"I hear crickets," Major Milizé's bright voice remarked. "Are you outside?"
Knife in hand as a precaution, Shin crept silently through the undergrowth beneath a dark stand of trees. Moon-silvered branches clawed at his passing form, like dying souls pleading for him to reap them.
"I'm checking the rabbit traps we set in the woods beyond our base," he explained quietly to the inquisitive girl.
Despite a rough beginning, Shin could admit to himself that he had grown fond of this Handler. Although she was tragically naïve, her compassion and concern for her Processors was so genuine that he found it impossible to resent her, as some of the others had at first. If her efforts to express that compassion were a bit clumsy and misguided, it was only to be expected of someone who came from a world as different as hers. He knew she truly wanted that world to change—but it wasn't her fault that she alone had no power to make it do so.
By this time she had learned the truth about the Legion, and the fact that he was aware of their voices. However, the rest of his own condition was something he'd kept to himself. Major Milizé could know his ability to hear the Legion was real because she had experienced it secondhand through the Para-RAID, but she would never believe his very touch could kill. And besides…
And besides, it was rather nice to talk to just one person who didn't think of him as their own angel of death.
More than that, she had known his brother, if only briefly. In a sense, she was the only connection he had to Rei as he had been. Although she was a child herself at the time, the impression the elder Nouzen made on her was obvious from the way she spoke of him: the vivid recollections Shin devoured as hungrily as the lives of the dying. It was a weakness that shamed him, but he wondered if she knew just how vicariously he lived through her every word about her savior's warmth and kindness. Where his own memories of the love he vaguely knew once existed should have been, he could find only blackened ashes of guilt and grief… and the very real voice that screamed his name in the depths of his bones, hungering like him.
"You're all alone out there at night?" Major Milizé queried with a touch of concern. "Is that safe?"
He was never really alone, but he couldn't tell her that.
"It's alright. We don't have any nearby predators larger than foxes," he reassured her, his thoughts mercifully pulled back to the present. "But it's possible the foxes could break into the traps and steal the rabbits themselves, if we left them until morning."
"I see. …So you eat the rabbits you catch, then?"
Shin briefly squeezed his eyes shut.
"Yes."
The rest of Spearhead Squadron ate the meat of the rabbits, at least. The nourishment he gained from them came before that, when he absorbed their lives. Animal memories were too ephemeral to leave the mark in him that humans did, and their energy was some help in easing his hunger between reapings of mortally wounded comrades… but as time passed, they were becoming an increasingly ineffective stopgap. Someday soon, he knew mere rabbits and chickens would no longer satisfy him, and only more human life would do.
So much time was escaping him. Before that day came, he had to find the Shepherd that called out to him in his brother's voice—and silence it forever. This was the only reason he suffered himself to keep living at all.
A rabbit sat trembling in the first trap Shin came to. Kneeling down, he removed the glove from his left hand, and carefully reached inside to get a grip on the animal. It panicked and thrashed at his touch, but its layer of fur protected it from his power; he needed to get underneath, to touch the skin directly.
"I don't think I could ever eat something if I knew it used to be a living animal."
Shin froze, blinking. His fingertips halted in their quest to bury themselves under soft brown fur.
"I mean, I can understand why you do it though," Major Milizé babbled on awkwardly. "I know the rations you get from the Republic aren't enough, and you need all the strength you can get. It's just such a foreign idea to me because we don't really have meat at all inside the Gran Mur… but please believe me. I don't want you to think I'd ever blame you for doing what it takes to survive."
A deep sigh breathed out of Shin. Slowly he withdrew his hand from inside the trap, to watch the rabbit hurtle out of it and bolt away into the brush.
"You'd blame me if you knew the price for my survival."
"What?"
"…Nothing, Major."
