Disclaimer: I don't own EVA. With all that angst and weirdness, maybe I'm glad I don't….
Das Ewige Dasein
"The Eternal Life"
I remember when I was happy. I mean really happy. Not this fake façade that I can pass off with a smile and even a laugh and people believe me and they don't know that there's anything wrong. No, I mean really happy. I can still remember that.
Everything was so different then. I didn't have a care in the world – I didn't have to have a care in the world. My mother handled the world for me and all I had to do was be a child. I didn't know there was anything wrong until it was too late. Until my mother was dead.
I stopped being a child that day. It didn't matter that my body was still small, my voice still inquisitive and my eyes still capable of growing wide and begging when I wanted something. Something snapped in my head the day she died, and all the world's color was washed away in a rain of gray and black. Happiness went with it, and I don't even think I remember how to be really happy like I was before.
Maybe it would have been different if I hadn't been the one to find her.
She had problems. I didn't know that then, because I was only seven years old. I couldn't have known then that it wasn't right to have to visit your mother in the hospital – the mental ward, I know now – every day, that it wasn't right to have done so for as long as you could remember. My mother had always had problems. She must have, because I can't think of a time when I didn't have to go to the hospital to see her. I thought it was normal. I thought there was nothing wrong with it. I didn't know that the reason she was in there was because she couldn't handle the stress of living as a mother in this big bad world that she left me in. That she just couldn't handle doing everyday duties like shopping or cleaning or caring for her daughter without getting frantic and confused. That she thought her daughter was a doll.
I am a doll. I am a doll like that bitch Ayanami is, only I am not Ikari's doll. I am my mother's doll.
But then again, don't we all have problems?
I have a problem, Kaji tells me.
Kaji. I smile, and I think of him again because whenever I think of him the world almost isn't so bad anymore. He is tall and well-built and his eyes are clear. His long brown hair is almost always pulled back into a soft ponytail that just touches his shoulders and he is always dressed so nicely. I wonder why he is not something more important in this whole operation. Doesn't Ikari see just how important Kaji is?
But then I wonder why Kaji is doing this at all. The world turns grey again and I can't get out of bed so I lie and stare at the colorless ceiling and wonder why Kaji does this. I don't think it's the money – I know the sum that NERV pays him can't be much. I know it's not for me – I'm a lost cause and all anyone has to do is open their eyes to see that. There is no hope for me.
"That's not it at all, Asuka," he tells me in that warm voice of his, as I stare out the window at the blue sky and the green grass and the younger children running after each other down the street while I sit in here and study EVA schematics and search for a reason why I can't get my synch ratio even higher than it already is. Shinji is catching up to me, and I can't let him do that.
He can't be as good as I am.
He can't be better than I am.
And I'm not even going to think about Ayanami.
I know that's not my problem. I know the fact that I can never be happy – never be really happy – is something everyone thinks that I will get over, given time. Time. It's been years. *Years*. I'm not going to get over it.
"It's your perfectionism," he says, "That's your problem, Asuka. You always want to be the best. You push yourself so hard. You should go easier on yourself. You're an EVA pilot – I know you can handle things."
I think he is saying more, but I can't hear him. I'm too busy thinking, My mother couldn't handle things. I don't know what that means for me.
The glass of the window I'm looking out of seems to have become a portal – a window into the past, because I can see the harsh white walls of the hospital stretching above me. The halls were so big when I was small, I didn't know if there really was a ceiling or if the noisily buzzing overhead lights were really a hundred noisy suns, shining down on me as I skipped down the hall to visit my mother.
Happiness.
I was always happy when I got to see her. I lived with the delusion that it was normal for her to be a mother while sitting in her cold metal bed, wearing a thin blue hospital gown and laughing at jokes she had made up to tell herself. She always did that – she would sit there for hours and make up little nonsensical jokes, and she would tell them to herself and to me when I would come. I was young – I thought they were the funniest things I had ever heard. I didn't know.
I never knew.
Not until it was over.
"Asuka," she would say, cradling a red yarn-haired rag doll in her arms, speaking to it because she thought that I was that rag doll. I didn't know that, I thought she was speaking to me, as I looked up at her from the cold tile floor and wished she would look at me when she spoke. She was so far away from me, so high up because I was so small. She was pretty, too, and everything else anyone could ask their mother to be.
Except sane.
"Asuka," she would say, "do you know what the duck told me yesterday?"
"No, Mama," I would say, grasping the bedrail with my pale little hands, standing up on tiptoe to hear what she would say next, still wishing she would look at me. "What did he say, Mama?"
She would smile, and chuckle a little before answering, and that smile had never seemed crazy to me. The fact that she never looked at me, never really spoke to me directly never seemed crazy to me. But what did I know?
"He said to me that ducks like to eat quackers," she would grin at the Asuka-doll, and we would laugh, and I would be happy.
I liked to wear my blue dress in to see her, because she always said I looked so pretty in it. She said I looked pretty every day, and she said that I would grow up to be a good little girl and that I would make her proud.
I always wanted to make her proud. And I am a good little girl. I am.
I know now she was talking to her doll.
"Asuka, I know you want to impress your mother," I remember someone telling me. I don't know who it was. Everything but my mother is just a watercolor blur of faces and voices up until the time that she died. After she died, that was when things became sharp, when someone took a razor and cut out my world, cut it out like I would cut out clothes for my paper dolls.
I am a paper doll, someone else cut out a paper world for me.
That voice again, dripping out of the watercolors, and I still can't remember who it was. "I know you want to impress her. But you don't have to try so hard. She loves you just the way you are."
But that wasn't enough. I wanted to do great things, I wanted to be the best so that she would be proud of me and give me praise when I visited. But most of all I wanted to do great things because I thought they would make her look at me. If I made her proud, she would turn and look at me when she spoke. I just knew it. I could see it in her eyes, when she would glance at me, every once in a while, almost acknowledging I was there before turning back to the good little doll in her arms.
I never got to see her eyes.
Well, that's not true, I think, looking at the hazy reflection of my red hair, blue eyes, pale skin in the window as Kaji continues to go on about this plug connection or that.
I see those eyes all the time. I see those dead unblinking eyes staring at me out of her too-pale face, gaunt with the weight of the rope tied about her neck. I see her dead body hanging from the ceiling, cold and unmoving. I see her dead mouth, smiling, and I imagine the little joke she must have made up about death to tell herself at the last instant that made her smile like that. I see her dead hands, limp and no longer cradling her doll, which hangs dead and limp from the ceiling beside her.
I hear myself screaming, all the time, wearing that blue dress that matches the blue eyes that are full of tears, hearing my voice scream, "Mama! Mama! Mama!"
Something flooded over me, as I sunk to the floor, legs sprawled beneath me and shiny black patent leather shoes scraping along the cheap green and white checkered tile. The tears rolled down my cheeks, and my voice grew hoarse from calling her name. The doctors came in, shouting and yelling and I was lost in a sea of pant legs and voices. I had stopped yelling, and for another minute or so no one even seemed to notice I was in there.
Then one of the nurses gasped and pointed, and someone yelled for her to get me out of there. I was bodily lifted and carried away, watching my mother's still white body lying on her still white bed, her hair spread out on the pillow like brown rays of sunshine, bobbing up and down over the nurse's shoulder as she swiftly carried me away from that place.
I felt numb. I felt tired, after all my crying, and I know I felt scared. But there was something running underneath it all, something that had come as soon as I saw her, as soon as I began crying and screaming her name. Something soothing, taking the harshness off my fright, something that was now making the tears slow and stop and letting their trails begin to dry on my freckle-spotted cheeks.
I felt relieved. I didn't really know what to call it at the time, but I felt relieved somehow that it was finally over. That something had happened, because somehow even though I was so young I had known that this couldn't have gone on much longer. Something had to happen. Something had to break. And now, at least, she was out of her pain.
And I was just beginning mine. I felt torn – how could I feel so relieved that she was dead? That she wasn't moving and breathing and blinking and that she would never again laugh or talk or cry? How could I feel relief at my own mother's death? What kind of a person was I?
I didn't want to lose my mother. I didn't want her to be gone. I didn't.
And the yelling began again.
"Mama! Mama! Mama!"
"Asuka?"
I turn back to Kaji, who has closed his schematics book. I look at the clock on the wall and see that it's nearly time for him to leave. But he still has fifteen minutes –
"I'll see you tomorrow, Asuka," he says softly, and shows himself out of the room.
They're all so afraid, I think. They're all so afraid to do anything to upset me because they think I'm going to end up like her. They think that I'm going to end up frantic and scared and unable to take care of myself.
I stand, smoothing out the skirt of my yellow dress, tightening the red ribbon in my hair. I begin putting my books and blueprints away for lack of anything better to do. That's not going to happen to me, I think. That can't happen to me.
If that happens to me, then how will I make my mama proud? How will she ever be able to look down from Heaven and see me doing great things if I end up scared and small like she did?
I have to be the best. I have to do it for my mama. I have to show her that the world was terrible to her but that I don't mind. I have to show her that I can do something with my life. That I can be the best – that I am the best.
I have to make my mama proud of her little red-haired doll.