children. She got enough of it at work every day.

She had not liked Japan’s isolationist stance towards the end, but she could not quite condone Britannia kicking the doors down to keep the Sakuradite flowing. For one thing, what Britannia did to its Areas was unspeakably barbaric. Not that Japan’s deeds during the last great war were anything to sing about, as her mother’s family reminded her every time she visited.

That cat . . . might have arrived at the right time. Being the odd one out at school required a lot more than the ability to outrun the bullies, Angela Nakamura knew. Thank goodness she had no carpeting and was not fussy about curtains . . .

Hands on her hips, she wondered what was taking him so long to carry one cat into the house. Looking back at the entryway, she saw that he was manfully trying not to tear up as the cat happily gnawed on his hand.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

After the bites on his hand had been washed and treated with antiseptic, Suzaku got ready for bed.

Angela-san had firmly rejected the idea of having the cat sleep with him. “I’m going to be hauled up for child abuse at this rate.”

The cat, sensing a good thing as the winter months approached, had been perfectly happy to occupy an old cushioning pad on top of the refrigerator.

Suzaku usually turned in early. It took a while for him to get to sleep. Not because of the strange surroundings or the fact that he was sleeping alone. He had his own room and it was spacious enough for a ten-year old with no possessions to his name. It was just that at times like this, he missed the company of other children--namely the two siblings he had become close to over the course of a year.

In the early hours of the morning, he was drifting in and out of sleep when he realised that there was someone else in the bed with him. And it was definitely not the cat.

It was all he could do not to yell as he came fully awake and fell off the side of the bed in his panic.

“You’ll wake someone up,” said the dark figure occupying the other half of the bed. The light from the street lamps outside gleamed off a pair of very familiar golden eyes as he gaped up at the green-haired girl.

“You can talk!” he said, somewhat accusingly as he fumbled for the switch of his bedside lamp. “Why didn’t you talk before?”

“There wasn’t anything to say,” she said and that seemed to be explanation enough for her as the lamp illuminated the room.

“But why are you here?” he blurted out. There were a metric tonne of questions piling up in his mind but he only had one mouth.

“I had no place to stay,” she said. The shirt and slacks she wore were rather worn and shabby. Suzaku wondered if she had been living on the street. And who was she anyway?

“But I--what’s your name? Who are you?” he demanded, remembering the horrible scene in the rubble of a collapsed building. What are you?

“I am C.C.--and I will stay beside you until you fulfil our contract.”

“Contract . . . you said . . . you had a wish?” Suzaku had not been entirely sure if it had been a dream or a hallucination. He was not entirely sure if this was a bizarre--

“You have accepted the power of the Geass,” she said. “That means you’ll fulfil my wish in exchange.”

He would have asked what the unfamiliar word entailed, except he was interrupted by a sound akin to someone’s stomach growling--

Suzaku stared at C.C., who had the grace to shrug in an embarrassed fashion. They tip-toed down to the kitchen, where Suzaku retrieved the leftover pizza from the refrigerator and popped it into the microwave. The cat blinked at them sleepily and climbed down to join them. The clock on the wall indicated that it was five-thirty in the morning, but Suzaku did not feel the slightest bit sleepy. Not after this.

C.C. practically inhaled the two slices he put in front of her. She ate like she had not had a meal in days. Suzaku felt rather sorry for her, but she had somehow attached herself to him and he could not imagine how he was going to explain this to Angela-san. It was not quite the same as a pair of royal siblings living in his household as “foreign exchange students”.

“I don’t think Angela-san can take in another lodger,” he started apologetically. “I’m imposing on her as it is--”

“She doesn’t have to know I’m here. I’ve been watching you for the last two weeks.”

“But I never--how did you do that? You followed me to school?” This was more than a little unsettling. He knew that various agencies were interested in him and that the Britannians were not letting him out of their sight until they could be sure that their hold on Japan was consolidated, but not this.

“I am a witch after all,” she said, watching in mild amusement as the cat jumped on her lap to see if any cheese from the pizza was left.

Suzaku was learning that C.C. only gave certain answers to some of his questions. He also suspected that she was a lot older than she appeared and said so to her face, not having learned to curb some of his impulsiveness.

“You shouldn’t ask a woman her age,” she told him in her maddeningly vague way.

“But Angela-san doesn’t mind,” he said. “She’s thirty-one.”

“Some modern women are like that,” C.C. said agreeably. It struck him as unfair--she had told him that she was a witch and now she was not telling him anything.

She left moments later when Angela-san’s alarm clock rang at six-thirty, slipping out the backdoor and over the fence like a phantom before Suzaku could even ask where she was going.

A few minutes later, Angela-san came down to the kitchen and saw Suzaku at the table.

“Pizza for breakfast?” Angela-san asked quizzically. But she left it at that and went to fire up the coffee-maker.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

She could barely sense the Geass. And this puzzled her because she had no idea what the power was. She had not been this fazed in decades.

If she had not made the contract with him, she would never have known he had any ability other than being a potential acceptor. And like the previous ones, she had attached herself to him in an unofficial capacity.

He was only a boy and children were usually more accepting of the change. They did not question why a witch would speak to them. They did not question the nature of her only gift and sole curse. Some of them--Suzaku being one of them--even felt sorry for her.

Even then she knew she was taking risks. Coming to the Tokyo settlement and trailing after a boy who was being watched by both the Japanese and the Britannians was not how she would have chosen to keep a low profile. But she had been drawn to trail after the boy to school.

It had been a while for her, but she remembered how cruel children could be.

She watched as every carefully aimed pellet, pencil and eraser-end missed him during class. He narrowly avoided the legs stuck out to trip him and the balls kicked his way during P.E. class.

When she finally figured it out, she almost laughed at herself for being so dense. His power was capable of self-defence, whether he liked it or not.

Yet the Geass could not save him from the dreams that plagued him every week. She shared his bed on most nights, for he could not bear to have her sleep on the street. Sometimes, she sensed them--dreams of blood and a corpse on the floor.

* * * * * * * * * * * *