I'm confused...

I first read this years ago, and I keep coming back to it. It’s just beautiful, an excellent depiction of the childhoods and teenage of two young men with a love/hate relationship. It’s technically advanced, filled with beautiful metaphors and imagery, jumping back and forward in time, juggling different perspectives and writing styles, and demonstrating how to use a reoccurring element (frogs, cicadas, the gilt-edged/cardboard cards) to drive knives into readers’ hearts. It hands out the jigsaw pieces of its plot one bit at a time, until they all fall into place for a stunning conclusion.

Aside from the excellent character writing and the way it fills in some holes in canon, there is also the stunning grasp of tarot imagery to praise. The fic is broken into bits, and each bit is prefaced with a new card. You don’t have to know the symbolism, because the story explains the most important ones, but if you do…. wow. Just jaw-dropping.

Splendid story from beginning to end. I realise I'm years late with this, but I hope you won't mind.
I have nothing but praise for this story; you nailed the characters perfectly and gave depth to all of them.
I love the tarot reading - alright, I disagree about spades being air, but that takes nothing away from my enjoyment of the story so it's alright - and how the symbols and the event are retold and related.
Lovely perfect story.
Just one not-so-niggly nitpick: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is by Keats, not Yates - which should be Yeats, BTW - I' actually surprised nobody else told you.
Thank you for your lovely fic.

Hello !
Once again, I sort of agree with everything my fellow reviewers already said. This is by far one of the most beautiful and the most confusing things I've got to read on this fandom. I love the ideas behind it, your way of writing, the symbolism, and mostly your writing style, but it was still so hard to understand. We sometimes don't know whose point of view we're reading, and what happened to whom. Mostly the post-R1 passages, actually. Since it doesn't exactly follow a chronological order, and since the reader is unaware of how things went in your universe, sometimes it gets a little frustrating. When it came to a past we could understand, the vagueness was incredibly beautiful, however.

I like a lot the way you wrote the scenes, the characters, the past. All about Lelouch and Nunnally's childhood made me cry. And Marianne was perfectly written here ; I always loved the character, and was very disappointed in the plot-twist of R2 (that didn't even make sense to me -that still doesn't). It was beautiful, somehow dark and very touching, something going along the lines that the canon showed us at first ; wise, beautiful, strong, and hardly one for etiquette. And still some parts gave me shivers, because that wasn't exactly a happy and innocent tale.

I would really say that, aside from the parts that I just couldn't understand, the idea was perfect. I wish I could understand the symbolism better, too. If a more explicit version of this existed, I would absolutely love to read it. (I'm a big idiot xD)

If I had any criticism about characterization to make (but just to make one), it would probably be about that moment :
"Nunnally turned her hurt face towards him. He grimaced, but didn't apologize; there were things in the world more important than sparing her feelings."
I probably would see Lelouch as one who would always put Nunnally's feelings first, just after her safety. Maybe I got the feeling from the picture drama/sound episode of their childhood in Japan where he was uncaring to anything that didn't happen to be his sister, but who would always try to make her happy, even by lying. (about the store room, about her arranged marriage, about the corpses). I'm not sure she believed him though, but sure enough she pretended very well to. (surely to make him as happy as possible as well.)

Aside from that, I'm going to repeat things but I just am very amazed by your style, and almost hate myself for not understanding it better.
Anyways, really, great work !

I hate you. I love you. This literally made me sob like a baby. I am crying right now. I have never cried so hard because of a fic. This is so beautiful and so sad, and I'm so sorry I can't give you anything more coherent than this. Everything about this fic is so right to make it feel so wrong. The frogs and the cicidas and the tarot deck and Nunally saying that they're worth so much more all just break my heart. And Suzaku dying over and over and over and what there was and what there is- it all hurts so much.

Thank you.

i have to agree that i can't see much happening in the present time of this story but, it's filled with so many amazing snapshots and whatnot that made the suzaku and lelouch i know from the series. i have just seen them from a very possible perspective through reading this and it was a breathtaking experince. splendid :)

This is really really interesting.

With that said, I would also like to point out how very confusing this is. I'm assuming it's an AU, but nothing really adds up when placed together. Your writing style in this is very good, but also very confusing and distracting. Even though I read through the whole thing, and enjoyed it, I'm still not really sure what happened.

No disrespect meant, of course, I truly did enjoy this. I really loved certain parts, like when Lelouch meant "I'm sorry" and "I love you" but it came out as "Meet me by the pond." (I know that's not the exact wording) I also really enjoyed the moments of summer between the three of them, and how even the sweet things held a sense of despair and darkness hiding beneath. I especially enjoyed how freakin creepy you wrote Marianne, because I always thought that she was a rather creepy mother to Lelouch and Nunnally.

...Holy cow.

That was freaking amazing O.o

The only thing I could think at the end was "Oh my god." The epicness fried my brain.

Oh, and for some reason (probably the reason its genre is tragedy), I was crying.

The last part, especially. Just...amazing.

I don't even know how to describe it (But, being me, I'm going to try anyways).

It was lonely and poetic and sad and wonderful. I think the most striking part of it all was the ending, where you wrote:

What there was:

and listed everything that had been.

What there is:

Beautiful.

More than anything, this gave me the sense of a deep and profound loneliness. Heartbreaking and soothing all at once- his piece took my breath away.

Stunning. Absolutely arresting.

This captures their relationship so well - the real and imagined past come together into something so potent. The symbolism and mysticism surrounding the tarot cards overshadows their whole story; echoes it and supports it and, in the end, swallows it. What an entirely appropriate and unexpected association you make!

There's so many beautiful and bittersweet moments within the story. You mix the golden memories of childhood and summer with the darker moments of death, of frogs and mothers and fathers who don't care. It's magnificent. I simply can't praise this story highly enough.

I love it!

*stares in complete shock*

*favorites*

*runs off to tell everyone she knows about this story*

I usually hate reading R1, because they're so out of synch with how I view things to be, but this was stunning-lyrical, moving, and dramatic. You really set every scene and downfall to the heartbreaking end by getting into the fundamental root of the characters. You even wrote Marianne perfectly! Damn, this is what R2 should've been.

The stylistic motifs were just flawless.

It's so stupid that there are only 22 reviews for this story.

This ficlet is most definitely a piece of art. Your expressions: ("shades of rain"), the way you go into tremendous detail, the characters much more real then you needed them to be, your allusions and metaphors were so beautifully intricate it makes my heart want to cry. This story, like it is supposed to, I guess, reminds me of the end of summer. It is a labryinth of ideas that are too deep for me to understand, yet at the same time it is plain, simple, and sad. It is a story of love and tragedy and friendship and you wove them all so well...I am truly impressed. I love this story. Poignant, innocent, heartshattering.

Please continue writing! It would make my world.