AN: There is a very important AN at the end of this chapter. This is canon to FNA, but ... well, you'll see.

Britannia.

Ironic, how much of a forbidding miracle was necessitated for a prince and a princess to be exiled, to a land which would be conquered by the exact same country that exiled them.

"I will obliterate Britannia."

Yes, I blamed Britannia. I blamed the man who is Britannia.

Ten years ago, a little boy and a little girl lost their mother.

No … It would be more accurate to the record of the world, to say that an empress was murdered, and her prince and princess were simply collateral damage. That was what the royal house of Britannia saw.

How easy it must have been to scorn the dead commoner, the woman who had earned her place beside her emperor. No matter what Mother had achieved, the imperial family would never accept one not of their inbred stock. And because of that, how easy it must have been to pour condemnation upon her children, without regard to how wrong it was. There was no mercy spared for the victims, for the living and the dead.

They were not there. They simply ceased to exist for us.

I had heard the gunshots in the night.

I was the first to see her sprawled over Nunnally.

The steps of the villa were stained with Mother's blood, her dull eyes staring into the trembling ones of my sister.

I couldn't hear the commotion. I ignored the two butlers on the upper stairs. All I saw was the two figures in the light, and the frozen expression my sister had as she stared without seeing. I'm certain I had the same expression.

Looking back, my audience with the emperor came too soon.

"Why didn't you keep Mother out of harms' way? You're the Emperor, the greatest man in this nation, if not the world! You should've protected her and now you don't even visit Nunnally!"

"I'm no use for that weakling."

I could only gape at him.

"… That weakling?"

"That is what it means to be royalty."

The childish rage that engulfed me …

"Then I don't want to be your heir! I give up my claim to the throne! I'm sick of the fighting and scheming over who will succeed you!"

I screamed a scream of hatred, frustration, and desperation born of a brother watching his crippled, blind sister for days. Lying in that bed, never able to see or walk again, seeing a sight no child should see-

"Father, I've had enough!"

The silence, how it rang in that hollow hall.

And he stood, towering over a scared, defiant child. He roared at me-

"You are dead. You were always been dead to me, dead from the moment you were born. Who gave you the fine clothes you wear and comfortable home? The food you eat and your very life?"

He began his stride, and the child could not help but step back from his father. "All of those, I have given to you. In short, you are nothing to me because you have never existed. Yet you dare to speak such foolishness to me? Lelouch, you are dead, and therefore you are not entitled to any rights."

In the hall, their eyes were not daggers, they were the hammers of condemnation for a young boy and his younger sister.

"I am sending you and Nunnally to Japan, as prince and princess. You will serve well as bargaining tools."

The sentence was dispensed without mercy. No quarter was asked, and none given.

What infuriated me was my helplessness to help my sister. I acknowledge how likely it was that I could have been my sister's substitute, embraced in my mother's grasp even as the bullets struck. It was dumb fate, a pure, feckless, fickle chance made possible by negligence from the most powerful man in the world.

Perhaps I was selfish. Nunnally needed help, more than I needed answers. But I knew, even if her suffering lessened for the moment, we would have been consumed by the family. I knew this from the sympathy given at my condemnation. And …

I wanted justice. I wanted answers. I alone could protect Nunnally, and I alone could discover who killed our mother. Selfish desires and selfish survival- what else could I do?

Thus, I still directed all my hatred at this man. How couldn't I? Why wouldn't I? Who was he to send the weak to their exile?

He was strong. That was what I understood.

Then is it good to be strong? All my hatred was contained in that question. I bore this hatred for a heavy four years, until-

Hah. Until I met two contradictions.

One rash boy, the son of a stubborn, prideful man, who exercised his strength upon my arrogance and helplessness.

And yet, he eventually sought to save lives in the ending of war.

I can recall his words. They were very similar to my sentiments at the time-

"Is it bad to be weak?

"The world seems like such a terribly sad place, a world without any hope at all. There's disease, racism, living in a never-ending cycle of hate. The cycle must be broken. Somebody has to do it.

"Of course, it's doubtful that the one who does it will make the bad things go away. No one should lose more of the people they love. At least, a world without war.

"I don't know how you would do it, Lelouch, but if I stopped trying, them my father's death will have been in vain. My own father died because he had to sacrifice his life in this war."

However, he didn't resolve my hatred. In fact, I swore to him I would have my vengeance on Britannia. I thought this vow inescapable.

And then I met the other contradiction shortly after.

One who would help because people were invaluable in his eyes.

He held his store of treasure, his stock in the world in people. He treasured people more than himself.

A dangerously unselfish boy.

And just like I met the first, I was struck down by him. He had no strength to bear, no power to wield other than his conviction. It was his incredible, naïvely ignorant words that wrought a crack in my resolve.

"My dream is to be a superhero. I want to save everybody."

He stood for those sentiments simply because he told himself one thing.

I am not worthy, and others are.

Even if he couldn't see it, his actions spoke for him. He was made to be a pawn, but his behavior …

Absurdity, that's all it was. This world would not permit a savior so pervasive. Even so, it made me realize something about myself. As much as I considered him to be abnormal, I was even more so. I clung on to hatred for years upon years. Anyone would have told me to have forgotten this.

If he stood for me, my father would laugh. The world would laugh at a boy consumed by hatred and a boy obsessed with an unequivocal, impossible justice. But perhaps I would be comforted knowing such people exist. Such stupid, foolish, good people.

He would fight for Nunnally.

That day, when I saw him first talk to her, was when I decided that the world was no longer worth living. The world, that would consider we who were wronged absurd, had to be changed.

Instead of destroying people such as him and I, I would destroy the world and make it anew.

That was the turning point. Since that day, I've lived a lie: The lie of living. My name, too, was a lie. My personal history, a lie. Nothing but lies.

Who could suffer such a world to exist? I had to become part of it. In that, I could understand how much the world's evil permeated its people.

I was sick to death of a world that couldn't be changed. But even in my lies, I refused to give up in despair.

Well, then…

AN: I guess it's come to this.

I want to thank everyone for your support over the past four years. FNA has been a slow, long, and fairly painful journey. The story has had a tumultuous start (most certainly not aided by a significant rewrite or two), and a decided lack of maturity or structure. Perfectionist tendencies mixed with disjointed writing spurts result in a poor show all around. I did my best, but I can't say that I'm proud of how it turned out.

What I can say is that I'm damn proud of the response you all have given. As my first foray into fanfiction, I really didn't have much hope for any sort of significant response from anyone. The internet can be a terrible place. You all have surpassed my wildest expectations for encouragement and constructive criticism. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I do owe an explanation of my situation and my failings as a writer. Real life has a lot of challenges (to which you may reply, 'No shit, Sherlock.'), and the path I've chosen for my life is vastly different from the one I dreamt up of four years ago, when I started writing. I suppose I'll bore you with my own story, for a little bit.

I had finished watching Code Geass and Fate/Stay Night after my first semester of engineering school. I had tanked a few finals (Calc and Chem), and I really wanted to escape, if only for a little while. Captain Sparkles had recommended me to watch them a few years ago, and I shrugged and said 'Why not.' I have to say, I can't imagine a better introduction to anime (well, besides DBZ or Gundam or Naruto- but that's another discussion for another time). Winter break passed quickly, and so I threw myself into my studies with a little more vigor.

Somehow, I had more time than I expected. Sparkles had been writing for a while, piquing my interest in the writing scene. Crossovers particularly appealed. I have to say, there's something amazing in fitting together two worlds as seamlessly as possible. I began cobbling together pieces of a fic from CG and FSN, and sent them tentatively to Sparkles. That was a fb convo to be seen, though that's all I remember of it. Come summer, I released the first few chapters of FNA.

Sophomore year came around with a few more classes than I expected. I don't recall much about my writing schedule, other than its spottiness. I do recall that it was in the spring of 2011 that Sparkles published FZE. That lifted my spirits a bit. I was struggling with research and an advanced curriculum, so having someone who I consulted with greatly on this project for a year actually join me- that was pretty nice.

Then there was junior year. It was worse than the college bum-rush of high school junior year. Research projects, exams, problem sets, more exams, the list goes on and on. I was spending more time with my friends, and I was introduced to League of Legends. Yeah, you can probably imagine how writing could slip my mind. But somehow, I made time for a rewrite- which was another problem in itself. I had noticed that my writing style changed significantly (a preference for ~7-10k word chapters, a more fluid description style, and a new appreciation for depth). I also finished the F/SN visual novel, and damn, Nasu can write. Akito also came out, shifting my view on a few things in big ways.

When I looked at FNA, all I could see was a heavy reliance on shounen. That's not me, that's not what I want to do. I wanted suspense, supernatural, politics, and grand strategy to climb to the fore, bringing shounen tropes and ideas for the ride. There was potential in Code Geass and Fate/Stay Night for so much more. FNA just seemed like a mishmash of things, rather than an integration of the two universes to bring my favorite elements out. The whole thing is filled with contrivances and happenstance, too, which made me want to fix the whole thing even more.

But in order to execute my vision, I needed time. That was a luxury I didn't have. Second term junior year, I entered a graduate program for robotics and control systems. My workload skyrocketed.

And that's pretty much why I haven't posted anything for the past year. Senior year was the toughest year of my academic life. I took a part-time job to pay off some debts, and began competing with doctoral students for grades and research opportunities. I had to work in two undergraduate projects, with really unreasonable professors. One of them was my capstone project, required for me to graduate. For that, I built a medical exoskeleton with my roommates. That was cool.

And so I graduated, with a bachelors. To get my masters, I needed to work for the summer (this summer of 2014, incidentally) at a medical research facility. I thought I would never have time to write.

Funnily enough, though, I did. The work-life balance was great. I wrote when I got home from work. But not for FNA.

You see, I couldn't focus on it. There were just too many problems to fix, it was just too clunky.

… I know this is going to create a lot of backlash, but … well …

It's a complete reboot.

I guess I should push forward through this as fast as I can.

The reboot will not replace FNA. FNA will stay up on fanfiction . net, but I won't update it. It'll most likely be renamed to be some sort of archive.

I've posted the first chapter of FNA's reboot in the fic entitled 'Fate: Covenant Apotheosis'. Yeah, the title is a bit pretentious, but 'to whom fate has promised divinity' carries both FSN and CG's intentions quite well, as well as my own. It'll be on the F/SN and CG crossover category (same as this one), so just click the crossover page above and head on over, if you're interested.

I do hope this makes up for my absence. Having no academic work is pretty nice, and all I have to do until the end of August is to finish an arm for a surgical bot. I'm really sorry for not keeping up with this fic, but please, if you liked FNA, try FCA for a week or two.

There, that's out of the way-

Eh? Vortigern?

… Why?

Great, now I have her on my case. Does anyone know how to console a despondent knight?

I could have tasted more, Mordred. I could have consumed all within my kingdom. And I should have consumed you, you ungrateful, bastard child.

Eh? I'm not Mordred, Vortigern. You're confusing me with someone else. Now shoo, go away.

Hmph. You dare? You dare deprive them of mine glory?

Hey, I didn't have much choice, you know.

… To break a dragon's heart is terrible and cruel.

-!

-Kkk. My throat, get your hand off my throat-

I wished to crush that false empress, and to subjugate that pitiful Master of hers. All that remains of my wish is a dream. Britannia will remember your treachery, Mordred.

Put me down! I can't breathe, Vorti-!

Begone, author of lies. Your pitiful soul will nourish me as your carcass bursts within my maw.

…

Crunch. Squish. Drip, drip.

Mmm. He was surprisingly … flavorful.

I suppose it would be better form if I had cooked him, though.

…

Yes, he does taste much better seared.

Hm. You, there. It is rude to stare while a king partakes in his nourishment.

Unless ... You would be so kind to offer yourself as a second course?

If not, then leave. Go read whatever lies the silver-tongued bastard wrought.

I'll be waiting.