Alexis is dealing again when Degurechaff rounds the corner and shoots him an amused look. She waves her lieutenants down before they can do more than start to rise and says, “I’m not here to break anything up, don’t mind me.”

Erich sighs internally and rises to his feet, squeezing Alexis’ shoulder and shaking his head when she tilts her head in silent question; he’s certain that whatever Degurechaff wants him for, she doesn’t want an audience while she says it.

(There’s something tense in her aura now, like she’s made a decision but isn’t sure of the outcome.)

(That’s… concerning.)

“Is everything alright?” Erich asks quietly as he walks to Degurechaff’s side and the two of them move away from the little nook made by crates.

Degurechaff grimaces, hands clasped behind her back and shoulders rigid. She doesn’t look up at him as they move, her steps light and fast. “The two of you will need Ja—Akitsugo lessons if you intend to communicate with your second soulmate,” she says. “And seeing as I’m probably the only other person here with that skill…”

“Is there a problem with that, Colonel? If you don’t want to, I’m sure we can muddle through.” Erich bites back a frown at Degurechaff’s phrasing, hoping that she isn’t regretting something that his already happened.

(And what was she about to call the language?)

(Curiouser and curiouser…)

“No, sir. I’m happy to help,” Degurechaff answers swiftly, but she still doesn’t look up at him while she says it. “I just…”

“Colonel Degurechaff. If you don’t want to tell me where you learned the language, I won’t question it. What you do with your free time is up to you,” Erich says, tone bordering on sharp despite his best efforts to moderate it. He’s not used to this, not used to her being troubled about something so… so meaningless.

(What did he care if she spent time at some point to learn another language?)

(It had clearly never affected her work, after all.)

Degurechaff leads the way into his tent, then spins to face him as soon as they’re both inside. Her hands are clasped behind her back and she’s tense, almost vibrating with the nerves that he can feel in her aura. “Sir, if I tell you something in confidence, will you keep it to yourself no matter how odd it sounds?”

Erich arches an eyebrow, trying to determine where she’s going with her question. “So long as it’s no threat to our men, of course I won’t.”

She pauses, gaze sweeping across his face as she considers his words, and then…

She huffs a sigh and swallows nervously, chin tipping up almost defiantly as she says, “I know the language because this isn’t the first life I can remember.”

He blinks at her words and reaches out with his senses, brushing against nerves-anxiety-honesty and feeling the first stirring of relief as the weigh of her statement begins to sink into his mind.

(She’s a reincarnate.)

(She’s not a child.)

“Sir…?”

“How old are you really?” he asks absently as he reevaluates everything he knew about her. It puts much of her knowledge in a new light, and settles the squirming ache that rose any time he looked at her and thought about everything his country and the war had stolen from her.

“Older than you,” she answers with a weak smirk.

And suddenly that odd, black humor when he told her his unknown soulmate was older than him and so it couldn’t be her made so much more sense.

(She was older than him in her memories, at least.)

(How odd to think that…)

It still doesn’t make it right, still doesn’t absolve his country for seeing a magically powerful child and throwing her at the front lines at the first sign of war, but it’s something.

(He’s learned to appreciate the little things.)

(This isn’t exactly little, but… it also doesn’t change a thing.)

(She’s still Tanya von Degurechaff, still the monster he’s feared for years, she’s just… letting him see beneath the surface she presents to everyone else.)

(Why him…?)

“A question, then,” he says as his mind circles back to that strange word she keeps using. “Several times now you’ve used the word genocide in relation to my family and the Reapers. Why?”

Her eyes widen in shock and then she curses as she looks away and tugs at her hair. “Sorry, sir,” she grits out, not meeting his gaze. “Sometimes I forget that things aren’t identical between my memories and this world.”

“Aren’t the same…?”

Degurechaff nods, mouth twisted into a grimace. “In almost every way you can imagine,” she says, hand running through her hair once before being clasped behind her back. “Genocide… I forgot that word wasn’t invented yet. It’s the intentional destruction of an entire people, so that the culture and history ends. These Reapers… what they did to your people fits the concept.”

Erich frowns, turn the word and meaning over in his mind; the Reapers hadn’t succeeded, but only by the barest margin. Their arrogance gave his ancestors time to hide certain things and people, and that alone guaranteed their survival.

(It could easily have spelled the end for them.)

(It had spelled the end for entire lineages and their related skills.)

And then his mind catches on something else she said. “Hasn’t been invented yet,” he repeats, brows furrowing at the implications. If she knew about the future, if she knew about how the war would go, if she could have done anything to prevent any of the mess they’re currently in… “Do you mean to tell me you remember the future?” he asks sharply.

“For what little good it does me,” Degurechaff says with a scoff, waving aside his words and tapping a finger against her main computation orb. “Sir, the world I remember, magic was a myth. A… a fairy tale told to children or… or written about in fantasy novels! The war I studied wasn’t fought with the help of mages and no one poured time and effort into studying the scientific principles of magic!” She pauses and looks up at him, eyes wide and edged with hysteria. “I can use concepts and tactics I read about, adapt the basic strategies of the world I remember, but even if the war had started at the same time and way that it did in my memories — which it didn’t — it’s progressed entirely differently because of people like me; mages able to win dominance in the sky and perform missions that the world I remember could have only dreamed about.”

He licks his lips and tries to imagine the world she’s describing, tries to imagine how the war would have progressed without mages like her and her battalion and… can’t. Magic has always been an integral part of history, even before scientists determined how to harness it reliably; wizards and witches and warlocks have always been there alongside the villagers they serve and the nobles they swear allegiance to. Even his people used to count magic users amongst their number; some of their best and most cherished relics were enchanted by those with both magical and spiritual powers.

(Yet another thing they lost during the… the genocide of his people.)

(There hasn’t been a Quincy Mage born in living memory, and there probably never will be again.)

“Earlier in the war, when we captured the Republic’s capital… did you know this would happen?” he asks warily, remembering that night and the horror that she promised.

(The horror that came true.)

Degurechaff huffs. “Not this, specifically, but… yes. The world I remember survived two great wars like this one, which we called World War One and World War Two, followed by numerous smaller conflicts that constantly chewed through resources and created more and more unrest throughout the world.” She gives him a strained, half-hearted smile and shrugs. “With that much war in living memory, there’s… a lot of history for me to learn from on how wars like this work.”

(Two wars like this one…?)

(Why?)

(Wasn’t this one enough?)

He reaches up and adjusts his glasses, remembering the terrifying papers he read early in the war and how those papers influenced policy. “You were trying to warn us,” he murmurs in sudden recognition of the true purpose of it all.

(But no one took it seriously enough, he now knows with the benefit of hindsight.)

(Their actions were always never quite enough…)

“The only way I could,” she agrees softly, turning away to stare at his desk and the papers stacked there. “I didn’t want to get dragged into this mess of a war, but…” she snorts and shakes her head, her shoulders drawing back and her spine straightening. “It’s better to be in control of my survival than to sit back as a civilian or as a barely-trained recruit being thrown at the front lines and told to get to work.”

“That’s why you joined so early.” It makes sense; with how early she joined, she had a chance to build her skills during the rising tension when things weren’t quite so dangerous. The fact that she ended up finishing her training in the worst place and time possible wasn’t something anyone — even her — could have predicted.

“For what little good it did me.”

Erich arches an eyebrow at her bitter words, but lets the comment slide; she’s — they’re all — trapped in the midst of a war she’d hoped to avoid, after all. Some bitterness is warranted, he feels. “General Zettour would be proud to know he’s not the only one using history to his advantage,” he says instead, choosing to focus on Degurechaff’s use of memories to her advantage.

That she can remember an entire other world full of conflict makes some of her deductions and strategic leaps less incomprehensible but no less incredible; unlike General Zettour, Degurechaff is relying entirely on her own memory and the lessons she learned in her past life, without the ability to research or reread anything she might have forgotten. And her ability to adapt on the fly and pull victory from defeat is proof of her genius; he’s known officers with a lifetime of training unable to do the same.

She shoots him a wry look and spreads her hands wide, saying, “He certainly seems to enjoy picking my brain whenever he has the time.”

“He enjoys picking anyone’s brain who can keep up with him,” Erich replies with amusement, remembering moments when he was on the other end of one of General Zettour’s ‘conversations’. Stimulating, yes, but also terrifying in a way that always left him jittery and sharp for hours afterward.

(Someday… someday maybe that could be him.)

(Maybe…)

His words startle her for some reason, but then she relaxes and huffs a laugh. “That sounds like him,” she agrees, then runs a hand through her hair and tries to neaten it up a bit. “Do you have any other questions for me, sir?”

Erich considers her, taking in the fading edge of nervousness and the relief settling firmly in her aura, and then shakes his head. “Assuming you don’t want me to address you differently in private…?” he asks leadingly, wondering if that’s another thing weighing on her mind. He can’t imagine being reborn with his memories intact; he’s heard of exactly one legend involving something like her situation, and he can’t imagine it’s at all comfortable.

“It… doesn’t matter,” Degurechaff says, once more startled by his words. “I’m still me, if that… makes any sense, sir? I’m Tanya, and the person I was isn’t Tanya, but his memories aren’t my memories even if I can remember them…” she trails off with a growl, scrubbing at her face in agitation. “I don’t know a better way to explain it, I’m sorry sir. We’re… we’re the same person but we’re not the same person, and being me doesn’t bother me because that’s all I’ve known even if it isn’t all he knew. We agree on most things and I’ve been influenced by his memories, but I’ve still… I’m different from him even if we share the same thoughts and memories.”

He frowns, trying to make sense of her rambling spill of words; her situation is more complex than he expected, with what sounds like some sort of divide between her previous life and this one. It makes sense if he looks at it from a certain angle — the self made by the previous experiences would not be the self generated by these experiences — but surely having memories of another life would preclude a second self from forming? And… “He?” he can’t help but ask, wondering how Degurechaff handles that clash of experiences.

Degurechaff shrugs and gives him a wry smile. “I miss being tall,” she says with a touch of annoyance, rising up on her toes and stretching her hand up into the air as if to indicate a height that she can’t even reach thanks to her new stature. “He was as tall as you, I think, or maybe taller, it’s hard to find a good memory to judge height from. Being a girl’s fine, usually. Except…”

“All the times people dismiss you for being either a child or a woman or both,” Erich finishes for her, knowing exactly what Alexis went through when they were younger.

“Exactly.” She hums a bit and looks up at him, saying, “I always appreciated the way you treated me, sir.”

He bites back his surprise, giving himself a moment to actually think about the way they interacted in the past and the way she might have taken some of his actions.

His fear had led him to being overly professional with her at times, treating her like any other soldier under his command because he didn’t want her focus to turn on him for some perceived slight. And after he realized that no one would listen to him about how monstrous she really was, many of his objections had been to do with her physical age because really, why were they sending a child to war?

“At some points, I was afraid you would take my objections to your promotions and posts… poorly,” he admits faintly.

Degurechaff gives him a confused look and asks, “Why would I be offended about that, sir? I am a child! Well… this body is a child, and… I think that influences some of my actions more than I’d like at times. I’d always hoped that reason would persist and I’d be assigned to the rear, but…”

“You made yourself very indispensable to some very important people, Colonel Degurechaff,” Erich tells her dryly, filing away her admission to think on it later. She’s closing in on fifteen now if he remembers her age correctly, but fifteen still isn’t adult.

(He can’t let this change how he treats her, though.)

(But a bit more consideration for her body’s physical age…)

(He can do that.)

“I know,” she grumbles, shoulder slumping a bit and her nose wrinkling in disgust. “The more I tried to get promoted somewhere safe the more trouble I got promoted into.”

He smothers his laughter with a cough and looks away when she shoots him an annoyed glower, giving a token effort to hiding his amused smile.

Still… it’s hard for him to reconcile the bloodthirsty soldier of his memories with… this. Having memories of another world where bloody war was a constant could explain her easy adaptation of the mentality of humans as resources to spend, but the energy with which she’d once thrown herself headfirst into battle was at odds with her stated desire to be posted in the rear.

(She no longer has that energy, but he doesn’t consider that strange.)

(No one has that energy anymore.)

“Perhaps consider being less indispensable at waging war then, Colonel,” he settles on, amusement coloring his voice.

She sweeps her gaze over the tent they’re standing in and then gives him a dry look. “I’ll take that under advisement, sir,” she says, tone completely flat. “Let me know when you’ve picked out an officer from our troops capable of keeping up with you.”

“Serebryakov might—”

“Visha is mine and I’ll thank you to keep your dirty infantry mitts off of her,” Degurechaff interrupts with a playful sniff and a turn of her head, the edges of a smile curling at her lips.

Laughter escapes before he can swallow it back, Degurechaff’s continued protectiveness over Serebryakov always a pleasant surprise to him. “I suppose I’ll have to continue relying on you then, Colonel.”

(His past self would be nearly incoherent with terror after this conversation…)

(How strange to be laughing instead.)

“Happy to serve with you, General,” she says with more seriousness than he expected, even after her admission of appreciating how he treated her.

(He… doesn’t know what to do with that.)

(Except to hope he continues to live up to her expectations.)

“I don’t believe I have any other questions for you,” Erich says before he can start to worry himself into a knot. He has enough trouble already without borrowing more; if Degurechaff says she likes working under him, then he’s going to accept that at face value and continue on.

She relaxes, a final knot of tension slipping from her posture at his acceptance. “Let me know if you do,” she murmurs, then takes a step back towards his desk. “With that out of the way, I have a question for you, sir. Have you decided what to do about your second soulmate?”

“We have,” he answers as he steps past her and settles in his seat. He gestures for her to sit, mentally steeling himself for the discussion to come.

(She’s not going to like their decision, he can already tell.)

(But maybe she’ll support them anyway…)