Two Contours on a Winter Day

Powder snow lay over the market in Liberté et Égalité’s revolution square, glittering in the soft sunlight of winter. There was a bazaar being held for the upcoming Atonement Festival. It was a fire festival for forgiveness held yearly before the coming of spring, but with the passage of time the original meaning of the festival had faded, and it was now simply seen as one more yearly event.

As she was walking through the bazaar filled with the excitement of a coming holiday, an eleven-year-old Lena stopped in her tracks. As everyone went about the place accompanied by friends, family, or lovers, Lena seemed to be the only one walking alone. She had no romantic relationships, her father died when she was young, and her mother loathed going out to such vulgar, public places. Since Lena skipped grades repeatedly, she had only one friend her age.

It was perhaps unavoidable, then, that she would be here all alone.

After all, she spent every waking moment ardently pursuing the goal of becoming a soldier so she could someday live up to the words of the person who saved her life. She never lamented that choice…but at times like these, there was a pinch of regret.

She looked up at the clear winter sky, so different from the sky she beheld on that fateful day. Was my savior still out there, fighting beneath the same sky? Had he been able to reunite with the brother he longs to meet? Even for a fleeting moment?

Those words alone left her lips, cooled by the winter wind, as she looked up at the azure sky stretching out into the battlefield.

There was little hope of finding a shovel lying around in those long-abandoned city ruins. With the skeleton so stripped of flesh, there was little concern of animals picking away at the corpse. It also meant that the grave he wanted to dig wouldn’t need to be very deep, but even so, digging through the cold ground with nothing but a bayonet was backbreaking work—Shin only being twelve and still very short in stature only made it harder.

If Fido hadn’t come looking for him and helped out, it would have surely taken him the whole day. He was somehow able to finish before sundown. He leaned against Fido, whom he used to shield himself from the wind, as he stood in front of the modest mound of soil and sipped on some hot water he had melted from snow.

The Eighty-Six weren’t allowed to have grave markers, and no flowers grew in the snow-laden ruins for him to place by the grave. The sky was a clear blue, a far cry from the snowfall of the night prior, but there wasn’t another soul around. Shin had no words to direct to his brother, now reduced to a bleached skeleton.

After all, even if he buried his brother’s remains here, his ghost was elsewhere.

His bayonet’s tip was bent out of shape after digging through ground as cold and hard as steel for a whole day. He held up the piece of his brother’s Juggernaut’s armor which had been scavenged by Fido, using it to block off the sunlight. Drawn on the feeble aluminum alloy armor, too thin to even block machine gun fire, was the Personal Mark of a headless, skeletal knight.

A ghost with its head cut off that refused to stay dead.

That Personal Mark felt like a sarcastic jab at Shin himself, but any chance he had of ever knowing why his brother drew it on his unit was gone forever.

While keeping the container Shin was leaning against still, Fido swerved its optical sensor around and blinked its round lens once.

“…Pi.”

“No, they won’t worry even if I don’t go back right away. The head of maintenance can’t stand me anyway.”

Shin cracked a self-deprecating smile as he thought back to the young head of maintenance for his squadron’s base. Shin didn’t think he was a bad guy. It was because he cared for Processors ten years younger than him that he couldn’t tolerate the “Reaper” that drove everyone around him to their deaths.

The squad captain, who had been friends with the head of maintenance ever since their time in the internment camps and seemed to care a lot for Shin as the youngest of the group, also died in combat last night.

And so did all his squad mates. Again.

There was no one waiting for him to come back. No one had expected him to survive, or even wished for that to begin with. Still, he knew he had to survive. Even at times like these, there was the faint desire to cling to life.

As he looked up to the azure sky, which his brother’s remains had gazed at to the bitter end, he whispered while knowing no one was there to concur or disagree with him.

With over a hundred kilometers of wall between Liberté et Égalité and the battlefield, reinforced by the Gran Mur, minefields, and jamming, the two couldn’t possibly reach each other. And so…

In one corner of the street where the people uplifted by the festivities wouldn’t notice her, she looked up at the eastern sky which oversaw the battlefield.

“…It’s cold.”

In one corner of an abandoned battlefield, in ruins blocked by the snow, he looked up to the western sky, where the sun would set.

“…It’s cold, isn’t it?”

Neither of them could know that, at that moment, they were linked through gazes that met and words that slipped from their lips, frozen and white into the air.

August 25th (Raiden’s Birthday)

“Isn’t it your birthday today?”

Raiden frowned at the sudden question. It’d been over a year since he began his torturous life in the Eighty-Sixth Sector. And that was also how long he’d known this unpleasant Reaper captain of his, who’d asked such an out-of-place question.

But thinking about it now, it was true. He turned thirteen today. And so had Shin.

“Y-yeah. Now that you mention it.”

He’d forgotten, since no one celebrated birthdays here at the Eighty-Sixth Sector. There was no need to remember dates of birth, either. But Raiden then realized something and asked, not that a few months’ difference would make him consider Shin to be his elder.

“What about yours?”

“I forgot,” he replied indifferently.

He wasn’t being evasive about it; he just honestly didn’t remember, and his tone implied that the fact he forgot didn’t hurt him. In a few years, he would be told he was born in May, but neither of them had any way of knowing that now, of course.

Shin finally cocked his head a little and said, “Why not celebrate it?”

“…I guess it’s not a bad idea.”

Much like how Shin indifferently admitted to forgetting his own birthday, most of their squad mates didn’t remember their dates of birth. They couldn’t recall much from the time before they were cast into the Eighty-Sixth Sector—they were burned by the fires of war.

But Raiden happened to remember his, so maybe this wouldn’t be a terrible idea.

And besides.

“So, why are you really doing this?”

“It’s almost time this unit got reorganized, so I figured it would be a good excuse to unwind with the surviving members.”

Yeah, that was about what Raiden thought. He glared at Shin a little, but he didn’t mind.

“It looks like the Legion won’t be moving for the next day or two, and we got a bunch of sugar the other day, so maybe we could make something sweet,” Shin said, and cracked an unpleasant smirk.

Raiden got a really bad feeling.

“We also got some canned crackers and milk cans from the emergency storehouse, and we’ve got eggs. I brought over a recipe book I found, so maybe we—and by we, I mean I—could make a custard cake.”

“Okay, no.”

Shin was a terrible cook. Raiden didn’t know for sure if it was because he was too impatient and skipped steps, measured everything by eye, or because he regarded cooking with a notable lack of delicacy, never caring for how strong the fire was and letting the pot boil over.

Either way, he was simply too rough to cook properly. And he probably cared nothing for taste, either.

Shin was still smirking for some reason. “No need to be shy.”

“I ain’t shy, I just feel like I’m in danger here… Dammit.”

Realizing he was being teased, Raiden scratched his head. It had been a year since they met. At the time he’d thought this guy was a cold, heartless angel of death. And while Shin had learned how to smile, Raiden wasn’t sure how to feel about Shin’s attempts at teasing him.

“If you just want to eat sweets you could just say so. Fine. I’ll make it.”

Crushing crackers to make tart batter and stuffing it full of custard cream. That much should be doable even in the poor conditions of the Eighty-Sixth Sector, though they would perhaps have to improvise an oven somehow.

Still, Shin demanding sweets now meant he really was a kid deep down, Raiden thought with a hint of surprise as he glanced at him

Shin, however, gazed back with a puzzled expression.

“That’s not it… I don’t like sweets.”

“Asshole.”

Lena + Annette

“We’re both going to be soldiers starting tomorrow, you know? Let’s use our last day of freedom to go shopping.”