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1.
On the Audhumla, they gravitate towards each other. Despite that first conversation, Amuro always seems to find himself in Char’s orbit. When he finishes up tinkering with something in the hangar, Char is always hovering around. When he’s trying to avoid the younger boys, Char will seemingly materialize to distract them with a nod over his shoulder. When he’s not sleeping well, like most nights, Char turns out to be keeping the same hours. Amuro would call it stalking if he couldn’t catch that moment’s hesitation, even without looking at Char’s face, like their sudden chance meeting has caught him equally by surprise.
All said, though, it suits Amuro just fine. After so long alone, it’s almost painful, but he can’t really bear talking to anyone else—Hayato, a little, but even then he feels awkward fast. No one knows quite what to do with him. Everyone has expectations.
Of course, Char has expectations of him too. But they’re a different kind.
Somehow it’s more bearable coming from him than from an old friend or a child who will look at him like that. Char will match him blow for blow. Char will try to get under his skin. Char won’t treat him with any kind of pity or sympathy, just understanding. It feels good, satisfying in the way poking at a wound does.
And yet he’s never unkind about it. Teasing, but never mean. Only provocative, the first shots fired to get an idea of how your enemy fights.
Their newfound peace strains somewhat as Char’s return to space looms. As Amuro doesn’t change in the way everyone’s hoping he will. The Audhumla feels alive and tense. He finds excuses to make himself useful as a mechanic—well, Katz really did do a number on the Mark II, and they do need all hands on deck. But it helps to familiarize him with the new suits and saves him from most of the well-meaning questions. Even Beltorchika won’t bother him when he’s clearly working.
Char, on the other hand, spends more time than he should pacing around the hangar and staring at him. They don’t talk about it. He’s usually gone by the time Amuro comes down. It’s driving him crazy. Both the staring and the not being able to talk.
The night before they hope to reach Hickory, Amuro takes it into his own hands, pretend to be working until Char shows up so he can ambush him. Watching for it, it’s even more obvious how he turns tail the second he realizes he’s been noticed.
Amuro catches up to him in the hallway. They walk together for a moment, long enough for him to be sure that Char isn’t genuinely hoping to avoid him. In the end, he still can’t tell if maybe this was the desired result all along. It can be frustrating, the way Char refuses to ask for things normally. Luckily for both of them, Amuro has no shame about rising to the bait.
“You’re sure you won’t leave behind a mobile suit?” He starts. It might be pointless, but they’ve always been persistent with each other.
“You’re sure you won’t come to space?” Char counters the question, head tilted. The thing about Char is that he always smiles like he’s laughing at someone. It’s just that when things are good, you feel like you’re in on the joke. “Have a drink with me and I’ll think about it.”
“You could have just asked, you know.” Not for the first time, he thinks that Char must be an incredibly lonely person. He’s well liked—people almost always want to be around him—but that doesn’t have anything to do with it.
What a pair they are.
He has some idea about how it might seem, going back to Char’s room. It’s not a concern, really, just a…sense, from the way people talk about the Lieutenant and others, especially with women. Amuro doesn’t know what his own plan is, in that regard. Couldn’t possibly guess if that’s something he wants. He’s never thought much about it, even when he understood even less than he does now about the things men are supposed to do. Not that he’s doing much better these days. (Is it unkind to Bel, if he thinks of it the way he does? As a thing he’s supposed to be doing because this is what adults do, what men do?)
The point being, though, he has some expectations, none of which end up proven right. Char seems to stutter for a moment once they actually step inside. It’s not really much to see, the same room as anyone else on the ship. Except his dresser is probably full of red clothes.
“Drinks.” Char says out loud, as if he’s reminding himself. Amuro takes a seat at the low table, as standard as everything else, and tries not to watch him move around. As strange as it is seeing him every day, it’s even stranger seeing him like this. Like an animal out of its habitat and oddly aware of the fact.
If Char notices him staring, he doesn’t say anything about it. Just joins him at the table and pours two neat glasses of bourbon. As steady as they’re flying, he could just push it over. Instead he insists on handing it to Amuro, not letting go until their fingers have touched.
“You know you don’t have to do this as an excuse to talk.” Amuro says, half-teasing. It seems to set them both at ease, Char’s slight and mocking smile returning. “We can just talk.”
“If you don’t want it...”
“I didn’t say that.”
The bourbon is good, warming. Without much to do around the house, Amuro had spent a reasonable amount of time learning that not all alcohol is created equal. But even expensive alcohol tastes like alcohol. Char watches him carefully for a moment, like he’s waiting for something. Like he could read some sort of answer in the motion of Amuro’s throat.
Then he sighs, and presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose, up under the sunglasses. He shifts them off and folds them with a snap, a neat click as they’re set on the table. When he looks back to Amuro he’s frowning a little, like he’s daring him to say something about it. “Doing all this feels a bit pointless with you.”
“All…?”
“Acting like a certain type of man.”
He understands without being able to put it into words. There is a sudden painfully warm feeling that sometimes hits him when he’s talking to Char, and it surges up now: a vague and wordless urge to be kind.
“Then,” he tries, “What type of man are you?”
A kind person, Amuro had said, without thinking twice. He just knows it. He believes in that, maybe more than he believes in anything else right now.
Again, Char stares at him for a long time. Almost glaring in the force of his stare, if not the anger. He hasn’t touched his drink.
“I don’t know.” He says, finally. “What about you, Amuro Ray?”
Like with swords. Parry, the blade slides aside, then they go back and forth again…
It doesn’t bother him, though. He’d rather hear the question from Char than from himself. Something Beltorchika said flashes inopportunely across his mind. About what can motivate a man to change. Isn’t that what they’re always doing? Testing each other?
“I don’t want to fight.” Amuro admits, to no reaction but a steady gaze. “I know I should. Sometimes…some part of me wants to. I hate it.” Once he’s said it, it doesn’t feel like such a heavy thing--the words are clumsy and pointless. They do nothing to communicate what he’s been feeling. But talking to Char like this, he can at least make some kind of plea: you’ll understand, right? It’s overwhelming, how much he wants that. “It’s not like I can leave now, though. I can’t go back to…”
Char shakes his head as if disgusted. “Being in a cage? It’s such a waste of you.” His lip curls, a little, and the snarl is handsome on him. “Staying here is a waste of you.”
The comparison is clear. Amuro doesn’t indulge it. “You won’t change my mind. Especially not like that. But I’m saying I could fight here, if I knew it was helping you up there. Do you understand?” Somehow he’s ended up leaning over the table, pushing into Char’s space. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink.
“Amuro.” Instead, Char stares at him with open, naked contemplation. He looks a little wounded, somehow. “I’ll miss seeing you like this.”
At a loss for response as he is, Amuro has to recognize it as a kind of victory. It’s as close to an admission of defeat as he’s going to get. And he does get that suit, in the end.
2.
At Kilimanjaro, they huddle up in tents, no room for privacy with the howling wind outside and the fact that they might have to be up and ready for a fight at a moment’s notice. Some of the pilots elect to sleep in their cockpits, even though Amuro knows from experience it’s hell on the back. He’ll probably end up doing it anyway.
It’s on his way out into the snow that he feels compelled, suddenly, to pass by the command tent. There are lamps still on within. No need for him to check in.
No need, but he does, anyway.
He’s not that surprised to see him. It’s hard to imagine Char packed in among cots with other soldiers like so many matchsticks in a box. But then—he must have at some point, right? Must have trained with other soldiers. He gives off the impression of a born leader, sure, but it’s never that simple. Once again, he’s struck by how little he really knows about Char’s life. How they’ve never gone through all the little, meaningless questions that make up the process of getting to know someone. They just went from trying to kill each other to…whatever they are now. It’s somehow even easier after some time apart.
“Amuro.” He acknowledges, not looking up. “Can’t sleep?”
Amuro pauses, still halfway outside the tent. “It’s cold.” He replies, which is not really an answer.
That for some reason, gets Char’s attention. “Stay and warm up. We need you well.”
“No, I’m just—” Just what? Why had he bothered coming here? He realizes, belatedly, that Char is already standing and fussing with the hot water. There’s nothing for it. “Actually, sure. I think I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“You think?” It’s a little teasing, mostly genuine interest. With practiced ease Char pours more hot water from the heater into two cups, mixes a packet of something into Amuro’s. He doesn’t exactly give off the impression that he enjoys playing host—more that it’s some kind of deeply-held instinct. Amuro has thought of asking about it. Someday, when they have time. If that ever comes.
Still, he settles into the seat next to Char’s and accepts a cup of tea. Thin and bitter, made from powder, but warm is warm. “I have a bad feeling. Call it intuition.”
Char slides in beside him, close enough to touch. “About Kamille and that girl, right?”
Amuro frowns. Because that girl has a name, and yet he understands the impulse there. Because if Char is thinking the same thing that all but confirms his fear that the same thing is going to happen all over again. He knows it’s not Char’s fault, really. Not that he regrets snapping at him earlier, exactly, but it’s not useful. “Maybe there’s nothing you could have done. That we could have done. But we can’t do nothing now.”
Char shakes his head slightly. “I tried talking to him. He’s too angry with me right now to listen, anyway.” He’s not forthcoming on what that’s about or whether or not it’s deserved, so Amuro lets that part go. “You could.”
“I think I ruined my chance, back when they met. I couldn’t explain it to him.” Amuro grips his mug tight, waiting for his hands to warm. Seeing this, Char doesn’t say anything about his shifting closer. They can’t have one of their best pilots catching cold, after all. Even if it’s only practical, there’s a certain ease that comes with being closer to Char. The comfort of knowing even if he fumbles with his words he’ll be understood. It makes it easier to speak. “I don’t know what would have happened if anyone had spoken to me. About anything other than needing to fight.”
“Do you think that would change anything?”
“It’s not that exactly. I know that we can’t avoid fighting. But I can’t accept that these things are inevitable.”
He misses Char’s reaction, barely able to see his face from this angle. They’ve steadily moved while talking, closer than would be appropriate if they weren’t so familiar with each other already. Amuro is almost leaning on his shoulder. For some reason, that makes everything he’s thinking more overwhelming. Impossible to put into words.
If anyone had treated him differently—Char, too, was only barely an adult—he always wonders, what their last conversation was, what made her go out and fight--
“Nothing we do now can change what we’ve done.” When Char speaks it’s low and quiet, as close together as they are. “That’s the burden of being an adult. All we have is a responsibility to protect those who are the future.”
They haven’t spoken about it. Even now, they’re not really talking about it, exactly. But Amuro understands, when they fought that final time, they were feeling the same thing. As both of them are thinking about the same thing now: if there had been any space for grieving, for anything other than the necessity of violence, how they both might have come out of that different. Neither of them can bear to see Kamille like that, with no answer but vengeance. Char sighs and shifts, adjusting his arm like he means to place it over Amuro’s shoulder, though the touch never comes.
It’s good to know that they feel the same. But--
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like it’s too late for you.” Amuro mutters. “People can change, you know.” He refrains from mentioning just how much Char has changed even in the time they’ve been together.
There’s an empty pause. Then he can feel more than hear Char laugh joylessly, the sharp rise and fall of his shoulders. “Call it intuition.”
Amuro nudges him. “You’re a better person than you think you are.” I don’t hate you for what happened, he means.
“I could say the same for you, Amuro Ray.” It sounds like: See, I don’t hate you either.
Something turns in his chest. Not replacing the dread, but settling comfortably on top of it. If, in the worst case, they all die fighting a few hours from now, he’s glad to have had this conversation first. He thinks—allows himself to think, for only a second, that Lalah would be glad of it too. That they can understand each other.
Satisfied, at least with that, Amuro lets himself pause for a moment. His eyes don’t close, and he doesn’t lean on Char any further. But it’s something. To be warm and not alone, for a while.
“You should get some rest.” Char says, quietly.
Amuro manages a displeased noise. It sounds a little strange to say he doesn’t want to be alone. But no matter how busy and desperate things have been on Earth, Amuro has, admittedly, been lonely, in that way that can’t be satisfied by other people.
But Char’s right, and he can’t exactly sleep sitting up in here. “Okay. Fine.” He stretches and carefully stands, already missing the body heat. “You should too. Punishing yourself isn’t going to change anything.”
Char flashes him the hint of a smile before turning back to the map. “You don’t know that.”
It’s permission to leave and Amuro takes it. A prickling feeling rises at the back of his neck, growing as he walks away. He pushes the tent flap open. His fingers meet biting cold.
Suddenly, it’s very necessary that he say something.
Char is already looking at him when he turns around. “I know coming down here wasn’t what you or Kamille planned. But I’m glad you’re here.”
“We’ll be good support for Karaba’s forces.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He knows it and Char knows it. They understand each other perfectly well. Neither of them are getting away that easy. “It’s good to see you. Even in this situation. That’s all.”
Now sitting at attention, Char blinks at him once, twice. A question wants to be asked—but then, his surprise resolves into something more comfortable, and he relaxes.
“It’s good to see you too, Amuro.” He pauses another long moment, as if he’s about to say something else, before thinking better of it and looking down again to their plans for war. “Now get some rest. That’s an order, if you need it to be.”
3.
Char wants him in the room when they make the first plans for Dakar.
That’s not unusual on its own. Amuro is a pilot, not a politician, but he’s well-known enough that people want his opinion on these things regardless. What’s strange is the way he asks—too fervent, his hand coming down a little too hard on Amuro’s shoulder. And they might challenge each other, even these days, but he’s not going to deny Char anything he needs. Nor is he going to fight his instinctive concern.
So he’s in the room, even if it’s not strictly his job. So he stands next to Char, even if it’s not exactly protocol. So he refrains from saying anything as Char explains what he intends to do. How he intends to use himself.
It’s the right choice to make. Amuro is proud of him, both for seeing the path and having the strength to take it. He’s changed. They both have.
But his absolute misery about it is making Amuro reconsider. It’s hard to believe that not everyone in the room can feel it. The tooth-grinding, headache-inducing wave of feeling coming off of Char as he explains his plan. He’s never felt that before. Anger, sure, the pain of the dying, white hot desperation cut with grief, but not this particular despair.
Yet Char continues, his tone barely stiffer than usual, explaining how they’ll position their aerial defense. It’s all sound. The logic makes sense. And as for his own protection:
“Amuro will escort me.” He says without room for question or argument. Normally, Amuro might bother him about it on principle, but it’s the most at ease he’s sounded all day. Like no matter how careful this plan is, Amuro’s presence is the one thing he can be sure of.
He’s not about to take that away. “He’s safe with me.” Amuro agrees, and he can tell in the way Char looks back at him that he knows he means it. Knows how he means it.
After, Char is waiting for him in the hall. Though that’s not exactly right—he’s looking out the window, trying not to seem like he’s waiting. Not paying any attention at all to the earth below.
Amuro takes his cue to sidle up to him. They must be moving over grassland right now, smears of pale green filling the window. He feels the sudden and affectionate urge to lean up against Char’s shoulder.
Instead he shoves his hands in his pockets and considers the earth and the air and the man before him. “So. What’s your plan for me?”
Char’s usual smile would be more believable if he weren’t so obviously miserable. “Am I not allowed a last indulgence before I give up my freedom?”
“I would have offered if you didn’t ask. I’m just interested.” It’s an understatement—they would have had to drag him out of the suit. Their other pilots are good, sure, but he’s not about to trust anyone else with this. “Do you need me to keep you from running away?”
“No. I just don’t think I could speak without seeing you.” This is the most startling thing about Char, more than the teasing, more than the charm: his ability to be suddenly earnest in a way that always catches Amuro off guard. “You’re proof. That it’s still worth trying to…” He trails off suddenly, his jaw set, frowning like he often does when he’s desperate to be understood without words.
Amuro wants to understand. Does understand, in that moment: a hope for the future. The weight of it. A great capacity for kindness.
He’s not sure, even after what he’s been through these past years, what he believes a newtype is. But the thing that makes him a good pilot—the thing that’s kept him alive so long, somehow, is not more training or even any particular skill. It’s his intuition. The ability to react before he even knows what he’s reacting to.
It’s that intuition that moves him before the rest of him can catch up, that brings his hand to Char’s face. He feels, in that same automatic sense, Char’s lack of startling at the touch, his answering understanding of what is about to happen. From there it is only a matter of closing the space between them.
Results are mixed. Char is, surprisingly, a chaste and somewhat clumsy kisser, mouth closed and arms suddenly thrown round the back of Amuro’s neck like a lifeline. Not that he has a whole lot to compare it to. But it’s better, immediately and definitively, than anyone he’s tried to kiss before. More instinctive, none of his brain working itself into paralysis over how he should move or what he should do with his hands or if he’s doing it right. Instead he slides one hand into the soft mess of Char’s hair because it feels right. Takes it slow and gentle because he wants to. There’s nothing to succeed or fail at. It’s simply something that is happening, and it’s nice the way nothing in his life has felt simply nice in a very long time.
He wonders if that’s a newtype thing, too, or if it’s just the way they know each other.
When Amuro pushes closer he can feel his forehead bump against Char’s stupid sunglasses. It startles him into laughing as they pull away. Char follows him automatically, one arm snapping out to catch Amuro at the waist. “You can take those off, you know. I know who you are.”
Char lifts a hand to them almost self-consciously. “I suppose there’s no hiding anything from you, is there.” He fiddles with them for a moment, but then—simply takes them off without hesitating, and blinks down at Amuro like it was never an issue.
The novelty hasn’t worn off. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To understand each other?” He has seen Char’s eyes before, plenty of times now, though he does always feel like they should only be glimpsed for a moment at a distance or surrounded by fire and debris. And he’s perfectly aware that Char is handsome, even with his insistence on covering half his face.
What he’s less prepared for is the intensity with which Char looks at him now. For how familiar it is. It’s exactly like meeting him on the battlefield—that same force, that same pressure bearing down on him, with none of the old anger. A challenge, maybe. Understand me. Please, understand me. Beautiful eyes and the little pale line of a scar.
On impulse, Amuro leans up and kisses the mark.
4.
The angle is a little off. Char has only gotten taller and out of his clothes he’s all limbs, and he ends up practically folding them over Amuro’s shoulders.
It’s shockingly vulnerable. He’s surprised Char took his clothes off at all.
5.
Saying goodbye hurts less than he thought it would. He knows in that way beyond knowing that Char won’t just go off and die on him, that they’re sure to meet again. Which is not to say it doesn’t hurt, that Amuro doesn’t feel the inexorable weight of loneliness starting to press down on him again. But he’s said what he needed to say, and that’s fine. It’s fine. Nothing left but to play their roles.
But then it’s the morning they plan to launch and Char is ducking out of the Hyaku Shiki’s cockpit, for some reason, raising a hand to him. “Amuro.” He calls, smooth as he’s ever been. “Could you give this a last look for me? I need a mechanic’s eye.”
It’s so laughably transparent that he doesn’t know how Char ever pulls it off. But he looks so picture perfect and not at all up to something that if Amuro didn’t know him so well he’d nearly buy it, that he really is worried about fixing something in there.
And it works. No one gives him a second look as he sighs, put upon, and heads over to the mobile suit. Char has already gone back in, then, so certain that he’ll follow. It’s really pretty annoying.
The hatch is barely closed when Char hauls him bodily in, sprawling both back of them over the pilot seat. Amuro thinks, for a moment, he’s about to be kissed. Instead, Char clings to him strangely—one hand in his hair, one curled at an odd angle over the back of his shoulder—and presses their foreheads together. His glasses are gone.
“You could come with me,” he says once again, as close as such a proud man gets to pleading, so urgent and earnest that for a brief moment Amuro forgets all the reasons not to.
But the moment is just a moment and it’s funny, isn’t it, how Char is always asking him to come along. To make himself afraid and vulnerable. In that regard alone, he’s nobody special. The same as what anyone else asks of him.
“What if I asked you to stay here with me?” No matter how he feels, he’s not asking in anger. “Live on the earth you hate so much, with me? Would you?”
The worst part is that Char doesn’t say no out of hand. He frowns like he’s really considering it, really thinking the idea over, the scar distorted by the furrow of his brow. And that’s—Amuro can’t be responsible for doing that to him. Not when he’s just given up so much of his freedom. So he presses his hand to Char’s forehead, thumb smoothing that line, and tells him to—
“Go on. But you’d better come back in one piece, okay?”
Char smiles his mocking smile. Pain radiates off him like a toothache. “It’s not that I hate the earth. You know that.”
Amuro hears the words, but feels the refusal behind them.
It’s only for an instant. Char reels his pain back in and lets himself be held. Later, when they finally do part ways, there’s no bitterness between them. But in that instant he knows, in that deep unconscious way, that they won’t meet again on this planet.
6.
Amuro looks up for them every night.
Nothing bad has happened, of course—he knows he’d feel it if something happened.
There are messages, when they can get through. From Katz, mostly, and once again he wishes he hadn’t let the kid go. He seems so frustrated and so sad. Amuro remembers feeling that way, before he stopped feeling much of anything. But at the time he hadn’t thought about the kids watching.
A war hero. And now Katz wants to be the same thing. What a sad joke.
There’s a couple from Kamille, too, and those are sad in a different way. But he’s prescient enough, for better or worse, to always let him know Char’s still breathing. Tell Lieutenant to stop being an ass or Lieutenant is really upset about how things went with Axis—that last one worries him a little.
Char never writes, even up until the end. Of course he doesn’t.
7.
There’s a photo someone took, that evening after Dakar. The mood was infectious. Even aside from the effects of the speech they were still rebroadcasting over the radio, Karaba had needed a win. He doesn’t know whose camera it was, being passed around, or who took the photo. But it’s Amuro who gets it, months later, when someone goes through the prints.
In it, he and Char sit shoulder to shoulder on one of the stiff common room couches. Not quite drunk and not quite leaning together. It wouldn’t look like much to anyone else.
But he can recognize, in the grainy picture, the slight shape of Char’s smile. The angle of his shoulders. The lack of tension, for a moment, in the way he carries himself.
Amuro has never been the sort for decorating a cockpit. Instead he keeps it folded, shoved under the second skin of his normal suit over his heart the way other people keep pictures of their family. Parents and children and pretty little houses and then there’s him and Char, not quite looking at each other.
8.
The first clue that something’s wrong is that Amuro can’t decide what jacket to wear.
He’s on shore leave for the first time in this war (inasmuch as this war is distinct from the last,) a full week colony-bound to some place at Side 1. He doesn’t really care. It was where his superiors put him, that’s all. If he could, he’d be on earth, but there’s nothing there for him anyway. No one he can bear talking to. Nothing he wants to do. He is aware, distantly, that’s it’s the worst he’s been living since those long seven years of hibernation.
But he’s fine. He has his orders, and he’ll be fine. Maybe a vacation will even help. Amuro has no plans but to try to sleep, fail at sleeping, and maybe play tourist for a while.
So it’s weird that he wakes up early from a typical nightmare, eats a typically necessary but joyless breakfast, and then somehow gets stuck on what to wear. Amuro takes care of his appearance well enough, but he’s never been particularly vain in that way. Strange that he gives it a second thought now. Strange that he checks his hair in the mirror before he leaves.
It is, Amuro has to admit, nice to spend some time on the pretense of solid ground instead of on a ship. Nice to see something green at least pretending to be unconfined. The area around his hotel is lush with gardens and trees. Carefully placed ponds in strips of soft grass that turn into sprawling hills just outside this block of city. It might be easy to forget what’s outside, if you’d never been out there. The crushing weightlessness that surrounds them.
Even knowing that, he does enjoy the morning spent walking around and getting a sense of the place. He’s been fighting so often it’s sometimes hard to get used to his body as a thing on its own, a thing that is him and is not simply moved by him. A brochure lets him know that the colony’s countryside isn’t far away, and that if he takes a bus past the areas used for farming, there are a number of picturesque mountain towns perfect for a weekend getaway. So maybe the next couple days will be hiking, if he can work up the nerve.
Maybe it’s just the weird feeling he woke up with, but it’s all a little too familiar. Amuro doesn’t usually go to places like this. There’s not many other memories to compare it to.
Times like this, days like this take a toll on him. It’s tiring, having to see the world so loaded, every little thing weighty with a potential future meaning. And the feeling doesn’t shake off over the course of the day like it sometimes does. Instead it gets heavier, a pressure headache quietly growing.
So really, he should have known.
When the lighting starts to lean towards afternoon, Amuro gives up on getting over it. He takes a slightly different path back, letting that feeling nudge him along the outskirts of the city. Not the instant, instinctive moving in space but the imminent sense of something hanging overhead, something that will fall if you unbalance it. It’s not usually this strong.
Similarly, it’s not quite hunger or any sense of bodily necessity that has him turn and head into a store on the corner. Just the sense that he should, that it would be a good idea to, or avert some disaster. It takes him minutes just to process a shelf stocked with meal replacements and choose one at random. Distracted as he is, he turns and nearly steps directly into another person.
The pressure in his head resolves itself into a sudden and sharp shock.
Amuro knows who’s standing in front of him without even needing to look. He would know him with his eyes closed. Could feel him coming miles away out in space.
He looks exactly the same, down to the fact that he’s wearing fucking sunglasses indoors. They don’t do much to hide his briefly stricken look, like a spooked horse about to bolt.
Amuro somehow has the presence of mind not to say Char out loud in public, even though that’s all he wants to say, the whole sea of questions he wants to ask condensed into a wave of raw feeling. But Amuro has to assume he’s let himself be presumed dead for a reason and not out of some kind of spite. So he takes a deep breath instead.
“You’re—what are you doing here?” It comes out a little more accusatory than he means, but he just can’t get over it: Char Aznable, a year later, standing shellshocked in front of him in a grocery store.
Char collects himself much quicker (the glasses, Amuro thinks, really are cheating.) “Being a human sacrifice. Wasn’t that your advice?” He says, easily, the fake little half-smile slipping back into place as if no time has passed at all.
Something goes a little sideways in Amuro’s chest. If you’re angry with me, just say it, he wants to say, but it’s probably not worth having a fight about it in public. Not when Char could so easily just walk out of here, leave him alone again.
Amuro sighs. “I mean, what are you getting?” He tries to ease the mood. “I’ll pay for you.”
“Very gracious.”
“Federation pays an honest wage.” Which is not true, but whatever. It’s not like he usually needs money.
Char doesn’t miss the signal for what it is. His face falls a little, even hidden. “Do they, now.”
“Even when I’m on leave.”
“And how long can they afford to spare you, at a time like this?”
“A week or so.” He tries to say as casually, as easily as possible. They can talk about it later. Maybe. He hopes. “To be honest, I think they don’t want me around. Look, are you going to tell me what you need, or?”
What follows is not shopping together. No, it’s mostly Amuro trying to act as normal as humanly possible while Char looms in the corner of his vision, choosing items seemingly at random when he remembers he’s supposed to, watching him for some kind of reaction. Not saying anything. He does let Amuro pay, though, without interfering. He takes the bag before Amuro can even think of it. Such a gentleman.
Nothing about this makes anything less strange.
“I’ll help carry those to your car.” Amuro offers. It’s a flimsy excuse and he doesn’t even understand for what, exactly. Char makes plans. So surely he must have one.
Char does not give up his grocery bag. Even behind his glasses, he’s not quite looking Amuro in the face. “There’s a shuttle.”
They stare each other for what feels far too long, far past the point of playing it off. Amuro doesn’t care. He just needs to think of something, to do something, and he’s about five seconds from that something being grabbing Char by the collar and telling him to say what he wants. He’s fine with putting his pride aside if it means he gets to keep looking at Char, if it means not waking up from whatever strange dream this is—
“I’m staying a few hours away.” Char says, abruptly resolved.
It’s enough. Coming from him it’s better than enough. And Amuro knows he should step back, that there’s all kinds of questions, and reasons he shouldn’t, but the pull is stronger. Like his head is ringing again. He’s always made his best decisions in the moment, anyway.
“Let me go get my things from the hotel. Clothes, at least.”
Char smiles brilliantly at that, a genuine one, as if he’s said something of far greater importance. “Inviting yourself, are you?”
“We’ll say I heard you think it.” Emboldened, he grabs for Char’s free hand, as if to reassure himself that this is real. “Come with me? I feel like you’re going to disappear if I turn around.”
His happiness falters for a half second, like he’s doing something he knows he shouldn’t. “I can’t. My situation is…delicate.” There is a moment. “Will you come with me anyway?” he asks quietly, warily. It has all of the weight of all the times he’s asked before behind it.
9.
And so Amuro finds himself the next morning with one of Char’s undershirts hanging, oversized, off his shoulder, evaluating the situation.
He’s not quite adjusted to colony time yet, and the light is barely there. Amuro squints in the dark. There’s no way to see Char’s sleeping face at this angle, unfortunately, and he doesn’t want to risk waking him by moving around.
The place they’re staying isn’t exactly glamorous, lacking the kind of mystery he might assume from the word safehouse. It could generously be called a cottage, a couple small rooms crowding each other. Tables that fold out from the walls to save space. A bed just big enough for the two of them if they press together. Pretty typical for colony housing in a city.
But this place—he can’t quite think of it as Char’s house, as funny as the idea is—is out in the part of the colony designated for farmland and untouched countryside. Their nearest neighbors are neat rows of grain. Char had pointed out horses in a field as they drove in.
It’s different. Seeing him off of the earth.
Not like a weight is off him, though. If anything his burdens seem to have grown heavier. Amuro stares at the back of his head and wonders what this long, pointless year has been like for Char.
“Amuro. Your thinking is loud.” Comes from somewhere beside him, clipped and tense even muffled as Char’s voice is by the pillows.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can feel you.”
Amuro can feel it too, the moment of them aligning just so. The strangeness of a foreign body melting away into recognition. “I’ll try to sleep a little more.” He says, knowing he won’t, pulling the blanket up over both of them. Clinging to each other in the dark.
10.
He learns a lot of things very quickly: that Char likes his coffee with sugar and no milk, that neither of them are particularly good at taking care of themselves outside of a military schedule, that Char runs cool and is horrible about tangling his cold legs and feet with Amuro’s in the middle of the night.
Within two days he’s fixed the coffeemaker, disconnected the phone line properly so it won’t be tapped, and now he’s halfway through messing with the radio, sitting cross-legged on the bed and trying to coax it into picking up military transmissions. Char watches all of this with a keen and catlike sort of bemusement.
“You’ve quite a talent for that.” He notes over the loud crackle of static and snippets of electronic music.
“I like having something to do with my hands.” Amuro says without looking at him. His hands are trembling; he used to be quicker at this before that started. The coil is digging into his fingertip where he’s pulling at it. “Would’ve been a mechanic if I wasn’t a pilot.”
Char makes an interested sound at that and stands, goes to wash his coffee cup in the little sink. Amuro’s so engrossed that he sort of forgets about it, so it takes him a moment to understand what Char’s asking when the bed dips under his joining weight and he leans against Amuro’s shoulder and says, “What about now?”
“Maybe. If I wasn’t a pilot.” And that’s a big if.
“You could leave.”
It hangs in the air too long, the static suddenly very quiet. He should say something. Knowing that he should makes him even less able to.
When Char breaks the silence, it feels so severe it almost makes him jump. “Never mind. I don’t want you to agree with me only because I’m the strongest thing pulling you at the moment.”
He doesn’t sound angry at all, more—too cold and too light, really. Amuro wishes he could honestly say that’s not true. But he still can’t bring himself to respond aloud. Instead he cedes ground in the way he sets the radio aside and lays back on the bed, now utterly focused on Char leaning over him.
“You don’t enjoy this fighting for its own sake.” As gently as he’s speaking, every word lands with a heavy weight. “In fact, you hate it.”
Amuro can’t meet his eyes, turns his head aside instead. Watches the morning light stream in as Char speaks softly to him.
“But you feel it’s the only thing you can do.”
“…yeah.” He admits, then, without shame. Char, of all people, will understand.
He doesn’t say anything else. Just waits, watching him still, until he seems to come of some kind of conclusion that takes the energy out of him. As if suddenly tired, he eases himself down so they’re laying together. Slowly, like he expects something bad to happen, resting his head on Amuro’s chest.
It’s always been clear that Char is not the kind of man who can ask to be held. So he just—does the thing he always does, pushes pieces around to make them fall his way.
It must be exhausting living like that, Amuro thinks, and wraps his arms around him.
His hair has grown even longer and more unruly than it was a year ago. Amuro lets his fingers tangle absently in it. Winding, unwinding. Stroking at the nape of his neck as he sighs, quiet and muffled against Amuro’s chest.
Char’s weight is a comforting sort of burden. The kind he’d be willing to bear. The kind he might be able to choose for himself. But he just…
When Char needs to speak, he lifts his head a little to be understood. “I told Kamille once that someone like me is only good for fighting. That’s why I never got married.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You never got married because you’re deliberately insufferable. And no one suits you like that.” No one else, he means.
“Amuro…”
He has the nerve to look offended by that. So Amuro pulls him up and kisses him until he couldn’t possibly complain.
11.
When he sleeps, it’s always the same. You fight for nothing. No home, no family, no one you love.
He wants to say that she’s wrong. But he can’t forgive himself enough for that.
12.
It’s a strange sort of impromptu honeymoon. They don’t actually end up having sex more than once, which Amuro manages apparently so well that Char, ridiculous man that he is, covers his face with a pillow nearly the whole time.
But it’s nice, nicer than he deserves, so nice that Amuro almost finds himself waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s comfortable. It’s trading off the duty of making coffee in the mornings. It’s walking in the man-made countryside, talking about nothing. It’s touching, always touching, in a hundred small and chaste ways—nudging of shoulders, brushing of fingers.
It’s strictly not talking about what they’re doing here, with each other or in general.
Because Char is doing something, that much is clear. Amuro doesn’t ask what his plan is. But Char goes out without him a few times, in the evening or at night, only comes back in when Amuro is curled up pretending at the idea of sleep. He always comes back agitated, sits up at his desk with the lights on looking dour until Amuro gives up pretending and gets up to start tinkering again.
“How are the nightmares?” Char asks him, only once.
Amuro glares, too tired to be polite. “If you’re asking if I’ve seen her, you already know the answer is yes.”
They let that understanding sit between them, a third presence. Another year gone by, and still neither of them is ready to put it to words yet.
Amuro is the first to give in, to look away from Char’s knowing stare and back down to his hands. Time passes. The scrape of a chair in his periphery. He’s not really paying attention to what he’s doing. Just needs to look at his own hands for a while. Amuro tries to lose himself in it, tries to separate himself out into little metal bits and pieces.
Char’s hand on his shoulder pulls him back to himself. There is something tentative about the gesture—there often is, when he’s the one initiating. “I really was asking.” He says, quiet. “You sleep even less than I do.”
“I told you I didn’t want to come to space.” He doesn’t really have any other way to explain it. It’s not even about Lalah, though often it is. It’s not even really about having nightmares. It’s always there. “It’s better here with you than on a ship.” The worst was when he would come back from a sortie exhausted, but still too keyed up to sleep, his body permanently bracing for a hit that isn’t coming.
Char hmms, his touch a little firmer. It’s pleasantly grounding. “Stop punishing yourself.”
“Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?” Amuro closes his own hand over Char’s, keeping it pressed there. After a year of not being touched gently, he feels a little insatiable. He’s gone longer than that on his own, of course, but knowing that hasn’t made it any better. Hasn’t made either of them need it any less, apparently—he knows without being told that there’s been no one here for Char, either. “You’re really not subtle about being miserable.”
“It’s better here with you.” Char repeats, and leans down to kiss him.
An obvious maneuver, sure, but no less pleasant for it. It’s not wrong, Amuro thinks, determined, to want some comfort. To not want to be in pain. Even if he deserves it. They’ve both been like this for such a long time.
Amuro tilts his head back until the angle becomes unpleasant, resting his weight on Char behind him. Leaning turns to standing turns to the sudden unspoken agreement that the space is too full and too stifling.
It’s a nice night, though, whatever season this is being a warm one. They leave the third presence seated at the table. Amuro pulls them, is pulled, outside and into the grass, a place under the windows where it looks like there was meant to be a garden someday. Sitting turns to leaning turns to laying together half tangled. Char always seems more at ease when he can’t entirely be seen. The broadcast of stars suits him.
Amuro lets himself get lost in it for a while. It’s nice. The grass is soft on his back. The climate here is a little cooler, a little less dry than where he grew up.
He could get used to it, he thinks. It would take time. But he could get used to it, even if it’s not what he deserves.
He looks over Char’s shoulder, looks at the stars and they don’t look back. The moment suspends itself. He can see the rhythm of this life.
Char will suggest he come to bed and Amuro will. He’ll press his face to the other man’s back and notice again how his hair is getting long. He’ll think that maybe, tomorrow, he could help to cut it. Tomorrow, he’ll check the weather schedule and if it’s nice they can go visit the nearby farms, see the horses.
He feels sort of like a kid playing house. Well, maybe that’s really what he is.
When Amuro wakes up, he’s alone in bed with the blanket tucked over his shoulders. Sun fights its way through under the curtains. It takes a moment, but by the time he can move himself enough to read the clock, it’s already late in the morning. A full eight hours. He feels…not like a new man, but a little bit better. He even manages to remember to eat breakfast on his own, since Char has already gone off to wherever it is that he goes.
He’s not back by the afternoon, so Amuro forgets to eat, then. And then the evening comes. And then the night.
Char doesn’t come back that night. And he doesn’t leave a message behind. And he doesn’t come back the next morning and Amuro begins to feel like a normal person would, at this point, be worried. As it is, he’s strangely calm. Knowing that if there were something to be worried about he would have felt it, that sharp sting of urgent fear.
Even so, he should be doing something. And so Amuro digs through the house to realize only to realize that all of Char’s papers, fake as they are, are gone too. And then it’s the morning after that and Amuro is due back at the spaceport in a few hours and well, he thinks, there’s the other shoe. He wishes he felt more surprised. More angry, worried, anything else.
Alone, he has a choice to make.
A few hours later he’s standing straight in uniform, tired again already. Amuro tries not to feel angry. It won’t do any good. There’s no changing anything about it.
He doesn’t bother gathering at the windows as they leave like some of the younger soldiers do. From up here it will only look small. Nothing to be nostalgic about. Just a closed bottle drifting through space.
It doesn’t really bother him as much as he expects it to. Pisses him off, sure, in the way that Char is always good at doing. But by now he knows they’ll see each other around, that eventually that man will try to let himself back into Amuro’s life like a cat. And the faster this war is over the safer it will be for Char to come out, so at least that’s reason enough to keep fighting. Better than fighting for nothing at all.
13.
It’s another five years before he sees Char again.