Chapter II: Journey
In short order, Lena was back behind the wheel of the truck, following the machine as it bounded across the snow in a flawlessly even stride. She doubted it was even moving at anything close to its full speed, yet she still had to push her aged vehicle almost to its limits to keep up.
The presence that encompassed both Shinei and Shourei Nouzen had advised her of a radio frequency to tune the truck's ancient two-way receiver to. It allowed them to continue talking as they traveled; and for some time afterward, she mostly just listened to whatever the mingled ghosts within the machine wanted to say. Sometimes it felt almost like her past conversations with Shin, but now she could sense an openness that had never existed back then. Even when he'd talked freely and at length about all kinds of subjects, there had always been a wall somewhere at the core of him, closing off untold depths of meaning she yearned to reach. However, now that Shin and Rei had found some painful kind of closure together, their discourse was by contrast so unfiltered that it startled her.
Shin's voice dominated for a while, recounting what the last survivors of Spearhead Squadron experienced on their final journey. Days spent traversing a world apart, full of forests and rivers and blooming fields. Exploring the ruins of the Giadian Empire: a town, a school, a zoo. Quiet, plain-spoken descriptions of mundane and beautiful and almost humorous moments… juxtaposed sharply with the solemn, unflinching recollection of giving a damaged Shepherd its rest, freeing the ghost of what had once been a comrade.
This seemed to stir things that Rei's essence wanted or needed to express. His voice did not assume dominance for as long—perhaps another sign that his taking the fore might have required a greater effort—but his words bled with raw memories and emotions that left Lena gripping the steering wheel white-knuckled, struggling not to break down in tears.
Five years of existence as a Shepherd of the Legion, with all he'd ever been crushed down into a numb forgotten blackness by the overwhelming will of soulless programming. Drowning in a constant tide of anguish and rage from the Black Sheep and the other Shepherds, a torment that twisted the one part of himself he had somehow managed to hold onto: the single undying spark of desire to find, to protect his brother.
The brother he had all but squeezed the life from with his own hands, even when he was human—because he told her that too. He poured out the guilt that had been intense enough to survive both death and assimilation, turning him for so long into the monster that nearly killed Shin yet again.
It was a story that shocked Lena… but it didn't anger her. It never could. Because even if Rei's fleeting breakdown of helpless anger had scarred both brothers for the rest of their human lives and beyond, it still paled in comparison to what they had always truly meant to each other. What they'd become when they were finally reunited was a testament to that. If things hadn't unfolded in exactly the way they had, Lena wasn't sure if either of their souls could ever have become complete as single and separate beings.
And even if it was selfish… at least with the softening of retrospect, Rei's past sins also paled in comparison to what he'd meant to Lena herself.
Maybe that was why he had been so protective, so tender toward a daughter of the people who condemned his entire family to die. Unable to return to the little brother he wanted so desperately to make amends to, he could only give something of that caring to another child he found in need—never imagining how it would be carried forward years later to the very one he loved.
Curiously, Shin's part of their being did not try to halt or divert such intimate and agonizing subjects. There was a shared pain in the soft echo of his voice beneath Rei's, but he either could not or simply would not deny his other half this release. …Given the fact that Shin's essence seemed to be the stronger one, Lena had a definite suspicion it was the latter. Even if they were now beyond the reach of physical harm, there was clearly still much in them that needed to heal in other ways. If they felt she could help simply by listening, by taking some of their hurt into a heart of flesh such as they no longer possessed, she was more than willing.
On the other hand, when she still couldn't begin to define the exact nature of them now, it seemed laughable to think she could do anything to help. Having memories of the two very distinct young men she had known, it was difficult to consider them as something truly merged and singular—even if their conjoined being did seem to prefer to identify as he, not they. She just wasn't quite sure how that worked.
Eventually, after Rei's voice had vented its burdens and Shin's had gently redirected to lighter, trivial subjects, Lena decided that at least settling on a single name might make things easier.
"Can I ask you something that might be… a little awkward?" she ventured carefully.
"Of course, Captain." There was now a nearly even balance between the two voices, reflecting a mood that seemed much calmer than what had come with Rei's earlier outpouring.
Lena drew a breath, feeling herself flush slightly. "It's just… I'm not really sure what I should call you."
"I don't mind answering to either of the names you knew me by. Or just Nouzen, if you'd prefer a name that did belong to us both."
"Calling you by only one of your first names would feel a little disrespectful to—the other part of you," Lena admitted uncomfortably. "And using your family name is… more formal than I wanted to be, now that I'm no longer your Handler." More to the point, their surname was not nearly personal enough to encompass what both brothers had meant in her life, but she wasn't about to admit that.
"I see." An infinitesimal pause. "Then let me suggest this. Add a single letter to 'Shinei', and it becomes a combination of both our shortened names."
Blinking, Lena pondered that riddle for a moment before testing the feel of the answer on her tongue. "Shinrei?"
"…It also means ghost in the Giadian language."
Lena choked at that startling footnote; but from their history of past conversation, she recognized the offhandedly macabre irony as being very Shin. Of course the Reaper would be serious about embracing such a name, and whether or not Rei had ever shared his younger sibling's touch of morbid humor, he doubtless wouldn't mind indulging it. Accordingly, Lena didn't bother to ask if they were really alright with the literal label of "Ghost". She only considered whether she could bear to utter the name herself, now that she knew its tragic double meaning.
"Okay," she breathed out at last, giving a small nod of resolve. "Shinrei."
It was still strange, but at least it was a crutch to help keep her from stumbling over the sheer incomprehensibility of it all. The Nouzen brothers as one would be Shinrei to her; and maybe from there, she could try to get comfortable with using the singular pronouns of he and him for their combined presence as well. And if there were other times when she could still feel the distinction between the two, as she had during their recountings of what were effectively their last separate memories… well, she would figure out how to handle that part of the conundrum when she needed to.
The newly rechristened Shinrei seemed satisfied by the compromise. "Alright then. …I've just told the Shepherds they should call me that in your presence as well. Names haven't been an issue for us until now, because… we don't really need words to speak to each other anymore."
"You're communicating with them right now?" Lena wondered, faintly surprised.
"They've seen and heard everything since I first met up with you, Captain. Like I said… they're all a part of me now."
Something flopped in Lena's stomach, and she pressed her lips together tightly to keep from making a faint pained sound. He had said that—but hearing the words while she was trying to absorb so much at once was rather different from slamming head-on into that specific fact. If it was difficult enough figuring out how to perceive a combination of just two beings, then this…
"Is that… very much like your merging too?" she asked carefully, with a subtle frisson of inexplicable dread slipping like ice water through her nerves.
"In some ways. I hear and feel the minds of the Shepherds much more strongly than the ordinary machines that are the White Sheep… and the Shepherds feel me. But without the suppression programming, they're still individual beings with their own will and personalities, just as when they were human." A slight hesitation. "As the will of the Legion, I could take control of their host units if I wanted to… and to some extent, possibly even their minds. But I will never do that. I've sworn it to them—and if anything caused me to break that promise, I'd rather be destroyed than go on as something that could hurt them that way."
"Of course," Lena agreed a little too quickly, feeling yet another twisting sensation in her gut. "I know you'd never—"
Her sentence fell off a cliff as thoughts she didn't like pulled her over its edge. It was true, she had no doubt that Shin with his immense kindness and tragic nobility could never have done something so monstrous, but…
But now she knew Rei had been capable of at least one devastatingly violent outburst in the past—and she couldn't guess at what else his years of Legion enslavement had done to him. As much as she didn't want to believe it of the gentle young man who was once her savior, she couldn't discount the possibility that something rooted in him might… break again someday.
It might not even be him, either. Shinrei was physically a machine now… and breaking was simply what machines did, sooner or later. It was only a question of how a mechanical malfunction might affect a machine with a human soul.
Lena sharply shook the thought out of her head. If there was such a danger, it was a bridge they would cross in the future—not today. And besides, the same concerns must already have occurred to Shinrei, so she was sure he would figure something out.
…If he and the Shepherds even chose to continue existing this way in the long term, once their mission was completed and the Eighty-Six were free.
"Captain Milizé?"
The words startled her back to attention, to see that Shinrei was slowing ahead of her. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. It's just… we're very close now to the site of Spearhead's last battle. We can make a small detour to avoid it, if you want."
"No." Lena breathed deeply, gathering her courage. "I'd rather see it for myself."
Saying nothing, Shinrei picked up his pace again, leading her toward a rise in the distance. Finally they crested it, revealing a landscape much like the snow-covered battlefield where he had found her that morning… but considerably more sprawling. Upwards of a few dozen machine hulks lay here, shattered and silent beneath drifts of white.
It struck Lena suddenly that only Shin's Juggernaut had survived long enough to reach this place. One of these machines had been his—but everything else here was the destruction he alone had wreaked upon the Legion before he fell.
She stopped the truck abruptly and stumbled out of it, looking around her with sudden urgency: searching irresistibly for the one heap of wreckage that was different from the rest.
Shinrei did not seem surprised by her impulsive action. He moved slowly toward a mound near the center of the snow-muted scene of carnage, and halted beside it, his turret swiveling towards her almost expectantly.
With her heart in her throat, Lena followed, trudging through snow that was much deeper than at the previous site. As she passed by a smaller curved shape that looked eerily like a headstone protruding from the snow, she identified it as the canopy of a Juggernaut. Its metal edges were sheared and jagged, as if something had ripped it from its frame with tremendous force.
Lena was almost sick to her stomach then and there, but she swallowed down her dread and kept going.
As she came near, Shinrei wordlessly stretched out a spider-like limb. One flick of it swept away heavy snow from the side of the mound, to reveal a glimpse of battered and dented steel—bearing the emblem of a headless skeleton that carried a shovel.
Although Lena fell to her knees, somehow her eyes were burningly dry. She couldn't understand it. Of all times, she should have been able to cry here and now… at the place where Shin had died.
Where his head had been severed from his body… but the rest of him…
The Eighty-Six did not bury their dead. For some reason they obeyed that cruel edict of the Republic, even knowing the monstrous fate it had allowed so many comrades to suffer before the Legion's harvesting of human brains came to light. If the last remnant of Spearhead had abided by this practice to the end, could it mean that whatever remained of Shin's headless corpse was still—?
"You don't need to see any more."
And with that, she seemed to have her answer.
The words might have been a question or a warning, but either way, Lena agreed wholeheartedly. She sucked in several deep breaths, and once she was sure her next movement would not make her vomit, she clutched the liquid-metal hand she found extended to her. Shinrei lifted her gently to her feet; and like Rei's hands long ago, on the night when it had been her father's body lying dead in a coffin of wreckage, the hand lingered reassuringly over hers for a long moment before it withdrew.
Somehow, that was what broke through the terrible constriction around her heart, and let her feel the hot sting of tears in her eyes at last.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't bring any flowers like you asked me to."
"It's alright. When spring comes, this field will be full of them anyway." Shinrei's turret turned, looking out across the battlefield. "And besides… it wasn't really our final destination after all."
Several minutes passed in silence after Lena and Shinrei resumed their journey, leaving Spearhead's last battlefield behind. Mired in her own thoughts, Lena tried to sort through and compartmentalize her emotions on her own… but it was a lot. Visiting what was effectively Shin's grave had shaken her so deeply, it took her some time to even recognize that he was not the only one to die there.
"The other members of Spearhead Squadron. …Were their bodies still back there somewhere too?"
"Yes." The prompt and dispassionate reply came mostly in Shin's voice, dealing as it did with his experiences and memories. "They fell much closer to that ridgeline we first crossed. Without their Juggernauts, they didn't make it nearly as far into the field before they were knocked out by self-propelled mines… and then the Legion took them easily." Regret and frustration filled a brief pause. "With the time I tried to buy them, they could have escaped into the woods, and at least had a chance to survive a while longer—but they came after me instead. Idiots."
"You should have known they would." It felt as if even the tiny, sad smile that crossed Lena's lips would cause her face to break, but the hurt was of a good kind. At least a little. "I never got to see any of your faces, but even I could tell that. I could tell staying by your side meant more to them than living without you."
"And now I carry them with me in a way even I never could have imagined."
Lena's heart gave a little lurch at that statement: a reminder that the last members of Spearhead and the other remaining Shepherds were in some way present with Shinrei even at that moment. Swallowing hard, she quested for some casual subject to divert him from the undeserved guilt he felt.
"So when did you learn the Giadian language? Was it something you picked up from your parents before the war?"
The voices balanced out again, signaling a return to ordinary conversation for Shinrei—if the explanation that followed could even remotely be called ordinary.
"No… It came as part of the assimilation package."
"Oh," Lena winced, instantly regetting her choice of topics to lighten the mood.
"Remember, the Empire built the Legion. Its programming language was originally based on Giadian… although after years of assimilating Eighty-Six from the Republic, it evolved into something much more hybrid over time. In any case, the language was just part of the information the Legion was programmed with—along with the entire sum of human history and knowledge up to the time when it turned on its creators."
At some point, Lena figured there had to be a time when Shinrei would run out of gut-punching revelations; but clearly, that time was not yet.
"And… you all have access to that knowledge?" she wondered.
"Yes."
It was mind-boggling to try to imagine. With his voracious appetite for books, Shin had been almost frighteningly intelligent and articulate even as a human, but now possessing so much knowledge instantly and at will… It must have been the one thing other than his joining with Rei that he could have welcomed about his new condition.
Wasn't it?
Lena's blood ran cold as something inside her abruptly raised that question. Immediately she recoiled in horror from both it and the fact that anything existed, even subconsciously, to make her consider the possibility. …However, now that it had surfaced, it wasn't going to go away.
She wouldn't ask him. She couldn't ask him. After the years he spent taking the lives of comrades with his own hands to spare them from assimilation, she couldn't voice the idea that some part of him might have believed he deserved it himself… or somehow even wanted it. Wanted, in some tragically twisted way, to be condemned to the same hell as the brother he thought he'd needlessly destroyed.
"Are you alright, Captain?"
Shinrei's double-voice made Lena snap to alertness so hard she almost strained her neck. She gulped, wrestling down her dark thoughts and feelings, and tried desperately to effect an upbeat, casual tone.
"O-of course! Why do you ask?"
"I noticed some of your vital signs just spiked."
Oh…
Oh, dammit.
Lena remembered something Shin had told her months ago. The Legion were equipped with life-sign sensors to detect the most viable subjects for assimilation, and that meant…
She breathed deep, and rolled the dice.
"I'm okay. Just… trying to process a lot. Please don't worry about me."
The ensuing pause was heavy with doubt. Even so, Shinrei's answer carried the patient tone of someone who knew there was a deeper truth, yet for now chose not to press the matter. "Alright."
And Lena exhaled a heavy breath, nearly slumping against the steering wheel, as the realization sank in that it might well be physically impossible to lie to him.
