By Lelouch hides behind the Shinkirou and asks Charles why he didn’t protect Marianne eight years ago. Charles answers that people aren’t created equal and that Lelouch should use Geass to find out. Lelouch knows that’s a trap because attempting to use Geass on Charles means he leaves himself open to Charles using Geass. Outside the Geass Order, Rolo orders the Black Knights to look for Lelouch. Jeremiah looks at Bartley’s body and says he should hate him for what he did to his body, but he can’t given Bartley’s loyalty to the royal family. Lelouch shoots out a bunch of small mirrors, allowing him to use Geass and reflect his command over to Charles’ eye while he continues to hide behind the Shinkirou. The Geass hits Charles, but he responds by pulling out a gun and shooting himself in the heart. Lelouch wonders if he’s won and screams out. In Area 11, Kallen slaps Suzaku and tells him she doesn’t know anything about Lelouch. He pushes her back into chair and says he’ll use the Refrain to learn everything. He tells Kallen she’ll soon lose her free will, but he realizes doing that would make him like Lelouch, so he tosses the Refrain injector aside. Inside the Geass Order, C.C. tracks down V.V. and tells him she couldn’t escape her fate. V.V. says he’ll accept the fate of immortality and recalls his childhood pact with Charles. Lelouch stands over Charles’ body and is disappointed because he wanted to ask him questions and make him apologize. Just then, Charles gets up and tells Lelouch to use the way of kings if he wants to get the power of kings. Lelouch’s Geass doesn’t work, so he shoots Charles with his own gun, but that doesn’t work either. C.C. wonders why Charles took away V.V.’s Code, and she thinks that V.V. liked Marianne. Lelouch realizes that Charles is immortal now, and Charles says he’s found a new power to replace Geass. Charles activates a device, and Lelouch finds himself in a white space surrounded by masks. Elsewhere, Viletta approaches Ohgi and points a gun at him. She says she’ll erase all her stains of being with Elevens. She asks him why he saved her, and he answers that at first it was just for information about Zero, but he came to fall in love with her. Viletta says she wishes she hadn’t met Ohgi, and Sayoko emerges from some nearby bushes. Lelouch asks what’s going on, and Charles comments that it’s funny how someone so stained in lies demands the truth from others. Charles asks Lelouch what he gained by being Zero, and Lelouch answers that he obtained an army and territory. The masks tell Lelouch that he lost Euphemia, and that he can’t show himself to Suzaku or Nunnally. Lelouch says he lies in order to live like anyone else, and the masks tell him he wears a mask because he doesn’t want others to see his true self. Charles tells Lelouch there’s no need for lies, and C.C. suddenly appears, telling Charles that Lelouch holds no value for her anymore. Charles tells C.C. that he’ll grant her wish, and she tells Lelouch that her wish is to die. She tells him that the end of the path for a Geass user is to succeed the one who gave them the power. She says no one was ever able to fulfill her contract, but now Charles can. Lelouch can’t believe that she’s lived in order to die. She tells Lelouch that if he has a reason to live, he should kill her, which will give him the same power as Charles. C.C. tells Lelouch he’s too kind, and Charles sends Lelouch away.
At Area 11, Nunnally asks Rohmeyer for her hand as she discusses the reconstruction of the Saitama ghetto. She asks if there’s any disadvantages to the Elevens in the project, and Rohmeyer answers that it benefits everyone. But Nunnally knows she’s lying and asks her to revise the plans. Rohmeyer asks Nunnally to leave the work to experts, but Nunnally reminds Rohmeyer that she’s the governor. At school, Suzaku thinks to himself that there’s no way to confirm things without meeting Lelouch. He asks Rivalz if Lelouch is at the clubhouse, but Rivalz tells him Lelouch hasn’t been around since Shirley’s death. Suzaku runs over to the underground base and asks an intelligence officer where Lelouch and Viletta are, and he sees they’ve been Geassed. In Dallas, Schneizel and Kanon meet with Nina. Nunnally speaks with Suzaku and informs him that Area 11’s status will be upgraded because there has been progress. Suzaku recalls Charles telling him that if Lelouch regains his memories, he’ll use Nunnally. Nunnally asks Suzaku if he’s hiding anything, but he says he’d never lie to her. She follows up by asking whom she spoke to on the phone recently, and she believes it was Lelouch. She reaches for Suzaku’s hand, but he’s surprised and pulls back. Lelouch appears in the European countryside and sees a girl collapse, but she falls right through him. C.C. tells Lelouch he can’t do anything because these are her memories. A nun asked young C.C. if she had a reason to live and offered her a contract. In the forest, Sayoko and Viletta fight, and Ohgi takes the brunt of a dagger attack and falls off a cliff, with Viletta following after him. C.C. tells Lelouch that her Geass power was to be loved, so she could make everyone love her. Because everyone loved her, she wasn’t able to tell what true love was. The only person she could trust was the nun who was unaffected by her power. One day, C.C. gave up all the love at the nun’s request. The nun told her that she needed to find someone else to take the power of immortality and end her curse of long life. The nun tricked C.C. and passed her immortality to C.C., which allowed her to die. In a strange gallery filled with paintings, C.C. asks Lelouch if he’s a person from the real world. C.C. tells Charles that everyone who loved or hated her has disappeared in the flow of time, but he tells her that her long journey is ending. Lelouch suddenly reappears inside the Shinkirou, and Charles is surprised that he opened the thought elevator. Lelouch concludes that the entire area is a system that interferes with thought. Several objects grapple onto the Shinkirou, and Charles grabs onto C.C. Lelouch asks C.C. why she didn’t push her immortality onto him, and he wants to know if she’s pitying him. Just then, C.C. breaks away from Charles and frees Lelouch. The Shinkirou takes off, and Lelouch begins destroying the temple. As C.C. falls, Lelouch chases and grabs onto her. In Dallas, Nina successfully detonates her FLEIJA bomb, and Schneizel tells her she’s a genius. Lelouch and C.C. reappear inside the Geass Order, but when she wakes up she doesn’t recognize Lelouch and asks if he’s her new master.
The cliffhanger from the last episode is followed with Lelouch skillfully using small mirrors as a way to safely use Geass on Charles without exposing himself. Charles takes the strange action of shooting himself, which makes Lelouch wonder if he’s done for. Unfortunately, all that happened was that Charles took V.V.’s Code, granting him immortality. Thus, we learn quite a bit about what a Code Geass is. C.C. was a medieval peasant girl who was granted the power to be loved by a Geass-using nun. Eventually, the nun tricked C.C. into taking her immortality so she could die herself. Now, C.C. reveals to Lelouch that her wish is to die and end her long life, which Charles is going to grant. On some other fronts, Viletta confronts Ohgi, and their encounter ends with a literal cliffhanger. Also, Suzaku wisely backs down from his attempt to use Refrain on Kallen. That he would even think of doing so just shows how obsessed he is with proving that Lelouch is Zero, and of course he’s lying to Nunnally too. In the end, Lelouch breaks out of the thought elevator, but he’s too late to save C.C. Because the process is interrupted, C.C. doesn’t die, but she loses all her memories and reverts to being a medieval peasant girl. In a way, you could argue that is death itself – although her body lives, everything that made up C.C.’s personality is gone. In a way, seeing what C.C. has been reduced to and Lelouch’s reaction reminds me of the end of Zeta Gundam, when Kamille Bidan lost his mind and babbling like a fool. At the very least, this presents some drawbacks for Lelouch’s plan since C.C. was his close accomplice from the beginning.
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