When Asuka wakes at last from her long sleep, the light shining into her right eye is painfully bright. Her left is mercifully shaded by an eyepatch, but she has no time to consider why that might be so — the faces of Misato and Dr. Akagi loom over her.
"We have to hurry," Misato tells her, removing straps from her limbs, "or we'll be caught."
"Rei," Asuka rasps, unwilling to move until she understands the world she's found herself in. She doesn't know where she is or why she was bound, but those questions can wait. "Did I ruin her party?"
A flicker passes over Misato's face, and Asuka grits her teeth.
She couldn't even do that much, then? She couldn't save the happiness of a single girl — how had she ever believed herself capable of saving the world?
And then Dr. Akagi speaks, and Asuka's heart stops beating.
"The one known as Rei Ayanami is no longer present in this world." Dr. Akagi's voice is detached, but even her cold eyes betray a moment of grief.
"We don't have time for this right now." Misato spits the words, but they contain only the bravado Asuka associates with anger directed at oneself. "Get moving!"
Asuka allows her body to follow the older women on autopilot, her mind replaying those words over and over: "The one known as Rei Ayanami is no longer present in this world."
How can that be? It must have been Shinji's—
The thought stops, Asuka unable to place the blame on the boy even in the confines of her own mind. Shinji was an idiot… but even so, he would have fought tooth and nail to keep Rei alive. That was who he was.
So who was Asuka, who wasn't even there when Rei needed help, to judge him for his failure? Asuka, who hadn't even been able to protect a dinner party to preserve Rei's smile.
There is an intake of breath as they round a corner, and Asuka's head turns to see what has startled Misato. Anger blooms in her chest.
"You told me she was dead!" Asuka accuses, her fire roaring back. Of course she shouldn't have trusted them — when had trust ever done anything but disappoint her?
"She is," Misato murmurs. "Rei was just a clone, like her."
Just a clone.
The words thunder in Asuka's head, but her fury is strangled in its cradle by the blank gaze of the girl in front of her. There is no recognition of Asuka, just of an enemy — and the girl (Asuka can't think of her as Rei, not with those empty eyes) prepares to do everything she can to bar their passage.
Just a clone.
Rei hadn't been 'just' anything. She had been Rei.
Asuka has many things to say. She wants to scream them until her throat is sore and her voice no more than a soundless displacement of air; scream them loud enough that they will wake the dead and reach the ears of the one to whom she never spoke them in life.
What she does not say is this: "There are no such things as clones."
Asuka is willing to believe that Rei had begun life in the same manner as the girl blocking their path — Asuka herself had been born in a hospital room when a beloved stranger wrapped trembling hands around her neck. Was a cloning facility truly so strange compared to that?
But gazing into the eyes of the girl in front of her, Asuka knows deep in her bones that there are no such things as clones. It is a truth that she will take to her grave unspoken, unless it is whispered in some dark place to a girl with the face of the one for whom her heart is breaking.
Misato, she thinks, would not understand at all — and Dr. Akagi would understand far too well: her terrifying mind would finally peel back the tattered curtain that is Asuka and catch a glimpse of the long-abandoned backstage and its dusty collection of cracked porcelain figures.
A doll does not let tears slip from its eyes when its companion falls from the shelf and shatters on the unforgiving tile below, and a doll is all that Asuka knows how to be — so she raises her head high and lets loose a scream as the battle is joined.
And when Asuka spends her first day on the Wunder painting the walls and ceiling of her room a very specific shade of blue, it is only Dr. Akagi who does not nod and accept her declaration that she has done so to remember the sky.
But Asuka thinks that the joke is on her, really — after all, isn't it the sky that lights up the world?
Author's Note:
Yesterday, my friend linked me to Xairathan's Prometheus. I read it, and then I thought for a while.
After a shower I wrote this, and gave it a day to settle.
Prometheus said everything that I could ever wish to say about OG Asuka and Rei, so perhaps it's only natural that this piece is set in the Rebuild continuity. It isn't impossible that I'll write more for them now that I've been prodded into doing so once, but I have a natural aversion to saying too much that translates into a preference for brief character pieces and long periods of silence.
I hope you enjoyed this short foray into the world of a crumbling doll.