1st District, Republic of San Magnolia
June 14th, Stellar Year 2146
"You understand it's not as easy as you make it sound, don't you Lena?"
Uncle Jerome stood behind his desk, chair pushed all the way out to the corner of his room. He leaned with both hands planted on the coffee-ringed hardwood, silver eyes made stern by the scarred face they sat behind.
"I can't just give you a rank. Especially not one so high up as Major. Even in a nation like ours, that would cause talk of nepotism. Everyone knows how close your father and I were. The others on the military council would have to review my actions, and my own rank would be put in jeopardy."
"Technically, it is nepotism," Lena pointed out.
"You aren't helping your case."
"There's so much left to do, Uncle. Our class went to the Operations Center a week ago on a field trip, to see the Handlers in action, and I swear to you there were several officers drinking on the common floor. In the middle of the workday, while there was a scheduled tour! They couldn't even keep themselves together for appearance's sake! How am I supposed to change any of that if I don't at least have a high rank?"
"Our youngest currently enlisted Major is thirty-eight years old. It will be less than a month before you turn fifteen. You might be sixteen or seventeen by the time you graduate. That is nothing. You are a child."
"Why is it that when I act like a child, I'm told to be an adult, but when I try to be an adult, I'm told I'm just a child."
"You aren't acting like an adult," Uncle said reproachfully. "Adults work. Children beg. A rank is more than just a title. It's a symbol of respect, seniority, experience. And respect isn't given. Respect is earned."
Lena frowned. Uncle's face was hard-set and firm, and so was his character.
He was stubborn, but was he wrong? She gave it a moment's pause. If she was going to carry on her father's legacy, then she needed to at least reach the same rank as him. Rank meant subordinates, power, authority. Leverage, in other words, and for a machine as large as the Republic, she needed as much leverage as she could get. She had thought asking for the rank of Major would be a good start.
But maybe it wasn't that simple. Maybe it shouldn't be. What kind of example would she be setting for those below her if they learned that she'd gotten her rank simply by asking her Uncle for it?
"Then let me earn it," she said firmly.
Uncle Jerome met her eyes and held them. He said nothing. His stare carried a palpable weight, and Lena had to fight herself to keep from breaking eye contact.
"I take classes with the 6th years now. Commanding field missions is part of my curriculum. If you give me assignments that will prove to everyone else that I'm worthy to be a Major, that should silence any accusations against you."
"Field missions are not exams, Lena. If you fail, you can't re-take them or do extra credit assignments. There are living, breathing humans in every Juggernaut you command - a known fact now, in no small part thanks to you. While you're 'proving' yourself, you would be sending boys and girls your own age onto the battlefield."
He spoke without cruelty, judgment, or nearly any emotion at all. He simply laid each fact out in naked plainness.
"If one dies - if all of them die - as often happens in encounters with the Legion, could you withstand that?"
Finally, the pressure of his stare became too much. She looked away, down at the floor through the corners of her eyes. Uncle Jerome pushed off from his desk, shifting into a straight-backed stance, hands at his sides. He opened his mouth to speak further.
Then the door to his office slammed open.
A figure moved past her at so quick a pace her hair fluttered forward as if in a breeze. Long legs made heavy strides, and yet with no sound at all upon the floorboards. Lena blinked. Standing in front of her, straight-backed and resolute, was Rei.
He wore his black Imperial flight suit, re-tailored and mended with the years, well-worn from years of use. He wore a silk mantle over top, silver with a crimson trim, ending just below his shoulder blades. His long blood-red hair was as distinctive as ever, though he had taken to sweeping it fully behind his ears, and his glasses had been replaced with contacts.
"General Karlstahl, there's no more stalling them," Rei said, his voice urgent and strained. He must have been under a lot of stress to not even notice Lena as he walked past her. "The rate of attrition may have slowed recently, but that hasn't made the Eastern Ward any less depleted. They're down by almost thirty percent, and there's more 86 immigrating behind the wall than ever. The council wants us to deploy the combat students. They say they've had more than enough time to train."
Uncle spared one last glance at Lena over Rei's shoulder, before turning to the Imperial exile with his full attention.
"They've had two and a half years," Uncle Jerome said flatly. "Out of a four year program. And that's only the oldest of them. There are students who only just enrolled this spring."
"They want us to send out a hundred thousand."
"That's a quarter of their entire population."
Rei nodded gravely.
"How soon do they want them?" Uncle asked.
"A month. Even sooner if the casualty rate rises."
Uncle made a concerned noise.
"And your project? How has progress been?"
"Fast, but not fast enough. We certainly won't reach mass production in a month. But maybe in two month's time, we would be able to field some working prototypes."
"And you really think it would work?"
Rei's shoulders tensed beneath the cover of his silver mantle. Even looking at him from behind, Lena could tell the depth of pressure he was under.
"Will a better-designed Feldress, combining the omni-directional mobility of the Juggernaut with the defensive power of my Imperial Vanagandr, be enough to inspire the Alba to fight? I believe so. The Juggernaut is a deathtrap. No student in their right mind would choose to operate one, but a safer machine is an easier sell."
"You underestimate the poison in this nation, Consular Nouzen. A culture cannot so easily recover from a half-decade of shuffling all its sacrifices onto the shoulders of others. The Alba aren't refusing to fight because they're afraid to die. They refuse to fight because they don't realize fighting is even an option. In this war, dying has always been the role of the 86. Every Alba believes that. Even Vaclav believed that, or he would not have brought his daughter into a war-zone."
"Does Lena believe that?" Rei asked. "Do you think Lena believes that?"
"My thoughts are my own, Consular. As for your first question, I believe you could ask her yourself." He gestured to Lena, and Rei turned to see her.
The open, honest surprise on his face was confirmation enough: he really hadn't noticed her when he barged into the office, even though he'd walked right past her.
"Lena! Hey kiddo, sorry I didn't even see you. How are you? It's been forever." He switched almost instantly from a hard, business-like tenor to that familiarly warm tone. But the smile on his face did little hide the bags under his eyes.
There was a weariness in him that Lena had never seen before. He looked beaten down. She hoped it was just exhaustion from overworking. That's probably all it was. But she couldn't smile back, seeing him like this.
"Rei, is what you said true? Are they really going to start sending the 86 back outside the wall?"
Rei's smile died by inches, curling in on itself until his face had returned to the hard, flat line he'd spoken to Uncle Jerome with.
"Yes," he said.
"But that will undo everything! They'll never trust the Republic again. Some of them have only just started to believe they might be safe here - and even the ones in the military haven't had time to finish training yet!"
"'Even' the ones in the military?" Uncle scoffed. "That's 95% of the Colorata population behind the Gran Mur. The day you proposed your plan to me, Consular, I warned you. That this was always going to be their fate - this country will never fight alongside the 86, no matter how hard you two try."
Lena swallowed. Uncle Jerome had always been pragmatic, always reminding her that ideals had to be backed with facts and materials. But there was more than just that in his bearing today. Today, in his shoulders that he tried so hard to square and yet still slumped down at the edges, she saw hopelessness.
"Then why did you agree to help us?" Rei asked.
"Because half an effort to train them is still better than no effort at all. Make no mistake, we've done good work. You have done good work," he said, meeting Lena's gaze directly. "Those we send out will have had two years of peace to train with their Juggernauts. That's two more years than they'd usually get. They'll live longer, and fight better - but they'll still have to fight.
"You've been pursuing a war of equal standing, Lena, where silver goes to battle side-by-side with red and black and blond. You've been pursuing a fantasy. And the fighting you'll see in two weeks will be cold, hard reality."
If someone were to tell Lena her heart had physically frozen in her chest, blood turned to crystals of crimson ice and flesh frost-bitten and dead, she would have believed them. Her Uncle's words had shot so violently through her.
"I refuse to believe that," Rei said, and the staunchness of his voice was an irrefutable truth unto itself. "I've met Alba willing to fight. Lena has too. Dammit, General, you're one of them! You've been fighting with us since the start. You've been breaking down this country one system at a time to make things right! We can do this. I know it."
"You would call it fighting, what we've done? Political maneuvering, meetings and seminars, diplomatic counsels?"
"Not every fight involves a gun, General."
"Would you tell your late lover that?" Uncle asked. "She, who died on the battlefield?"
Rei fell silent. Uncle Jerome met Lena's eyes again.
"You wanted a chance to prove yourself. Now you'll have it. They will ask me to deploy units who are familiar with the Eastern Ward. Most likely, that would be those who lived there before their induction behind the wall. And it just so happens that this describes nearly the entire body of combat students in Solis Novem.
"I can give you control of one Squadron."
Lena's first thought was for Emma-san. Always-smiling Emma-san with her long bluish silver hair and kind Celesta eyes. Emma-san, who would clean the student commons of Sovereign Hall after the Scepter students' raucous parties, simply because no one else would. She imagined Emma-san in a Juggernaut, and there was something about that picture in her head that seemed innately, terribly wrong somehow. Like her and the battlefield were two elements diametrically opposed.
And yet she thought of what would happen if any other 6th year Scepter student took command of Emma-san's Squadron. Those same students who drank during the day and stumbled their way into the exam halls.
"Give me control of Spearhead," she said. Another image passed through her mind. Lucius and Cedric, both wearing the black uniform of Sword. "And make Emily Caritas the Handler for Glaive. She's only in her fifth year, but she's more than capable."
Uncle Jerome nodded firmly. "Done."
Rei's face was a brittle, confused mask, resolved and shaken and steadfast and one push from cracking, all at once. "If we can't fight together, Alba and Colorata, Republic and Empire, then we'll die. There's no other way we could stand against the Legion."
"You're right," Uncle agreed. "We will die."
—
Lena ran her hands over the shiny, smooth silver of the Para-RAID. Her fingers trembled as she did. The device was familiar to her, of course, and the Republic's version wasn't terribly different from the one Rei gave her, so long ago. This was a hub model, a choker-style collar that boosted its range and transmission using the much higher concentration of nerve cells in the spinal cord. The model might have been different to the one she'd first used, but nothing else was. Certainly there was nothing in its aluminum frame to feel apprehensive over.
No, she felt nervous for a different reason: she was going to contact her Squadron today.
She'd done her research. There were cameras all over Aegis Hall, which the administration and police campus were supposed to use to keep tabs on the 86. In practice though, they rarely did, and it was appallingly easy for Lena to ask to use them. They didn't even question her intentions.
Which were not voyeuristic, of course. She just wanted to get a feel for her Squadron's daily routine by watching it in action, so she wouldn't interrupt anything when she made contact.
Admittedly, she was also curious about putting faces to the names of everyone she'd be commanding. The records were often inconsistent (a holdover from when there were no records kept at all of the 86), and none of the members of Spearhead Squadron had pictures next to their entries. However, much to her disappointment, the cameras were all too grainy to get a proper image of anyone.
Lena had done everything she could to prepare for this moment. She thought it would set her mind at ease. It didn't.
They're at dinner now. It's the last chance you'll have tonight if you want to get them all together like this. So just do it. Press the button. C'mon, you killed a charging bear when it was about to maul your friend to death. Talking to your new subordinates should be easy!
Her finger stayed where it was, hovering an inch above the Para-RAID.
More than anything else, it scared her that she would have to be the one to break the news. That they were being deployed. That they'd have to leave the safety of the Gran Mur and go back to fighting the Legion day in and day out until the Republic called them back again. She didn't want to be the one to ruin their happiness.
She didn't want them to hate her. Especially not Emma-san.
That's what it means to be a leader. A leader isn't liked or loved. Both are too personal. Both break down the chain of command. A leader is respected. Sometimes feared. And you have to be ready for that. If you truly want to make your father proud and change this country, you have to be a leader.
So lead.
She let that thought be her last, forcing the words out her mouth before her resolve could have the chance to waver again.
"R-resonance, start! Target: Spearhead, ah-all of them! I mean all! Spearhead All!"
Great. She hadn't even started talking to any of them, and she'd already made a fool of herself. Her cheeks burned, but she did her best to stifle that down as she caught the faint but telltale pins-and-needles sensation of sensory synchronization, radiating across her skin. It faded quickly, but the first wave was always a shock.
".:A-all members of Spearhead Squadron, this is Private Vladilena Milize, of branch Scepter! I am going to be your new Handler as of today. Unfortunately, this comes as a result of new combat deployment orders. In a month's time, all of you will be reporting to a base in the 86th District, and will be expected to engage Legion forces in battle. I… understand that this may be difficult to hear, but never fear! I will do my very best to make sure that all of you come back safely!:."
Lena finished her speech out of breath and feeling somewhat proud of herself. She hadn't stuttered as much as she thought she would. She was so proud that for the first few seconds, she didn't even notice the silence on the other end.
It was a cool, dry voice that shattered her.
".:Milize-san, I think you may have made the wrong connection. No one else seems to have heard you:."
It was official. Lena wanted to die.
She dropped her head into her hands and groaned and wondered aloud how someone could be objectively smart, but simultaneously the biggest idiot anyone could ever know. Her moping went on for awhile, until she regained the wherewithal to remember that there was still an active connection on the Para-RAID - and thus someone listening to her as she whined.
".:Um… who am I speaking to?:." she asked in a voice that was absolutely, positively dead inside.
".:Private William Lowell, ma'am. Designation: Spearhead Eleven:."
".:Private Lowell, could you end my life?:."
He didn't laugh, but Lena wasn't sure if she was joking in the first place. She did catch a hint of some small bemusement through the Para-RAID, at least.
".:I'm afraid ending lives is your job, ma'am. I wouldn't want to overstep my bounds:." he said dryly.
She quirked a half-smile at that. He certainly wasn't wrong.
".:Well, at least I only made a fool of myself to one person:."
".:Are you new to using Para-RAIDs, ma'am?:."
Lena's first thought was to state the truth. Of course she wasn't, she'd been using Rei's since she was ten. But she cut that off, almost violently so, slamming her mouth shut a moment after it opened. She couldn't tell the truth. She'd implicate herself if she did, and while she couldn't know the consequences that might come of that, she knew they wouldn't be good.
Plus, it might be less embarrassing if he thought she was just inexperienced and not, you know, an idiot.
".:Maybe a little bit:." she said, and didn't have to fake her sheepishness even a little bit.
".:What did you say to it when you tried to resonate with the Squadron?:."
".:Spearhead all-of-them. I kind of fumbled up my words a little bit. Maybe it thought I was saying Spearhead Eleven instead?:."
".:Most likely. Para-RAIDS are designed to read the wearer's intentions, but if your mind is unclear or agitated, it can fail. In that case, it defaults to the voice command system instead:."
".:Which is terrible, and I hate it:."
This time he did smile, very wryly, very lightly. So light she barely sensed it at all. But it was there. And somehow it felt like a victory to have coaxed it out of him. She barely knew Private Lowell, but she felt she didn't have to in order to realize how rare such an expression must be on him.
There was a distinct, static coldness that radiated from his end of the sensory link. It came from his chest, and Lena could sense that same ghostly chill beside her own heart. A chill that ran deep, that denied expressions altogether.
Even his small, wry smile seemed to stand in defiance of it.
".:Yes:." he agreed. ".:Were you anxious about contacting us, Milize-san?:."
She found it slightly galling to be so clearly seen through, but there was little use in denying it.
".:Yes, quite a bit. This will be my first time commanding a Squadron, and to have to break such harsh news to everyone on our first meeting is… daunting:."
It took her a moment to realize what she had said. Essentially complaining to the person she was sending off to war about how hard it was to give him his orders. She was killing him, and making him take on the burden of it too.
".:No, wait, I'm sorry. That's not right of me:." she added hastily, hoping she hadn't already offended him. ".:I don't mean to complain to you. You're going to be fighting after all, and I'll be safe here no matter what. It's not my place to-:."
".:But you find it difficult, don't you?:." the soldier interjected placidly, calmly, like it didn't affect him.
It took her a moment to realize he had asked her a question. She nodded without saying anything. He sensed it and returned a nod back.
".:If something is painful, then it's painful. There's no need to deny it:."
It took her another moment to remember how to speak again. She had expected to receive many things when she broke the news to her Squadron. Anger. Disdain. Hatred. But not sympathy.
".:But it's selfish:." she protested. ".:Yes, it's hard. I've agonized all day over the best way I could tell everyone. I keep wondering how many of you might still be alive a month from now, or if someone I talk to today, I might never talk to again. But how could I burden you with that? When you're the ones who will be fighting, while I sit back in an air-conditioned office?:."
The thoughts poured out of her one after the other. She realized faintly that she was being hypocritical. She was doing again the exact same thing she said she shouldn't. But the words coming out her mouth were not new to her. They had been tumbling in her mind for hours and hours on end, and with every ricochet off the walls of her skull they came ever closer to terminal velocity, until she could no longer stop their course.
The soldier on the other end said nothing. He made no effort to interrupt her. His silence was vast and contemplative, and when her voice finally petered out, somehow she knew he had listened to every word.
".:We aren't the same, Milize-san. I'm glad you recognize that:."
She waited for him to continue. When he didn't, she asked him instead.
".:What do you mean?:."
".:We live in two different worlds:." A pause on the other end. Lena could feel the weight of it, heavy and thrumming, possessing its own vital pulse. Like it was its own entity. Like silence was his natural state, and the instant he stopped talking it surged to retake its place, and held it jealously.
".:I exist for the battlefield. I was born to it. And all my life I've known I was not wanted. You are the opposite in every way. If you were to pretend this wasn't the case, I would resent you. And so would my Squadron. But if you are aware of that, and if you're honest with them as you were with me, they'll understand:."
".:Are you sure?:."
".:Yes:." he said. His voice was backed with a quiet, steel-like certainty. ".:Our worlds are different… But pain is pain, and fear is fear. You don't have to deny yours to accommodate ours:."
She didn't know what to say for a long moment after that. His tone was dry and cold, like a tundra wind, and the icy chill that radiated from him had never wavered in the slightest. Like there was a shard of ice buried beneath his skin. Like he'd learned to live with it over years and years.
And yet his words were still so warm.
".:Dinner is going to end soon, Milize-san. If you would like to make your announcement, now would be a good time:."
She shook her head, focusing herself back to attention. ".:Yes, of course! I'll do so now. And, um, thank you, Lowell-san. I appreciate what you said:."
He nodded.
".:Of course, ma'am. I look forward to fighting with you:."
I worried for a little while about my two favorite emotionally retarded dumplings.
I generally have no idea how my stories will go. I can really only predict what might happen by one chapter in advance, maybe two, so I had no idea if Shin and Lena would even have chemistry in this fic. I wondered if that could even be possible after all the changes I've made to canon by now. But, I guess I wondered in vain. It really doesn't matter what universe or timeline Shin and Lena inhabit, they'll always be cute dorks together. And that makes me happy.
- Verbosity