It took Shin a long time to realize his eyes were blankly tracing the same sentence in his book over and over again.

Blinking from the semi-trance he had lapsed into, he looked up. At that late hour, he was alone in the common room; for some reason, he hadn't wanted the solitude of his own quarters that night. For the first time, he felt that even the absurdly masked mannequins looming over the mess tables were better company than his ghosts.

Even more so than usual on the nights following a battle, he wished he could simply sleep. He wished he could forget—even for just a little while.

Hours later, he still tasted the scent of charred flesh, felt cracked and blistered skin all but sloughing away from bone beneath his mercy-killing touch. His entire soul and body ached with Daiya's essence, vivacious and awkward and painfully yearning to know a love too fragile for the short and violent lives of the Eighty-Six.

Nor was Daiya the only comrade lost that day; but Shin had not reaped Lecca. Pinned down within her damaged Juggernaut, she'd been forced to put a bullet in her own brain as the Legion closed in, leaving no life for him to consume when the battle was over. Some part of him wondered what sadness she had felt at the end, knowing she would not be carried by the Reaper as all of Spearhead Squadron so dearly and perversely wished: not become a part of him, not nourish him with her life.

It was nothing new for Shin to witness death at its ugliest and most brutal, but tonight, for what reason he didn't know, it felt just a little bit different. It wasn't even uncommon for him to be unable to reach a comrade before they died, but this time, it somehow felt like a failure on his part as it never had before.

Perhaps it was because he knew Spearhead was the end of the line. So far from human now, so filled with lives that did not belong to him, he didn't know if he was even capable of dying himself; but every one of his current comrades would, and they would be his last. Even if he outlived them when they were sent on their inevitable suicide mission, he could never return… and beyond the loss of them, he saw only darkness. Perhaps his awareness of that nearing end, whatever it might be for him, had begun to make him just a little bit sentimental toward the lives around him.

Shin could afford no sentiment. For now, he had to remain the dispassionate and unwavering Reaper. This was not only to fulfill the expectations of his comrades, but to satisfy his own wretched need—if only to keep himself, at least for as long as possible, from becoming the even more terrible monster he feared he could be.

Yet even so…

Perhaps when the last of his comrades had given him their everything, and there were no more precious lives by his side for him to take, he could allow the monster to consume him last of all.

…Or at least, whatever was left in him that was not a part of it already.

Sensing movement at the corner of his eye, he raised his head to see Anju hovering in the doorway. Her face was pale and strained, her eyes glossy with unspilled tears.

A trace of Daiya's feelings and fantasies about Anju inevitably flickered through Shin, but it was no more than a brief aching ripple across his consciousness. No matter how much desire for physical intimacy he might consume from others, it could never overcome the experience carved into his own body and mind: the knowledge that when he touched someone, what he felt was their death, the sensation of their very lives bleeding into him. After living with that reality for so long, the thought of the warm yet shallow contact others welcomed could only instinctively repel him.

Anju's appearance before him that night was not surprising. The ones left behind would always come to him soon after. Rarely did they even know what it was they wanted from him; but he had come to understand that this was their instinct. It was much like the way they always asked him to remember, even knowing he could never forget.

Quietly closing his book, he looked Anju in the eye… and he lied to her.

"Daiya knew, Anju. He understood."

Just that easily, the girl's tears brimmed over. Pressing a hand to her mouth, she turned, and silently fled from the room.

There was no need for Shin to embellish the lie, to make any claims of exactly what it was Daiya had known. Anju would interpret his cryptic statement as she wished, taking it as some profound and personal truth he had gleaned from the memories he absorbed. It was always like that, and it always caused them pain at first; but in the end, it let them tell themselves what they wanted to believe, which helped them make some kind of peace with their loss. And in the meantime, even the gentle push to release tears they couldn't willingly shed made them feel better too. It gave them just the little bit of strength they needed to go on, to wait for their turn to come as well.

For this reason, Shin had long accepted that telling kind lies to those who survived was just as much his duty as reaping the lives of the dying.