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Because she couldn’t hear the way that he could, it was easy to pretend. In fact, she’d been pretending for so long that it had stopped really being pretend at all. She didn’t have to play a farce or tell herself that it was Shin. Hadn’t had to for a long while now.
“I missed you.” His arms wound around her and he nuzzled his face into her neck, skin warm against hers.
“I missed you, too.” She grasped his arms and rested her head against his. Alone in her room, she didn’t care what they looked like. Not that she cared much outside of it either. The others had given up on making their complaints. Mostly, they kept their silence now, and she didn’t care how they looked at her, when they managed to at all.
Raiden was the only one of them who still bothered to say anything. “Lena, I know you miss him, but he wouldn’t have wanted this”-it always came with a pitying frown.
It didn’t matter what he would have wanted anymore. At first, Lena had thought that it would. At first, she’d protested the arrangement, called Vika a mad-scientist and much worse than that. She’d railed against the desecration, the indignity of the whole idea, until she barely had any breath left to speak.
But she’d been overruled-Shin was simply too valuable, and Vika was certain he could at least bring back that uncanny sense of hearing.
Ernst had made his protests too, but the Kingdom of Roa Gracia had fired back that the Federacy had been unspeakably stupid to let such a priceless resource onto the battlefield in the first place. The Alliance and the Theocracy had both agreed, and so Ernst had been overruled just the same way Lena had. They’d all been angry at first, but they could only sustain that anger for so long until it burned itself away to little more than ash.
So, Lena didn’t think about what Shin would have wanted at all. If Raiden was right, then he was gone, and what did it matter to him? If Raiden was wrong, then he was just as good as with her. Because if it looked like Shin, smiled like Shin, and spoke like Shin what was it that really made it different from Shin? Nothing that she could see. Nothing that she could hear. Nothing that she could feel.
His lips brushed against her neck, bringing a small smile to her face. She teased a hand through his hair. This felt right to her. It always felt right to her… so how could it be wrong?
Certainly, he wasn’t exactly the same. He couldn’t pilot a Reginleif with the same boldness and deft grace that he had before, and no one would have risked letting him try, in any case. If she was being perfectly honest with herself, Lena had to admit that his eyes weren’t exactly the same either. They were shaped the same, and they carried the same crimson hue-Vika had done his job well, but there was something about the way that he looked at her now that was just a little bit different.
His lips met hers and she kissed him back. Whatever it was that was different, it wasn’t too different to ignore. Having him was much preferable to not having him. Being with him was much preferable to not being with him.
When she was with him, she didn’t have to think about the fact that the last word to drop from his lips had been her name. That it hadn’t sounded desperate or angry or sad so much as it had like a benediction. When she was with him, she didn’t have to remember the silence that’d stretched on inexorably, in defiance of her screaming. Didn’t have to remember how that silence had made her deaf to everything else, even the sound of her own voice. That memory could be erased as though it had never happened. After all, if he spoke to her now then those really couldn’t have been his last words. If she called him, and he answered, she couldn’t really have been screaming into the void.
Raiden, Theo, Anju, Kurena, Dustin-none of them spoke to him. They called Shin dead and pretended he didn’t exist at all. Lena thought that must have been lonely. As much as Vika told her it probably wasn’t, she couldn’t help but thinking it was, and so she’d talked to him, and at first it had been like talking to any stranger. It was only over time that it started to really feel like talking to Shin.
Vika said something to her once: “It’s more than a Sirin, but it’s not really him. You know that don’t you? …he would have been able to tell you.”
She’d heard him, but she hadn’t cared. Besides, she saw the way that Vika looked at Lerche, so who was he to talk? He must have realized as much himself, because he never tried to tell her the same thing again.
She was sure that it didn’t matter. Not to her at least. Not as he breathed her name against her lips. Not as he held her close. Not as he loosened the buttons on her blouse one by one.
Once in a while though, as they lay in bed in the dark together, as her chest rose and fell and his failed to move a centimeter, as she felt herself drifting off to a sleep that could no longer claim him. Once in a while, she did wonder, though she was never brave enough to ask:
Shin had always been haunted. By the voices of the Legion, the Sirins, all the dead that still walked. Her Shin could still hear them too, spent hours in strategy meetings pointing out enemy positions, spent battles by her side giving her important intelligence.
What did he sound like to himself now? Was the quiet prayer of her name still being repeated in his mind? Or was it something else? Was there any chance that he was screaming at what had been done to him? And, if he was, then could he hear himself scream?