Aside from the constant hum of the Wunder's engines, the ship is completely silent when Asuka awakes, one wide eye staring into the lumpy shadows of her room, and the other throbbing painfully in the darkness. Asuka curls the fingers of one hand against the eyepatch covering her left eye, and a searing bolt of pain lances through her skull, intense enough for Asuka to loose a grunt of discomfort.
To her left, the only unfamiliar shape in Asuka's room stirs in her sleep. Kyu shivers and draws herself into a ball in the vacant space Asuka's abruptly left behind, folding her knees towards her chest. Absentmindedly, Asuka reaches down and winds her fingers through Kyu's hair, savoring its softness. Her hand moves along the shape of Kyu's head, pushing stray hairs behind her ear, trembling as it encounters the warmth of Kyu's cheek and the slow, steady breaths passing over her lips.
It had taken a month for the nightmares to stop once Kyu settled in Asuka's room. Even now, Asuka wonders if they haven't truly left Kyu; if she's only stopped remembering them, or accepted them as part of the cost of her freedom. That might be the next best thing, if she couldn't be fully rid of them. Asuka smiles down at Kyu's sleeping form; blinks, and then only a dark blur lies where Kyu should be. Asuka squeezes both her eyes shut, trying to ward off this image and the building tension, gathering behind her left eye.
Her hand slips out of Kyu's hair and settles on the bed, pushing off the mass of blankets gathered in the center along the unspoken barrier between Asuka and Kyu's halves. Kyu makes another noise and rolls over, planting herself firmly amongst the warm sheets Asuka threw onto her side of the bed. Asuka slides off the edge, landing lightly, heading straight for the small bathroom at the other end of the room.
Asuka leaves the light off as she enters, feeling her way to the sink. Her silhouette stares at her from the mirror as Asuka leans over the basin, glaring back at it. Tonight, the only thing reflecting back at her is her own familiar outline, and none of that blue light that Asuka has grown to associate with dread. A sigh escapes her, carrying with it more relief than Asuka remembers hearing from herself in a long while. The last time she'd heard a sound like that, it had been after Misato allowed her to transfer Kyu out of the brig and into her own quarters.
Back then, Misato asked her if it had been pity that made her want to take care of Kyu, or something else. There's no way Misato could know of what Asuka had felt for the first Rei; that her constant attempts to talk to the clones they fought were based in something more than a practical hope of taking away one of Gendo's pawns, but sometimes Asuka still wonders. If Mari could tell based only on those desolate looks Asuka would wear after defeating an Ayanami-type, maybe Misato could've figured it out, too.
Then from the outer room comes a notable creaking, and all thoughts of the past flee from Asuka's mind. She steps out into the passage between the bathroom and the bedroom, creeping forward with practiced motions that make no sound despite the rumbling of the floor and its faint but palpable upward slant.
The shadow of Kyu sits upright amidst the sheets, bundled from the waist down in a cocoon of puffy blankets. The other half of her protrudes from the bed, hunched over, elbows crossed and resting on her knees. She looks up at Asuka's approach, shaking with a tremor all her own: cold or fear, or both.
"Kyu?" Asuka says, drawing within arm's reach of the bed. She hesitates to move closer- some part of her has still not adjusted to Kyu, and compels her to linger there for fear of spooking her. It's this same part that Asuka thinks won't let open up to Kyu, in spite of Sakura's constant urging. At rare times like this, the one irrational wish that Asuka allows herself has nothing to do with the desert, but that it was Sakura, somehow, who'd managed to communicate with Kyu, if only so she wouldn't be the one left with the task of acclimating Kyu. It's a thought she's had often, that Kyu would be so much better off if anyone other than her- the ill-adjusted pilot with an Angel in her eye- was helping her.
And in that same thought, Asuka knows it would be impossible any other way. No one else would have bothered to call out to her in that fight. Even Mari had given up on that hope with her cryptic statement of, I don't need to lose any more Ayanamis, Asuka. It would have had to been Asuka; it could only be Asuka.
She takes that step forward, over the line she'd imagined for herself, and carefully climbs onto the bed next to Kyu. "Are you alright?" she asks, reaching for her. "Was it another dream?"
"Where did you go?"
"I…" Asuka points in the direction of the bathroom. "Just there," she says. Another step closer, and the fuzzy outlines of the shapes on the bed become distinct. She sees Kyu turn her head, eyes reflecting the line of golden light intruding from a crack under the door of Asuka's room. She sees the way Kyu's mouth moves into an 'o' shape and the sigh that passes heavily through it, a release of stress more than air. Asuka starts to move closer, and it's then she notices the change in how the sheets are gathered: her side of the bed is bare, now; Kyu has assembled all the blankets around her, keeping the warmest ones from Asuka's side closest to her, and arranging the rest like a fortress around her.
"Just the bathroom," Asuka repeats, the flat of her palm resting gently on the top of Kyu's head. With her other hand, she carefully untangles Kyu's fingers from her grip on the sheets, tugging some back over to her side. A thing that surprises her about Kyu: in spite of her naivete and constant bewilderment with the world, her grip is strong as iron. It might even rival Mari's in sheer persistence. "Okay?" Asuka says, moving her hand over Kyu's. Finally, she gets Kyu to relax her hold enough to pull the rest of the blankets away. "Let's go back to sleep."
"Yes," Kyu says, lowering herself onto her side.
"Do you want to?" asks Asuka. Kyu pushes her way across the bed, towards the center, a ridge forming in the blankets. So that's how that happened. "Alright."
Asuka's back hits the mattress. A moment later, she feels something warm approach her side. Kyu rolls over, facing her back to Asuka, clutching her pillow to her chest, pulling the rest of the blankets over from her side with her legs. "Oh, alright," Asuka murmurs again, and extends an arm to settle loosely around Kyu's shoulder. Kyu, apparently satisfied, sighs again and rubs the top of her head along Asuka's arm.
"Good night," Asuka whispers over her. Kyu doesn't answer. Her eyes, already shut, flicker with the steady rise and fall of her chest, which betrays what might be the tiniest smile upon Kyu's face.
Rei's apartment has managed to stay standing in spite of all the Angel fights that have devastated the city. Asuka doesn't know if it's luck that this is the case, or some strange form of foresight from the Commander. She nudges the door aside with the back of her hand, its rusted hinges announcing her presence for everyone to hear, if there were anyone alive in the building other than her.
It turns out there is. There's only one person Asuka knows who wears their school uniform at all times. Someone who is unmistakably Rei Ayanami is standing in the middle of Rei Ayanami's apartment. Of course- Rei lives here- so why would that be unexpected, again?
"Rei," Asuka says, stepping over the threshold. "Um… hey."
That isn't right, either. That doesn't sound like something Asuka would say. She'd be more demanding, or at least sound like she had more control over this encounter than her shaky greeting would indicate.
Rei, her back to Asuka, continues to stare out the window. Around her shines the deep orange light of a cloudless sunset: something new to Rei's apartment. The buildings that had blocked that light out before were demolished a week ago, and now there's this: a radiance that borders so closely to the red that Rei said she hates that Asuka has to wonder why she keeps looking at it.
"Rei?" Asuka says, raising her voice in case Rei hadn't heard her the first time. "I, um…" Why had she come, again? "I wanted to talk to you."
She thinks Rei might have swayed a bit- shifted her weight from one side to the other, something like that. Or it could be the light that's playing tricks on her.
"Are you mad at me?" She takes a step closer, wandering slowly from the entrance, past Rei's kitchenette, and into the apartment proper. "Have I done something? Rei?"
Asuka moves into the furthest edge of Rei's shadow. Around her, nightfall shrouds the apartment. "Rei?" she says, finally stopping at the shoulders of Rei's shadow.
"You've failed." Rei turns slowly, unveiling the paleness of her face from the darkness. "We are tasked to destroy Angels."
"Yes…?"
"You are an Angel." Rei squares her shoulders, gaining ground on her. "I must destroy you."
Her hand approaches from the shadows; Asuka hadn't seen her move it. She staggers back, moving sluggishly, barely catching herself on the corner of the kitchenette. "Rei," she pleads, watching the fingers that extend towards her eye. "Remember? You don't have to follow orders. Right?"
"You've killed so many of me. All you do is destroy things." The red in Rei's eyes is deeper than Asuka remembers ever seeing them. They're a murky brown, more like dried blood than any shade of red. "Therefore, you must also be destroyed."
"Rei, that's not-"
Asuka looks around the room, searching for the source of whatever's taken the air from around her, cutting her off. All she can see is blue; there's a voice coming from somewhere, whispering to her. It sounds like how Asuka imagines Rei might sound, were that ever present undercurrent of uncertainty in her voice replaced with anger instead. You see? it tells Asuka, she's right.
"I didn't want to!" Asuka shouts into the light. Beside her, a dark brown line opens up in the wall, spitting a glowing orange hue back at her. "I never meant to, Rei; I would never-"
It'd be a lie, to say she'd never hurt Rei. She'd crossed that line long ago, though if you asked her, she wouldn't be able to tell you whether it was that one confrontation in the elevator or the first time she'd thrown Unit-09 to the ground that did it.
"I didn't want to," she protests. Her voice quivers and drives more cracks against the wall of blue blocking her vision. They glow like embers at the edges, and their centers blaze with painful gold. "I never meant to…" Asuka's head swivels, searching her fraying surroundings for Rei. As if to answer her unspoken plea not to be left alone, again, the haze of blue and orange is broken by a pale hand, reaching through it towards Asuka's face.
The light vanishes all at once, leaving the apartment dark. Its blackened walls hiss, scorched parts flaking off and fluttering to the ground in heaps. Rei's fingers touch Asuka's skin. Suddenly, Asuka can't tell where her own pain ends or where the burning, white-iron heat of Rei's hand begins. She doubles over, or tries to; Rei has her frozen without touching her anywhere else; the world around her eye twists with painful wetness, and her plaintive cries are cut short by the taste of iron trickling past chapped lips. Other hands, gloved in black, close around her wrist and arms and pull her back towards where the door of Rei's apartment should be. Through the throbbing ache overtaking her mind, she thinks she hears Rei speaking again, calling her name.
"Rei!" Asuka screams, twisting herself away from the grasping hands.
She lands on something soft under the cover of darkness with hands still reaching for her and Rei's voice hovering over her, whispering her name with urgency.
"Asuka?"
"No!" snaps Asuka, swinging her arm wildly around her and knocking Kyu's hands away. Her head, still pounding, grows hot against the palm of her other hand, pressed tight against her eye. It's then she notices the absence of that layer of fabric she's grown so used to that her mind is more perturbed by its absence. "My eyepatch." Her gaze snaps up, zeroing in on Kyu, frozen with her arms held tight against her chest on the opposite side of the bed. "Where is it?"
Kyu extends one hand across the bed, palm up. Asuka glimpses the familiar black hue of her eyepatch nestled against Kyu's pale skin and snatches it up, pressing it against her face. She guides the strap under her ear with a practiced motion, and trembling hands tie them off behind her head. The bed settles behind her: that would be Kyu, sitting up, hands balling into nervous fists as she watches Asuka.
"I thought I told you never to touch it," Asuka snaps. The force of her words slams into Kyu, who simply nods and lowers her head. "Why'd you have it, anyway?"
"You pulled it off." Through the thin curtain of Kyu's hair, Asuka sees her eyes dart away, towards the door.
"You were trying to put it back on?" Kyu's head shakes, up and down, the shape of her mouth a constantly shifting line. Asuka huffs through set teeth and pushes herself up, moving towards the bathroom. In her periphery, she sees the hunched mounds of Kyu's shoulders slump a little. "Stay there," Asuka says over her shoulder, jabbing her finger at the bed. She doesn't check to see whether Kyu listens; it's a natural thing to assume she will. The ruffling sound behind her would be Kyu, lying back down.
Asuka pushes her way into the bathroom, her palm slamming against the light switch, and wheels to face herself in the mirror. The black cord lies plainly visible, pinning her bangs down, save for an unruly patch that's just escaped its hold and sprung upright. Asuka works her fingers under the cord, freeing her hair and smoothing it down in one motion. Her eye flicks up, inspecting the Asuka glowering back at her, and instead falls upon a dark blur that has settled itself in the corner of the mirror, blocking what little light comes from the hallway behind her.
Kyu hovers by the entrance of the bathroom, hands clasped in front of her, eyes fixed on a loose screw protruding from the threshold. Asuka feels the sneer on her face soften, but only just. "What do you want?" she asks, taking a step towards the clone. Kyu shuffles to the side, hiding herself from view behind the edge of the doorway.
Almost reflexively, Asuka shoots the mirror another glance. From down the hall comes the delicate sound of Kyu walking back towards the bed, or maybe the door: Asuka's hand finds the lip of the door frame, and she propels herself out of the bathroom and into the hall after Kyu.
"Hey," Asuka calls after her. In the unlit blackness of her room, it's hard to tell Kyu in her plugsuit apart from her surroundings. She spies movement at the edge of the bed. Kyu lifts her head to look at Asuka, and the forlorn glimmer in her eyes sucks the wind from Asuka. Whatever she'd planned to say dies prematurely in her chest, reshaping itself as she draws near to Kyu. "We're not going to get any sleep like this, are we," she mumbles, partly to herself, partly for Kyu's benefit. "And it's almost light out…"
Asuka lifts her head up, staring at the ceiling. After a while, Kyu follows her gaze up, finding nothing but flat steel panels. It's what's above them that Asuka is thinking of: the narrow hatch that leads to the flight deck, where she'd so often found herself just after Misato had taken WILLE and split away from NERV, pacing under skies as red as the eyes that had haunted her dreams.
"Right," Asuka says. If the past is lingering on her mind tonight, she might as well go to meet it. "I'm going up. I'll be back before breakfast."
Kyu doesn't reply, which Asuka expects. She doesn't expect Kyu to slowly get up, lingering a few steps behind, following her down the hall towards the red-painted ladder waiting for them at the end. She feels like she should have, though: it wouldn't be like Kyu to want to sit in a small, dark space, waiting for someone to come back for her.
The two of them clamber up the ladder, Asuka pushing the hatch aside and holding it while Kyu comes up the rest of the way. Kyu straightens herself up, shivering slightly under the constant chilling wake of the Wunder's passage through the air, lingering by the hatch. Asuka keeps moving, finding a seat for herself on a crate strapped down in the shadow of one of the Wunder's artillery guns. She settles her elbows against her knees, hunching her shoulders to brace herself against the cold. It's been far too long since she'd come up here. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kyu come around the side of the cannon, claiming the far edge of the box for herself.
The skies are awfully clear these days, Asuka thinks. Before, when NERV had more drones to spare, the Wunder's path was marked by black plumes of smoke and debris falling from the sky, not listless white clouds. The golden morning sky is unfamiliar, but not unwelcome: she finds she prefers this and the quiet over the way her mornings used to be, where her wake up call was the proximity alarm and she'd gotten more sleep in her EVA between sorties than in her actual room.
And it wasn't that Asuka hated her EVA- she never could; it was too much a part of her, but she could fear it. Deep down, she knows she does, and has ever since the Angel put itself into her eye. What was supposed to protect her had ended up hurting her, and such a reversal is one that Asuka still finds herself contemplating during sleepless nights.
Kyu shivers again, moving closer to the center of the crate, away from the wind. Her shoulder knocks into Asuka's, and before she's even looked up, Asuka says, "Why do you insist on coming with me everywhere?"
Kyu blinks, her mouth still. Asuka releases a long sigh with a shake of her head. "Well, it's not like you have much of a choice," she relents. Anything that can distract her from thinking too much about the past- "Your only options are, what. Me, and the brat sitting in confinement? Yeah, I'd pick me, too."
"It's more than that." Kyu speaks softly into the wind, her voice nearly lost in it. Asuka's head whips around, and for once Kyu isn't looking at her. She's staring off at the horizon, watching the ship's wings carve white contrails into the sky behind them, where they dissipate just as quickly.
"Yeah?"
"Being around you. I…" Kyu bites her lower lip, brow furrowing briefly. "I enjoy it?" she murmurs, seeming to have found the word she'd wanted. Asuka knows that can't be it.
"The only person on this ship who's said that is Mari, and we both know she's crazy."
For once, Kyu doesn't smile at a jab at Mari. She hangs her head, folding her hands in front of her.
"Kyu, people don't enjoy being around me," she elaborates. "Normal people don't. You may be a clone, but you're still…" Asuka lifts her hand to her eyepatch. Kyu's blurred form shifts behind her arm as she turns toward her. "You're human," Asuka says at last, and the word tastes bitter on her tongue.
"Asuka?"
"I've got an Angel in my eye. I don't age like everyone else." Asuka kicks the crate with her heels and jumps up, hands shoved deep into her pockets. "You get along with Sakura just fine. You could hang out with her instead of following me everywhere. I bet she'd be more fun."
"She is not the one who asked me what I wanted." Kyu places a hand on the cannon behind her, rising slowly. For once, her voice doesn't sound like the one Asuka's always expected, always heard whenever Kyu spoke. "Right now, what I want is to be near you."
Something crumbles inside Asuka's chest. She turns on Kyu, teeth ground against each other, gesturing wildly with one hand: "And what about when that's not what you want?"
"I see no reason why that would change."
"It'll change when you start thinking about things more!" Asuka knows what words are coming, the ones she's thought of so many times in the dark, that Rei's voice has often accused her of. She couldn't hear them from Kyu: better to say it here, cut things off now, before it gets to the point where Kyu pieces things together. "Look at where we are, what you're sitting on!" She jabs a finger at the crate of artillery shells beneath Kyu. "You know we almost shot you down in Unit-09? That Mari tells me she went straight for the head? That I taught her that, because I thought if you went for the head, whoever was piloting wouldn't feel too much of it? We've been doing this for fourteen years, and there was a new pilot every time, and the only reason there isn't one now is because you listened to me. And if you hadn't-"
Asuka tapers off, having finally run out of breath. She sees the shift in Kyu's weight, a gentle swaying that could almost be mistaken for an attempt to balance herself on the moving ship. That's it, then: the thought is out in the open. At least it won't have been Kyu that said it.
"I have thought about it," Kyu says. Her voice is surprisingly level for discussing other clones and how close she'd been to being just another one of them. "When we fought, you could have shot through my entry plug to get to the core. You should have done it the moment you could, but you didn't." Kyu sways back in the other direction, moving directly in front of Asuka. "Yes, I chose to eject. I could not have, if you did not choose to give me that chance."
The breath that Asuka had drawn in passes through her lips, chilling quickly without any force behind it. The truth in Kyu's words is one she hasn't considered before. There's no mention of her eye, or the Angel, only of the opportunity that Asuka alone could have given her. Those are Kyu's memories of Asuka: an offer and a question, and nothing of Angels or any of the other reasons that the regular crew members avoid her.
"And you're sure that's what you want?" Asuka says. Kyu nods, stepping closer. She doesn't flinch or move when Asuka wraps her arms tightly around her, squeezing both eyes shut with a raspy, drawn-out breath. The Rei in her dreams had been wrong, she tells herself, and Kyu is the proof of it.
After a moment, Kyu lifts her hands, awkwardly returning Asuka's hug. She ends up mostly hanging off Asuka's shoulders, a visual so absurd that Asuka can't help but release a giggle.
"What is it?" she hears Kyu ask her.
"Nothing," Asuka replies. "Just thought of something funny."
A timid smile takes root on Kyu's face, vanishing just as quickly, but not before Asuka's heart has soared in her chest. It isn't so strange a thought that Kyu could draw some happiness from her, after all. Asuka smiles back at her, arms still wound around Kyu. From a distant cloud behind Kyu, a peal of orange blossoms against a cloud, and then another.
Asuka's arms drop away from Kyu, and she takes a few steps towards the edge of the ship. Motes of light fall from a nearby cloudbank, streaking towards the earth, accompanied by more lights even further away.
"Asuka?" Kyu has followed after her, lightly touching the back of her hand. "What is it?"
"I don't know," Asuka says. Her eye tracks the passage of the lights, but nothing in it tells her whether she's looking at bits of NERV drone, or simply debris from orbit passing through the atmosphere. Unconsciously, she turns her hand around, linking her fingers through Kyu's. Another burst of orange ripples through the clouds accompanied by a rain of light, which leaves smoky grey trails behind, raking through the sky.
The weight of Kyu's head settles on Asuka's shoulder, her fingers pressing lightly against Asuka's knuckles. More trails have materialized in the Wunder's path, distorted by the gusting of the wind.
Asuka tilts her head to the side, searching for something else. Her eye meets Kyu's instead, and doesn't look away.