Title: Reaper
Author: Jordanna Morgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author's consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Characters: Shin, Raiden, Lena, Legion!Rei, Ernst, Frederica, Annette, several ill-fated lesser characters…
Setting: Various points throughout the series.
Summary: The hunger Shin has felt since he lived through death has never ceased to grow.
Disclaimer: They belong to Asato Asato and A-1 Pictures. I'm just playing with them.
Notes: This started as an idea that came to me just before I went to sleep. I began writing it on a lark the next day, and from there the concept has evolved into a collection of scenes both tracking with and gradually diverging from canon. If you find this rather experimental tale intriguing, please comment and let me know you'd like to see more.
"I don't want to die…"
The words echoed over the Para-RAID in a breathless groan, choked by whatever blood Kujo had left that wasn't spilling from every crack of his shattered Juggernaut. Shin could smell it heavy in the air, mingled with the smoke and dust the recent battle had left behind. It was a scent that should have turned any normal person's stomach.
Instead, his body had learned to ache with anticipation at the scent of blood—because it knew what would come next.
When Shin looked down through the gaping hole in the Juggernaut's hull, Kujo's drawn and bloodless face relaxed. His eyes softened, cracked lips twisting into something that was almost a smile. He knew what would come next, as well… and in this moment, at the end, he welcomed it.
They always did. As if Shin was some kind of damned angel of mercy.
As if he wasn't the monster they all knew he was.
"Shin. Promise me… you won't forget me."
They always asked that of him too, like some instinctive final imperative that every human mind would resort to as it felt its life fading. Regardless of the fact that they knew he never could forget—no matter how deeply a part of him wished he could.
Declining to answer, Shin peeled the glove from his left hand; it was always his left hand, although there was no logical reason why. He reached into the wreckage, and his bare fingertips gently came to rest on Kujo's cheek.
When Shin's exposed skin made contact with his own, the dying man tensed for a brief moment. Then his eyes slowly closed, and his last breath sighed out of his body, very softly.
At the same time, Shin's own breath choked silently within his chest, as everything that was once Kujo flooded into him.
He had never been able to describe it well. It was an overwhelming wave of warmth and pain and terrible pleasure, sweeping images and sensations into his mind in the same way a tsunami carried the debris it gathered. The love of a family long gone, dim fragments of childhood innocence before the war, fleeting happy moments with comrades turned friends in the Eighty-Sixth District… and more than anything, jagged recollections of battle and loss and hidden rage for the fate that had been thrust upon them.
That's right…
Kujo had been one of Spearhead's oldest: a seasoned veteran of the war, to the extent that any Eighty-Six child who had survived this long could be. There was more inside him than in most others now.
And Shin's ravening soul devoured it all.
When it was over, he exhaled unsteadily and stumbled back a few steps, half-collapsing against broken concrete. Had there been anything in his stomach to give up, he would have wanted to be sick. He could focus on nothing but drawing slow breaths as every fiber of his being brimmed with Kujo: Kujo's memories in his head, Kujo's emotions in his chest, Kujo's very life-energy humming through the rest of his body. It hurt to the deepest core of him, and it sated him exquisitely, filling every empty place in the hollow hungering shell that he was.
The fullness would fade with time—far too little time. The memories and feelings would settle, compartmentalized in a way he had been forced to learn since childhood… but the new weight in his soul that was an echo of Kujo's life would never leave him.
As his mind began to swim back through the deluge to some semblance of awareness, his first move out of conditioned habit was to pull the glove back onto his left hand. His right hand rose to his face, leaving an unnoticed streak of Kujo's blood on his cheekbone, and came away spotted with moisture of a different kind. He stared at the evidence of tears he couldn't feel, wondering hazily why it was there.
A crunch of footsteps on gravel jerked him to alertness. As usual, after ensuring that none of the others came near the Reaper at work, Raiden silently approached him alone: coming just close enough to ground him, to remind him of place and time and the physical duties that remained.
One more deep breath, and Shin straightened, drawing his pistol from the holster at his side. His hand was steady as he fired a bullet into the skull of Kujo's dead body, rendering the brain worthless to the Legion. Truthfully, he was not even sure if his own monstrous harvesting left anything usable for them in that fragile mass of flesh… but he always took the precaution, even so.
Exchanging his gun for his knife, he proceeded to chip away a piece of Kujo's personal mark from the destroyed Juggernaut. All the while he could feel Raiden's eyes on him, but there was no pressure in the gaze. The Vice Captain was patient and pensive, his quiet sympathy never once descending into a pity he knew Shin would not welcome.
Their comrades were fools for asking to end their lives as Shin's prey, as if what he did to them was a kindness. For all he had tried to explain it to them, only Raiden truly seemed to understand, at least well enough to be watchful and mindful. Perhaps even well enough to protect Spearhead Squadron from its own captain… because Shin was certain that someday, someone would have to.
If any of them survived the war against the Legion long enough.
Striding back to his Juggernaut with Kujo's token clutched in his hand, Shin carried with him one more dead comrade among hundreds—in a far more true and terrible way than those still living would ever comprehend.