Author Note:This is a fucking ode to the gorgeousness that is Suzaku Kururugi.

I do not apologize for my levels of obsession, or for using Nunnally to orchestrate said ode.

Carry on.

He had green eyes.

No – he had the greenest eyes.

Empress Nunnally had known Suzaku's eyes were green, but still… it was something to finally see it.

Long ago, a child Lelouch had called Suzaku's eyes like forests – or swamplands, or jungles. He'd sat in Nunnally's presence and come up with comparisons, and adjectives most children didn't know yet. Expansive and untamable, her brother had said. But in his voice Nunnally had heard something different.

She'd heard, captivating, beautiful.

Nunnally had remembered green, despite having never been able to lay eyes on Suzaku thanks to blindness. She hadn't been blind her whole life, however, so she'd been able to call up hills of summer grass inside her mind, and the vegetables she'd helped their mother pick out from the garden for the dinner table. Lelouch had said 'green,' and she'd known what that was. She'd thought green eyes suited Suzaku.

Yes. Suzaku Kururugi had the greenest eyes – even in two dimensions, meeting hers now from on glossy paper.

She was looking at Suzaku for the first time in her life.

And what a life. She, the empress. She, her brother's legacy. She hoped that green could help her now. Nunnally had always believed green to be a comforting color, in its lushness, in its verdant splendor. Green was organic, the essence of life and growth, the sign that expansion came about whatever may, in cycles, because life went on.

It just felt odd. Because… life did not quite go on here, on the page Nunnally had just turned the photo album to. Had Lord Weinberg known, when he'd given this book to her, that life would look so strange and frozen to her on its pages?

She looked at Suzaku's eyes again, this time in another photo.

No one had told Nunnally that green could be poison, also.

The texture of Suzaku's hair caught Nunnally's attention next. She already knew it; she'd felt it herself, and thus brought it to life despite her old blindness, so it wasn't shocking now to see the locks that curled into Suzaku's eyes. Their color, their haphazard arrangement. Wholesome, earthen brown.

But in this image Anya had snapped, Suzaku's eyes were not like sunlit underbrush, or the gloss of a green apple, or soft moss that blanketed a stone.

Suzaku seemed to be the stone.

She looked. The Knight of Seven had just straightened out of a deep bow. Nunnally could tell, from the way his arm still lingered just across his chest. She didn't know to whom he'd been bowing to, but the look on his face….

She saw determination, resignation, and a cold intent to harm. Like poison sat inside a glass.

She flipped back to the early album pages, the pages Kallen had collected from Suzaku's earlier time at Ashford. In one photo, Suzaku smiled, with an apron and a spatula. In another, he yelped in a manner Nunnally could almost hear, dodging a persistent Arthur.

How truthful was the brighter hue of Suzaku's eyes in these happier pictures? Did the green shade really change so much, when his emotions ran rampant?

Which eyes had her brother seen?

Nunnally looked up and away from the book at that moment. What green had Lelouch registered, facing Suzaku, in the hell of all their betrayals and lies? She could imagine violent storm winds, stirring up and darkening the foliage. Had her brother gotten tangled, strangled, as if Suzaku's eyes were lethal, winding vines seeking to harm him?

Still, it didn't seem difficult to fall in love with Suzaku's eyes.

Nunnally thought that anybody might, studying them again now as she dared. Even when Suzaku's eyes appeared dark, so dark, or flat and dull and tempting death, reminding her of insect-eaten leaves, she knew they could be tender, also. Those eyes could look like new shoots.

What did Suzaku's eyes look like, when he loved? Had he ever loved, in his lifetime?

Nunnally turned another page. She found another shot snapped amongst the Knights of Rounds. Suzaku stood, casting a reproachful glance at Lord Weinberg.

When Lelouch had lived, he'd lived always in the regard of Suzaku's gaze. He'd been able to gaze back – see those eyes alive, afire, verdurous and insistent. Was Nunnally relieved… or jealous that she'd never had the opportunity herself? That she would never get to see Suzaku even now, despite gaining her vision back?

Nunnally thought she knew the answer. She desperately wished she could see Suzaku's eyes. What might it be like to feel Suzaku's gaze, or to watch his gaze drop in respect for his empress? On his knees, bowing that tousled head as Lelouch's Knight of Zero… what had Suzaku's eyes said to her brother when he'd murmured, "Yes, Your Majesty?"

Footsteps rustled the grass and leaves. Zero joined her in the garden.

"You've looked at those pictures for a long time."

Nunnally didn't close the album. "This is the face of someone I once knew, but never got to look upon."

Zero paused before speaking. "And are you surprised? About what he looks like?"

She said, "I'm surprised I still can't see the truth."

There were a lot of things that she could see – and most of them without her eyes. She'd touched her brother's hand and realized the whole truth of Zero Requiem. But some things, Nunnally reflected, needed to be experienced firsthand before one truly understood them. She looked at her reflection in Zero's mask.

She would not be allowed to know, would she. It would break a promise that had been sealed with unbreakable love and hate, and drive and death and sacrifice. But surely, Lelouch hadn't meant for his best friend to always, always hide, forever?

Zero asked, "The truth about what?"

"I want to know which version of his gaze he left with, when he left. I want to know the emotion that finally settled in those eyes of his – as he fought for my brother's sake, risking his life, knowing he was taking the world on his shoulders. What did he feel? And wherever he is…." Nunnally didn't smile this time. She simply played the game, the way she always had – treating Zero as a symbol, and not revealing what she knew about the person beneath his clothes with her words or voice. "Wherever he is, if he's still here, are his eyes the color of sadness and strength, of regret, of lingering hate? Or of acceptance and happiness at last? I want to know… has he moved on? If he still exists, is he glad of that?"

Zero stayed quiet a long time, his hands resting on her wheelchair. The birds whistled, but nothing else stirred around them among the thickly-dressed trees.

They were alone. The view stretched before them, a vast expanse of possibility… and of never-ending green.

Suzaku Kururugi knelt in front of her and clicked off Zero's mask.

Nunnally couldn't see his eyes, for hers were blurry now with tears. "Suzaku," she said to him.

And that was all, for a long time.