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Commander Char is watching him.
The briefing is in Char’s personal quarters, with only his closest confidants in attendance. They drink an appropriate amount of wine and discuss the war effort, how it’s been and where it’s going, move pieces around on maps and propose points of attack.
The whole time, Char is watching him.
Challia is paying enough attention to contribute what he needs to. He has noticed the patterns and knows when to take his turn. Char has more presence in the room than any of the others and it dampens anything else around him. It is hard to focus on anything else.
Challia won’t look up into his eyes. A strategy is proposed. A plan is made. Challia and Char will fight, and they will win, and then they will fight again. Challia has come to realize the finer details do not matter. On the battlefield, the two of them become something no one else in this room can understand.
Char will lead and he will follow. They will act on deadly instinct, they will strike before their target can comprehend its own destruction. They will not lose.
The men shake hands, salute, then they’re gone.
Everyone has been dismissed. Challia is free to leave. He hasn’t been told to leave. Char refills his glass. He’s opened a new bottle, a blend he hadn’t offered to the others. The wine is dark red and the taste is too bitter for Challia’s liking, but he’s drinking it anyway.
It’s late, for whatever that’s worth in a synthetic environment this far from Earth. Challia has lived his entire life in a cycle dictated by a planet he’s never stepped foot on, a home that isn’t his.
Challia knows he’s speaking but the words don’t matter. His mind is somewhere else.
It isn’t frightening like the first time he opened himself to the full potential of the psycommu and felt his self blur in chromatic aberration. Inside the Kikeroga’s core he had become man and machine and miracle and weapon. Nowhere and everywhere. Uncontrolled expansion into an infinite universe and within him the action potential to fill all of it, an endless sea. He’s never seen the sea.
But with Char he has an anchor, and he is not alone.
They talk to fill the space between them. They talk about the war, about Zeon, about the rush of piloting, the twisting storms of Jupiter’s eye, the Earth Challia has never seen. Nothing and everything.
He doesn’t know if it’s the wine, or the way he always feels around Char, the odd spark that flits between them when their eyes meet on the bridge, tethering them in a way that’s theirs and theirs alone, but real doesn’t feel real. Time is fluid, and it’s flowing through his fingers.
“You’ve never seen my face, have you?”
These words are concrete amidst abstract syllables. A jarring change in the rhythm of Char’s voice.
Challia has never seen Char without his mask. As far as he knows, no one has. The Commander doesn’t reveal his real face to anyone. He’s heard rumors— facial deformities, a missing eye, a scar. He never asked. It’s not his place.
“Would you like to?”
The Commander sits across from him, but Challia hears him speak as if he is standing at his side. Char’s voice is hushed, breath warm on Challia’s ear. Whispers of secret schemes for him and him alone. A wry smile, and Challia swears he can see a spark crackle in the man’s eyes beneath his mask.
“Why don’t you find out for yourself?”
He’s drawn in, pulled towards the gravitational well in Char’s heart, and he’s not thinking, not breathing. Char is gazing up at him. Even through the lenses, Challia knows Char is seeing him. Like how he knows the Red Gundam sees him when Char inhabits it. Wide bright eyes, binary stars that stare into him, through him, see him , burning after-images that linger behind his eyelids and follow him into his dreams.
Head full of dancing green sparks. Fingers in soft blonde hair. He isn’t wearing gloves and there’s nothing in between them now, and yet there is still so much.
Challia releases the mask.
His hands freeze. The mask falls away, and there he is, there Char is, sparkling blue eyes (how had he known they’d be blue?) and pale skin, and he’s so close he can see each individual fiber of color in his retinas, and for a moment he thinks Char wears that mask because no one could look into those eyes and see anything else again.
He is the Commander. He is the Red Gundam’s pilot. He is the armada of ships he leads and the fervor of Zeon. He is the photons spewed from stars and the particles in the air around them and the centrifugal gravity that holds their home.
For a moment, Challia sees him.
But there’s something deeper, darker, knotted and buried and left to rot in the black void between the stars. Entropic erosion. And it’s growing.
Then Challia is back in his chair, and the table is between them, and he’s looking everywhere other than Char’s face. He’s asking why and Char is laughing in that quiet way he does, as if the laughter is for him and him alone.
“I can’t tell you all my secrets at once. I’d lose my mystique.”
And Challia knows this face is another mask, another shell, another stretch of distance between them. Whatever he saw before is gone— maybe he hadn’t been meant to see it.
Challia can look at him now, and Char’s eyes are like the Gundam’s. Bright electric blue, gaze fixed on him and nowhere else. But all Challia sees looking into them is his reflection.