A/N: This story will not die, for what is dead may never die.

I know it's a short update, only about two thousand words, but I wanted to get this posted now. It took me long enough already, and I'm starting a new job next week so I don't want to mentally commit to include more content and then drag it out further.

To all of you who followed or favorited myself or this story and returned after such a long absence on this, I can't thank you enough. I know it can be frustrating to have a story you enjoy lie forgotten for so long, but, well, real life. Could I have made a better effort if I had the motivation to work on it? Yes, yes I could have. Did real life happen? Yes, yes it did. But I don't want to make excuses. My updates on all stories will be inconsistent what with reality and motivation interfering with my progress, but sometimes that's the way it is.

I know this chapter isn't the smoothest, but, well, at least it exists, right?

I hope that you enjoy this update for The Price of Vengeance, and I hope to continue this much sooner rather than later, though I can make no promises.

"James, get me another box of morphine from the truck," Dr. Thomas Carlson called over his shoulder. "Takeshi, finish stitching him up." The nurse beside him nodded. "Make sure you show him how to properly change the bandages and check for infection before you send him out." Micro-managing under stress was an old habit of his. He needn't have worried-His team of nurses were a well-oiled machine when it came to trauma care-but they were used to it by now, and they moved from one patient to the next like a well-oiled machine.

Carlson resisted the urge to run a hand through his graying hair long enough to first peel off his gloves and wash his hands. "Melinda." He nodded a greeting to the lab assistant currently coordinating admissions to the makeshift clinic.

"Dr. Carlson."

He grabbed himself a water bottle from the table in the far corner. "How many do we have waiting for treatment?"

"We've got thirteen out there, all of them with superficial injuries," she replied. "The worst of it is over."

He shook his head. They had finally finished preliminary treatment eighteen hours after Britannian forces withdrew. Soon it would be time to start helping dig through the wreckage to find the missing. "What a clusterfuck," he muttered under his breath.

"All too true," Melinda agreed. "On another note, there is a Britannian student here to see you specifically." She glanced down at her notepad. "He said his name was Liam Ashford, and that he was an old friend of yours."

His lips tightened. Of all the times to make his life more complicated… "You've already distributed basic pain meds to the ones who are waiting?"

Melinda frowned at him, offended that he thought she might forget something as basic as that. "Of course, Dr. Carlson." He smiled at her reaction in spite of himself.

"Sorry. Tell Mr. 'Ashford' that I'll be out in two minutes." His assistant nodded and took her leave. Carlson picked his way between the cots scattered across the floor. "Dr. Connors." He got his friend's attention in between treating patients. "I need to talk to someone. You have the clinic until I'm back."

He met the teenager on the steps of the building. They'd set up in an old conference center on the outskirts of Shinjuku. It wasn't in the best shape, and there was nothing they could do about the dust, but there was enough space for the team to work efficiently and still have space to set up bunks for staff breaks. That had been a godsend.

"Dr. Carlson." The teen pulled back his hood to reveal the same dark hair and violet eyes that Carlson remembered.

Thomas leaned against the handrail, taking the time to light up a cigar before he replied-another bad habit from his army days. "Lelouch. It's been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Almost two years."

Had it only been that long? He supposed that when you saw someone almost every day for years the time apart would seem longer, wouldn't it.

The awkward silence stretched on. He watched the spring breeze steal away a lungful of smoke. "Why are you here, Lelouch?"

The teen stared out across Shinjuku's skyline. Smoke still billowed from scattered first throughout the ghetto. It would take days for them all to burn out, and it wasn't as if there was any sort of fire brigade in the ghetto. Any organized volunteer corps would be too worried about their own families and homes to help. "It's lucky this happened in Shinjuku. In a ghetto with more wooden buildings the whole district could've burned down."

"Yes, it's lucky that the Britannians massacred hundreds of people here and not in another neighborhood." Carlson glowered at the boy until he looked away. "You didn't answer my question."

"Can't I just visit my old teacher?"

Dr. Carlson snorted. "If you just wanted to talk, you could've done that when I wasn't running an emergency triage clinic. I thought the first thing I taught you was don't try to bullshit me."

Lelouch shrugged and a smile flitted across his face. "Sorry. Old habits die hard." It quickly faded. "I wanted to apologize for the last time we spoke." He toed a piece of debris with his foot, sending up a plume of dust to drift away in the breeze. "You were… a good teacher."

"Hmm." He took a deep drag on his cigar, taking perverse enjoyment in poisoning his lungs. "You're saying your goodbyes." His old student gave a slight nod. "When does it start?"

"Within a week."

"Have you told them yet?"

The boy glanced at the ground. "I haven't told Ruben. He needs deniability. I… I told Milly though."

Carlson shook his head at Lelouch's almost guilty expression. "It isn't wrong to care about someone, Lelouch. Or to let someone else care for you."

The boy refused to meet his eyes. "It is when it will only hurt them."

Carlson snorted. "All these years, and you still haven't learned. Do you even remember why I stopped training you?"

"You said I was selfish."

"You still are selfish." He glanced out across the skyline, clouds burning in the sunset. "He who fights for revenge fights for no one but himself and in his hollow victory shall find only loneliness and sorrow."

"Napoleon's On Classical Legends, describing the fate of Achilles in the Illiad." The reference was a reflex, ingrained over years of study. At least Lelouch hadn't faltered in that. Perhaps he'd matured more than Carlson gave him credit for. "But sometimes fighting for oneself is still reason enough."

"Not when fighting for oneself means trying to start a civil war in the largest nation on Earth." Carlson glanced at the teenager, but his expression was a mask. "You can call it a rebellion or a war for independence or whatever else you want, but don't condescend to claim that you would stop short of your own personal goals."

"Maybe so," Lelouch replied with a shrug. He paused for a while and Carlson let the silence drag on, content to nurse his cigar. "I could use your help, you know."

There it was. Carlson had known it was coming, of course. As soon as Melinda had mentioned his visitor, he'd known, just as Lelouch knew his answer would be the same as two years ago. "You already know I won't. Not unless you can prove that you fight for those who follow you."

After talking about rebellion and wars and death, it was strange how easily they fell into small talk. Lelouch spoke of how trivial his classes were, to the point that he was skipping them to play chess matches against the nobility. They chuckled about how he could never have gotten away with that when he studied with Carlson.

Lelouch marveled at how Carlson's daughter Adleisa had grown. She was eleven now, and almost came up to her father's chest in the pictures he showed Lelouch. "She misses you, you know," the doctor said after they shared a chuckle at how soon she'd outgrow her father. "You were like an older brother to her for years."

The teenager looked away, unwilling to meet his mentor's eyes. "I'm… I can't be that to her. Not like she wants me to be."

A calloused hand squeezed his shoulder, and Carlson gave him a sad, warm smile. "I know."

"Dr. Carlson!" He glanced back at where Melinda was waving from the door of the old building. "We had another dozen stragglers come in."

They said their good-byes. After the way they last parted, it felt like there was finally closure between them, as much as they disagreed with each other. As Lelouch stared at his old mentor's back, though, he couldn't help but feel wistful for all the rest of the things he would sacrifice on the path ahead.

If there was one thing Kallen learned when Naoto died, it was just how utterly crippling depression could be. For someone who always wore her thoughts on her sleeve, who let her emotions out, it felt like her world was collapsing.

Now, today, less than twenty-four hours after almost every friend she had was captured by Britannians, she couldn't move.

She could hardly even breathe.

The bedroom seemed at once claustrophobic and terribly, hideously empty, the walls closing in around her even as she lay curled up, drowning in a bed that seemed far larger than it ever had before.

Had she slept at all? She didn't know. Just as when Naoto died, she could hardly tell the difference between nightmares and nightmarish reality.

The world swam before her eyes, long since dry, her tears having run out hours before. Kallen stared at the wall, trying not to think about what her friends were going through and what would happen next. Trying, and failing utterly. Her body trembled with each breath.

When the bastards killed Naoto, at least they'd returned the body. The one decent thing he—Kallen had for years refused to think of him as her father—did since he moved back to the mainland with his new wife was use his influence to get Naoto returned to them for a decent funeral. It was also the only time he'd been back to Japan since he left two years after the invasion.

It was all for appearances, of course. Kallen refused to believe that he actually might have cared, no matter how his shoulders shook over the closed casket at the viewing.

Ohgi and the others did not have an aristocratic bastard of an excuse for a father, though. Somehow she doubted the Britannians would be willing to return the bodies of terrorists to anyone who claimed to care about them.

And here she was, lying in bed and feeling sorry for herself, thinking about her friends' funerals like they were already gone.

But weren't they? After all, it wasn't as if they would be pardoned. And she couldn't break two dozen people out of a high-security military prison on her own.

She had a better chance of meeting a decent Britannian than seeing her friends again.

Shuddering, she tried to banish the thought from her mind.

"Dear?" Kallen flinched before realizing it was only her mother, Ayuka. She hadn't even heard the door open. The bed shifted a little as she sat beside her daughter and massaged her shoulder. "Oh, Kallen…"

At once, the tears came flooding back. Kallen found herself once more clutching her mother like a child longing for the safety of her parents. "There's no one left. Naoto's gone, Ohgi and his friends are all gone…"

"Shh, baby." She stroked Kallen's hair like she had back when the world was worth living in, back before the Britannians ruined it. "Shh…"

"I—" a wracking sob tore through her. "What's the point of living in a world like… like this?"

Her mother cradled her, rocking side to side. "Dear, no one can answer that but you." She planted a kiss in the disheveled red hair of her daughter's head. "You might find a purpose in God, or in the friends and family who support you, or in someone special that you find where you least expect it."

"Is that why you loved Him? Because of your grief?" Kallen couldn't help but take a shot at Him. Her anger at the Britannians was too raw, too close to the surface not to. She regretted her words as soon as her mother stiffened against her.

"Kallen, do not talk about your father like that. Not in this house." Ayuka sighed sadly. If only her daughter could see what sacrifices her father had made for her. "I loved your father because he was, and is, kind and good and a decent man, no matter how you and Naoto saw him." She went back to stroking her daughter's hair. "I just want you to be happy. Seeing you alone like this, destroying yourself with guilt… It hurts me more than could imagine. Alright?"

"Yes, mother," Kallen whispered.

"Just try to make yourself happy for me?" Ayuka felt her daughter nod against her and hugged her tighter. "Loneliness is the worst kind of pain, Kallen. You still have friends at school. They care. One of your classmates called today to see how you were. He said that he'd been trying to call you but you weren't replying."

Kallen sagged in annoyance. She didn't want to talk to Britannians right now, especially some stuck up noble brat who went to a school like Ashford. "Mother—"

Ayuka released her daughter from her gentle embrace and stared down her annoyed glare. "He was genuinely worried. He said that you didn't seem yourself when you left school yesterday."

Yesterday? But she hadn't been at school at… all…

Kallen went from depressed to hyper-alert. "Who was it?"

"Dear, what's wrong?"

She grabbed her phone from her bedside table and checked her messages, wincing as the gashes on her hands from yesterday complained at her treatment. "Who was it? Who called to check on me?"

Kallen saw the ID at the same time as her mother replied. "It was Milly's foster brother, Lelouch. He's one of your closer friends at school, isn't he?"