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rex_sunTitle: Nothing in Yourself
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Code Geass
Characters: Shirley-pov. Lelouch, Suzaku.
Summary: (Kinkmeme request.) Shirley tries to understand Lelouch. She really, really tries. But as Suzaku says: Lelouch doesn't want to be liked. He doesn't even want to like. And Shirley has to wonder if either of her friends hold any kind of hope in their hearts at all.
Notes: I thought chapter 5 was going to be the final chapter. I was wrong! Some of the scenes really grew from what I had originally planned. So this is NOT the final chapter! :P
Lelouch: temperamental, angry, and sometimes cruel. He had argued with Suzaku for a week prior to Suzaku’s fall. Lelouch had been the only one on the tower with Suzaku. He had been questioned by police. He had refused to tell anyone else the true story of the incident. Afterwards, he did not bother to visit Suzaku in the hospital.
Suzaku was worried for Lelouch. He and Lelouch were not on good terms.
Suzaku, Shirley knew, would do anything to protect Lelouch, including hiding the truth of Lelouch’s Refrain use.
Would he also hide the fact that Lelouch had pushed him off of a three-story tower? Would Suzaku’s tender, protective feelings really go that far?
Shirley knocks for five minutes on Lelouch’s door—literally, five, she checks her phone for the time every thirty seconds because it feels more like an hour passes without answer. Finally the door’s many locks unclick and Lelouch throws open the door with a snarled “What do you want?”
Shirley gasps and takes an instinctive step back. Lelouch’s usually handsome face is twisted into a horrific grimace. His teeth are bared like a threatened animal. Shirley has never, never seen Lelouch this angry.
So this is what Suzaku has to ‘help’ Lelouch with.
“What do you want, Shirley?” Lelouch repeats brusquely but not quite as venomously.
“Su—… I was asked to check up on you.”
Lelouch glares at her, fire burning in his eyes. He steps back and allows Shirley into the apartment entrance. She crosses the threshold nervously, expecting him to shove her at any moment. Strangely, though, she does not feel angry with Lelouch. Seeing him like this, she is only one stop short of certain that it was Lelouch that pushed Suzaku. But she is not angry. Is this what Suzaku feels for him? She thinks that maybe Lelouch regretted it as soon as it happened. Shirley thinks that Lelouch really does lo—
(What kind of thinking is that?)
“Suzaku asked me. He’s worried about you.”
Lelouch doesn’t budge an inch. They stand there, in the entrance hall of the apartment and no further, staring at each other, Lelouch’s hands balled into fists.
“I’ll bet. He has a sort of holier-than-thou attitude,” Lelouch hisses.
“That’s not fair,” Shirley says, remembering only halfway through the sentence to keep her voice calm and even. “He cares about you. He’s your friend. He wants you to be happy.”
“He’s a fraud,” Lelouch growls, looking madder than ever. He takes one step towards Shirley. She (barely) manages to hold her ground. “Did he have you thinking he was a saint, Shirley? Don’t believe his shit. He’s not better than me! He’s just as despicable as I am! He just doesn’t know how to put his guilt behind him, get over himself, long enough to do what needs to be done!”
Shirley shakes her head in disbelief. She’d never have thought such vile, hateful words could have come from Lelouch’s mouth, not about Suzaku at least. Before she can stop herself, she asks impassionedly, “Why did you push him, Lelouch?”
—but she has said the wrong thing, utterly.
“PUSH HIM!” Lelouch spits, face contorting in rage. “Push him! Fuck you! Fuck that! Fuck everyone! I know that’s what they think! What the police think, but they don’t really even care whether I did or not! What the other students think, but I don’t give a damn! Push him! Is that what he’s telling you? I thought you would know, you’re so goddamn cozy with him! Cozy, yes, cozy. Thought he would have told you the truth.”
Shirley backs away to the door, opens it behind her back.
“HE FUCKING FELL OFF ON PURPOSE! On purpose! It’s not me! He hurts himself on purpose! You haven’t noticed?”
As she runs he calls after her, “THIS ISN’T MY FAULT!”
—and he moans in agony when she’s too far away to turn back, “None of it. None of them. I only want to protect—”
Shirley should have told someone what happened. She knows that now. She should not have left Lelouch alone after that, she should have done this, she could have done that, she would have, but…
The council room is somber like a funeral on Monday. Lelouch had not been in class all day.
“He’s in there,” Rivalz mumbles, nodding to the hall, to the door out of their sight. Rivalz’s pen is going back and forth over the poster submission he is supposed to be approving or rejecting, making little lines like daggers through the little printed graphics.
Only Nina is actually doing work. Shirley has learned that burying herself in her computer programs is Nina’s first response to stress. Milly, on the other hand, is pacing, full of energy but no focus, and Kallen is frozen in the seat farthest from Nina’s computer, looking pensive, and Rivalz listlessly goes through the motions of student council work.
Shirley feels a little something like Saturday’s fear well up inside of her all over again. She keeps seeing that distorted, angry snarl in the back of her mind. It’s like a tiger prowls behind the secret locked door of the Ashford Academy student club house.
“It wasn’t Lelouch,” Milly says suddenly.
“How do you know that?” Shirley asks quietly. Lelouch might have told her one thing, but Suzaku had said another, and the police had implied yet another. Shirley has no idea who to start believing.
“Lelouch wouldn’t hurt Suzaku,” Milly says. She sounds so sure.
Would Suzaku hurt Suzaku? Shirley thinks. Thinks of all the little injuries he’s seemed to crop up with over the years. She thought mostly he was just sort of clumsy and she hadn’t really noted them after a while. There was that one time, of course, with his broken leg, but—who in their right mind honestly jumped off ladders, like Lelouch had muttered about at that time?
Who in the world would willingly put themselves in the path of danger?
“Shirley! Come with me, please,” Milly says very abruptly, and just as abruptly turns on her heel and marches out of the council room.
“Madam President?” Shirley calls wonderingly, hurrying after her with many looks over her shoulder at the rest of the confused council. Milly is already hurrying down the hallway to Lelouch and Suzaku’s apartment by the time the council room door swings closed. “Madam President, what are we doing?”
“I’m going to ask him myself,” Milly says loudly. Shirley is mystified and even a little horrified to detect the faintest waver in her voice, the barest shimmering wetness in her eyes.
“Oh—oh no, Madam President, I—I don’t think that’s a very good—“
“I’ll get him to say the truth, and then no one will question him after that,” Milly barges on, pulling a key from her pocket—a skeleton key—“He’s a good person. He’s—“
Milly doesn’t finish that sentence and Shirley, face crinkled with stress and worry, doesn’t ask her to.
The lock clicks; the door swings open with a small whoosh of air. “Lelouch?” Milly calls before stepping boldly over the threshold. Shirley follows with her heart beating in her throat, a bad feeling settling in her bones.
“Lelouch?” Milly turns the corner and strides into the living room, but Shirley sees the edge of her blonde hair swing to a stop. “What are you doing in here? In the dark?”
Shirley breathes sharply through her nose, dreading the moment she follows Milly around that corner.
Lelouch is nearly one with the darkness of the living room: his black hair and black clothes all blend into shadows. Only his pale skin stands out amidst the fabric of a dark armchair. Shirley winces when Milly clicks on the nearest lamp and the room flares up in dim orange light, casting darker shadows still and illuminating things best left to the unknown.
In the orange light, they can see that he is sweaty and shivering. His eyes are darkened and wide, the bags beneath them heavy and pronounced. His hair is wet, but only on one side and the tips—there is, oddly, large chunks of still-dry hair, but more clings to his temple in sick, unclean swathes. He doesn’t look at them, instead staring vaguely in the direction of the empty couch, and his gaze flickers briefly but never to anything concrete. So sweaty—Shirley can’t tell if that is water or sweat pearling and sliding down his neck. Lelouch is half-dressed, in dark jeans and a slim black undershirt—as if he was preparing to go somewhere and stopped halfway through.
And his arms—his arms in the lamplight are—pale and bloody and bruised and scared and—
“Lelouch,” Milly whispers into the dimness. Neither girl moves forward, paralyzed on the spot.
Lelouch says nothing but licks chapped lips and reaches out for a water bottle. He sips it idly, gulping around the tiny mouthfuls, dry and thick. He rocks back and forth in small ways. Then he sets the bottle aside and rubs his face in his long-fingered hands, taking deep breaths. Eventually he begins to smile while his friends look on without speech of their own. His toes twitch spastically and knock over two dark vials from which nothing spills.
“Her shoes are very tiny,” Lelouch says hoarsely. “I didn’t know they made shoes so small.”
Shirley instinctively looks down at her size-eights. Milly’s size-sevens.
He says, “Was I so small, mother? Or so pink? I think she looks like a little piglet. No, mother, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. She’s a cute piglet, so round and pink and then you dress her up in pink outfits. Oh, it was the maids? Can’t you tell them to put her in blue? That’s sexist, mother. What’s wrong with girls in blue? I think she’d look prettier in blue, her eyes are like yours and you look very nice in blue—
“I love you. …
“It’s just us, now. I promise I’ll always protect you, Nunally. Do you believe in me? I love you.”
Lelouch stands and rubs his sweating face again. He sways on his feet and manages to take a few shuffling steps forward. He holds his hands out in front of him vaguely, as if unenthusiastically miming taking hold of something.
He says, “The room is white. The window sills are full of flowers. This is our new home.”
Milly finally turns away and hides her face in her hands. She’s sobbing, Shirley realizes. She hurries forward and smack into Shirley, and Shirley puts her arms around the older girl. On the other end of the room, Lelouch wraps himself in his own arms and hums and sways and sings a song in Japanese. For a minute or two Shirley times the falling of her tears to the tick of the clock, audible over Lelouch’s mumbling. At some point Lelouch stumbles over to them and tugs on Shirley’s arm. “Come meet my sister,” he chuckles warmly. Shirley tears her arm away and turns her back on Lelouch. She wants no part of it. She will not indulge his weakness. Lelouch laughs again, breathlessly, and addresses the curtains instead.
Shirley isn’t one hundred percent sure what happens after that except at one point Milly runs crying from the room, trying desperately not to let tears fall or noises sound with one hand pressed over her mouth. Shirley recalls a hazy image of looking around the bend and seeing Milly and Rivalz at the end of the bright hallway beyond the apartment door. Rivalz looks white as a sheet as he clutches Milly’s arms. Milly shakes her head, tears halted, her head high and proud but red and wet in the unmistakable signs of crying.
And once or twice in her memories she sees Kallen with some frozen look of shocked disgust on her face, and Nina nervously curious, edging toward the door, like it’s some great zoo exhibit and the scientist in her can’t stand not looking but the little girl in her can’t bear to watch the cruelty. And at some point Shirley sits in the kitchen and an adult passes by the propped open door and then passes again. Lelouch comes into the kitchen a second later, clinging to walls and smiling over his shoulders. He takes a pudding cup from the fridge that clearly has a large ‘S’ in marker written on the lid, and Lelouch peels it back and eats it with a dipping finger. He says more things that Shirley isn’t sure of later, some conversation that only he can hear the other half of.
More adults. Lights being turned on everywhere. A police officer. Someone tearing apart Lelouch’s bedroom, Suzaku’s. Someone asks Shirley to leave. Shirley makes towards the apartment door but doubles back into Lelouch’s room. Lelouch has a gentle hand on one of the adult’s arms. “What are you looking for?” he asks softly. “Maybe I can help.”
The little box from the back of Lelouch’s closet is on the floor, burst open and contents spilling. They are photos of a little girl in pigtails, some with big blue eyes and other with her eyes inexplicably closed. There are also photos of Lelouch and Suzaku throughout the years, including one where Suzaku is wearing a strange robe, and one where there is another little girl with black hair with them. And there is the shattered half of some ornamental plate, and a few scraps of ribbon. The hinge of the box is broken—it had never been unlocked.
And then quite suddenly Lelouch is on the floor, jerking and foaming at the mouth and kicking the paramedics that swarm him. He says Suzaku’s name, and the name of his little sister, and he cries for his mother. His eyes roll and he spews and chokes on vomit. He goes blue and still and deathly-pale as they carry him off.
She recalls all of this with the clarity of a memory under water. The noises are distant, the expressions distorted, she can’t place directions, she can’t tell time. Someone asks, “Is he going to die?” and no one answers.
Sometime around eleven, Mr. Ashford peeks into the student council room and says mildly that it might be best for them all to go to sleep in their own dorms. Gathered solemnly inside like refugees waiting out a bombing, the student council members answer softly back, things like “Yeah…” and “Maybe…” and “In a second…” But not a single one of them makes a move and Mr. Ashford withdraws without pushing. He gives his granddaughter a small peck on the check before he goes.
The light bulbs in the ceiling are the same they’ve always been, but the room is so much dimmer without the traces of sunlight streaming through the windows. Suddenly the club house is overly large, deeply dark, and lonely. The sounds of Mr. Ashford’s steps retreating echoes on the tiles, heard even when the man has reached the floor below them. The front door closing moans down the barren hallways.
Every now and then a flurry of keystrokes like little mouse-feet running gently intrudes the silence. Nina raises her glasses afterwards and rubs her tired eyes before hunching over and glaring at the screen. She is currently researching Refrain in depth, and occasionally she reads aloud some passage that interests most of the room but from which Shirley and, oddly, Kallen, both flinch. Shirley looks over when she goes quiet and remembers Lelouch and Nina huddled together over the computer or over homework. Lelouch had been the only one capable of even keeping up with Nina, and Nina had appreciated him for that. Neither of them was a particularly friendly, engaging person, so it was difficult to realize until just this night, when Nina was fervent and hyper in her unrest. Oh yes. Nina and Lelouch are friends.
Rivalz had given up perusal of the television when the clock struck ten. His first reaction was a shocked, pale sobriety, and from there he had attempted humor and exuberance to make up somehow for the sweeping loss of all cheer in the council room. He had dared not joke about Lelouch, instead bringing up everyday topics like how Brad had actually slipped on a banana peel in the cafeteria that morning or how the math teacher clearly needed lessons in English. No one had thought him very funny, though, not even himself, but still he tried to fill the air with the broken garble of quickly dismissed stations and his own little chant of “No, no, no, no, nope, nope, nah…” Now finally he is still and silent, curled into a hard wooden chair at one end of the long table, his knees to his chin. Shirley remembers Rivalz and Lelouch taking off in Rivalz’ motorcycle and Rivalz enjoying a lunchbox from Lelouch. Lelouch is Rivalz’s best friend.
Kallen is harder. Kallen didn’t know Lelouch very long at all. But there she is, huddled under a blanket and stubbornly staving off sleep as she lies on the couch. Shirley remembers her crying at some point, for what Shirley can’t fathom. Kallen is not quite Lelouch’s friend, but she is still here, and Shirley suddenly feels incredibly warmer towards the girl since her vague anger from a few days ago. (Was it really only a few days ago?)
Milly is the only one on her feet. She stands next to the phone with a blank face and dallies between sitting and standing about every thirty minutes. Shirley remembers that the only tears she’d ever seen her strong, crazy student council president shed were for Lelouch. Shirley is just starting to grasp that maybe Milly feels a little something more for Lelouch than the rest of them. It’s like that sudden epiphany that comes to those students bad at math, where they realize just how clever all these little equations are but can’t for the life of them figure out how anyone came up with them in the first place. Yes, it feels something like that. But, well, after all, Milly has known Lelouch much longer than the rest of them. The only one who had known Lelouch longer is—
“What about Suzaku?” Shirley asks, and even though she whispered it sounds abnormally loud.
No one says anything back, but Kallen huffs and Rivalz shrugs. Nina spares a glance and then opens a new tab to investigate hospital policies, though that doesn’t very much help. Milly doesn’t move an inch.
Kallen has fallen asleep on the couch and Rivalz has fallen asleep with his head pillowed in his arms before the phone finally rings. Milly picks it up before the first ring is over. The room is so deathly quiet that Shirley can sort of hear some of the conversation.
“Yes, we’re still here,” Milly says.
“Well, your mother and father went as his guardians and … doctors said that … speak …”
“Okay. Okay… Okay,” Milly says with a sigh, mostly to herself. “So is he going to be alright? I mean, in the long run.”
“… too early … alive … “
“I’m happy…”
“…okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I suppose I won’t until I see him again. Grandpa, I want to take off school tomorrow. To go to the hospital.”
“…told you…”
“I know,” Milly sighs again. “But I still want to see him. And someone has to tell Zack—Grampy, can he please still work here? Please…”
“ We’ll talk about it… … …”
“I guess they can sleep in the clubhouse, right? It’s already one in the morning and the dorms are a long way away.”
“ … … ”
“I will. I love you too, grampy.” Milly rests the phone on its cradle. Shirley stands uncertainly as Milly shakes Rivalz awake. He jumps and she explains in whispers that they’re sleeping here tonight.
“But what about Lelouch?” he asks adamantly, offended that she suggest sleep when he does not yet know the fate of his best friend, as if he hadn’t been asleep for well over twenty-five minutes by now.
“He’s alive,” Milly says simply. “We don’t know the long-term effects yet, but right now he is paralyzed and can’t speak.”
“Paralyzed!”
“It just means he isn’t moving, not that he can’t,” Milly explains. Shirley wonders how she can be so calm in this situation. She continues as if their friend wasn’t half-dead, “Kallen can stay where she is. You can take the couch in—” and for the first time she falters but gulps and barges on “—in Suzaku’s apartment. And there are bedrooms for us.”
Milly leaves a note under Kallen’s sleep-heavy hand and then leads the rest of them into the apartment at the back of the clubhouse. Rivalz is asleep on the couch in an instant. Nina willingly takes the smallest bedroom, built for the maid that Suzaku and Lelouch never had. The bed in there is not dusty as Shirley expected of an unused room, but the police and the other adults absolutely wrecked it earlier and found three whole cartons of Refrain bottles, half of them empty.
Shirley hesitates farther down the hall. Suzaku’s and Lelouch’s rooms are side by side. But Milly makes her decision for her by sweeping past her gracefully and taking Lelouch’s room, leaving the door wide open. Shirley watches with her heart strangling her throat and burning her eyes as Milly carefully steps over the mess, removes her shoes, tie, and blazer, and then slides primly underneath Lelouch’s ruffled sheets. She snuggles her face into Lelouch’s pillow and settles there. Her eyes remain wide open.
Shirley swallows around the lump in her throat and takes Suzaku’s equally messy room. They had found no Refrain here and they seemed disappointed. Shirley sets her extra clothing aside and then drops down to the bed on the floor. As she lies on the floor, she feels her back straightening and stretching pleasantly. The blanket is heavy and warm and it smells very strongly of Suzaku—earth and soap and powerful maleness. Shirley can almost imagine his strong, muscled arms sliding around her, and suddenly she feels like everything will be alright because Lelouch is alive and he has Suzaku.
Shirley manages to sleep in spite of the occasional sharp gasping sob that drifts through the deep black home.
None of the student council had really expected the news of Lelouch’s hospitalization to remain quiet. There had still been a ton of students milling about on the campus when the ambulance pulled up. Still, no one was quite prepared for the news van that cornered students when they got too near the gates.
“Hello, miss,” a tall blonde man calls to Shirley as she rushes past on her way to the gym. “My name is Diethard Reid, and I was wondering if you could tell me about the recent and dramatic upsurge in students being hospitalized here!”
Shirley glares, disgusted. She was never one to spew hate for the media, but that is such a gross tweaking—“It was only two!”
“Friends of yours?” Reid says enthusiastically.
“You’re not allowed to ask about minors!”
A nasty smile is blossoming on Reid’s face abut Rivalz rushes forward and takes Shirley by the arm, steering her away forcefully. “Don’t even look at them,” Rivalz spits angrily.
Later on one student says something about that same blonde guy lighting up a cigarette and complaining of slow news days to his coworkers. “And he’s breaking the law, you know, he’s not allowed to light up so close to the school.”
“Of course, it wouldn’t take them long to get the real scoop,” Paulene the gossip says importantly that evening, brandishing her tablet computer. “See, here’s their website.”
The girls around her all gasp. Shirley squints at the celebrity page displayed on the tablet. There is a blurry picture of a gender-ambiguous person in sunglasses and a barrette hurrying quickly frown the camera, head down. The person’s clothes are designer and expensive; the hair peeking from the cap is a bright, well-groomed blonde. A man in a black suit is rushing toward the camera with a hand out while another suited man has his hand on the blonde’s back, urging the blonde forward. Shirley doesn’t exactly get it until someone flicks their finger on the screen and reveals the title of the page.
It reads, ‘Prince Clovis spotted visiting the hospital’. Shirley rolls her eyes. Of course, Prince Clovis is about the only thing Paulene could ever think of—she is such a fangirl.
“Prince Clovis,” Paulene reads loudly, and Shirley mostly tunes her out except for key phrases like, “…loyal subjects have noticed an unexplained sickening of their dearest prince… pale, nervous, and withdrawn, quite unlike our usual charismatic prince… why he didn’t choose to consult one of the royal physicians… possibly charity work…”
“Our mysterious prince,” some girl croons. Shirley sighs and checks her phone. She knows the Ashford family went to the hospital today too. She never asked Milly to, but Shirley had hoped the older girl might have at least texted her and informed her of—of—well, everything. Anything.
“Hey Shirley, what was the hospital they sent Lelouch and Zack to?” someone asks excitedly, effectively ripping Shirley from her reverie. Shirley stumbles for a second but comes up with the name. The gathered girls squeal and exchange rapid, excited looks.
“What?” Shirley demands, clearly missing out on the conversation.
“They’re being silly,” an older girl says as she turns a page in her book.
“What if Prince Clovis is visiting Lelouch?” Paulene fills in for Shirley.
“That’s dumb,” says Sophie.
“Just a hypothesis,” Paulene defends smugly.
“A dumb one,” Sophie shoots back.
“Yeah, I don’t think so either. But it’s a funny coincidence,” says a girl named Jessie. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it were true?”
“You never know.”
Shirley excuses herself from their company and goes to bed particularly early, gazing longingly at her phone.
When no word comes from Milly by morning, Shirley makes her decision—and she isn’t the only one judging by the loud roar outside the dorm. She dresses at breakneck speed, entirely forgoing any sense of beauty, and flies out of the dorms while most girls are still sitting up and rubbing their eyes.
“Are you gonna get on, or are you just gonna stare as I drive away?” Rivalz asks with a smirk. Shirley considers the rumbling motorcycle with some trepidation but also some undeniable excitement. Nina is already awkwardly settled into Rivalz’s sidecar, helmet secure and fingers clutching the sides hard. She is shaking her head and whimpering, and Shirley wants to hug and kiss the girl, because how much must it take for Nina to even consider skipping school?
“You’re on!” Shirley says loudly. Somehow they’re all a little less responsible in the absence of the most irresponsible guy they know. Rivalz gives her a thumbs-up and tosses her his own helmet. She protests mildly, but he only has two helmets after all.
Shirley settles in behind him on the bike amongst the stares of the students rising just barely from sleep. She wraps her arms around Rivalz’s broad torso and thinks, What is Milly thinking, ignoring the chivalrous, strong Rivalz for Lelouch of all people?
…but then again… though she didn’t like him at first... —she smiles—…there’s something about Lelouch that draws people in…
“Ready? Hold on very tightly! Here I go—“
The bike growls and sets off. Nina utters a tiny little scream and huddles down as far as she will go in the sidecar. Shirley can’t help her own yelp, but Rivalz just laughs, and soon they are on the open road and the wind is absolutely freezing on her face, disproportionately so to the actual temperature of this early April morning. The moment they reach the speed limit, Shirley knows fear and exhilaration, feeling like a kite to the wind, weightless, like at any moment she could lose her grip, fall off, and die. This is cool, she knows. She’d never really gotten the ‘cool’ factor of motorcycles—and now she does. (And yet Rivalz was entirely willing to forsake this ‘coolness’ and add a sidecar—just for Lelouch’s sake.)
After maybe ten minutes, Shirley is finally confident enough to lift her head and—she knows she’s doing what’s right—not morally right, with that she isn’t concerned. But what is right by her heart and what is right by the rules of friendship.
In the hospital parking lot, Nina falls out of the sidecar like she’s going to be sick, but thankfully she is not. The warm spring air finally settles back over them and they all laugh at each other’s wind-ruffled hair—laugh like they aren’t in the middle of a hospital parking lot while skipping school in order to visit their half-dead friend. Their cheer somehow lasted all the way up to the front desk where the nurse was neither the stereotypical grump nor the also stereotypical sweet-as-honey-mother-figure. She was just a normal woman living her life in a normal job, and she told them Lelouch’s room number and said that ‘Zack Lamperouge’ had already been discharged.
Shirley boldly opens the door of Lelouch’s single-occupant room first.
—and immediately stops and gasps.
The green-haired woman twists around in her chair and stares at them scrunched in the doorway with the same bored look as the last time Shirley had seen her. She’s still wearing that blasted orange jumpsuit.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hello,” Rivalz says from behind Shirley. He pokes Shirley in the back and slowly they file into the room. “Who are—“
“I was just going to leave,” the woman says. Shirley notices with a frown that she drops Lelouch’s hand, which she had been clutching just moments before. The woman then exits the room silently, lightly, gracefully, like a ghost, and the three members of the student council are left alone, previous cheer forgotten, in a cold, sparse hospital room.
Lelouch is propped up on his pillows, and his eyes are open, and his chest moves up and down in his breathing—but he does not acknowledge them. He does not so much as twitch or glance in their direction. As they draw closer, Shirley sees that the hand the woman had been holding is slowly relaxing from a curled state, like a spider dying in reverse.
He looks dead. In that room on Monday, it was his pale skin that stood out in the darkness. Now in the stark whiteness of the hospital room, it is his hair like a living inkblot that makes him remarkable. Otherwise he looks like uncolored line art, white skin to white sheets. His dark lashes, his dark eyes, his dark bruised arms are like stray marks by a clumsy artist. Even his lips are chapped and white, and his skin-and-bones frame is feeble and pathetic wrapped in the off-white hospital gown.
He needs help to breathe—there is a tube across his face, attached to his nose. An IV line sticks weirdly out of the arm less scarred.
“How long does he have to stay here?” Rivalz asks Nina.
Nina looks faintly embarrassed as she shrugs. “I’m not exactly sure. I suppose until he becomes responsive, at the very least. Then a psych evaluation, and a lot of what happens after that is up to the Ashford family.”
Rivalz has his eyes glued to his sickly friend. “Can’t he hear us?”
“Yes, most likely,” Nina says a bit more confidently. She must have found more pages dedicated to the after effects of Refrain overdose than the policy of caring for overdoses. “But it is unknown whether he is fully processing what he’s hearing, since he can make no response. But he is likely aware that we are present.”
Shirley lowers herself slowly into the seat that the mysterious green-haired woman had vacated minutes earlier. “So,” she says tentatively, “You know I’m here, Lelouch?” She puts her hand into his. It feels cold. Lelouch doesn’t react in the slightest. “Lelouch, we all came to see you. Can you feel my hand in yours?”
Rivalz and Nina look on in pronounced discomfort. Rivalz gives a great sniff.
“Can you hold my hand back, Lelouch? Can you squeeze?” Shirley asks clearly. She could have sworn that he was holding the hand of that woman. And if he was responding to her—“Please?
“…Lelouch, you don’t want to die, do you?”
But Lelouch does not squeeze her hand. The three visitors spend one desolate, quiet hour in the bleak hospital. Rivalz and Shirley take turns trying to talk to Lelouch. Nina sits on the end of his bed and pats his foot, but can find nothing to say. Later she apologizes for not knowing how to be a better friend, and Rivalz, unusually emotional after the visit, gives her a quick one-armed hug before going to warm up the motorcycle.
Shirley lingers on the last few minutes of their stay, the moment when Lelouch’s hand twitched under hers but did not close, and he let out a wordless grunt but spoke no more. Like a man sleeping, Rivalz had said, and they had left with disquieted stomachs and hearts and minds.
None of them bother going back to class when they get back to Ashford. Without words they mutually agree and trudge up to the clubhouse in tandem. Rivalz and Shirley while away the last hour of class by watching the television with pronounced disinterest; Nina spends it on the internet, hopelessly making up for the knowledge she lacked in the hospital.
Kallen doesn’t show up for the afternoon’s council meeting. Milly shows up thirty minutes late. She takes a startled look around the room and says, “There you guys are! I had a hunch you went to the hospital. Geez.”
She looks a little older than she usually does—not half as exuberant, but still perfectly confident with her hands on her hips.
“I can’t believe you guys,” she says sternly. “Not even visiting Suzaku!”
It takes a minute before Rivalz and Shirley gasp; Nina hunches down—she, apparently, had realized immediately and simply failed to bring it up. She stays behind as the other three go to the back of the clubhouse and, once again, enter that damned apartment where so many things have gone wrong.
Suzaku is propped up on Lelouch’s soft bed: a number of pillows have been added since last Shirley had seen the place on Monday night, Tuesday morning. His leg and arm, both in a cast, are gently pillowed. An Eleven maid with kind, warm brown eyes is tidying up the damage done by the police. Suzaku opens his eyes when he hears them approach.
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes the way it usually does. “If I had been there…” he whispers during a lull in the conversation.
Milly, Rivalz, and Shirley stare at him with newly budding horror and pity. The maid, Sayoko, hastily gathers a pile of dirty laundry that had previously been neatly piled in a wastebasket and leaves the room. Long seconds pass.
“…it’s my fault. I know better than to leave him alone.”
“Suzaku,” Milly says reasonably, “there’s nothing you could have done. It wasn’t like it was your choice to get hurt.”
Suzaku turns his head and a pained expression arises. Shirley’s eyes widen and she bites her lip, remembering what Lelouch had said about the incident. It couldn’t be—it just couldn’t, could it? (Who is she supposed to trust here?)
“I suppose not,” he says hoarsely. Then he apologizes and says that his head hurts something terrible and could they please leave him now. Many, many apologies.
Miraculously, Lelouch is released by the middle of the next week. Suzaku tells Shirley immediately, a quick text during third period: ‘lelouch home’ and Shirley feels a little fire cracker go off in her belly. Already? So he can walk and talk and everything? He didn’t do any permanent damage after all? No holding due to psychological reasons, no admittance into a rehab program? What? What?
Though she texts Suzaku back, Suzaku sends only: ‘txt is hard, talk l8r’.
Right after school, she tells herself. After school, after school. During the last period of the day, she gets another text. Having been spreading the news to Rivalz, Nina, and Kallen, she feels a great lurching jolt in her stomach to see not a reply from those three but instead the name ‘Lelouch’ popping on her screen.
‘I’m not like Suzaku. I don’t want to die.’
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Code Geass
Characters: Shirley-pov. Lelouch, Suzaku.
Summary: (Kinkmeme request.) Shirley tries to understand Lelouch. She really, really tries. But as Suzaku says: Lelouch doesn't want to be liked. He doesn't even want to like. And Shirley has to wonder if either of her friends hold any kind of hope in their hearts at all.
Notes: I thought chapter 5 was going to be the final chapter. I was wrong! Some of the scenes really grew from what I had originally planned. So this is NOT the final chapter! :P
Lelouch: temperamental, angry, and sometimes cruel. He had argued with Suzaku for a week prior to Suzaku’s fall. Lelouch had been the only one on the tower with Suzaku. He had been questioned by police. He had refused to tell anyone else the true story of the incident. Afterwards, he did not bother to visit Suzaku in the hospital.
Suzaku was worried for Lelouch. He and Lelouch were not on good terms.
Suzaku, Shirley knew, would do anything to protect Lelouch, including hiding the truth of Lelouch’s Refrain use.
Would he also hide the fact that Lelouch had pushed him off of a three-story tower? Would Suzaku’s tender, protective feelings really go that far?
Shirley knocks for five minutes on Lelouch’s door—literally, five, she checks her phone for the time every thirty seconds because it feels more like an hour passes without answer. Finally the door’s many locks unclick and Lelouch throws open the door with a snarled “What do you want?”
Shirley gasps and takes an instinctive step back. Lelouch’s usually handsome face is twisted into a horrific grimace. His teeth are bared like a threatened animal. Shirley has never, never seen Lelouch this angry.
So this is what Suzaku has to ‘help’ Lelouch with.
“What do you want, Shirley?” Lelouch repeats brusquely but not quite as venomously.
“Su—… I was asked to check up on you.”
Lelouch glares at her, fire burning in his eyes. He steps back and allows Shirley into the apartment entrance. She crosses the threshold nervously, expecting him to shove her at any moment. Strangely, though, she does not feel angry with Lelouch. Seeing him like this, she is only one stop short of certain that it was Lelouch that pushed Suzaku. But she is not angry. Is this what Suzaku feels for him? She thinks that maybe Lelouch regretted it as soon as it happened. Shirley thinks that Lelouch really does lo—
(What kind of thinking is that?)
“Suzaku asked me. He’s worried about you.”
Lelouch doesn’t budge an inch. They stand there, in the entrance hall of the apartment and no further, staring at each other, Lelouch’s hands balled into fists.
“I’ll bet. He has a sort of holier-than-thou attitude,” Lelouch hisses.
“That’s not fair,” Shirley says, remembering only halfway through the sentence to keep her voice calm and even. “He cares about you. He’s your friend. He wants you to be happy.”
“He’s a fraud,” Lelouch growls, looking madder than ever. He takes one step towards Shirley. She (barely) manages to hold her ground. “Did he have you thinking he was a saint, Shirley? Don’t believe his shit. He’s not better than me! He’s just as despicable as I am! He just doesn’t know how to put his guilt behind him, get over himself, long enough to do what needs to be done!”
Shirley shakes her head in disbelief. She’d never have thought such vile, hateful words could have come from Lelouch’s mouth, not about Suzaku at least. Before she can stop herself, she asks impassionedly, “Why did you push him, Lelouch?”
—but she has said the wrong thing, utterly.
“PUSH HIM!” Lelouch spits, face contorting in rage. “Push him! Fuck you! Fuck that! Fuck everyone! I know that’s what they think! What the police think, but they don’t really even care whether I did or not! What the other students think, but I don’t give a damn! Push him! Is that what he’s telling you? I thought you would know, you’re so goddamn cozy with him! Cozy, yes, cozy. Thought he would have told you the truth.”
Shirley backs away to the door, opens it behind her back.
“HE FUCKING FELL OFF ON PURPOSE! On purpose! It’s not me! He hurts himself on purpose! You haven’t noticed?”
As she runs he calls after her, “THIS ISN’T MY FAULT!”
—and he moans in agony when she’s too far away to turn back, “None of it. None of them. I only want to protect—”
Shirley should have told someone what happened. She knows that now. She should not have left Lelouch alone after that, she should have done this, she could have done that, she would have, but…
The council room is somber like a funeral on Monday. Lelouch had not been in class all day.
“He’s in there,” Rivalz mumbles, nodding to the hall, to the door out of their sight. Rivalz’s pen is going back and forth over the poster submission he is supposed to be approving or rejecting, making little lines like daggers through the little printed graphics.
Only Nina is actually doing work. Shirley has learned that burying herself in her computer programs is Nina’s first response to stress. Milly, on the other hand, is pacing, full of energy but no focus, and Kallen is frozen in the seat farthest from Nina’s computer, looking pensive, and Rivalz listlessly goes through the motions of student council work.
Shirley feels a little something like Saturday’s fear well up inside of her all over again. She keeps seeing that distorted, angry snarl in the back of her mind. It’s like a tiger prowls behind the secret locked door of the Ashford Academy student club house.
“It wasn’t Lelouch,” Milly says suddenly.
“How do you know that?” Shirley asks quietly. Lelouch might have told her one thing, but Suzaku had said another, and the police had implied yet another. Shirley has no idea who to start believing.
“Lelouch wouldn’t hurt Suzaku,” Milly says. She sounds so sure.
Would Suzaku hurt Suzaku? Shirley thinks. Thinks of all the little injuries he’s seemed to crop up with over the years. She thought mostly he was just sort of clumsy and she hadn’t really noted them after a while. There was that one time, of course, with his broken leg, but—who in their right mind honestly jumped off ladders, like Lelouch had muttered about at that time?
Who in the world would willingly put themselves in the path of danger?
“Shirley! Come with me, please,” Milly says very abruptly, and just as abruptly turns on her heel and marches out of the council room.
“Madam President?” Shirley calls wonderingly, hurrying after her with many looks over her shoulder at the rest of the confused council. Milly is already hurrying down the hallway to Lelouch and Suzaku’s apartment by the time the council room door swings closed. “Madam President, what are we doing?”
“I’m going to ask him myself,” Milly says loudly. Shirley is mystified and even a little horrified to detect the faintest waver in her voice, the barest shimmering wetness in her eyes.
“Oh—oh no, Madam President, I—I don’t think that’s a very good—“
“I’ll get him to say the truth, and then no one will question him after that,” Milly barges on, pulling a key from her pocket—a skeleton key—“He’s a good person. He’s—“
Milly doesn’t finish that sentence and Shirley, face crinkled with stress and worry, doesn’t ask her to.
The lock clicks; the door swings open with a small whoosh of air. “Lelouch?” Milly calls before stepping boldly over the threshold. Shirley follows with her heart beating in her throat, a bad feeling settling in her bones.
“Lelouch?” Milly turns the corner and strides into the living room, but Shirley sees the edge of her blonde hair swing to a stop. “What are you doing in here? In the dark?”
Shirley breathes sharply through her nose, dreading the moment she follows Milly around that corner.
Lelouch is nearly one with the darkness of the living room: his black hair and black clothes all blend into shadows. Only his pale skin stands out amidst the fabric of a dark armchair. Shirley winces when Milly clicks on the nearest lamp and the room flares up in dim orange light, casting darker shadows still and illuminating things best left to the unknown.
In the orange light, they can see that he is sweaty and shivering. His eyes are darkened and wide, the bags beneath them heavy and pronounced. His hair is wet, but only on one side and the tips—there is, oddly, large chunks of still-dry hair, but more clings to his temple in sick, unclean swathes. He doesn’t look at them, instead staring vaguely in the direction of the empty couch, and his gaze flickers briefly but never to anything concrete. So sweaty—Shirley can’t tell if that is water or sweat pearling and sliding down his neck. Lelouch is half-dressed, in dark jeans and a slim black undershirt—as if he was preparing to go somewhere and stopped halfway through.
And his arms—his arms in the lamplight are—pale and bloody and bruised and scared and—
“Lelouch,” Milly whispers into the dimness. Neither girl moves forward, paralyzed on the spot.
Lelouch says nothing but licks chapped lips and reaches out for a water bottle. He sips it idly, gulping around the tiny mouthfuls, dry and thick. He rocks back and forth in small ways. Then he sets the bottle aside and rubs his face in his long-fingered hands, taking deep breaths. Eventually he begins to smile while his friends look on without speech of their own. His toes twitch spastically and knock over two dark vials from which nothing spills.
“Her shoes are very tiny,” Lelouch says hoarsely. “I didn’t know they made shoes so small.”
Shirley instinctively looks down at her size-eights. Milly’s size-sevens.
He says, “Was I so small, mother? Or so pink? I think she looks like a little piglet. No, mother, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. She’s a cute piglet, so round and pink and then you dress her up in pink outfits. Oh, it was the maids? Can’t you tell them to put her in blue? That’s sexist, mother. What’s wrong with girls in blue? I think she’d look prettier in blue, her eyes are like yours and you look very nice in blue—
“I love you. …
“It’s just us, now. I promise I’ll always protect you, Nunally. Do you believe in me? I love you.”
Lelouch stands and rubs his sweating face again. He sways on his feet and manages to take a few shuffling steps forward. He holds his hands out in front of him vaguely, as if unenthusiastically miming taking hold of something.
He says, “The room is white. The window sills are full of flowers. This is our new home.”
Milly finally turns away and hides her face in her hands. She’s sobbing, Shirley realizes. She hurries forward and smack into Shirley, and Shirley puts her arms around the older girl. On the other end of the room, Lelouch wraps himself in his own arms and hums and sways and sings a song in Japanese. For a minute or two Shirley times the falling of her tears to the tick of the clock, audible over Lelouch’s mumbling. At some point Lelouch stumbles over to them and tugs on Shirley’s arm. “Come meet my sister,” he chuckles warmly. Shirley tears her arm away and turns her back on Lelouch. She wants no part of it. She will not indulge his weakness. Lelouch laughs again, breathlessly, and addresses the curtains instead.
Shirley isn’t one hundred percent sure what happens after that except at one point Milly runs crying from the room, trying desperately not to let tears fall or noises sound with one hand pressed over her mouth. Shirley recalls a hazy image of looking around the bend and seeing Milly and Rivalz at the end of the bright hallway beyond the apartment door. Rivalz looks white as a sheet as he clutches Milly’s arms. Milly shakes her head, tears halted, her head high and proud but red and wet in the unmistakable signs of crying.
And once or twice in her memories she sees Kallen with some frozen look of shocked disgust on her face, and Nina nervously curious, edging toward the door, like it’s some great zoo exhibit and the scientist in her can’t stand not looking but the little girl in her can’t bear to watch the cruelty. And at some point Shirley sits in the kitchen and an adult passes by the propped open door and then passes again. Lelouch comes into the kitchen a second later, clinging to walls and smiling over his shoulders. He takes a pudding cup from the fridge that clearly has a large ‘S’ in marker written on the lid, and Lelouch peels it back and eats it with a dipping finger. He says more things that Shirley isn’t sure of later, some conversation that only he can hear the other half of.
More adults. Lights being turned on everywhere. A police officer. Someone tearing apart Lelouch’s bedroom, Suzaku’s. Someone asks Shirley to leave. Shirley makes towards the apartment door but doubles back into Lelouch’s room. Lelouch has a gentle hand on one of the adult’s arms. “What are you looking for?” he asks softly. “Maybe I can help.”
The little box from the back of Lelouch’s closet is on the floor, burst open and contents spilling. They are photos of a little girl in pigtails, some with big blue eyes and other with her eyes inexplicably closed. There are also photos of Lelouch and Suzaku throughout the years, including one where Suzaku is wearing a strange robe, and one where there is another little girl with black hair with them. And there is the shattered half of some ornamental plate, and a few scraps of ribbon. The hinge of the box is broken—it had never been unlocked.
And then quite suddenly Lelouch is on the floor, jerking and foaming at the mouth and kicking the paramedics that swarm him. He says Suzaku’s name, and the name of his little sister, and he cries for his mother. His eyes roll and he spews and chokes on vomit. He goes blue and still and deathly-pale as they carry him off.
She recalls all of this with the clarity of a memory under water. The noises are distant, the expressions distorted, she can’t place directions, she can’t tell time. Someone asks, “Is he going to die?” and no one answers.
Sometime around eleven, Mr. Ashford peeks into the student council room and says mildly that it might be best for them all to go to sleep in their own dorms. Gathered solemnly inside like refugees waiting out a bombing, the student council members answer softly back, things like “Yeah…” and “Maybe…” and “In a second…” But not a single one of them makes a move and Mr. Ashford withdraws without pushing. He gives his granddaughter a small peck on the check before he goes.
The light bulbs in the ceiling are the same they’ve always been, but the room is so much dimmer without the traces of sunlight streaming through the windows. Suddenly the club house is overly large, deeply dark, and lonely. The sounds of Mr. Ashford’s steps retreating echoes on the tiles, heard even when the man has reached the floor below them. The front door closing moans down the barren hallways.
Every now and then a flurry of keystrokes like little mouse-feet running gently intrudes the silence. Nina raises her glasses afterwards and rubs her tired eyes before hunching over and glaring at the screen. She is currently researching Refrain in depth, and occasionally she reads aloud some passage that interests most of the room but from which Shirley and, oddly, Kallen, both flinch. Shirley looks over when she goes quiet and remembers Lelouch and Nina huddled together over the computer or over homework. Lelouch had been the only one capable of even keeping up with Nina, and Nina had appreciated him for that. Neither of them was a particularly friendly, engaging person, so it was difficult to realize until just this night, when Nina was fervent and hyper in her unrest. Oh yes. Nina and Lelouch are friends.
Rivalz had given up perusal of the television when the clock struck ten. His first reaction was a shocked, pale sobriety, and from there he had attempted humor and exuberance to make up somehow for the sweeping loss of all cheer in the council room. He had dared not joke about Lelouch, instead bringing up everyday topics like how Brad had actually slipped on a banana peel in the cafeteria that morning or how the math teacher clearly needed lessons in English. No one had thought him very funny, though, not even himself, but still he tried to fill the air with the broken garble of quickly dismissed stations and his own little chant of “No, no, no, no, nope, nope, nah…” Now finally he is still and silent, curled into a hard wooden chair at one end of the long table, his knees to his chin. Shirley remembers Rivalz and Lelouch taking off in Rivalz’ motorcycle and Rivalz enjoying a lunchbox from Lelouch. Lelouch is Rivalz’s best friend.
Kallen is harder. Kallen didn’t know Lelouch very long at all. But there she is, huddled under a blanket and stubbornly staving off sleep as she lies on the couch. Shirley remembers her crying at some point, for what Shirley can’t fathom. Kallen is not quite Lelouch’s friend, but she is still here, and Shirley suddenly feels incredibly warmer towards the girl since her vague anger from a few days ago. (Was it really only a few days ago?)
Milly is the only one on her feet. She stands next to the phone with a blank face and dallies between sitting and standing about every thirty minutes. Shirley remembers that the only tears she’d ever seen her strong, crazy student council president shed were for Lelouch. Shirley is just starting to grasp that maybe Milly feels a little something more for Lelouch than the rest of them. It’s like that sudden epiphany that comes to those students bad at math, where they realize just how clever all these little equations are but can’t for the life of them figure out how anyone came up with them in the first place. Yes, it feels something like that. But, well, after all, Milly has known Lelouch much longer than the rest of them. The only one who had known Lelouch longer is—
“What about Suzaku?” Shirley asks, and even though she whispered it sounds abnormally loud.
No one says anything back, but Kallen huffs and Rivalz shrugs. Nina spares a glance and then opens a new tab to investigate hospital policies, though that doesn’t very much help. Milly doesn’t move an inch.
Kallen has fallen asleep on the couch and Rivalz has fallen asleep with his head pillowed in his arms before the phone finally rings. Milly picks it up before the first ring is over. The room is so deathly quiet that Shirley can sort of hear some of the conversation.
“Yes, we’re still here,” Milly says.
“Well, your mother and father went as his guardians and … doctors said that … speak …”
“Okay. Okay… Okay,” Milly says with a sigh, mostly to herself. “So is he going to be alright? I mean, in the long run.”
“… too early … alive … “
“I’m happy…”
“…okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I suppose I won’t until I see him again. Grandpa, I want to take off school tomorrow. To go to the hospital.”
“…told you…”
“I know,” Milly sighs again. “But I still want to see him. And someone has to tell Zack—Grampy, can he please still work here? Please…”
“ We’ll talk about it… … …”
“I guess they can sleep in the clubhouse, right? It’s already one in the morning and the dorms are a long way away.”
“ … … ”
“I will. I love you too, grampy.” Milly rests the phone on its cradle. Shirley stands uncertainly as Milly shakes Rivalz awake. He jumps and she explains in whispers that they’re sleeping here tonight.
“But what about Lelouch?” he asks adamantly, offended that she suggest sleep when he does not yet know the fate of his best friend, as if he hadn’t been asleep for well over twenty-five minutes by now.
“He’s alive,” Milly says simply. “We don’t know the long-term effects yet, but right now he is paralyzed and can’t speak.”
“Paralyzed!”
“It just means he isn’t moving, not that he can’t,” Milly explains. Shirley wonders how she can be so calm in this situation. She continues as if their friend wasn’t half-dead, “Kallen can stay where she is. You can take the couch in—” and for the first time she falters but gulps and barges on “—in Suzaku’s apartment. And there are bedrooms for us.”
Milly leaves a note under Kallen’s sleep-heavy hand and then leads the rest of them into the apartment at the back of the clubhouse. Rivalz is asleep on the couch in an instant. Nina willingly takes the smallest bedroom, built for the maid that Suzaku and Lelouch never had. The bed in there is not dusty as Shirley expected of an unused room, but the police and the other adults absolutely wrecked it earlier and found three whole cartons of Refrain bottles, half of them empty.
Shirley hesitates farther down the hall. Suzaku’s and Lelouch’s rooms are side by side. But Milly makes her decision for her by sweeping past her gracefully and taking Lelouch’s room, leaving the door wide open. Shirley watches with her heart strangling her throat and burning her eyes as Milly carefully steps over the mess, removes her shoes, tie, and blazer, and then slides primly underneath Lelouch’s ruffled sheets. She snuggles her face into Lelouch’s pillow and settles there. Her eyes remain wide open.
Shirley swallows around the lump in her throat and takes Suzaku’s equally messy room. They had found no Refrain here and they seemed disappointed. Shirley sets her extra clothing aside and then drops down to the bed on the floor. As she lies on the floor, she feels her back straightening and stretching pleasantly. The blanket is heavy and warm and it smells very strongly of Suzaku—earth and soap and powerful maleness. Shirley can almost imagine his strong, muscled arms sliding around her, and suddenly she feels like everything will be alright because Lelouch is alive and he has Suzaku.
Shirley manages to sleep in spite of the occasional sharp gasping sob that drifts through the deep black home.
None of the student council had really expected the news of Lelouch’s hospitalization to remain quiet. There had still been a ton of students milling about on the campus when the ambulance pulled up. Still, no one was quite prepared for the news van that cornered students when they got too near the gates.
“Hello, miss,” a tall blonde man calls to Shirley as she rushes past on her way to the gym. “My name is Diethard Reid, and I was wondering if you could tell me about the recent and dramatic upsurge in students being hospitalized here!”
Shirley glares, disgusted. She was never one to spew hate for the media, but that is such a gross tweaking—“It was only two!”
“Friends of yours?” Reid says enthusiastically.
“You’re not allowed to ask about minors!”
A nasty smile is blossoming on Reid’s face abut Rivalz rushes forward and takes Shirley by the arm, steering her away forcefully. “Don’t even look at them,” Rivalz spits angrily.
Later on one student says something about that same blonde guy lighting up a cigarette and complaining of slow news days to his coworkers. “And he’s breaking the law, you know, he’s not allowed to light up so close to the school.”
“Of course, it wouldn’t take them long to get the real scoop,” Paulene the gossip says importantly that evening, brandishing her tablet computer. “See, here’s their website.”
The girls around her all gasp. Shirley squints at the celebrity page displayed on the tablet. There is a blurry picture of a gender-ambiguous person in sunglasses and a barrette hurrying quickly frown the camera, head down. The person’s clothes are designer and expensive; the hair peeking from the cap is a bright, well-groomed blonde. A man in a black suit is rushing toward the camera with a hand out while another suited man has his hand on the blonde’s back, urging the blonde forward. Shirley doesn’t exactly get it until someone flicks their finger on the screen and reveals the title of the page.
It reads, ‘Prince Clovis spotted visiting the hospital’. Shirley rolls her eyes. Of course, Prince Clovis is about the only thing Paulene could ever think of—she is such a fangirl.
“Prince Clovis,” Paulene reads loudly, and Shirley mostly tunes her out except for key phrases like, “…loyal subjects have noticed an unexplained sickening of their dearest prince… pale, nervous, and withdrawn, quite unlike our usual charismatic prince… why he didn’t choose to consult one of the royal physicians… possibly charity work…”
“Our mysterious prince,” some girl croons. Shirley sighs and checks her phone. She knows the Ashford family went to the hospital today too. She never asked Milly to, but Shirley had hoped the older girl might have at least texted her and informed her of—of—well, everything. Anything.
“Hey Shirley, what was the hospital they sent Lelouch and Zack to?” someone asks excitedly, effectively ripping Shirley from her reverie. Shirley stumbles for a second but comes up with the name. The gathered girls squeal and exchange rapid, excited looks.
“What?” Shirley demands, clearly missing out on the conversation.
“They’re being silly,” an older girl says as she turns a page in her book.
“What if Prince Clovis is visiting Lelouch?” Paulene fills in for Shirley.
“That’s dumb,” says Sophie.
“Just a hypothesis,” Paulene defends smugly.
“A dumb one,” Sophie shoots back.
“Yeah, I don’t think so either. But it’s a funny coincidence,” says a girl named Jessie. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it were true?”
“You never know.”
Shirley excuses herself from their company and goes to bed particularly early, gazing longingly at her phone.
When no word comes from Milly by morning, Shirley makes her decision—and she isn’t the only one judging by the loud roar outside the dorm. She dresses at breakneck speed, entirely forgoing any sense of beauty, and flies out of the dorms while most girls are still sitting up and rubbing their eyes.
“Are you gonna get on, or are you just gonna stare as I drive away?” Rivalz asks with a smirk. Shirley considers the rumbling motorcycle with some trepidation but also some undeniable excitement. Nina is already awkwardly settled into Rivalz’s sidecar, helmet secure and fingers clutching the sides hard. She is shaking her head and whimpering, and Shirley wants to hug and kiss the girl, because how much must it take for Nina to even consider skipping school?
“You’re on!” Shirley says loudly. Somehow they’re all a little less responsible in the absence of the most irresponsible guy they know. Rivalz gives her a thumbs-up and tosses her his own helmet. She protests mildly, but he only has two helmets after all.
Shirley settles in behind him on the bike amongst the stares of the students rising just barely from sleep. She wraps her arms around Rivalz’s broad torso and thinks, What is Milly thinking, ignoring the chivalrous, strong Rivalz for Lelouch of all people?
…but then again… though she didn’t like him at first... —she smiles—…there’s something about Lelouch that draws people in…
“Ready? Hold on very tightly! Here I go—“
The bike growls and sets off. Nina utters a tiny little scream and huddles down as far as she will go in the sidecar. Shirley can’t help her own yelp, but Rivalz just laughs, and soon they are on the open road and the wind is absolutely freezing on her face, disproportionately so to the actual temperature of this early April morning. The moment they reach the speed limit, Shirley knows fear and exhilaration, feeling like a kite to the wind, weightless, like at any moment she could lose her grip, fall off, and die. This is cool, she knows. She’d never really gotten the ‘cool’ factor of motorcycles—and now she does. (And yet Rivalz was entirely willing to forsake this ‘coolness’ and add a sidecar—just for Lelouch’s sake.)
After maybe ten minutes, Shirley is finally confident enough to lift her head and—she knows she’s doing what’s right—not morally right, with that she isn’t concerned. But what is right by her heart and what is right by the rules of friendship.
In the hospital parking lot, Nina falls out of the sidecar like she’s going to be sick, but thankfully she is not. The warm spring air finally settles back over them and they all laugh at each other’s wind-ruffled hair—laugh like they aren’t in the middle of a hospital parking lot while skipping school in order to visit their half-dead friend. Their cheer somehow lasted all the way up to the front desk where the nurse was neither the stereotypical grump nor the also stereotypical sweet-as-honey-mother-figure. She was just a normal woman living her life in a normal job, and she told them Lelouch’s room number and said that ‘Zack Lamperouge’ had already been discharged.
Shirley boldly opens the door of Lelouch’s single-occupant room first.
—and immediately stops and gasps.
The green-haired woman twists around in her chair and stares at them scrunched in the doorway with the same bored look as the last time Shirley had seen her. She’s still wearing that blasted orange jumpsuit.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hello,” Rivalz says from behind Shirley. He pokes Shirley in the back and slowly they file into the room. “Who are—“
“I was just going to leave,” the woman says. Shirley notices with a frown that she drops Lelouch’s hand, which she had been clutching just moments before. The woman then exits the room silently, lightly, gracefully, like a ghost, and the three members of the student council are left alone, previous cheer forgotten, in a cold, sparse hospital room.
Lelouch is propped up on his pillows, and his eyes are open, and his chest moves up and down in his breathing—but he does not acknowledge them. He does not so much as twitch or glance in their direction. As they draw closer, Shirley sees that the hand the woman had been holding is slowly relaxing from a curled state, like a spider dying in reverse.
He looks dead. In that room on Monday, it was his pale skin that stood out in the darkness. Now in the stark whiteness of the hospital room, it is his hair like a living inkblot that makes him remarkable. Otherwise he looks like uncolored line art, white skin to white sheets. His dark lashes, his dark eyes, his dark bruised arms are like stray marks by a clumsy artist. Even his lips are chapped and white, and his skin-and-bones frame is feeble and pathetic wrapped in the off-white hospital gown.
He needs help to breathe—there is a tube across his face, attached to his nose. An IV line sticks weirdly out of the arm less scarred.
“How long does he have to stay here?” Rivalz asks Nina.
Nina looks faintly embarrassed as she shrugs. “I’m not exactly sure. I suppose until he becomes responsive, at the very least. Then a psych evaluation, and a lot of what happens after that is up to the Ashford family.”
Rivalz has his eyes glued to his sickly friend. “Can’t he hear us?”
“Yes, most likely,” Nina says a bit more confidently. She must have found more pages dedicated to the after effects of Refrain overdose than the policy of caring for overdoses. “But it is unknown whether he is fully processing what he’s hearing, since he can make no response. But he is likely aware that we are present.”
Shirley lowers herself slowly into the seat that the mysterious green-haired woman had vacated minutes earlier. “So,” she says tentatively, “You know I’m here, Lelouch?” She puts her hand into his. It feels cold. Lelouch doesn’t react in the slightest. “Lelouch, we all came to see you. Can you feel my hand in yours?”
Rivalz and Nina look on in pronounced discomfort. Rivalz gives a great sniff.
“Can you hold my hand back, Lelouch? Can you squeeze?” Shirley asks clearly. She could have sworn that he was holding the hand of that woman. And if he was responding to her—“Please?
“…Lelouch, you don’t want to die, do you?”
But Lelouch does not squeeze her hand. The three visitors spend one desolate, quiet hour in the bleak hospital. Rivalz and Shirley take turns trying to talk to Lelouch. Nina sits on the end of his bed and pats his foot, but can find nothing to say. Later she apologizes for not knowing how to be a better friend, and Rivalz, unusually emotional after the visit, gives her a quick one-armed hug before going to warm up the motorcycle.
Shirley lingers on the last few minutes of their stay, the moment when Lelouch’s hand twitched under hers but did not close, and he let out a wordless grunt but spoke no more. Like a man sleeping, Rivalz had said, and they had left with disquieted stomachs and hearts and minds.
None of them bother going back to class when they get back to Ashford. Without words they mutually agree and trudge up to the clubhouse in tandem. Rivalz and Shirley while away the last hour of class by watching the television with pronounced disinterest; Nina spends it on the internet, hopelessly making up for the knowledge she lacked in the hospital.
Kallen doesn’t show up for the afternoon’s council meeting. Milly shows up thirty minutes late. She takes a startled look around the room and says, “There you guys are! I had a hunch you went to the hospital. Geez.”
She looks a little older than she usually does—not half as exuberant, but still perfectly confident with her hands on her hips.
“I can’t believe you guys,” she says sternly. “Not even visiting Suzaku!”
It takes a minute before Rivalz and Shirley gasp; Nina hunches down—she, apparently, had realized immediately and simply failed to bring it up. She stays behind as the other three go to the back of the clubhouse and, once again, enter that damned apartment where so many things have gone wrong.
Suzaku is propped up on Lelouch’s soft bed: a number of pillows have been added since last Shirley had seen the place on Monday night, Tuesday morning. His leg and arm, both in a cast, are gently pillowed. An Eleven maid with kind, warm brown eyes is tidying up the damage done by the police. Suzaku opens his eyes when he hears them approach.
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes the way it usually does. “If I had been there…” he whispers during a lull in the conversation.
Milly, Rivalz, and Shirley stare at him with newly budding horror and pity. The maid, Sayoko, hastily gathers a pile of dirty laundry that had previously been neatly piled in a wastebasket and leaves the room. Long seconds pass.
“…it’s my fault. I know better than to leave him alone.”
“Suzaku,” Milly says reasonably, “there’s nothing you could have done. It wasn’t like it was your choice to get hurt.”
Suzaku turns his head and a pained expression arises. Shirley’s eyes widen and she bites her lip, remembering what Lelouch had said about the incident. It couldn’t be—it just couldn’t, could it? (Who is she supposed to trust here?)
“I suppose not,” he says hoarsely. Then he apologizes and says that his head hurts something terrible and could they please leave him now. Many, many apologies.
Miraculously, Lelouch is released by the middle of the next week. Suzaku tells Shirley immediately, a quick text during third period: ‘lelouch home’ and Shirley feels a little fire cracker go off in her belly. Already? So he can walk and talk and everything? He didn’t do any permanent damage after all? No holding due to psychological reasons, no admittance into a rehab program? What? What?
Though she texts Suzaku back, Suzaku sends only: ‘txt is hard, talk l8r’.
Right after school, she tells herself. After school, after school. During the last period of the day, she gets another text. Having been spreading the news to Rivalz, Nina, and Kallen, she feels a great lurching jolt in her stomach to see not a reply from those three but instead the name ‘Lelouch’ popping on her screen.
‘I’m not like Suzaku. I don’t want to die.’
