Misato is always politely silent when I leave, although not sparing me some quizzical looks, but thankfully knows better than to ask where I'm going all the time, usually in a hurry and visibly upset. It's better that way, she wouldn't have believed me anyway.
One of these days, someone will mention casually to her, over vending machine coffee, that they have seen the third child with increasing frequency as of late inside headquarters. Misato will chalk it up to my wanting to be somewhere familiar in my duress, needing the cavernous, eerie silence of unexplored metallic corridors to keep my mind from wandering toward unpleasant thoughts, probably even blame herself for failing as a guardian, until the coworker mentions that the third always hovers impatiently in the residence halls, in front of a certain door, and always follows that peculiar fifth child in, both with placid, prepared looks on their faces. Then, perhaps, her curiosity will be piqued, but she never could have guessed what goes on behind one of Nerv's locked doors.
The first time my shaking fist sunk into that delicate marble face, after the initial shock, the registering of what happened, I flexed sore knuckles as I stared at them, wide eyed with fear and...
The second time, I just couldn't stop smiling. Grinning. Later the thought would nauseate me and eventually make me sick, but at the time I didn't hear the distinctive crack of the small upturned nose over the screaming in my own head, a combination of all the voices I knew and all the awful things they'd ever said to me...Didn't see the dark dollop of result and consequence lurch forth and slide down the pure white skin, the thin lips, the narrow chin (my next target) and soaking at an alarming rate into the crisp starched collar and matting the pale hair that framed the long slender neck because of all the faces flashing at me behind my clenched lids, all with varying degrees of displeasure and disgust contorting the familiar features.
Asuka, with all those foreboding machines monitoring her waning consciousness, needles feeding her some mystery fluid, electrodes for the constant EKG stuck seemingly to every available surface…Debilitated, useless, just because I was a second too late…!
THWACK.
Losing my mind about Ayanami those few days after the N2 explosion that stretched on for what must have been weeks, just to be rejected, unknown. And after all the suffering, worrying, hoping, waiting, and hard work over the past few months to unearth a few tender, fleeting smiles, to find out she was just a shell to hold my mother's likeness…To find out that any protectiveness in battle or in friendship, any longing she expressed was artificially motivated by a mother's instinct...
THWACK.
And Suzuhara, Touji-kun, one of the only people I've ever met that cared to learn more than that I was piloting that monstrous…thing…and even turned to me in his time of confusion and desperation and need and I KILLED HIM. I thanked him for being my best friend by all but allowing the dummy plug to…to crush him. Dead. Bleeding. No right leg. Massive cranial trauma. Organs ruptured. Dead. (Oh GOD, please let it have been swift…painless…)
THWACK.
Knowing my father used women, generations of women, like he used me. People who deserved happiness after all their sorrow and foolishly sought it in him, only to be cast aside, spurned, when they were only getting in his way, never given the smallest nod for the life-threatening work they did for his approval, whose only crimes were that they had been born female, had had hopes and passions and desires...
THWACK.
That. BASTARD.
THWACK.
There was never any other sound but my angry breathing and involuntary throaty grunts of effort in the cold, dim room, lit in slats by drawn blinds, occasionally the impact of bone on bone, the throbbing of my heart. There were no cries for help, no evidence of struggle, no chase, nothing smashed against walls or tables but a frail spine and delicate, flawless head, ashen lips wet and shining red, drawn closed in what could have been a thoughtful frown in any other circumstance, or else they were cracked ever so slightly to allow collecting blood and saliva out onto clothes or whatever surface his head was closest to.
Long white hands always rested, always relaxed and never tensed, beside long legs or on the floor next to the occasional droplets of his own blood, palms up in some kind of angelic image of resignation and ready forgiveness. He had forgiven me even before the first strike.
Redredred eyes once so striking but now just another splash of the same despicable colour, closed in ridiculous calm or staring straight into mine, never accusatory, no signs of retaliation, but something else…
Was that…
Pity?
THWACK.
THWACK.
THWACK.
Then, trembling, slicked with a thin sheen of sweat, breath coming out in an involuntarily beastlike fashion from my straining throat (a small pain compared to my throbbing, raw knuckles, but both lessened by adrenaline), I would look away from that battered figure, those blackened eyes shining with curiosity, looking unblinking right at me, those ravaged, cracked lips barely open as if trying to say something I probably wouldn't have listened to anyway. Thin arms, almost all bones visible (a fleeting, unnecessary worry about whether he was eating properly) lift slowly, unsteadily, for an embrace that I almost always ignore.
Almost.
And somewhere in the dark, the rusty, metallic taste of dried blood.
The next time I visit him like this, he will have mysteriously healed completely, not a bruise or the nasty rug burn I know was there last time in sight. A perfectly clean, untainted canvas for me to stain with the results of my fury and frustration and anxiety.