The Knight Who Remembered

A Code is not a burden. It is a compass.

That is what C.C. told him, once, in the quiet of a submarine corridor while the world above burned with the consequence of every choice they had made together. He did not believe her then. He does now, twenty-two years later, standing on a rooftop above Ashford Academy with a pair of binoculars in his hands and the warm, impossible certainty of Lelouch is alive down there filling the hollow that had replaced his chest somewhere around year four of his immortality.
The Thought Elevators confirmed it. The Code confirmed it. And the small, stubborn, irrepressible thread of something the scholars of the Geass Order never could properly name - call it destiny, call it the will of the world, call it the fact that Kururugi Suzaku has never once been able to leave Lelouch Lamperouge alone - confirmed it loudest of all.

He is here. Four years older than the Lelouch below, and roughly twenty years younger than the man he used to be. And he is not leaving.

Not this time.

Inspired by Love_Psycho (some birds aren't meant to be caged) -- can find on archive of our own.