The transport's waiting bay was one of the few places on the ship quiet enough to think in — a narrow compartment meant for pilots on standby, lined with worn benches and the low hum of recycled air. Machu found Grievous there between shifts, seated with the stillness of something built rather than born, four arms folded in a way that still, after all this time, looked wrong to human eyes.
She sat down across from him without asking.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You already are." Grievous's voice carried that dry rasp it always had, somewhere between amusement and warning. "Go on."
"Elmeth." She said it plainly, no preamble. "That machine wasn't built for you. Everyone who's seen the specs knows what it was designed around — a Newtype resonance profile that isn't yours. It was supposed to have a pilot named Lalah Sune." She watched him carefully. "Do you know her? Do you know what happened to her?"
For a moment Grievous didn't answer. When he did, there was none of his usual theater in it.
"No," he said. "I don't know the name. I don't know if she existed here at all, or somewhere else, or not at all." He tilted his head, the motion mechanical and deliberate. "I only know I woke up in a lab on Luna II. No memory of arriving. No memory of a choice being made. One moment there was a war I understood, fought with a lightsaber and a fleet of my own — and the next, four arms, a new set of lungs, and a room full of Zeon engineers looking at me like I was a very expensive mistake they hadn't quite decided whether to keep."
Machu absorbed that in silence. It matched what she already suspected — that whatever mechanism had brought him here, it hadn't asked him any more than it had asked her, dropped into this world with Nyaan and a Gundam that didn't belong to this timeline either. Whoever — or whatever — was doing the choosing, it clearly didn't feel obligated to explain itself.
She nodded slowly. "That's... about what I expected."
Then, because some part of her couldn't help it — because months of digging through half-answers had left her simply curious about the parts of this that weren't a mystery — she added, "Can I ask something else? Something less serious?"
"You're on a roll today."
"The arms." She gestured vaguely at all four of his. "What's that actually like? Piloting with them, I mean. Everyday things. Does it ever get confusing?"
Grievous made a sound that might, on a living throat, have been a laugh. "Confusing. She asks if it's *confusing*." He straightened, clearly delighted to have been asked. "Little one, I once held three lightsabers and strangled a fourth Jedi with my bare hand at the same time. Four arms isn't confusing. Four arms is an upgrade the rest of you simply haven't caught up to." He flexed the lower set with theatrical relish. "The only difficulty is convincing your engineers to stop building cockpits sized for creatures with only two."
Machu blinked. "...I don't actually know what a lightsaber is."
Grievous looked at her for a long moment, something almost like disappointment crossing what remained of his expression, as if she'd failed some basic test of culture he hadn't realized he still expected people to pass. He opened his mouth — perhaps to explain, perhaps to mock her for not knowing — and then simply didn't bother. Some things, apparently, weren't worth the effort of translating for a universe that would never understand them properly.
Machu let it go too, and didn't ask again.
Machu couldn't quite help the small huff of laughter that got out of her. "That's not actually an answer."
"It's a better answer than the one you actually wanted." Something in his tone shifted, quieter now, almost sincere beneath the bravado. "You wanted to know if I feel like myself. I don't know how to answer that either. I feel like what's left after someone rebuilds you and doesn't leave a manual behind." He looked at her, unreadable behind that ruined face. "You, of all people, searching for someone who might not exist anymore — I'd have thought you'd understand that better than most."
Machu didn't answer that right away. She only sat with him a while longer, in the quiet hum of the waiting bay, two people built out of other people's unfinished stories, neither one any closer to knowing whose war this really was.
It was the sound of the hatch hissing open that broke the silence — quick, uneven footsteps, someone clearly not looking where they were going. Machu and Grievous both turned at once.
A small figure with a shock of pink hair had all but stumbled into the compartment, wide-eyed, breathing like she'd run the length of the ship to get there. She froze the moment she registered she wasn't alone, caught somewhere between bolting back out and pretending she hadn't just fled from wherever she'd come from.
Gotou Hitori.
Neither of them said anything at first. She looked, Machu thought, exactly like someone who had woken up a week ago in the wrong universe entirely and still hadn't been given a satisfying explanation for it — which was, as far as Machu understood the girl's situation, more or less exactly what had happened.
"...Wrong room," Hitori managed, barely above a whisper, already inching back toward the hatch.
Grievous tilted his head, unreadable as ever. "You're the Commander's secretary now, aren't you." It wasn't quite a question.
Hitori's answer was to make a small, strangled sound and disappear back through the hatch without another word, leaving it hissing shut behind her.
Machu watched the space where she'd been for a moment. "...She seems like she's having a worse week than either of us."
"Everyone on this ship is having a worse week than they signed up for," Grievous said. "She simply hasn't learned yet how to look like it isn't."
Lelouch POV
Lelouch's flagship held its position just above the terminator line, low enough that the curve of the Earth filled half the viewport, high enough that no Federation ground battery could yet reach it. He stood alone in the control room, hands clasped behind his back, watching the dark half of the planet turn slowly beneath him — cities strung out in scattered points of light, unaware, most of them, that anything above them had changed at all.
The reports from the day's strikes sat finished on the console behind him. He had already read them twice. There was nothing left in them to learn. What remained was simply the thinking he always did afterward, alone, in the hour when no one else needed to see his face doing it.
*It's harder than it should be.*
Not the fighting. The fighting had never been the hard part — Gato and Ridden and the rest executed cleanly, and even the pieces that failed, failed in ways he'd already priced in. The hard part was everything the fighting was supposed to be *for*. He had built this campaign, this entire slow-burning war within a war, around a simple enough premise: that the officials currently governing Earth — the ones who had let Zabi fanaticism and Federation complacency both fester unchecked for a generation — could not be reasoned with, only removed. That humanity, Spacenoid and Earthnoid alike, could not move forward carrying the weight of men who had built entire careers on the war never quite ending.
He believed that. He still believed it. It was, if nothing else, the one part of the plan he had never had to lie to himself about.
But belief wasn't the same as safety, and lately the arithmetic of it kept catching in his throat in a way it hadn't a year ago.
Because it wasn't enough to remove corrupt men. Someone always rushed to fill the space they left — and if the story that filled it became *the Spacenoids did this to us, the colonies did this, Zeon did this*, then he would have spent everything, killed everyone he'd asked to die for him, only to hand the next generation of Earth a cleaner, angrier reason to hate the people above them. He had watched Gihren use exactly that kind of hatred like a tool his entire life. He was not naive enough to think the shape only fit one man.
*If someone builds their throne out of that hatred instead of the ones I'm removing, I will have done this for nothing.*
It was, he thought, the one outcome he had no clean strategy for. Every mobile suit, every stolen schematic, every carefully rationed act of violence — all of it assumed that whoever inherited the wreckage afterward would be someone he could still work with, still argue with, still eventually *lose to* in the ways that mattered.
Which was, in its own quiet way, why he found himself hoping — actually hoping, an emotion he rationed as carefully as he rationed everything else — that Tianem's fleet would arrive soon.
Not to defeat him. Lelouch turned that thought over slowly, the only place he allowed himself to look at it directly. He had already begun shaping the ground so that when Tianem did arrive, there would be a way to yield to him that didn't look like surrender to anyone watching — a controlled loss, offered rather than taken, to a man who at least seemed to want something better than Gihren had ever wanted. If it worked, if Tianem could be maneuvered into holding the pieces without needing to burn everything down to prove he'd earned them, then perhaps the whole grinding machine of this war could be made to stop somewhere survivable.
*It has to look like his victory. Not mine.*
That was the part he could never say aloud — not to Char, who still hadn't decided whether to trust the shape of his ambitions; not to Grievous, who watched him with the patient skepticism of someone who'd seen a hundred political religions rise and fall; not even to Tanya, wherever she was tonight, doing the harder, lonelier work of building somewhere for people to go once all of this was over. If any of them knew he was quietly engineering his own defeat as carefully as he'd engineered every victory before it, the entire structure would come apart in someone's hands before it ever reached Tianem's. A plan that depended on losing correctly could survive exactly one leak before it collapsed into a plan that simply lost.
So he would keep thinking it here, alone, in the hour after the reports were read and before anyone needed him to be certain of anything.
Below him, Earth kept turning, indifferent, patient, still deciding — as it always was, in Lelouch's private accounting — whether it deserved to be saved by the method he'd chosen, or simply hadn't been given a better one yet.