Author Note: This is me, discovering old fanfics on my hard drive, trying to clear them out by finishing and posting all the ones that were practically done. Thank you for reading, if you are.

"Aaahh, I can't take it any more! Why is it you throw yourself into the line of fire, every time?"

Lloyd had asked him more than once, with fingers clenched in pale, fine hair.

Suzaku came down on the lift rope. Lloyd flung his arm out at the battered Lancelot. "You'll get my machine killed as well! Let the non-Devicer soldiers get killed while they're in their Knightmare Frames – not you." Lloyd didn't notice Cécile behind him. "Human parts… they give me indigestion. Worse than Cécile-kun's lunch—uUUAGH!"

"Well done today, Warrant Officer Kururugi." Cécile smiled benignly at him.

Suzaku walked away before he had to watch another kind of war, wiping his face with a fragrant towel. The towel came away all spotted red – from where he'd bitten through his lip, at some point he couldn't recall.

He'd careened around an impossible turn, and landed in the middle of enemy forces. He ought to have just gone around, but he hadn't.

"Cécile-kun, you've got to admit – he does this all the time! Our budget won't hold up to the damage!"

Suzaku didn't know the answer to Lloyd's initial question, no matter how frequently Lloyd asked him it. He unzipped his flight suit and found his orange uniform waiting for him, still foreign to his eyes after his promotion – but proof that laying his life on the line was normal, in his soldier's job description.

Suzaku changed into the uniform, and he didn't think about it.

He rarely thought about it. He chose not to think, deliberately.

When he did think, Suzaku thought about risk. If people risked nothing in life, they'd gain nothing.

Suzaku wanted to gain. He wanted world peace, and an improved life for Area 11. He wanted Nunnally and Lelouch safe and free. For that, he'd always known he'd have to risk.

Especially after all the ways he'd failed.

Why was it Suzaku threw himself into the line of fire?

That incident, thought Suzaku, reflecting, was when he'd first considered the question seriously… and started to settle on the answer.

"You missed a chance to go to heaven."

Later, much later, Cécile had taken him aside, and asked Suzaku – just like Lloyd asked – why he put himself in so much danger. Why had Suzaku tried to give his life so easily for a stray student?

She'd had other things to say as well.

Suzaku had tried to explain, when Cécile took him aside and asked what in the hell was wrong with him. He'd had to look at her twice, hard, and force a swallow, evaluating her. Who was this adult, who wore bright smiles while she threatened him? But Cécile's grip on his arm was careful… as she laid down a list of "incidents" in which he seemed to want to die.

Suzaku tried applying words like, "risk." He referenced "duty," "soldiers," "civilian safety," and the fact that he was still alive. Cécile said she did not buy any of it. People had a spark in them, she said. Seventeen-year-olds especially did – or they should. How come he didn't have one? Teenagers hardly thought they were mortal; was Suzaku just foolishly trying to test his own mortality… or was he thinking like an old man, waiting and waiting and wishing to die?

The more Suzaku thought about it now, the more he grew convinced it had been the wrong thing to do, after that, to sit Cécile down and explain. To steep her some green tea, lock Lloyd out of the room, and set to justifying - separately - each incident Cécile had named.

He'd finished with Lelouch. "He was a friend. It didn't matter what happened to me, Cécile, so long as he could live. He was a completely innocent student, caught up in the poison gas incident."

Her face hadn't changed. Suzaku had sat, perplexed. Weren't people supposed to find it commendable when someone put another's life before their own? Lelouch's life was especially worth it, worth far more than Suzaku's own.

But Cécile had let her tea get cold. If anything, she'd appeared ill, and worse than she had been before they started.

Suzaku had frowned, offering her black tea instead. Cécile had only stood abruptly and said, "From now on, you follow your orders, is that clear?"

For the first time, Suzaku had realized that being able to justify his actions out loud didn't mean he could make other people agree with those justifications – no matter how deeply he believed in them. He wondered, for the first time, if that meant his justifications were faulty.

He considered… and didn't think they were.

Didn't everyone - in order to live with themselves and navigate their tricky lives - have to establish their own moral code? How could anyone make decisions, if they didn't know which decisions felt most right? People couldn't just follow someone else blindly. Suzaku could not fathom having to go about the world without a sense of his own place in it, without knowing his value in comparison to the other lives around him.

People deserved to be valued, protected. If Suzaku ignored that, just because his own life was on the line, how could he live with himself, if someone died? And if Suzaku couldn't live with himself, then who could?

He had never wanted to be anyone's burden.

If I cannot live with myself, then who else...?

Is that why I put myself in the line of fire?

After that, he'd chosen not to think much again.

At school, Shirley often berated him. "Stop putting yourself down!" she'd implore him.

Suzaku usually laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and then got bitten by Arthur. Shirley would then just let him slide.

But this time, while they were alone – and Lelouch had stormed out of the council room because Suzaku's locker had been vandalized again – Shirley filled up the silence with a question. "Why do you think that they do this to you?"

"Why? It's obvious, isn't it, Shirley?" Suzaku felt perplexed again. "It's because I'm an Eleven."

"But you don't believe it's only that, do you." And Shirley put down her pink book about cooking.

For a moment, Suzaku felt guilty. How did she know? He played it off, simple. "They wrote, 'You stinking Eleven...'"

"You can't stand to watch people getting hurt. You can't stand to see them bullied. Suzaku, you're a nice person."

"I… guess?" He watched his classmate rest her forehead on her book, exasperated.

"Lelou knows too, and that's why he ran off. If this were happening to someone else - Eleven or not - you'd take a stand. But you refuse to stand up for yourself. So Lelou has to do it, all alone."

A burden. To Lelouch. Oh, god.

Suzaku's stomach flipped. He hated that – and so he fought the bile down. "Um, it's really not like that. I just think that making a scene in this case—"

"In what case, Suzaku?" Milly came back in. It meant she hadn't been able to talk sense into Lelouch in the hall. "Yours?"

Suzaku was being cornered. And now double-teamed.

"Suzaku. You don't think you actually deserve this treatment, do you? Why take it?"

"They're just... it isn't exactly..."

"I see." Milly crossed her legs, and both Shirley and Suzaku looked at her. "This is a case of having been born Japanese."

"President?" Shirley's voice sailed high.

Suzaku watched Milly nodding, unconcerned by the statement she had made. "Asian children are brought up differently. Often taught that nothing they do is good enough... and they feel like they have to take punishment, if they can't find ways to push themselves harder. One hundred and ten percent isn't even enough! I bet your parents broke you, training you to think like that. Right, Suzaku?"

"Um," Suzaku faltered, smiling, "that's just a stereotype..." He didn't say a word about his parents, or who had broken in the end.

But both girls went on to tell him he needed to value himself more. He was a wonderful person all around. If something wasn't fair for others, why should it be fair for him?

Suzaku nodded, smiled, and said, "I'll try a lot harder. I don't want to make anyone worry." But he had managed to determine the problem.

Being raised as Japanese had nothing to do with it. Suzaku, in the end, was not a wonderful person. Any nationality... if someone committed a crime that was unforgivable… that person deserved to be punished.

Allowing himself to get bullied, however, was perhaps the wrong way for Suzaku to go about his punishment.

That punishment hardly fit his crimes, after all. It was a rather weak way to take responsibility. And it made his friends worry; Suzaku was becoming a burden to them.

He didn't want to be a hypocrite, either. He'd saved others from being bullied, right in front of Princess Euphy – in the ghetto, when some Britannian students had been acting out. If Suzaku could stand against that, he shouldn't make it seem at school like bullying was acceptable, just because he hated himself.

The run got driven truly home. Suzaku hated himself.

Nunnally had been saved from her kidnapper, but Suzaku didn't feel proud of that, now.

He couldn't even respond to Lelouch, who hadn't left yet after silencing Mao.

"Tell me he's not right, Suzaku. That you aren't suicidal."

Suzaku had nothing to say to that. He stayed knelt on the floor, for a very long time.

"Why would you think that you deserve to die?"

"Think about what I've done, Lelouch." The secret about Suzaku's father and who'd killed the man and why was out.

"You eliminated someone who would have made life worse for others."

Suzaku stayed there on the ground, horrified. "It was unforgivable," he said. "No one has the right to decide whether or not another's life should be eliminated."

Lelouch looked at him strangely. He opened his mouth, his tone accusing. "Then why have you decided yours—" He stopped.

Suzaku felt himself turn pale.

Lelouch took a breath and changed his track. "If you didn't eliminate him, Suzaku, someone else would have – think about it. Someone has to make those kinds of decisions. You made one. It wasn't wrong. But to this day, you still don't believe it?"

"I murdered my own father," Suzaku said, "out of a childish, selfish desire for peace, when I didn't understand what peace required!" He wanted to yell, Don't justify it for me!

"People don't need to know the price of peace to want it – or even to start floundering toward it. Wanting peace, comfort, happiness for the world... those things are natural," Lelouch exclaimed.

"I wanted it for myself," Suzaku told him.

"What's wrong with that?" Lelouch pleaded. He dropped to his knees also, before Suzaku. "You're human. And besides, to help the world, first people have to help themselves. To be in good condition to take care of other people, we— What's wrong with that, Suzaku? Look at me."

Suzaku only grew more furious. How could Lelouch make excuses for him? Lelouch thought it was justified that one rash boy had killed for his idea of what was best for everyone? Only a king could make those kinds of decisions!

Suzaku was far from one. So was Lelouch.

"Enough," said Suzaku. "That's enough, Lelouch."

Lelouch rocked back onto his heels, his voice coming a little hoarse. "You aren't a bad person. Not to value your life is just—"

"It's that I value other lives above my own! I've killed, Lelouch, but at least if I put others before me from now on, I can start to make up for the lives that I've wrecked."

"You haven't wrecked—"

"I don't expect you to understand." It came out a little harsher than he meant it. But what did Lelouch know, anyway? Lelouch, who loved his crippled sister, who - besides a gambling issue with the nobles - had clean hands…. Suzaku softened his tone. "And you don't have to go so far, convincing me I'm worth it, just to counter everything that Mao said. I can handle it just fine. I won't inconvenience you or Nunnally like this again."

"You're important to us both! You're not an inconvenience. You just helped save Nunnally! Suzaku—"

Suzaku leaned in and kissed him.

A two-second touch. A chaste, closed-lipped delivery of pressure across Lelouch's traitorous mouth, that mouth that just wouldn't shut up. Suzaku's hand held Lelouch by the arm, and when it was over, he drew away fast.

Lelouch collapsed into a sitting position, hands splayed out behind him. Dazed.

Suzaku instantly felt awful.

Who was he, to use an unexpected method like that to shut someone up?

Or maybe that was why he'd done it. Because yes, it was awful of him. More proof that he wasn't a good person. More proof that maybe Lelouch needed.

Lelouch cleared his throat. "That... Wh-why?"

"You're noisy. And Nunnally's waiting for us."

"Yes. Nunnally. Yes."

But Lelouch stayed there, and Suzaku went outside first. He climbed out through the window he'd broken, surveying the damage to the architecture, wondering how and why he'd gotten away without a single scratch, despite never having hurled himself through a window before. Perhaps he'd studied too hard about it in theory.

Back outside on pavement, his right mind seemed to return to him. His moment of self-satisfaction was gone.

It was horrible, to prove to Lelouch in such a rude fashion that he didn't deserve any leeway or kindness. What right did Suzaku have to spring such an invasion of space on Lelouch? It could be construed as taking advantage. No, it was taking advantage.

Lelouch didn't deserve that. Suzaku wondered how many people already pushed themselves on Lelouch, because Lelouch was popular.

Lelouch was supposed to be his friend, and Suzaku had just done something to harm him. He was a burden, after all.

He still hated himself. And he thought that was why he jumped into the line of fire.

Mao had gotten some wrong, and some right.

Yes, Suzaku had murdered his father. He'd been a failure as a son. He had failed to bring peace, or positive change; the war had not ended despite what he'd done. Yes, Suzaku thought he had no right to live. He didn't want to live; he wanted punishment.

But thoughts like that weren't suicidal, were they? Mao had gotten some wrong, and some right.

Suzaku thought of what he knew of suicide. Jumping off buildings, guns inside the mouth, walking in front of speeding vehicles. Or worse - things Suzaku couldn't even begin to stomach. Slitting wrists, breathing in fumes, overdosing on prescription medication. Those ways seemed terrible and cowardly ways to die - and the deaths were often wasted, weren't they.

Suicides happened because people gave up or got scared. They didn't want to live any more… but that didn't mean they didn't deserve to. There was a difference, a titanic one - a matter of guilt that too few people measured.

And so Suzaku shied away from "suicidal" in his mind.

He was not afraid to live. He did not particularly seek to die. But every day… he spent repenting, slowly moving toward the punishment that would be his own death.

Suzaku did not profess to know when or how he would find that death, that rightful punishment, so he waited. He waited and he kept on taking risks. Suzaku could only live by his morals the best he could each day, hoping that if his time came, he'd have the power to make sure he died in the middle of doing something good. Something righteous, for somebody not just himself.

It would be selfish to die without applying himself to a decent purpose, wouldn't it?

Euphemia seemed a wonderful purpose.

"So please," she cried, "don't hate yourself!"

Euphy professed that she would love him. She made a promise to him, on the field, while Suzaku was about to die.

Euphy was so sweet, Suzaku thought. How he adored her forwardness, her stubbornness.

In the moments Suzaku thought were his final ones, Suzaku didn't hate himself.

As much.

The stronger feeling that overtook him was that… Suzaku would be relieved to die for someone as special as Euphemia.

As he stood trapped there, in the line of fire, his Knightmare running out of energy… he thought this time maybe he endangered himself because it might be nice to die for someone.

Then something quite strange happened in his mind. Suzaku thought about living instead.

And Zero came to rescue him.

When Zero's mask cracked – like the delicate shell of Suzaku's reality – Suzaku had only one clear string of thoughts that pressed forward under his shouted anger and betrayal.

Zero… Lelouch was the one that had made Suzaku want to live. Suzaku's ideals hadn't changed – he had simply been corrupted.

Even if Suzaku hadn't received a Geass, he never could have died there, on those steps, near that strange door, on that island, exchanging gunfire with Zero. Because Zero was Lelouch, and Lelouch would never kill Suzaku, would he.

Lelouch wanted Suzaku to live.

Suzaku had never felt quite so wronged or defeated, seeing Lelouch threatening him with Sakuradite and an expression of no remorse, and yet unwilling to actually finish him. So dead inside, Suzaku felt – the irony! – despite being so vibrantly alive.

I wish you would get just as mad as I am, and this could change, and you'd just kill me here. I would rather die than go through what might come after this, Zero.

I don't want to live long enough to carry out the things I know I'll do to you, if both of us leave here alive

Lelouch…!

But live…. Somehow, Suzaku did.

For a while, he managed to behave himself, and stay out of the line of fire. Suzaku thought it was because he focused so fully instead on hatred.

Hatred meant Suzaku had something to live for. Revenge, or perhaps just answers. In any case, when he went to the EU, when Suzaku was charged with care of one impertinent, arrogant Julius Kingsley – Suzaku failed to try to die at all. He even failed to punish Zero.

Instead, Suzaku preserved them both. He did a flawless job, until they had to fight Shin Hyuga Shaing.

When Shaing dug into Suzaku's hate was when Suzaku realized hate was what was keeping him alive.

"You're just like me," Shaing told Suzaku.

He tried to tell Suzaku they both hated the world, because the world had betrayed them. He tried to tell Suzaku they both wanted to kill, and to destroy; he said destruction was inside their hearts.

But that wasn't true, that wasn't Suzaku. That wasn't Suzaku at all. Suzaku's hate was ugly, he realized, like Shaing's was… and his hatred burned like fuel. Suzaku did not want to harm anyone… and Suzaku did not want hate to keep him alive.

No matter what Shaing said, no matter what Lelouch reminded him when Lelouch asked to die instead – out of his mind, half Julius, half himself as a child – it didn't change that Suzaku was a bad person. Even worse now, for almost strangling Lelouch. Was that the way justice most ought to be served? No. And if Suzaku only hated, only went after some dark, hatred-driven goal… he would be too invested in his life to let it be stolen, the way he deserved.

If Suzaku was going to protect a life, then it was not going to be his own.

Suzaku would preserve Julius, Lelouch, Zero… to get himself back into a position to ask Charles to use his Geass again. To wipe Lelouch away again, and start over entirely.

Suzaku wanted to get himself back into a position where all he had to worry about was being a good Knight of the Rounds. Fighting to change Britannia from the inside using moral methods, until somebody killed him.

But Zero just had to come back, didn't he.

Suzaku couldn't have put himself into the line of fire any more if he'd tried. Every single assassination attempt, every single piece of abuse aimed at him… he fended off successfully.

Lelouch's excuses at the shrine did not make him feel better about it.

Suzaku fought back and defended himself now, even when he did not wish to. His Geass took over his mind. Over and over again, it saved his life.

His Geass even helped him live through FLEIJA. FLEIJA was less a line of fire and more of a sphere of mass destruction.

Suzaku had not expected to live. Now Nunnally was dead instead, it was his fault… and Suzaku deserved five times more to die, to be obliterated.

But no one could do that to Suzaku now.

Lelouch designed Zero Requiem to make everything finally right.

They stood there facing each other. Lelouch began to outline the grand plan, but Suzaku stopped him midway. He saw a blatant problem with proceedings.

"Doing this will turn your wrongs into right. It's what you deserve, Lelouch, for all your crimes. But what will this do about mine?" Suzaku wasn't being punished at all.

"You think I didn't plan a way for you to redeem yourself as well?"

"I can't redeem myself if I can't die." It rankled even more, because Lelouch could.

Lelouch studied him a long instant. The silence of the room began slowly unnerving Suzaku. "Then give yourself entirely to me," Lelouch uttered, after a time.

Suzaku looked up, faltering. "Entirely?"

Lelouch maintained composure, as if nothing he had said could possibly be taken out of context. His next words flattened Suzaku's burgeoning anthill of amusement like a shoe, leaving him once again sober. "The endeavor of living for someone should be just as satisfying as dying for them. In both cases, you give the person – or the people – everything. You give them your life, Suzaku, down to the very last beat of your heart. Once you've sacrificed yourself to that degree, what difference does it make whether you're actually dead or not? Can't you see that it's the same?"

Suzaku swallowed, and hard.

"It's the same." Lelouch was looking at him like he would lift Suzaku's chin up, if Suzaku didn't keep eye contact. Suzaku felt like a child at Sunday school, shamed into repentance by some calmly chiding priest. He looked at Lelouch's gold-dipped robes. Suzaku's anger instantly flared up—

"It's the same," Lelouch repeated, choosing not to touch Suzaku. "Either way, you've given up your right to control anything about your existence. Hand your life to me, if you don't want it. If you would still discard it, then let me take it instead. Fight for me, Suzaku. Love for me. Live."

Love for him? Did Lelouch mean to take care of Nunnally, after he himself was gone? "Lelouch—"

"Be the symbol, after I am gone. And I as well, I said, will give my life up to you."

"That's," Suzaku said. "That is—" He thought the wordplay wasn't fair. Yes, they could both give up their lives by Lelouch's definitions. But Lelouch would still actually die.

"That is Zero Requiem." Lelouch took a step forward. He did reach out and touch Suzaku's face.

The touch landed on Suzaku's cheek. Suzaku jerked away from the intrusion.

"Become mine," Lelouch kept on, undaunted. "Give me everything, Suzaku, and I will give you everything that is mine in return."

"I can't. It's not that—" Was there a word? Easy.

It was not that easy to ease Suzaku's mind. It was not that easy to grant Suzaku punishment he would be satisfied by, punishment that would make up for his wrongs. What Lelouch suggested seemed like a twist that would be deeply, intimately complicated.

Lelouch took Suzaku's hand in his. Carefully, he guided Suzaku's fingers, until they rested on the pulse in Lelouch's geisha-white neck.

"Can you resist it?" Lelouch asked him, softly. "This life in my veins, Suzaku. All of it, yours. Yours, and yours alone from this moment on, until there is nothing left. Until every drop of me is gone."

"Spilling your blood, all over that white outfit?" No humor tinged it, when Suzaku choked the words out. Was Lelouch using Suzaku's lust for Lelouch's death to tempt Suzaku to agree to this, to tempt Suzaku to accept an imperfect punishment for himself in favor of perfectly punishing Zero? "Why?" he managed to say. "Why would you…?"

Lelouch let Suzaku draw away. "I never took aim down the line of fire, without expecting that I'd have to step into that line myself."

Suzaku thought for a long time.

Was it possible Lelouch was right? That more than one method existed of giving up your life?

To give up your life completely, it was not required that you die….

"He can predict my movements! Even so…." The Knight of One flitted through the air around him. The time had come for Suzaku to decide.

To give up his life, he didn't need to die.

"For the sake of Zero Requiem, I can't lose!" Was Suzaku still trying to convince himself? Would this plan workd? Lelouch….

"That's why I am ordering you to live!" Lelouch's voice rang out, certain.

For the first time he could remember, Suzaku hurled himself into the line of fire not so he would die… but so he'd live.

He felt his Geass kick in; his eyes tingled. Instinct reared up in him like a behemoth from in the sea. Every fiber in his body screamed, You'll die. Suzaku kept making his body scream it, but he knew that this time… he would live. Living was what he wanted.

Live on!

Suzaku twisted the command of his Geass. I must live, yes, but that means right now I have to defeat this enemy! Running away is no longer an option. It no longer guarantees my safety. So I—

Suzaku slashed through the Knight of One's sword, and the Knightmare armor came apart. He watched somebody else die.

And he was all right with not being in that person's place himself.

"Lelouch."

"Suzaku. You truly can't be reckoned with."

Suzaku cried when Lelouch died. But finally, he understood himself.

As Lelouch murmured soft goodbyes, as Suzaku ripped out the sword, Suzaku finally understood that living for someone could feel as satisfying as dying for them. As Lelouch tumbled down the stairs, Suzaku understood that his new role as Zero was just as righteous – just as repentant – as if he had been the one at Nunnally's side, bleeding out, slowly losing his life.

Lelouch had made it all make sense. Now, long after Lelouch was gone, Suzaku would live – putting himself into the line of fire, triggering his special Geass so he'd survive instead of die.

But Suzaku also finally understood, still crying, that somehow, he'd fallen slain in another fashion. Fallen for the person he had just killed.

Suzaku would never quite escape the line of fire after all. His heart had leap into it and remained there.