It had been months since Lelouch vi Britannia and Nunnally were torn from their home—used as pawns, offered up to Japan in a cold diplomatic gamble that left the imperial palace echoing with whispered accusations and barely concealed relief.
But their exile wasn't the only wound carved into the imperial bloodline that night.
During the coordinated terrorist strike, one of the royal residences—a sprawling estate nestled in manicured gardens, supposedly impregnable behind layers of security—became a battlefield. In the chaos that followed, amid the staccato of automatic weapons, the acrid bite of smoke, and the screams of staff fleeing through marble corridors, a stray round punched through an ornate window. Crystal shards erupted like deadly confetti as the bullet found its mark—a towering lamp of Venetian glass.
The explosion of flame that followed was almost beautiful in its destruction. Fire raced across hand-painted silk wallpaper like liquid gold, devouring centuries of imperial heritage in minutes. Caught in that inferno was a fourteen-year-old prince—small for his age, brilliant beyond his years, and utterly unprepared for the lesson in mortality that was about to scar him forever.
Now he lay suspended between life and death in a sterile medical wing, his body wrapped in pristine gauze that made him look more like a mummified pharaoh than a living boy. The bandages covered burns that mapped his torso like a cruel geography of pain, each layer hiding flesh that would never quite heal correctly. Machines breathed for him when his smoke-seared lungs faltered, their mechanical whispers the only conversation he could manage.
The visits came sporadically—siblings who swept in with practiced concern, their eyes sliding away from the worst of his injuries, their voices pitched with the hollow sympathy of those grateful it hadn't been them. They brought flowers that wilted in the antiseptic air and platitudes that rang as false as their tears. *If mother were still alive,* he thought during one particularly painful session with his half-sister Cornelia, *she wouldn't have left my side. She would have cared beyond political necessity.*
But as weeks blurred into months, even those perfunctory visits dwindled. The empire had moved on. There were other crises, other priorities. He was just another casualty of war—alive, but no longer relevant.
*They've written me off,* he realized one gray afternoon, watching rain streak down the reinforced windows. *To them, I'm already dead.*
That understanding settled into his bones like a fever, transforming his pain into something sharper, more focused. The physical agony was nothing compared to the emotional abandonment. Every missed visit, every hurried excuse, every sympathetic glance that quickly looked away—they all fed the growing darkness in his chest.
When he could finally walk again, his movements were measured and careful, each step a reminder of his body's new limitations. The medical wing's opulence—crystal chandeliers, imported marble, sheets worth more than most people earned in a year—felt like a magnificent tomb designed to entomb his former life. The empire that had failed to protect him now surrounded him with luxury to mask its guilt.
One evening, driven by restlessness and a need to confront his reflection, he made his way to the adjoining bathroom. His footsteps echoed softly against polished stone, accompanied only by the quiet rasp of air moving through his damaged throat.
He stopped before the gilt-framed mirror and truly looked at himself for the first time since the attack.
The boy he remembered—proud, curious, untouched by real hardship—was gone. In his place stood something else entirely. Scar tissue pulled at the left side of his face, creating an asymmetrical mask that spoke of violence and survival. His eyes, once bright with childish wonder, now held depths that belonged to someone much older. Much angrier.
But it was his height that struck him most profoundly. Where his peers had grown tall and commanding, he remained diminutive—his body's growth stunted by trauma and months of confinement. In the Britannian court, where physical presence equaled power, he would always be overlooked. Always underestimated.
*They left me to burn,* the thought echoed through his mind like a prayer turned poison. *And now they'll dismiss me as broken. Too small. Too weak.*
His reflection stared back, and for a moment, he saw not just his own face but the future stretching before him—a future where he would forever be the damaged prince, the one who survived but never thrived. The one they pitied but never feared.
The rage that had been simmering beneath his skin finally boiled over. His fist connected with the mirror in a explosion of silver fragments. The glass spider-webbed outward from the impact point, creating a fractured mosaic of his fury. Blood welled on his knuckles, warm and real in a way that felt almost cleansing.
*Good,* he thought, watching crimson drops stain the marble. *Let it hurt. Let me remember.*
He returned to his room with deliberate calm, ignoring the sting in his hand and the way the broken glass crunched under his feet. There, resting on his bedside table like an offering from fate itself, was a book someone had left—probably another well-meaning gesture from the medical staff who thought intellectual stimulation might aid his recovery.
He lifted it with bandaged fingers, noting the weight, the quality of the binding. A military history, filled with tactical analyses and case studies of successful campaigns. He began turning the pages with growing interest, his sharp mind seizing on strategies and organizational structures with hungry fascination.
Then he found it.
A chapter dedicated to unconventional military organizations. Guerrilla forces. Underground movements. Groups that had risen from nothing to challenge established powers through innovation, dedication, and absolute loyalty to a single commanding vision.
One passage made him pause:
*The most dangerous military organizations are often those born from personal grievance rather than political ideology. When a brilliant mind is combined with the fury of betrayal and the patience of the truly wronged, the result is not just an army—it's a instrument of surgical precision designed for a very specific kind of justice.*
His pulse quickened as he read on, absorbing details about command structures, recruitment strategies, the psychology of loyalty forged through shared purpose. The text described how the most successful underground organizations operated like living organisms—adaptable, resilient, capable of growing stronger under pressure.
*Red ribbons,* he mused, his eyes catching on a photograph of resistance fighters, each wearing a simple crimson band around their arm as a symbol of their commitment. Such a small thing, yet it transformed individuals into something larger than themselves. A visible reminder of their cause, their unity, their willingness to bleed for their beliefs.
His mind began to work with the cold precision that had always been his greatest gift. If the empire had discarded him, if his family had written him off as irrelevant, then he would show them the folly of their assumptions. Not through tantrums or desperate pleas for attention, but through patient, methodical preparation.
*They think I'm broken,* he thought, his scarred lips curving into something that might have been called a smile on a kinder face. *They think I'm too small, too damaged to matter.*
*They're about to learn how wrong they are.*
Behind the gauze that still covered the worst of his injuries, behind the careful mask of a recovering invalid, something far more dangerous than a prince was taking shape. Someone who understood that true power didn't come from birthright or physical presence, but from the willingness to build something new from the ashes of the old.
Someone who would gather others like himself—the discarded, the overlooked, the underestimated—and forge them into an instrument of precision that the empire would never see coming.
The boy prince was dead.
Commander Red had just been born.