Written for Kaisa.
As he slowly drifted into consciousness, the wafting sounds of piano scales being played entered his ears; it was to the rising and falling cadence of music that Shinji blinked, opening his eyes to find an off-white colored ceiling set with long, triangular tiles that stretched the span of the room in careful geometric calculation. His room itself was cold and barren; beside his bed was a single IV drip connected to his arm and the lights were thin rectangular slits set with precise spacing in the walls. There were no windows, a single narrow door, and no colors. Just a sterile white everywhere that Shinji could see.
"I'm awake," he whispered.
The music paused, as if acknowledging his speech, and then resumed, though instead of scales it played out the start of a somber, slow melody that pulled at Shinji's mind. Perhaps someone he knew once had played it.
Shinji closed his eyes and listened, imagining the kind of person that sat at the seat of the piano. Skilled—he had no doubt—and there were little to no mistakes and hesitation in the playing, a nearly perfect piece, if only the lighter, higher notes were easier for him to hear as the music transitioned from the slow, almost fantastical sounds to something more frantic. He had begun to fall into a light doze when his mind helpfully supplied Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14.
"Moonlight Sonata," Shinji said, mostly to himself.
The music stopped and for the longest time, a feeling of discontent and unease washed over him at the interrupted song. The player obviously had something better to do than play at the piano all day, he reasoned; neither were they playing for his benefit either. He was simply an eavesdropper, lying in an uncomfortable bed, in a white room.
The door slid opened with a quiet hum and Shinji watched as a white haired boy with bright red eyes sauntered in, a serene smile that suggested at a great inner peace curving the bow of his mouth. His fingers were long and slender, the nails trimmed neatly, and Shinji noted the stark white hospital gown the other boy wore.
"You're awake," the boy said.
"Were you playing the piano?" Shinji asked.
The curve of the boy's mouth moved higher. "Did you like my performance?"
Shinji paused and then nodded as much as he could while still lying down on the bed. "You're very good. I was just…" He trailed off, wondering if he should admit to being sad that the song was never finished.
"Yes?"
"I was just…kind of disappointed," Shinji mumbled, avoiding the other boy's eyes, hyperaware of the flush creeping up his neck and into his cheeks. He had nothing to be embarrassed about, and yet, he was, under the gaze of the white haired boy. "You didn't finish your song."
The boy came closer to Shinji's bed, his gentle smile never wavering.
"I was impatient," he said, reaching a finger to gently trace the curve of Shinji's right thumb. "I wanted to see you no matter what. I've waited a very, very long time for this, Ikari Shinji."
Adam was the first man, born from clay and fashioned after the image of God himself; Lillith was made as his equal, resplendent and beautiful and expected companion to Adam as it was not good for man to be alone. Subservience was unnatural to Lillith as they were made equal, and the two argued in the Garden of Eden. Tired and angered by her disobedience, God cast her out from the Garden and from Adam's rib, created the placid, softer Eve.
"Who are you?" Kaworu had asked after he recited the creation myth, but it was not a question of names.
Shinji frowned and wished he could move from the bed, but his legs were still numb and all his limbs weak. Gaping spots in his memory forced him to question all that he knew and yet, a deeper part of him in the darkest recess of his heart begged him not to look harder. Heartbreak loomed overhead and every time, Shinji thought of the abrupt interruption of Kaworu's music.
"Eve," he answered slowly after some introspection. "Probably. Or Lilith. I've never heard the story about her before. Can you help me sit up?"
Kaworu reached for him, his grip firm as he pulled Shinji into sitting position, propping him against the steel headboard of the bed slowly and with great care as if he was a glass doll that would shatter at any moment. In the little space that was left, Kaworu settled himself down, letting Shinji rest his head against his shoulder. It was slightly uncomfortable on account of how bony the other boy was, but the companionship and the warmth that bloomed within him satisfied a craving that Shinji didn't know existed.
He could feel Kaworu's breath against his cheek when he spoke. "It doesn't matter," Kaworu said, his voice like a tender whisper. "Lillith was a dark fire and Eve the sunshine; Adam loved them both unreservedly."
It was very curious that no matter how close Shinji got to Kaworu, the other boy didn't smell like anything; despite the hospital gown, there were no clinical or medicinal scents around him at all, just the ever persistent fragrance of emptiness.
Perhaps the reason for Shinji's loneliness was that there was no one else in the hospital. No nurses, no doctors, no patients; the IV attached to his arm would refill itself when it ran low and the lights in his room would never turn off. Time was nothing but an abstract concept, passing by unacknowledged, silent; yet nonetheless, like clockwork, Kaworu came to visit him always at what Shinji surmised was in the morning. The only way for him to tell was from the functions of his own body; he couldn't seem to stay up past a certain time and he was wide awake after some hours of sleeping.
When he woke up on some unnumbered day at some undetermined time, Shinji felt a strange apprehension in his gut.
Kaworu was late, he thought.
He waited and waited, his insides twisting, mutilating his reasoning. There was no sounds of music, no sound of footsteps outside in the hallway—not that Kaworu walked loudly, but sometimes, if Shinji listened with every fiber of his being, concentrated on the echo within his ear drums, he could make out the soft patters of bare footfalls outside his door. Has something happened? He worried.
When the door finally slid open, Kaworu came sauntering in with a wheel chair and a hum of music on his lips. It was clear that he was in a good mood and Shinji relaxed.
"Where did you go?"
"I was looking for this," Kaworu said, patting the back of the wheel chair. "We should leave this room for a bit. I'll take you to my piano."
His room, as bare and bleak as it was, was a comfort. He's memorized the precise lines of the ceiling, the number of light fixtures in his room; he had never gone outside before and he had never thought to ask Kaworu to bring him out either, in part because he didn't know there was a wheel chair somewhere in the building, but largely because he didn't want to burden Kaworu with his weight in order to cart him around.
"Really?" Shinji asked, his gut still clenching and unclenching around a ball of nervous, excited energy. He felt strangely attached to his hospital room and didn't want to leave, but his curiosity was piqued by the mention of Kaworu's piano.
Kaworu smiled at him, gentle and assured.
He moved Shinji effortlessly into the wheel chair and brought him the IV stand to hold.
"Ready?"
"Ready."
Outside was strange: it looked like a warzone. The roof of the hallway was partially collapsed, a pipe somewhere probably broken as a moist, damp feeling filtered through the air, and the deserted nature of the building lent to it an even eerier atmosphere. The lack of lights didn't seem to bother Kaworu and he maneuvered them expertly through the ruins until they came to a stop in front of a door that looked slightly worn from dust and age, a slot for delivering mail slightly off center and stuffed to the brim with charred pieces of paper. It opened with an archaic silver knob and Shinji felt the air in his lungs hitch.
Unbidden, memories of a door—perhaps not the one in front of him, or maybe it was; they looked so similar—and a girl with white hair and red eyes surfaced in his mind.
"Something wrong?" Kaworu asked.
"A slight headache," Shinji admitted. He had never seen Kaworu frown, but the other boy did and the twisting feeling in his gut returned tenfold.
"Perhaps we should go back."
"I'd still like to see your piano. I'd like to hear you play."
Kaworu paused, his eyes scrutinizing Shinji in a way that made him want to squirm, and then said in a plain, placid tone: "If you insist."
The piano room was as barren as Shinji's room; the walls were white and all encompassing and the only thing that sat between them was a black behemoth of a grand piano. Beautiful and shining, it stood out like a beacon to Shinji and he impatiently waved to be brought closer to it.
"What should I play for you?" Kaworu asked after parking Shinji's chair next to the piano bench. He ran his fingers swiftly over the keys, in a quick scale spanning several octaves before lifting his hands and poised them in midair.
Fascinated, Shinji shook his head, unable to look away from Kaworu. "I don't know. Anything. Oh! Finish the song, the one you never finished. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata."
Kaworu smiled and began to play, starting from the very beginning with the slow, somber sounds.
Shinji didn't know how long they stayed there in front of the piano, with him requesting Kaworu to play whatever came to mind, be it solos from Debussy to chopsticks. Every note, every chord that Kaworu pressed was a symphony of joy to hear. It must have been hours that they spent sitting there; he was so busy being enthralled and charmed by Kaworu's seemingly endless knowledge of music that sleep crept up on him unawares.
"Sorry," he tried to say, but what came out of his mouth was a jumble of words, barely comprehensible.
Kaworu nodded, as if he understood, and took him back to his room. In between the span of being moved from the wheel chair to the bed, Shinji thought he caught a whiff of something; a salty, coppery scent that was just as familiar as it was foreign.
"Are you bleeding?" Shinji blurted in a sudden moment of clarity. He had an image of Kaworu being hurt beyond repair, dead and ruined and his heart seized, his fingers reaching out to grab Kaworu by the front of his hospital gown. He was there and warm and his breath ghosted over Shinji's cheek.
Kaworu kissed him on the brow, the touch of lips on his skin lighter and softer than a feather, bringing a tsunami of drowsiness and dissipating the unnatural dread. "Go to sleep," said Kaworu, his voice already sounding hazy and far away, like a heavy veil had been put between them, muffling any and all sounds around Shinji. "We can talk more later."
"Okay," said Shinji, closing his eyes and for that night, he dreamed of a world with an ocean that was as red as blood and a girl with snow white hair.
The first thing Shinji saw when he woke up was a stranger with an uncompromising posture. His face was bearded and his gaze was stern, unwavering even behind tinted glasses. The clothes he wore were pitch black and stood out in stark contrast to the whiteness of the walls, making him seem severe and frightening, like a clever beast in the guise of a man.
"Are you running away again?" the man asked in a quiet voice, but there was a steel within it; cold and unyielding.
Shinji's hands balled into fists. Who did the man think he was to speak to him this way? How was he in any position to say anything about running away? The more his thoughts ran, the harder his jaw was clenched and the drier his throat became.
"I don't know," he said through gritted teeth. He wanted the stranger to leave. His head was starting to pound and the sound of his racing heartbeat was echoing in his ears.
The man continued to stare at him impassively. "Disappointing," the man said finally after a tense moment of silence. No other words were exchanged between them as Shinji shut his eyes and shoved his hands over his ears.
When he opened his eyes again, no one was there. He never heard the man's footsteps when he left and neither did he hear the door ever opening or close.
"Are there other people here?" Shinji asked Kaworu one day out of the blue. They were in the piano room again, although this time, Kaworu had found a chair tall enough that allowed Shinji to reach the piano keys with ease. It had been a marvel, running his fingers over the instrument and though his movements weren't deft and experienced like Kaworu's, Shinji had felt a familiarity tickling at the back of his skull as Kaworu taught him how to play basic scales.
"Do you think there is?" Kaworu responded.
Shinji frowned and remembered the strange man with the tinted glasses and the storm of emotion he elicited on the visit. He thought about the girl that was like Kaworu, with the white hair and startling red eyes. They were similar, in their soft spoken manners and appearances, but different. The girl was reckless whereas Kaworu was careful with his plans. Thoughtful, deliberate. They were both suicidally heroic.
"Where's Ayanami?" The name came to Shinji unbidden, but the moment the name left his mouth, he couldn't take it back.
But Kaworu just smiled.
"She's waiting," he said. "Shall I take you to see her?"
"You left her alone all this time?" Shinji asked, incredulous.
Kaworu shrugged, as if there was nothing wrong. "She's a shell," was his cryptic answer.
"Can I please see her?"
Kaworu helped him back into the wheel chair and traced middle C with his index finger before shutting the lid to the piano. He had a wistful look in his eyes when he turned to Shinji.
"Let's go."
They entered the hall, but not before Kaworu turned the light inside off. Shinji didn't even know there was a light switch or that the lights could turn off—he thought it was like his room, where everything was in a perpetual stasis. Kaworu took him through a route that Shinji never seen before, one that he didn't know existed. It started off the same as going back to his room, but it veered so differently. It was a careful, slow journey through shattered glass and splintered wood, cracking concrete walls and heavy slabs of metal that poked out at inconvenient places in their path. It was difficult with Shinji in a wheel chair and having to carry his IV stand.
Through the dimly lit ruins, Shinji heard the splashing and running of liquid. Water, was his first thought, but then the smell hit him and he knew it was nothing resembling that. It was a liquid he was highly familiar with, one that he worked with nearly every day and spent hours soaking in. LCL. He remembered. It smelled and tasted like blood.
They stopped in front of a broken metal gate, a hulking thing that crisscrossed in ways that warned any unauthorized intruders a heavy punishment would be dealt unto them. A faded leaf within a circle was painted on it, the logo of NERV a reminder of a distant, fragmented past.
Kaworu easily pulled the gate open and they proceeded deeper into the darkness. They went further, farther into the underground and Shinji was hopelessly lost already, unable to tell which left they had taken at the last cross section or if they had taken a right through a doorway at the last turn. He didn't know how Kaworu knew his way so well, but he must have been exploring during all the times Shinji was sleeping.
"Do you want to see her?" Kaworu asked, breaking the silence. His voice was breathy and strange. A muffled, stilted sadness seemed to have washed over Kaworu when Shinji wasn't looking and he didn't know what to do; he didn't like seeing his friend so heartbroken.
"I have to," Shinji replied, begging in his mind for Kaworu to understand. "She's been down here so long. I think it must have been lonely. I don't want to leave her like this."
Kaworu nodded, a barely perceptible movement in the dark.
"We're here."
He opened a smooth metal door and a swath of weak orange light spilled from the room. In the center was a dimly lit pressurized container of LCL. Through the window, Shinji could see the nude, floating form of Ayanami Rei.
Waiting, as Kaworu said.
"How do I get her out?"
Kaworu chuckled, quiet and joyless. "You'll know."
"Kaworu?" Shinji craned his head to look at the other boy, only to find that he's taken a few steps back, just enough so that he's out of the light and back in the dark, ruined cave of what was once NERV headquarters.
"You can stand on your own," Kaworu said. "You can do it."
Shinji could see the soft curve of his lips, an encouraging smile if he ever saw one.
Slowly, he took his feet off of the wheel chair's support and placed them firmly on the ground. His balance righted, he pushed off from his seat and found that his legs—previously clumsy and unable to support any weight—held him up surely as they had many times before.
"I don't think of you as Eve," Kaworu said and for a moment, Shinji had to rack his brain to figure out what conversation Kaworu was reaching back to. "Eve is just a shell."
"Are you Adam, then?"
Kaworu shook his head. "It doesn't matter. It's just a story. Now, hurry and go wake her. She's waiting."
Shinji took a step towards the container and then paused, turning back to look at Kaworu. He could sense the tension in the air, thick and roiling and he didn't like it; it was unpleasant and he wanted the easiness of being with Kaworu back.
"What will happen when I wake her?" Shinji asked, his throat thick and sore. Words were hard to form with his mouth and he was having trouble concentrating. All he wanted to do was to tell Kaworu to bring him back upstairs to the effervescent piano room and play music for him until he fell asleep, but he knew that it was something he couldn't do. They've crossed some unmentionable threshold and it was too late to go back. He could only proceed from here, to take a step forward.
"Whatever you want to happen," Kaworu said. "Anything you want."
"Then I want you to be with me. Here."
Kaworu just smiled.
"Please," Shinji pleaded, feeling the tears well up in his eyes. "Please. Please. Kaworu. Don't leave. Please. Don't leave me alone."
Gentle lips pressed against his own, the mouth on top of his swallowing his string of words. He's never kissed someone like this, not Asuka and not even Misato, in the prelude to that frenzied battle that he could only half remember. This kiss was lingering, affectionate; it warmed Shinji from the curl of his toes to the tip of his ears and he wanted to luxuriate in the feeling of Kaworu pressed against him.
"I love you," Kaworu whispered. "I'll be waiting. Will you come wake me?"
"I'll find you," Shinji promised. "I will."
"Go, then," Kaworu said, pushing Shinji past the doorway gently. He waved, a motion that was almost casual and Shinji wanted to scream. He was stupidly, heroically suicidal. Always. He'd sacrifice himself if it meant waking Shinji from the eternal dream and he hoped, he wished with every fiber of his being that Kaworu's words were true, that he'd be waiting on the other side to be awoken.
Shinji pressed his hand against the cool glass window of the pressurized container and watched as the machine flared to life at the touch. The liquid within started bubbling and a horrible hissing noise emitted from it as the pressure escaped. Finally, when all the LCL was drained, a hatch in the side swung outward and Shinji rushed inside to make sure Ayanami was still alright.
"Ayanami?" he whispered and he did his best to not linger on her soft curves or the way that she was so pale, her skin almost seemed translucent.
Her eyes fluttered open, revealing red eyes not dissimilar to that of Kaworu's.
"Congratulations," she said, her voice quiet and her lips curving into a small smile. "Everyone is waiting. You can wake up now." She offered him her hand.
"Okay," he said, but he hesitated for a moment. "Will Kaworu be there?"
"Whatever you wish," Ayanami replied.
"I wish that he'll be there," Shinji said and took her hand.