…Hands.
Silver and ghostly, they were all around Shin: grasping, ensnaring his Juggernaut, liquefying and bubbling through the smallest gaps in its armor to reform at a smaller size within the cockpit. As they reached for him, all he could hear was his brother's voice screaming his name.
He didn't know where his comrades were. He didn't even know what exactly had led up to this moment through the battle. Ever since he first sensed Rei's presence nearby, his mind had been wrapped in a black fog. Fighting, shock, impact, blood… and now the hands. Rei's hands twining around his throat, gripping and squeezing the same way they had when…
Shin's half-closed eyes flew open, his lungs involuntarily releasing what little breath he could through the constriction.
It was the memory of that night—but not his memory.
Other images followed in a rush. He saw himself as the child he had forgotten he ever was: drawing pictures, tugging at the much larger hand that held his own, hugging a book to his chest with shining and eager eyes.
No, please not…!
The pressure of the hands at his neck suddenly relaxed, as if with a start of surprise. In that instant of confusion, it felt as if they were almost about to recoil from him. It was the very reaction Shin had always imagined Rei would have, if the elder brother could have seen in life what the younger had become… but then the hands only lifted a little, trembling fingers cupping Shin's cheeks with an impossible tenderness. A phantom thumb brushed away frantic tears he had not previously felt on his face.
…I see.
Rei's voice in his head was now soft and crystal-clear as it had never been through those last five years of agony, and the emotions spilling into him through the contact…
Surrender. Regret. Guilt. Gladness. Sorrow. Regret. Love. Love. Love…
A rasping scream wrenched itself from Shin's throat as he reached up, trying to tear the hands away from his face. Despite his struggling, their gentle touch remained utterly immovable, pinning him back into his seat with nowhere to escape to; and then another hand manifested, snaking upward to softly caress his hair.
It's okay…
I'm sorry, Shin.
Sometime later, the remainder of Spearhead Squadron located the Juggernaut that infamously bore a headless-skeleton personal mark. The only lightly-damaged Feldreß was entangled with the husk of an inactive Legion Dinosauria, its limbs cradling the smaller machine as if in a protective embrace. Through Undertaker's armor, even at a distance, they heard a sound they had never imagined: the raw and wrenching sobs of their captain. When they succeeded in prying open the cockpit, they found him curled into himself like a child, still partially encrusted in the inert metallic residue that had been the hands of the monstrous machine.
Even after they had let him exhaust his tears, it took a little while of soft, soothing talk from Raiden and Anju to seemingly bring Shin back to awareness. At length he emerged from the Juggernaut by himself, and though he moved more like a zombie than a man, he accepted the canteen Kurena hesitantly offered him. His voice gone for the moment, he responded to the worries of his comrades and their anxious Handler only with small nods or shakes of his head. After drinking enough water to soothe his throat, he merely sank to the ground and sat there unmoving, his eyes closed as his focus turned fully and unapologetically inward.
Reluctant to disturb Shin's sleepless rest, or private mourning, or whatever it might be, the others made camp around him beneath the setting sun. They were willing to wait patiently for his recovery. Although it left them exposed in the open, they were sure that even in his present state, he would be able to alert them to any further approaching danger from the Legion.
Their captain was the eternally self-possessed and incorruptible Reaper, after all.
By the time they awakened the next morning, Shin was indeed almost unnervingly calm. He said nothing of what had happened to him in the prior day's battle; nor did he waver when he climbed back into his Juggernaut, extricating it purely with skilled maneuvering from the clinging machine-corpse in which his brother's ghost had dwelled. His voice was barely even rough as he offered a final goodbye to the grief-stricken Major Milizé, before Spearhead Squadron set out at last for the unknown beyond the Eighty-Sixth District.
Nevertheless, Shin's comrades could sense that something within him had deeply changed.