A/N: I have never seen a fic written on the alternate live action sequence that could have been in The End of Evangelion. This is me attempting to write a fic on that continuity. This story takes place during Instrumentality, to be clear. This is probably my worst work ever and I wrote it all in one sitting from 1-4:30 am.
I'm Not Here
Her muscles are aching from the strange position she has been lying in for the past few hours. Someone is beside her and he (it distinctly feels like a man, for whatever reason) sleeps like a log and doesn't even budge an inch as she tosses and turns around in the sheets. She sees that the room is a mess as she rises up from the bed with a jerk.
"A dream?" she speaks to no one in particular. Yes, a dream, but the details are hazy. Monsters and screaming. Blood. Warmth. Loss. Death.
None of what she remembers makes sense. She shakes her head a little. The stress of her life must be getting on her nerves finally.
Light streams in from the open window behind her and now she takes in who exactly has she been sleeping with. Asuka runs a hand through her long, auburn hair in frustration and looks away from him.
"Idiot Touji," she groans out loud. "I see that I drank on the way back from work and ended up sleeping with this jerk again."
Knowing that nothing can now been done to undo that fact now, she reluctantly gets out of the warm blanket and sets about her morning routine. "Men...you let them do it once with you and from then on that's all there is," she grumbles and puts on her black socks. "I wonder if they think about anything else…"
The idiot has his face turned away from her and continues to snore gently, no idea that she is thinking far too deeply about him. She continues her one-sided rant as she makes her way to the toilet. "Well, I guess if you do it once, then it's no different from hundreds of times."
She brushes her teeth and shortly after that, Asuka swallows the morning-after pill. There, done. Nothing to worry about now. She looks at her neck in the mirror, the faint hickeys glare right back at her and she feels more frustrated than ever on the topic of her and Touji. "That idiot," she mutters darkly, "always dodging the issue and refusing to commit, even though we both know it's convenient excuses to make do at the moment."
She absently sits on the toilet and pulls out a wad of toilet paper from the holder on her right. "But things proceed and before you know it, we both are living together," she sighs. She sniffs her nose into the tissue. "How did that happen?" she asks. Not waiting for herself to answer that puzzling question, she throws the paper into the toilet and flushes it, walking out before her mind can cook up a convenient solution for her confused heart.
The house is dull in these early morning hours and most of the lights are switched off. In the semi-darkness, she can still hear Touji's snores over the receeding sound of the flush. It feels so unreal, living together. No, not just that… All of this feels unreal. It's not right. It's not correct.
Something is missing. She's sure of it.
But what?
She has no idea.
Asuka is twenty-one years old. She just finished college and works as a secretary in a office downtown. Asuka Langley Soryu. Her name is strange for someone in Japan but she has never questioned it. Her family… When she thinks of her family, she feels a pain in her heart but she always quells it by saying that that is because they have been living apart for all three years of her college.
(Right?)
In fact, her mother called her the other day, didn't she?
(Did she really?)
She stands in the small, dark kitchen and everything is washed out in tones of grey and blue. It's such a dull, boring place, to be honest but this small apartment flat is all that she can afford at the moment. And now that idiot lives with her. It's so surreal. Their bentos are lying washed and clean by the sink and she has a strange feeling that someone else used to do this for her. Someone other than her mother. Maybe that is why she had been dreaming that strange dream with all those monsters and bloodshed — to escape this harsh reality of living on her own.
Of course there was no one ever who made and packed bentos for her other than she herself. Maybe the idiot can do it for her if he could just bring himself to get out of the damn bed. Asuka is so lost in her musings that she does not hear the light footsteps behind her and that is what causes her to jump when strong arms go wind themselves around her waist. She has been standing right beside the wall that separates her flat from her neighbour's and due to the suddeness of this situation, the two of them have now bumped into it from her automatic reaction.
"Idiot," she says but doesn't really mean it, "now the lady next door will think we keep going at it like cats in heat."
Touji nuzzles his face in the crook of her neck. "But aren't we?"
It's tempting to drop everything and go back to their room. Maybe call in sick to work and just laze in bed. It would be so good to do that, wouldn't it be?
He runs a hand up from her waist to her chin and turns her face around, kissing her deeply. She turns around completely and allows herself to be pushed back into the wall behind her. It's so good, it's so good. This feeling…
She opens her eyes to glance sideways and her gaze lands on the clock hanging on the wall of the drawing room. It's 7:50 am and she has to leave. She cannot live the rest of her life in a dream-like world like this! And it's wrong, running away from her responsibilities. She needs to work. It's wrong.
Asuka pushes him away with force. "We have no time for this." Her tone is brusque. He looks like a lost puppy and she almost loses that sense of this all being very wrong. His eyes are pleading and silently they say, "I'm sorry."
"Hey look," she mutters, suddenly somehow refusing to look at him. Her cheeks feel hot. "We need to go to work right now...but maybe…later." That last part comes out with a squeak. She never knows how to respond to the people who she becomes attached to, even if the attachment is frivolous at best. She never knows how to care for the people who care for her.
She knows he cares for her, even if he refuses to answer her questions regarding the nature of their relationship. Asuka kisses his cheek for a second. That should do it. They smile at each other and the silence around them doesn't seem so awkward anymore.
Awkward…
She suddenly remembers that she had dreamt of plenty of awkward things last night. It was all just some childish fantasy, she tells herself.
Her dream knocks on her head but she walks away and sets off making food.
("Hey Shinji, do you want to kiss?"
He takes off his headphones. "What?"
"Kissing a girl, you know?" she continues carelessly. "You have never done it, have you?"
He shakes his head.
"Then, let's do it!"
"What?! Why?"
"Because I'm bored."
"Kissing because you're bored… You are weird.")
She smiles a little as she prepares the miso soup. The person she was in her dream sure was aggressive. She had been far too younger too. That boy had been strange too. In the end, it all didn't matter. It was just an eerie dream at the end of the day. Nothing more, nothing less. A product of her stressed reality.
But why does all of this feel wrong?
She feels like screaming.
She leaves the flat at 8:20 am (she is so late) but bumps into the lady that is her neighbour, Misato Katsuragi. She greets her with a habitual, 'Good morning'. Both of them have large trash bags in their hands and they walk quickly towards the elevator at the end of the corridor.
"It's cold, isn't it?" Asuka says with forced cheerfulness. Ms Katsuragi replies that yes, it indeed is. They make small talk. The older woman shows unhidden interest in her love life and it inwardly irritates her. It feels familiar, though — this kind of teasing conversation, this lady, this elevator. It feels like she has lived all of this out in some twisted way in some other life.
("I sure hope you don't do dirty things on your date tomorrow, Asuka!"
Her face turns scarlet. "Shut up. I am not you, Misato!")
She shivers as she rides her bicycle. Her ponytail whips behind her in the wind. She knows she is running late and hurries on.
"Aah that neighbour lady, wasting my time with pointless talk!" she says while parking her cycle. She begins walking fast and breaks into a run. "Shit! Now I'll never catch that :31 express." She runs through the whole length of the parking area. "Jeez," she tells the wind rushing past her face, "she pisses me off."
Of all days to be late on, she chose the one on which a huge board meeting had to take place.
Luckily for her, her senpai has already photocopied the handouts they would be needing that day by the time she crashes into the office building, miraculously only fifteen minutes late.
The girl smiles at her as if she knows what caused her to be late. "Why don't you just break up?"
(She isn't wrong, Asuka thinks. In the end, Misato's small talk hadn't been the one to make her late. Not really. It had been her late night with Touji. Yeah...)
"It's a lot easier that way," Rei Ayanami continues. Her long hair falls over her face, hiding her eyes. She knows Rei — now her senpai — from her school days. They used to be in the same class back then and she had much shorter hair. Now she has grown it out. It still has its characteristic light blue colour. Some other things have changed about her too, like how the girl used to have a very timid and monotonous voice but that has definitely converted to loud and somewhat animated.
Asuka knows she really ought not to be calling her a senpai but she joined two months later than Rei and just fell into the pattern. A voice in the back of her head tells her that the dream version of her would have never done it. Heck, that girl had called Ms Katsuragi by just her first name, hadn't she?
She shakes her head lightly. "Yeah," she mutters, answering her senpai's earlier question on breaking up. "I guess so."
Rei collects all the copied handouts in a neat bundle and goes off on her own tangent.
"Of course, that's just cheap methodology," she says. "If you leave things vague and just try to put on a good face, you'll only get hurt. There's nothing worse than an obsessed/brooding man. There's no telling what he'll do. Just like a spoilt brat!"
"Senpai," Asuka replies, stretching the word a bit, "Did something happen?"
Rei doesn't reply to that. They walk in silence to the elevator. For some reason, Asuka's mind recalls the midnight cycle ride she had enjoyed with Touji a few days ago.
"So, what's the problem?" Senpai questions suddenly while they wait for the elevator to reach to their required destination. "You get romance and at the same time your sexual appetites are satisfied."
"It's not romantic in the least!" she nearly yells back. The treacherous bicycle ride remains in her mind.
"You really don't know if it's love until after you hang up the phone."
Rei had always been strange at conversations.
"Huh, really?" Asuka wonders if the subject of this talk is just her love life or has it come to include her senpai's too.
"When you're doing it, it seems like the purpose is just to overlap your bodies, and there's no warm, fuzzy feeling. You're just ravenous towards each other," Rei tells her.
She ponders over that statement as they walk out of the elevator and towards the meeting room.
"Whenever we put a little distance between us," Asuka pauses, "I get confused and wonder whether I really like him. It's the same old pattern every time where I think that maybe I'm just forcing myself to believe that I like him."
(A dysfunctional household with three dysfunctional people flashes in her mind's eye. "I hate you, Shinji. I hate everything!")
"It won't last for long," she continues, suppressing the urge to tremble. "I have a pretty short stance."
They lay out the photocopied handouts in front of all the chairs, going in opposite directions.
"You're pretty cold-hearted, but you just become attached pretty easily, don't you...like keeping a dog," Rei says while grinning. That's another change from their school days; Senpai never used to grin back then.
"And you're the type that recklessly and willfully causes men to misunderstand," she adds. The papers are all laid out and she taps Asuka's shoulder gently with the bundle of left copies.
They smile at each other for just a moment and leave together.
The rest of the day passes in a strange haze for her. People come and go and she attends to their requests and phonecalls. But her mind isn't here. It isn't grounded. During the break, she is alone. Usually she has Rei to keep her company but the meeting is keeping the other girl busy. She looks at the rice balls that lie in her bento and the lukewarm miso soup that floats in her small flask. All of it is unreal.
Why did that dream feel so real? Who was that boy? Why was that stupid neighbour lady in her dream? Why was she fighting monsters? Who was that boy? Why was there so much blood? Why was she so aggressive? What happened? How the hell did she dream all that in the span of some two hours? Who was that boy?
Who was that boy?
Who was that boy?
Asuka clutches her head with her hands. She must be finally going crazy because she is spending so much time thinking about some nonsensical dream.
And yet, the nagging feeling of something missing remains gnawing at her heart. She prays that the evening comes quick so that she can rest in her warm bed as soon as possible.
She looks at the clock. It's still 1:30 pm. Even the break isn't over yet.
It sure is going to be one long afternoon…
When the clock strikes five, no one is more glad than Asuka in the entire office. She can finally get to lie down. She rushes down the stairs and meets Senpai at the entrance of the building. They chat and the subject quickly bounces to Touji as they enter a convenience store to buy some snacks for the way home.
"He's quick to say he's stupid as an evasion tactic." She frowns after saying that.
Rei laughs from her position a few metres away. "He does it because he thinks that if the word 'stupid' comes from his own mouth, he'll be forgiven."
(The boy in her dream doesn't even ask for forgiveness. He never calls himself stupid for the sake of sounding apologetic. What he does though, is constantly apologise instead. Directly. No pretenses. She is so fed up of that constant meek attitude.
"What are you, stupid?" she asks, bewildered.
"Maybe I am.")
"He does it because he thinks he can always get my sympathy," she quips.
"That's because he's afraid if he doesn't have excuses ready. Because afterwards he'll only end up hurting himself."
(She's sitting at a table in the same dysfunctional household she saw in her dream. The strange boy from earlier leans in close to her, looking truly desperate.
"I want to help you, Asuka and I want to stay with you."
"Then don't do anything. Don't come near me. All you ever do is hurt me.")
Wait, what was that? She didn't dream about that. Why is she having these...flashbacks? And why does she look somewhat different in them? What is wrong with her? What is wrong with everything? She tries her hardest to focus on the conversation at hand.
"He's a nuisance, seriously," she sighs and remembers the idiot that Touji happens to be. They walk outside and she sits on a wooden chair placed right outside the entrance of the shop. "Always ringing my cellphone at work. But then, when he doesn't call I get really irritated and upset…" She taps her feet on the ground repeatedly. She knows that Rei probably thinks she is utterly frustrated over her boyfriend (which she is) but right now all these images from nowhere are just chopping her senses.
"That's just selfishness on your part, isn't it?"
She stops her tapping, wordlessly acknowledging the blatant truth thrown at her face.
After they part, Asuka chooses to walk to the second nearest station. A white cloth bag of groceries hangs limply in her hand and she walks listlessly among the crowds. It seems that for a while the strange dream and the eerie images have abandoned her mind. Perhaps this walk is helping her regain her inner peace. The city hustles and bustles with noise around her.
"Asuka…" someone says. It is clear and crisp over the chaos of the crowded street.
She stops dead in her tracks and turns around. Who called out to her? The voice was a man's but it was not a voice she knows or can assign a face to. For some reason that brown-haired boy's face flashes in her mind.
'So the craziness is back, isn't it?' she thinks. And here she had been happily assuming that it was a temporary thing. She wonders what will Touji say if she says that she has finally gone off the edge. She wonders if he will say anything at all.
Shaking her head, she continues walking onwards. The leaves on the trees by the footpath flutter high above her head.
("Don't leave me! Please care about me!")
She walks faster.
("Asuka, help me. You are the only one who can help me!"
"Liar.")
What is even happening anymore? Why is she seeing all this? Who is that boy? Who is that girl?
The incessant chanting that all of this is wrong just increases.
The breeze moves along and then for a moment, everything comes to a standstill, like the calm before a storm.
"I'm not here," the voice from before urges. The boy, but sounding older. Older and even more idiotic.
And suddenly, she just knows. None of this world around her is grounded in reality. How could it be real if the constant source of her confusion and trauma is not around?
Everything is blindingly bright.
A white light flashes in a pool of red.
"That idiot."
Hope you liked it! I have few more fics in store. I just don't know when I'll be posting them.