A/n: As a C.C. fan, I'd like to state that I was (sarcasm) only slightly (/sarcasm) mortified when she lost her memories/reverted back to her slave upbringings/decided since Anya filled the "emotionless-girl" quota for R2 that she was gonna try her hand at the "cute-average-girl" title that Shirley sorta left behind.

New C.C. is cute...but I'd like the old one back, please.

Disclaimer: I own nothing Code Geass related with the exceptions of a homemade Suzaku voodoo doll, but that's a whole different story entirely...

Beneath

It was there, beneath several compact layers of what he could only assume was amnesia, festering noiselessly, peaking through the tiny crevices of her new personality every once and awhile. And even though it was only a small, nearly insignificant flair of hope, he grasped it, held onto it wildly and tightly and nurtured it every time she glanced at him with that face that were hers but at the same time wasn't.

It had been far more painful than he thought it was going to be—far more gut-wrenching than it should have been, he corrected—to have their gazes lock and see no wave of recognition, see no sight of the woman who had promised to be with him forever, who had become, for better or for worse, the only perpetual pillar in his life. He had hid nothing from her, for she had the ability to guess it all, and in his game of secrets and masks, it had been a silent comfort.

Having her suddenly disappear (selfishly, he concluded—and unforgivably, he added) was like someone had chopped off one of his legs. He was left staggering, suddenly half blind and acutely wondering about what had happened and how it happened and (most importantly) why it happened. Even though she was physically there, sitting in front of him, prodding the remote control of his flat screen television with frightened curiosity, she couldn't have been farther away; hundreds of years suddenly separated them, even though physically he only needed to lift his fingers to touch the fine green strands of her hair.

Sometimes, he found himself getting angry—so furious at his helplessness, in fact, that he wanted nothing more than to simply grab her and shake her and yell at her until she snapped back with biting indifference instead of the cowering apologies that seemed so frequent nowadays. Sometimes, very little prevented him from actually doing so; sometimes, he came so close that his fists would clench and his knuckles would turn white and, when she asked if Master was okay, he would snap at her so loud that the walls of his private quarters would shudder like some remote corner of his soul.

She deserved it, he would tell himself later, seething over battle tactics already impeccably revised numerous times over. By noon (or around dinner, depending on when his outburst occurred) he would find himself ordering a pie of pizza and pushing the cart of oddly seasoned cheese and dough into his room (and towards her) long before he was consciously aware of it himself.

One day, while she was nibbling on the edge of a slice and when he decided (instead of running away and leaving her to her own devices) that he was going to stay, he finally noticed, finally recognized with an unfamiliar flutter in his chest the way she wrinkled her nose slightly when the pepperoni was too hot or the peppers too spicy.

A similar memory of her nose wrinkling replayed in his mind, though this time they were in his small chamber back at the Academy and she was on his bed, crassly mumbling through a mouthful about how predictable and naïve he was.

The flashback had been, at the time, too singular of an event for him to determine anything other than the lingering feelings of nostalgia it resurfaced, but ever since then, he began picking up parallels to her previous personality in an increasing fashion, as if he unconsciously sought them out.

There was the way, he noted with particular earnest, her right eyebrow furrowed faintly when she tackled something mind puzzling, be it (then) a confrontation with a Knightmare on the battlefield or (now) listing all of her numbers on a piece of paper. Or the way she pushed back her hair, first twiddling with the offending strand between her forefingers before tucking it absentmindedly behind her ear.

Or the way she slept, curled around herself in a cocoon of blankets and pillows and her stuffed toys, the way her hair seemed to spill about her when she shuffled around, or even the way she sometimes mumbled incoherent phrases in her sleepy stupor. Sometimes, those incoherent phrases were nothing but vague words strung together by equally vague strings; a few times (so few, in fact, that he wondered if he heard them correctly at all), he caught his name, half whispered, half hissed in a manner that had taken him quite by surprise the first time he had stumbled upon it.

They were small things—pointless, insignificant, useless things, he amended—but they calmed him, made him realize that she was still there beneath all the fidgeting and wincing and stuttering that seemed so out of place and so wrong but was happening regardless.

Because he knew (he hoped) that as long as she was still there (regardless of how impossibly deep), he could get her back.

A/n: Most of this feels like word vomit, as it was written during a short bout of insomnia a few nights ago. But that's the great thing about one-shots, and I don't particularly care. XD

Thanks for reading.