Sometimes, Shinei Nouzen thought he could remember being human.

Those fragments of a past were all but gone now: worn away by years of war, supplanted by lifetimes' worth of memories that were not his own. Even so, in moments when he was quiet and still, a precious image that felt like himself instead of another might flit through his consciousness like a butterfly. Laughter, his hand held warmly in the grasp of a larger one, strong arms wrapping around him to lift him up; most likely Rei, he realized.

The elder brother whose hands around his throat had—

He possessed no memory of what happened that night. He only knew he had died, and he wasn't meant to come back, but he did… or rather, something did. An inhuman changeling left in the dead child's place, like a story from the tattered fairytale books he couldn't remember Rei's voice reading to him.

It was clear from the moment he awakened to the cry of his priestly guardian, and his own head swimming with visions unwittingly stolen from the man's mind. Upon seeing him begin to stir, the priest had touched his hand to give him comfort—and thus became the first victim of the impossible new power Shin manifested. That brief contact left the old man bedridden with weakness for two days, and he never regained the memories that were now in Shin's head.

Shin quickly came to understand that his touch consumed the life of other creatures, absorbing their memories and emotions and physical energy into himself… even to the point of killing them.

The priest came up with the closest thing to an explanation that did not involve magical curses or supernatural beings. He noted that a certain telepathic ability between family members ran in Shin's bloodline. Perhaps the trauma of his supposed "near"-death experience had caused that power to run wild, he suggested—and begin to do something far more invasive than only passively hearing the thoughts of relatives.

Which conjecture he made from a careful distance on the far side of the room, forcing the kind of steady and gentle tone with which he might speak to a wild animal, even as his eyes watched Shin's every movement with unmistakable fear.

And as for Rei, he was already gone. Shin wondered whether it was really guilt that left his brother unable to bear facing him again, or whether he had fled in terror after somehow sensing what Shin had become.

The boy did not endure the old man's increasing paranoia for much longer before running as well, throwing himself into the jaws of the same Republic war machinery that had already taken Rei. He should have been too young, but he was intelligent and unnaturally strong; and the Alba officers assigned to the "repugnant" task of sorting Processors did not see his age when they looked at him, but only alien dark hair and intent red eyes that frightened them. Even the older Eighty-Six boys who would have eaten Shin alive began to give him a wide berth after—certain incidents. Most of those were merely due to his growing physical power and his natural talent for using it, but in a few early cases when he truly perceived a threat…

Well. It wasn't as if he had killed those idiots. And while the memories he'd relieved them of were not particularly pleasant, some of them had at least been highly educational.

Altogether, Shin's cunning and strength and caution had been enough to help him survive the first few years. He covered his skin carefully, applied himself to learning in every way he could, and rose through the ranks, maturing into a young soldier who was first formidable—and then infamous.

It wasn't even his lethal touch that earned him such a reputation. It was the secondary ability to hear the voices of the Legion that he discovered when he first joined the front lines… and the very interesting things that could happen when he introduced his more disagreeable Handlers to that power via the Para-RAID.

Along the way, a few small accidental contacts did expose his other trait to his squadmates. Somehow they always took it with the kind of unshaken and even philosophical acceptance that only the Eighty-Six could. Living with death every day was nothing new to them; but to live with it incarnate was at least something novel, if not oddly reassuring. The thought that death in human form had become their comrade seemed to make them feel curiously empowered, even less afraid of their own inevitable fates. Cast out to fight and bleed and die in the most horrific of ways, their only solace was to make death a friend they could welcome—and in Shin they found a living embodiment of this fancy. It quietly pained him, but through those brief unintended touches that betrayed his power, he had tasted enough of their carefully buried mortal terror to understand why they needed this. If it was a weakness to use him to reconcile with their fears, it was one he could forgive.

That was how he gained the title of Reaper, even before he took on the very role of his namesake.

Shin remembered the one who first asked him to use his power instead of a bullet if he was wounded beyond recovery. He was a blond boy named Jeno, a year younger than Shin, small but ferocious and with the loudest mouth in their unit. When Shin met his suggestion with flat unamusement, he had played it off rather awkwardly as a joke… until.

Until the day when a Löwe cut his Juggernaut in two, and his body with it.

As it turned out, neither of them had forgotten Jeno's request. Shin fully intended to disregard it as the jest he knew it had never really been… but the breathless, broken, too-childlike voice that called out his name from the wreckage was more than he could bear to walk away from, even though he knew a line would be crossed that he could never take back.

That first time was…

It was almost more than Shin could contain. Never before had he killed a human being by fully absorbing their life, even if that life was already dying. Becoming so filled for the first time with the everything of another nearly drove him mad. He didn't know how his comrades had gotten him back to base that night, and several days passed before he would even speak again—because until he adjusted to the suffocating weight of Jeno's life that had wrapped around him like chains, he knew any sound he made would have become a scream.

Yet word got around, and soon others began making the same request of him. They seemed to imagine that being drained of life by a living Grim Reaper would be a more peaceful or less painful death than a bullet to the head. Shin was not so convinced, but if that belief gave them comfort, he decided it was worthwhile to grant their wish. With practice, it became easier to bear the ghosts he was accumulating inside him; and among his comrades, being carried by their Reaper after death grew into a tradition that followed him from one posting to the next.

To him, however, it was so much more—as he realized only too late.

Shin wouldn't sleep for days after a reaping. He thought it was understandable when he could only spend the nights with his head crowded full of someone else's memories, talking to his ghosts for hours as he tried to process it all… but then he began to realize that even his interest in food was waning.

It soon became clear to him that there was something more at work than a mere loss of appetite from exhaustion or stress. For a time he forced himself to continue taking meals in the mess hall, trying to convince himself and everyone else that nothing was different from before; but in the end, he couldn't deny this creeping change in him. Food was losing its taste entirely, and he simply didn't feel hunger.

…At least, not in his stomach. The urge he found himself becoming aware of was more vague, a dull irritable yearning that seemed to wear the edge off his supernatural strength and alertness.

The first time that malaise disappeared after he consumed a life, and he noticed he physically felt better, he thought nothing of it. The second time, he uneasily chalked it up to coincidence… but by the third time, he knew.

His body was feeding on the lives he absorbed, deriving all its energy from that process alone—and the feeling he now recognized as hunger was gradually becoming more frequent.

On the night he understood that truth, he sat alone under the stars with the muzzle of his pistol pressed beneath his chin, ready to end it all…

And that was the moment when he first heard his brother's voice among the Legion.