Eighty-Six: Name

[jordannamorgan]

Title: Name
Author: jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Characters: Jérôme Karlstahl (posthumously), Shin, Raiden. Heavy implied references to Lena.
Setting: Sometime well after the fall of the San Magnolia Republic.
Summary: A Shepherd realizes the fateful link between his target and the last mortal care he clings to.
Disclaimer: They belong to Asato Asato and A-1 Pictures. I’m just playing with them.
Notes: A “what-if” one-shot, written for the prompt of “The Other Side” at fan_flashworks. Given its place in the canon timeline, this has no connection with my main “Eighty-Six” fanfiction project, “…For We Are Many”.



As a Shepherd of the Legion, the vestige of the man once named Jérôme Karlstahl remembered many things about his mortal life.

He remembered the bitter pride of a people; and in contrast to their cuttingly sharp arrogance, he remembered a weak corrupted softness, like something rotting from within. He remembered a society fraught with decadence and denial, its citizens resolutely oblivious to the horrors that waited beyond walls they thought invincible. He remembered faces passing in the street, rows of soldiers standing at attention: vacuous seas of silver hair and silver eyes, smiling and laughing, never once sparing a thought for the plethora of hues that had been purged from their midst.

Now, as he surveyed the squadron of gleaming white Legion units under his command, something deep beneath his programming laughed too—thinking that this was how so many of his countrymen had attained the ultimate form of the pure and shining uniformity they wanted. As a reward for their willingness to commit secondhand genocide or simply turn a blind eye, their own heinous wish had become their hell.

He had laughed brokenly at that irony even as he died, on the night the Legion came. The night when he stood bloody before the ravaging machines, the last to fall among his cobbled-together defense force, surrounded by headless corpses of soldiers who tried to flee and civilians who fought for their lives, all in vain… and he knew that she had been right in every last word of warning she tried to give him.

The distorted voice of his Supreme Commander spoke.

No Face to Hellequin. The presence of target Báleygr is confirmed. You may proceed.

He could only laugh even now, as he ordered his forces to advance upon varicolored humans whose spirits were far stronger than the silver cowards who once exiled them to die.

On the plain below the rise where he stood, Löwe and Ameise units clashed with Reginleifs. Screeches of stressed metal formed a chorus with the phantom wails and cries of Black Sheep. Artillery ripped the air, and explosions flashed in the twilight shadows. The war he had been trained for long before the Republic turned mere children into its cannon fodder unfolded before him… but now, he was on the other side of it.

No emotion for that fact existed in him. The country he once served at the cost of his conscience had suffered the destruction it earned for itself; and after that, nothing else mattered. Even had he still been a living man, he would not have cared for the other more troublesome nations the Legion turned its attention to, nor the human-piloted metal insects that defended them. If all of mankind was wiped out, no one would be left to remember San Magnolia’s shame… and so, even if he was still capable of any will or desire of his own, he had long since abandoned it to be consumed by the Legion’s appetite for destruction.

And what the Supreme Commander had specially tasked him with in this battle was the capture of Báleygr’s head.

The Shepherd did not even need the roving lenses of his Ameise scouts to identify his target. Among the enemy Reginleifs, there was no mistaking the one that practically danced through the chaos, cutting down one after another of his subordinate units. The only one that almost seemed to go out of its way to target Black Sheep over White—silencing the anguished voices of the dead forever.

Hellequin laughed with no feeling at all as he plunged forward to meet his prey.

Báleygr. It was a name every Shepherd knew. Although he was given no information as to why, the very fact that this singular human had earned the attention of the Supreme Commander, had even become worthy of a name… Yes, that was nearly enough to pique some trace of interest in him. In his mortal years of watching useless fools populate the military he served, it had been so long since he witnessed a true warrior in action. He found himself almost eager to see what this impudent creature could do.

Other Reginleifs tried to engage him as he entered the fray. He cut through them easily, dealing a few casualties, but equally content just to force them out of his way by landing quick crippling blows to legs or weapons. His squadron of drones could clean up the dregs in his wake—but his sole priority was Báleygr.

The object of his focus had taken notice of the attention. Ahead of him, Báleygr pivoted swiftly from demolishing a Löwe—in the process swatting down a passing Ameise with machine gun fire almost like an afterthought—and faced the approaching Shepherd head-on.

There was a cold confidence in the way this Feldreß moved. While not significantly different from its comrades in construction and structural limitations, it somehow exuded an efficient savagery that they could not compare to. This was not a mere quality of its design, some detached part of Hellequin realized… but the character of the pilot within.

Already he began to understand why Báleygr was so coveted.

Capturing such a supernaturally alert and agile target without dealing insurmountable damage to its fragile inner flesh-bag would be a challenge. Hellequin targeted the joints of Báleygr’s legs as he closed in, intent on simply stilling it before disarming it—

And suddenly Báleygr was almost on top of him, chain blades flashing past him all too close as Hellequin spun sideways to avoid losing legs himself.

Something akin to anger flickered beneath the Shepherd’s programming. He twisted back to face his opponent, as Báleygr did the same; and in that moment, he was struck by a glimpse of the unit mark on the Reginleif’s flank. Already he had seen it more distantly through the eyes of his scouts, and paid no mind to that irrelevant flourish of human vanity—but the sight of it firsthand at such close range was enough to halt him in his tracks.

A headless skeleton bearing a shovel…

Hellequin knew that emblem. He had seen it before.

He remembered.

It was many months ago, some time before the Republic’s fall and the end of his human life. That accursed image stood out chillingly within the pages of a restricted personnel file he’d gone to great trouble to obtain. A file he read in exasperation and contempt, seeking to understand what exactly was the rebellious and dangerous spell that she had been put under by…

Undertaker.

Báleygr was Undertaker, the Reaper of the Eastern Front. The infamous Processor captain who had driven at least one Handler to death and others to madness—including, in her own way, the only person left in the world who Jérôme Karlstahl had still cared about before his death.

Within himself, Hellequin uttered a formless, raging scream… and Báleygr’s entire metal exoskeleton physically flinched, as though it could hear the silent sound.

At an impulse from their Shepherd that was something less than conscious, every Legion unit on the battlefield ripped itself away from combat with the other enemy forces. Moving as one, they proceeded to close in around the target that consumed every last electron of his focus.

It was him. He was the one who had ignited her spark of futile idealism into flame. He was the one who inspired her to risk her career, her social standing, and even her physical well-being for outcasts already as good as dead. He was the one who had driven her to a fit of reckless insubordination that brought her censure and shame.

No doubt confused by the sudden disinterest in them, the other Reginleifs tried to scramble after their distracted former opponents; but the battle had gone hard for the humans, leaving many of their Feldreßs damaged and too slow to keep up. The shots they fired were ignored regardless, even if they did manage to pick off a few straggling Legion around the edge of the swarm that was moving relentlessly to encircle Báleygr. Undertaker.

He was the one…

He was the one who had warned her. Had prepared her. While the rest of the Republic’s citizens were caught utterly off guard by the Legion’s invasion, she had expected it… and with his guidance, just maybe she’d had enough of a plan to survive it.

She hadn’t become Legion. That was all Hellequin knew of her fate, for if she had been assimilated like him, he was certain he would have felt her among the Shepherds. She still might very well have died on the same night he did, her body mangled in the carnage and her brain left unrecoverable, but if not…

If she had stayed alive…

It would be because Undertaker, with his greater knowledge of the Legion than any human within the Gran Mur, had told her how.

For the first time since his death, the ghost of Jérôme Karlstahl discovered one thing he did desire for himself, powerfully enough to override the crushing will of the Legion within his programming—and that was simply to know.

That desire reached out of him in an almost tangible way. It echoed across the battlefield as a phantom moan that took the form of her name, ending in a scream of pure anguish.

“Lenaaaa…!”

Undertaker halted again, just for a second. And then, incredibly, two urgent words crackled from the loudspeaker the Reginleif was equipped with.

“She’s alive.”

The response to his desperate wondering hit Hellequin like an artillery shell. He staggered back a step… and every one of his subordinate units froze where they stood. They remained motionless as Undertaker’s pursuing comrades descended upon them, proceeding to blow them to pieces.

Hellequin no longer cared. Somehow, he no longer even cared about the voice of No Face raging at him from what suddenly seemed like a very great distance. In that moment, all that mattered to him was the knowledge that Lena was still alive…

But not safe. She never truly would be, as long as the Legion existed. She still needed to be protected—and that was something Hellequin could no longer do as the monster he had become.

Then…

Yet again he reached out with whatever inside him remained a shadow of self: clawing past the choking pressure of the Legion’s will, struggling to formulate human words. He didn’t know how it could be, but he needed Undertaker to hear his voice one last time.

“…Keep her safe.”

Almost imperceptibly, Undertaker hesitated once more in his advance toward the waiting Shepherd who had first joined this battle to kill him. Then he continued forward, chain blades poised at the ready. His answering voice over the loudspeaker was calm and resolute.

“I will,” he said, and the blades came down.

The fading echo of Hellequin’s final laugh was purely a sound of gladness.



A short time later, as the tip of Shinei Nouzen’s knife blade scratched against a shard of white-painted steel, Raiden Shuga drifted to his side without looking at him.

“Are you going to tell her?”

Shin paused in his carving, looking up toward the crumpled wreckage of a Dinosauria that stood a few yards away. The name wrenched desperately from the ghost in that machine still rang through his mind, chilling him to the core of his being. It was only the second time a Shepherd had managed to communicate with him directly, expressing a will that was not Legion, but human. He still didn’t fully understand how, but he did realize who—and that revelation disquieted him in ways he had no words for.

“…No,” he answered quietly.

Raiden was still for the briefest of moments, apparently considering his commander’s choice. Then he simply nodded once, and started across the field to help with emergency repairs on a Reginleif immobilized by battle damage.

Jaw clenched in concentration, Shin scraped a few final lines into the bit of scrap he held. Sliding his knife back into its sheath, he pensively regarded the completed name: Jérôme.

It was not the first time the Reaper had carried a name that once belonged to a Shepherd—but it was the first time he had etched one into actual Legion steel.

Yet the final form of its bearer was not the reason why this name must remain apart from Spearhead Squadron’s fallen comrades. Jérôme Karlstahl had been a high-ranking general who was complicit in the atrocities of the Republic, if only through inaction driven by calculated self-interest. Shin would not dishonor his fellow Eighty-Six by letting such a name be mingled among theirs, but…

Keep her safe.

…He would choose a peaceful solitary resting place for it. For her sake, Karlstahl deserved that much; because somehow, his caring for her had been strong enough to outlive the rest of his humanity.

Just like Rei’s caring for Shin.

That was why Shin understood. Why it mattered to him. Why he could become the Reaper for even a man like Karlstahl.

Slim fingers wandered up to his throat, touching the roughness of scars there. He knew too well that no man’s sins were merely black and white.

Perhaps it would be a sin of his own to keep Karlstahl’s true fate a secret from the woman they both cared for. If so, he was willing to shoulder it with all the others he carried. He too did not want her to be hurt any more.

Fighting to keep the promise that a Shepherd had asked of him would have to be atonement enough.

With a solemn sigh, Shin clutched the name-scarred fragment tightly in his hand, and moved off to join his comrades.

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© 2022 Jordanna Morgan