10:58 P.M
The lights here are pretty. Shinji thinks to himself, for only a moment, that living isn't such a chore.
That miracle happens on nights like this one. When the crowd of people he voluntarily surrounds himself with is large enough to make him feel like he isn't totally socially inept. When there is enough life, and love, and conversation going on around him to let him pretend like he doesn't exist for a few hours. Like he's just some floating entity, or a guy stuck in a perpetual out of body experience who doesn't have to hear himself breathe, or chew, or live. It's sad. It's really fucking sad, but it works for him.
He can do parties. For one reason or another, Shinji can't do dates. Can't go out to lunch with more than four people without letting social exhaustion drive him out the bathroom window. Can't look at that cute guy at the pharmacy for more than two seconds at a time. But Shinji, when blessed by these fuzzy pink lights, and the end of a glass of some toilet-y drug store wine, can do house parties.
Shinji even kind of likes house parties.
It's not school, and it's not NERV. It's a hazy pink limbo in between and he lets himself enjoy it.
And Asuka? Asuka makes these parties her bitch . Everyone knows she's coming, and everyone waits for her. She is a holy constant in their lives, a deity in a high waisted skirt and a shade of lipstick that tells you she is going to destroy you if you let her. And you will let her. Shinji does every goddamn time she opens her mouth.
"I don't know where you find your clothes." She's touching his jacket, picking at the loose threads poking out of his right sleeve. It isn't loving, or flirty. She's actively disgusted. His jacket isn't that bad, but her cutting him down is as good almost just friendly conversation. She is capable of far worse.
"Mm." He says.
Neither of them care about the stupid jacket. Neither of them are sober enough to care. She's on her fourth glass of something embarrassingly pink, and heavily diluted with vodka. He's on his third. And chances are, it isn't going to stop there because this is kind of their thing.
They're kind of in their element. They have matching alcohol tolerances, and when they drink like this they feel like gods among mortals. The best part is that nobody expects it. When the ninth gin and tonic has everyone else on their knees, crying in a puddle of piss and stomach acid, there are Asuka and Shinji. Standing in the midst of it all. Beacons of light. The top bitch and her right hand man who hates her almost as much as she hates herself. It's toxic. It's going to kill them. It's sweet because it's all that they know.
It's quiet for one sweet moment. And then Asuka gives an irritated click of the tongue, and he knows that it's over. The vicious cycle beats on, the same tired beat it plays every night. He tells himself that he isn't tired of it tonight.
Click. Asuka is annoyed. She lets him know.
"I'll bet you think it's cute when you ignore me." She says, waking him from a sleepy trance.
He gives a tiny shrug, and sinks deeper into the beaten up sofa beneath him. It's soft, and broken, and it smells like weed. Just like most everyone here.
"I'm not ignoring you."He nibbles absently at his pointer fingernail, and she swats his hand away from his mouth with the fiery wrath of a god wearing expensive perfume. Dirty habit. He always forgets, and she is generous enough to remind him.
"Well then,what are you doing?." There's venom in her voice as she admires her own reflection through red fingernails. Shinji chuckles and thanks whoever the fuck is up there that she's too absorbed in the idea of herself to have heard that. She keeps talking without looking away.
"Sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, that's what. There's a distinct lack of shotglass in my hand, Shinji Ikari, and I think you know what that means."
He thinks real hard at this one.
"That you need to…? Go get a shot?" Good answer, he thinks. And contrary to what Asuka definitely believes, the right answer. But everything with her is a matrix. Nothing connects easily, nothing is what you think, and everything is a challenge. She looks at him like he may as well have just spat in her face.
"Do you even know what shots are for ?" Her offended grimace is almost too much for him to smile. It's almost cute until he remembers why she's freaking out on him. That stupid shot game. Every Saturday, without fail, Toji starts up that stupid drinking game and Asuka drags Shinji into it because she doesn't give an honest fuck about his liver, and she knows he won't say no to her.
"Probably something different than what you think."
"Shots are for winning." She says. Bingo. "Nobody here is doing shots to get drunk, they're doing shots to win, and they're doing it to try and walk out of here thinking that they're better than us. And they're not better than us."
He's nursing his drink in silence until she says that stuff about people not drinking to get drunk, at which point he promptly laughs into his drink, and calls bullshit.
"I'm almost positive that ninety percent of the people here would disagree with you about everything you just said."
And then she pouts for a second because she's trying to think of a way to hurt him badly enough to make him play. Likely just emotionally, but he's sure she isn't ruling out physical tactics either. It's not that Shinji doesn't like to drink with her. It's just that the circumstances are kind of shitty.
She doesn't want to spend time with him. She wants to win a stupid game in spite of Toji. And Shinji kind of wishes that they would just get it over with and screw already, but he's also kind of holding out hope that Asuka will someday magically wake up on the right side of the bed. And tell him that she's so so so sorry. And that she loves him, and this has all just been one giant joke. That she won't hurt him anymore.
And it makes him laugh at himself. She elbows him in the side, hard, for laughing at something that he won't tell her about. That fantasy that he's been holding in his back pocket for so many years is getting too stale. It makes his throat ache when he thinks about it. He doesn't really want her as much as he just wants to feel something.
"So are you coming, or what?"
Ah, his favorite question. How kind of her to let him pretend that it's his decision to make. In two minutes he'll be standing next to her with a tiny glass cup in one hand, the other hand resting dutifully on her right shoulder. She'll shrug it off. He won't try again. Fucking clockwork. They both know he's coming.
He gives her a look so exhausted that she almost feel bad for him. Almost.
"Shinji." She warns, her voice teetering on violent. " Are you coming ?"
"No." He tries, rolling his sore shoulders towards his neck until they give a satisfying pop. "Not tonight. Sorry."
3:05 a.m
"Look, I don't throw up. I'm good, really. Just leave me alone. I haven't thrown up in like two years."
Shinji vomits for the first time in two years.
The next thirty seconds are an ephemeral lifetime. His knees get weak. The jelly in his head formerly known as a working brain is asking where home is. The scariest part isn't that he doesn't know where he is. The scariest part is that he doesn't care. Wouldn't ever care. Not if he was sober and splayed out nicely under sweaty sheets. Not when he falls to the cement like a sleepy child.
His head touches the pavement harder, and more passionately than he has ever touched another human in his life. The absence of the scent of blood is almost, almost a disappointment. Shinji would love an excuse not to go back to school tomorrow. Not to do anything tomorrow.
Not to do anything ever.
He laughs. It hurts so bad . Isn't that funny? Isn't it funny what life will do to get you to throw in the towel early and sleep six feet under ground for the rest of forever? Isn't it funnier that this is all entirely his own fault, and there is absolutely no one to cast the fiery cloak of blame onto?
"I never throw up." He talks in a voice that he swears to god isn't his own. Must belong to a child. The same child that fell into a cold vat of his own five hour old meal. Shinji Ikari wouldn't do this. Shinji Ikari is somewhere else right now.
"Of course you don't." Says the guy. That guy. The guy from before. The guy.
Shinji listens for just a second. Of course he didn't. That's right. He hasn't thrown up since that awful bout of food poisoning that time with Asuka in the student dining hall two years ago. His stomach unsettles, and then settles again. She laughed the whole time. When she caught it herself, he had to hold her hair.
"Of course I don't." He assures himself again. He repeats it to himself inside his head and watches the few little flecks of stars that the city lights haven't eaten 's so ugly out here and it breaks his heart.
When you're moving to the city this is never the image you paint in your head. Shinji, no matter how badly he ever hated himself, ever saw himself here. Not on the ground, first of all. Maybe watching the sky from something stupid and basic like a 19th floor balcony. He sees himself now, the him inside his head. Watching a navy purple sky pull into blackness as each and every star is bright, and ever performing. Someone in the distance is playing something very annoyingly American on a saxophone. He isn't vomiting. Vomiting isn't ever, ever, a part of the dream.
"I hate this." He says.
"I hate this." He says again, just to be clear. It feels clear. It feels clean. It feels like the most honest thing he's ever said in his entire life.
He's going to say it one more time, he's decided. Just because it feels good. He opens his eyes this time as if it'll somehow make a difference. As if to make sure he still hates this, before he throws it on out there again. Lo and behold, he's off the ground. He's staring into the street instead of absentee stars, and someone's phantom limb is keeping him alive and afloat.
"Oh yeah?" Says the guy. That's right, the guy is here. "Me too. Probably."
Shinji says nothing. Being anyplace but here would be such a blessing. Walking would grant that wish. So that's what he does. Tries to, anyhow.
"Woah woah woah. I'm all for quick recovery, but- Hey, just a second." Shinji's second attempt to wriggle out of the guy's arm is thwarted. He almost meets the ground again because his body feels suddenly too heavy too control yet too light all the same. Like he'd just fall. Like he'd float away if something wasn't holding him down.
So he lets himself be held. He grunts in irritation but what he really means is okay . They walk. Shinji still hates this.
"What was it that we were hating again?" Speak of the devil and his fucking coincidental dark magic.
Shinji holds back an acidic hiccup that burns the top of his throat.
"This." He gestures towards just about everything. "All of it. Me."
"You hate you?"
Shinji rolls his eyes so hard that it hurts and wishes again for the nine hundredth time that he wasn't dealing with this right throat burns with very used stomach acid. His eyes burn with something else. He knows exactly with what.
Don't. He tells himself.
"I don't hate you."
"That's because you don't know me." His voice cracks and for a second he cannot hear anything else but what he just said. Repeating, and distorting, and changing in his head. Stuck there until forever is over. Like a tired chorus to a song that hurts you whenever you hear it. Broken record. You don't know me. You don't know me.
"If you knew me-If…" Shinji breathes, and lets out that sour hiccup. "If you knew me, you'd wish you didn't."
Nobody says anything. Shinji is sure it's because the guy agrees with him. So why has he not made himself disappear. Why, when it seems like the easiest thing in the world to do, does this guy not disappear into the night sky the same way he mysteriously showed up? Not knowing Shinji seems like a privilege. One he'd take up if he had the chance.
And the guy laughs. God. Shinji isn't sure which one of the two of them he'd like to punch in the neck more right now.
"I do know you." He says, softly though they've no one to wake up. "And from my personal perspective, it isn't the...I dunno'...Catastrophic burden that you make it out to be."
"No you don't ."Shinji, needless to say, is not receptive of that. "You think because I puked on your shoes you know me?" And christ, that's right he puked on this guy's shoes.
"Thank you for being nice to me. You don't have to. You don't have to pretend that you're okay with doing this."
Then it hits him, and it hits him sharp and quick. What is this guy doing?
"Where are...Where are we going?"
"Home." The guy answers, and shifts Shinji upward when his knees suddenly decide that it's time for a good ol' concrete nap. He corrects himself quickly.
" Your home, I mean. You said something earlier about having to study for an exam tomorrow, right? Kind of hard to do that from a bathroom floor in a house that you don't live in. Though I've admittedly never tried."
The smart decision here is not to ask about the bathroom floor bit, because the small sober fraction of his brain knows that he doesn't want to know the answer. But he isn't out of questions just yet. It's cold tonight. The walk home is miles long. There's time for questions.
"How do you know where I live?"
His strange and shadowy counterpart laughs again. Shinji listens this time. It isn't a cruel laugh by any stretch. It's quiet, and humble and barely more than a chuckle. Hardly a laugh at all. Almost warm.
"You really don't remember, do you?" He asks, and the warmth in his voice is physically stunning. Shinji feels different after hearing it, in some way. "Not my place to remind you. A friend helped you out there. Asuka, I think. I've met her once before."
Shinji is somehow immediately sick again.
"Lucky you." The sarcasm is so thick he can taste it in his mouth. The guy laughs again, this time loud, and full of a personality that Shinji doesn't know.. It makes him feel good. To know that he can make someone laugh.
"I've had better luck than that." His arm snakes further away as Shinji's ability to walk by himself comes closer to returning.
It's sick that he kind of likes this. Being helped. Getting a kick out of attention like an incompetent child, or a crying baby, or Asuka. Shinji once read in a short story that burning to death after you freeze, right before you die, is warm and cozy. Like lying in front of a fireplace. It's killing you. You have no control over it. You like it. Something tells Shinji that when applied to burning, that isn't true.
It feels truer when applied to this.
"You know, I ought to be quite offended that you don't like me." Says the guy, and shinji's brain snaps free of it's dangerous train of thought. "We had a really nice conversation earlier."
Did we? Is his first thought. Remembering is a tough task right now. The shocker here is the fact that Shinji Ikari, no joke, apparently had a conversation with a stranger and they liked it .
"I never said I didn't like you." Shinji says.
"So you do like me?"
"No."
The guy, this guy, whoever (Shinji really should ask him his name) laughs again. The soft laugh. The first laugh. Shinji doesn't know which one he likes better. Or whether or not he likes either of them at all.
"I mean, I didn't say I did like you. I didn't say I didn't." He testifies, using his free hand to rub at his suddenly aching temples. "Don't confuse me, my head hurts."
"I'm not trying to." The other man consoles. His arm, Shinji has just now noticed, is gone and in it's rightful place. Shinji is walking like a normal person with a degree to get and an internship to make count and a liver to not destroy. It feels alright. It feels colder.
"But I like you, if it means anything."
And then there is a feeling. Just once, and for a tiny second that could have gone unnoticed. His stomach flutters beneath his cold skin. Maybe it's a disease. Maybe he swallowed a small family of moths. Maybe it's the vodka again. Maybe it's excitement, but likely not. He's counting on the moths.
"What did we talk about?" He says so suddenly that it makes him stumble over his feet. "Back there? You said we talked about something nice."
A steady hand takes his shoulder for safety reasons. Every part of his body is cold except for right there. Asuka was right about this fucking jacket. Good for nothing.
"Nothing super particular. Things. Stuff. Once you really got into the juice you gave a very interesting play by play of the first time you ate a pickle, and let me say, I am still to this second captivated."
His cheeks get all warm. Just moths.
"Oh my god you should have left me on the ground." He cradles his face in one hand and swears to himself, that once he is all sober and good and clean he is going to find Asuka and Toji and Kensuke and when he does, he will have a weapon. "Seriously, why are you still here?"
There is a quiet few beats, and it is long enough to send Shinji's stomach into a flutter again. In that time, he knows that the guy is going to give a real answer.
"You don't know it, Shinji Ikari, but you're worth the time." Pause. Don't look at him. Just the moths. "There isn't an incentive for everything. I don't do things because I have a reason, and I'm certainly not talking to you, or helping you because I want something out of it."
That's a first.
"I like you. You do stupid things to make your friends happy, and you're good to them,and you have things to say that make me think. I can see that in the span of a night. I hope you'll be able to see that some day."
Quiet.
"You're good, Shinji."
Shinji would so love to agree with that.
"I'm happy to have met you." They're stopped now, and for the first time during this walk, Shinji can see his eyes. "Even if only for a night, I'm glad to say that I knew you."
Shinji's crying now. Just a little, and only noticeable when you look at him straight on. But this guy has nothing else to look at. There is a crying man, and there are a million smelly garbage cans. Which one would you look at? It was going to happen, he knew that it was. He only wishes it wasn't know. He only wishes he wasn't so blindingly fucking drunk and he wishes that he could remember the first time that he made someone like him.
He wishes that it felt worse. Wishes that this didn't feel kind of good.
"Who are you?" Shinji asks, for once and for all. "Who the hell are you?"
11:31 PM, Earlier
"His name is Kaworu Nagisa and I kinda' think he should do me."
Asuka offers this lovely fact into Shinji's ear, staring across the ping pong table and straight into an unlucky stranger. Shinji can hardly say that he's surprised. He can't even see the guy clearly from way over here, but if Asuka is lusting after him, then he must have enough boom boom bang enough to quench everyone in this room.
"You're gross, I don't wanna' know that." He hisses, harboring a small amount of jealous hurt behind his bitterness. Figuring out how he feels about Asuka pretty soon would be ideal, but isn't likely.
"You're no fun."
"I'm fun." He argues. "The game is called shots . The game isn't called 'verbal confirmation that Asuka is going to make an idiot out of herself and regret it'."
"Don't we play that game every night?" Toji is his rescuer tonight, swooping in just in time to save Shinji from losing an eye over a moment of brave honesty. Now they're both in on it. Now they can die together.
"So what are we doing ladies? Are we doing shots, or are we fucking around when we're supposed to be doing shots?" Toji asks the most Toji question possible, and swings an arm around Shinji's shoulder.
"The second. As we've been doing." Kensuke makes an appearance, snapping a photo that Shinji will kindly ask him to burn later but secretly love. "For an hour ."
"Not here you aren't." And that would be Hikari, resident virgin mary, and mother hen to all. "People live here, you know. If my house mother sees this house tomorrow, she'll-"
"Bullshit." Toji, well, calls bullshit. "This is a house full of dopey women, not a convent. Your house mother will see this mess in the morning and congratulate you for not being such a princess all the time. Lighten up."
And Hikari lightening up is the first mistake.
Within ten minutes, everyone is kind of crocked. Worst than usual. Fact of the matter is, finals are approaching at lightning speed and everyone is desperate for a chance to forget their impending doom other than Toji, who is desperate for free alcohol in general. In twenty minutes, Asuka's hair is down all of the way, Shinji is missing a shoe, and Hikari has already gone up to bed.
Shinji looks to Asuka, and wonders whether or not they're going to pull it together this time. Her skirt is hiked up too high, and she's clutching the sides of the table, white knuckled. But there is a fire behind her historically cold blue isn't because of the cinnamon whiskey, though the stench of it is lingering on her like she may have bathed in it.
"Don't look at me like that." She tears into him as Kensuke takes his turn. "We're fine. You don't feel sick yet, do you? Of course you don't. Man up."
Shinji bristles. "You know, there's something kind of demoralizing about a twenty year old women who still wears bows in her hair telling me to man up."
"And shut up, at that." She tries to nudge the glass into his hand, and in the process, nearly knocks the both of them over onto the ground. Which is kind of unlike her. She seems off it tonight. If Shinji was any kind of friend, he would cut her off soon. Can he do that? Is he even allowed to cut Asuka off from anything?
"Maybe you should sit down?" he gently suggests.
"I'm good, I'm good ." She hardly gets the last word out of her mouth without jumbling it, so he doesn't exactly trust her. "Shinji, we're the team . The dream team. You neeeed to trust me when i teIl you that we can do this! Have I ever failed you at anything? Anything at all?"
Shinji thinks.
"Yes. Multiple times."
"Shut up." She hisses, and spits just a little as she does. They both ignore it as she wipes it away. His feelings aren't hurt. He's worried about her, though he'd rather not be. Sometimes he thinks she deserves nothing more than his indifference. Sometimes he thinks there's a chance that he could be in love with her. Sometimes it's just hate.
"How much did you have before we started the game?" Tonight it's worry.
"A lady never tells." And that means a lot. More than usual.
"Asuka."
"Shinji."
He says nothing. Asuka has to impress everyone but herself. That means looking sober and bright eyed and soft and sweet while simultaneously getting shitfaced to the eighth degree. She has to be the cool girl. She has to win, and always always be the best and he will never understand it.
"Pour it." She deadpans, smacking the glass into his face. He catches it before she causes any damage. "I'm gonna' gooo...Grab something. Do not fuck this up."
"You said you'd find me a ride back tonight." He baits her, knowing full well that she isn't going to bite.
"What, you can't make it home on your own? God, do I always have to-You know what..." That's when she pulls out a black felt marker from god knows where. She takes his arm by force and he knows better than to ask what she's doing. In large, semi-readable font, she scrawls out his address. Straight across his forearm. It tickles.
"There." She gloats, like it's the smartest idea she's ever hatched. "Now if you get lost, some helpful passerby can return you home right where you belong. Lost and Found! You'll be fine. I'll be right back, I said I would!"
Except for she didn't say that. Shinji looks at the return adress on his arm and feels like an infant for what surprisingly isn't the first time in the past twenty minutes. He deflates quietly and she doesn't stay to watch him because it kind of makes her sad. Not that she'd ever tell.
"Toodles, okay?"
And he has to accept it when she walks away with her nose up in the air because toodles . Toodles is the end of everything. Apparently good friends let their drunk friends walk away unattended at crowded parties, but good friends don't dare disrespect the rules of toodles.
Do not fuck this up she will now be saying for an eternity in his mind. Like he isn't in danger of fucking up a supposedly prestigious internship at NERV by drinking himself stupid in a room full of fellow interns, but he is in danger of fucking up a game with almost no rules. Lovely.
He pours himself a tall shot of someone's dad's Hakushu, knowing that there are a million and two better things to subject himself to tonight. Toji snickers from across the table and Shinji would fire something at him if he wasn't throwing back shot number whatever-and-a-half.
"Toodles." Toji waggles his fingers, and Kensuke tallies another point on the paper for Shinji.
"What's with her?" Shinji instinctively lowers his voice and watches her prowl across the floor.
"What's ever with her?" Says Kensuke, vice president of the Anti-Asuka Langley Soryu club. "You're acting like she's ever acted normal a day in her life."
The Anti-Asuka club stalls to watch their favorite disaster interact with the world that they've shunned for the moment. The population does a very convincing job of pretending to love her. She still looks cute, even all screwed up like this. She laughs, and puts her arm around someone. She forgets about him and gives him no choice but to remember her.
"She's trying to impress some new guy. Wants to expand the inner circle so she doesn't have to look at us anymore." Kensuke speaks a truth that makes Shinji wonder why she even bothers hanging out with them.
Toji takes his turn in one heavy gulp and only coughs for a second or two when it's over.
"I'll bet you money she's only interested in helping one thing expand."
Shinji's laugh is cut off quickly by something warm flickering inside his stomach. All of him goes red. He coughs and takes the next shot without even realizing that he's doing it, and so begins another unhealthy habit.
"That's how she wants to impress people? Getting drunk? Not very Asuka of her."
"Well, what would you do? Rattle off times tables until girls wanna' drop their pants for you?" Toji thinks he's funny, and laughs at his own joke while nobody else does because he's just that kind of guy. "Really, she's got the right idea. She's gotta' dosomething to make people like her."
"And being nice is too healthy an alternative for her?" Kensuke suggests, and Shinji thinks him stupid to think for even a moment that Asuka would try something like that. She isn't most people. Being kind would probably kill her.
"Not grand enough for her. Being nice doesn't get you attention."
Being nice doesn't get you anything. Shinji, with his empty pockets and microscopic list of personal contacts would know. He watches her. And then he watches her again. His stomach hurts and he feels like a creep. He wants to go home.
She leans into someone's ear and whispers something that he can't hear. He really, really wants to go home.
Toji, who doesn't understand Shinji but is trying very hard to, is there in an instant with a full shot glass and a sorry face. He swings an arm around Shinji's shoulder and they watch Asuka quietly dismantle herself.
"The sooner you get over this…" Toji doesn't finish.
"I know." Shinji mutters beneath the noise. He knows. He's trying to.
And then she's down. It only takes seconds, and the pretty little thing that she has painted herself to be is spilled out onto the floor like a drowned ragdoll. The noise doesn't cease. The party doesn't stop. A few people look back and watch her try to collect herself, but then something else interesting happens and she is old news again.
Shinji is over there as soon as it happens because this apparently his fucking job or something.
"Don't touch-...G...Get off of me, I'm fine." Her words are soupy and mashed together in ways that they shouldn't be. He picks her up under her arms and drags her to her feet. Some other guy steadies her as she half fights them off.
"Alright, lights out." Shinji tells 's disgusted with himself. Secretly relieved that she's too out of herself to finish the night. Too out of herself to be better than him.
"I'm talking to Kaworu. Don't be rude, come on, get off me."
Hikari and her roommates live here. Up the stairs,down the longest hall, and past the fake plastic ficus there is a tiny little room that has only ever been slept in by sad drunk people who can't make it home for the night. Tomorrow, Asuka will be absolutely thrilled to know that she has made the list.
So Shinji and this other guy take her up those stairs, one of them on each arm. It's only when they're half way up that Shinji realizes he hasn't actually made the effort to see who this guy is.
"Watch the corner." That guy says.
And Shinji doesn't watch the corner because he's very much watching that guy. The guy. The famous, and relatively unlucky guy that Asuka has been after this entire night. It's dark up here, and Shinji can only make out a few details. There's a piece of party tinsel behind his ear. He's too tall, but not much taller than Shinji.
He is, in the shortest words possible, the most prominent thing that Shinji has ever seen in a dark hallway at 12:00 am.
"Corner." Is the fourth word that he ever says to Shinji. Shinji is too busy over analyzing a random encounter with a helpful guy to actually listen to what he's saying. Needless to say, he doesn't watch the corner. The corner clocks him in the back of the head, and the guy laughs in the least demeaning way that Shinji has ever heard. He rubs the spot where the corner hit.
"Yikes." Shinji says.
"Yikes Indeed." Says the guy. Kaworu, he thinks. They're standing there for an oddly warn few seconds before Shinji forgets everything about the woman in his arms and decides that he needs to start a conversation with this guy right here, and right now.
"Hi." Is all he can manage.
"Hi there." Says Kaworu. "We should probably take your friend to bed."
"Probably." Shinji agrees, now a blooming shade of red that he prays to god can't be seen in the dark. They move her into the bedroom and Shinji secretly calls himself an idiot with every step that they take. She's pretty much flightless by the time they put her to bed. They don't turn the light on. It's quiet up here.
It somehow ends up with them both at the foot of the bed, sat out on an old quilt that somebody's grandmother would be ashamed to see disrespected like this. There's a smell like violet perfume and dust in the air. It almost makes him ill. But it's nice here. You can hear the bugs, and a few cars, and somebody's old radio. The faint chatter of people downstairs. There's a sliver of buttery light in the doorway that neither of them wish to enter too badly.
"Thanks for that." Shinji bites his tongue, and stares at the smeared address on his arm. Goddamn baby.
"Ah, no problem at all." It seems like he isn't going to say anything else for a second. "I've seen you before. NERV, right?"
"Mhm." Shinji answers, at first not wondering why he's never seen this guy at NERV this guy. At first he wonders why they're still speaking. Why they're huddled together in a tiny dark room with odd smells and a drunk girl. He hopes that Asuka isn't awake.
"Internship?"
Shinji nods.
"What else do you know about me?" What first seems like a witty stab at banter melts away into awkwardness when Kaworu doesn't answer right away. He shouldn't have asked that. That was weird. That was a really, really, really weird thing to ask and Shinji is never going to make another friend as long as he lives.
But Kaworu turns to look at him, and cocks his head as if to give this some thought. His thumbnail is in his mouth as he thinks. The tinsel in his hair moves, but doesn't fall. When he finds an answer, Shinji can see it flicker through his eyes.
"Shinji is your name, I'm pretty certain." He decides. Easy one. Shinji will give him that. "You've got brown hair. Kinda' tall. Cute face. You're majoring in Law and Justice."
Shinji and his innocent soul are all caught up in being surprised that Kaworu could guess about the Law and Justice thing before cute face rings around in his brain about thirteen times. Cute face. He almost chokes on his own spit.
"How'd you, um…" Choke. "How'd you know about me majoring in Law and Justice?
Kaworu extends a finger, and Shinji is prepared for nothing. He pokes it into Shinji's chest and Shinji stares at it for a whole minute, wondering whether or not this is some absurd sexual gesture that he hasn't heard of. Shinji is almost ready to do it too when Kaworu clarifies this mess.
"Your shirt." He says, and Shinji looks down. T3U Law and Justice. Beneath the words, there is a little student drawn picture of their school mascot donning a police uniform and a very menacing pair of handcuffs. They never hear the end of it for thatstylistic choice, but hey, the shirts were already printed.
"Oh." Shinji then thinks of thirty other responses that are more colorful than "oh."
"Lucky guess." Kaworu takes his finger away, and uses it to gesture towards the slumbering mess of legs and blankets. "She yours?"
"Yeah."
Kaworu nods. Shinji feels the overwhelming urge to correct himself for some reason.
"I mean, no. We're not….together or anything. If anything, I thought she was yours."
And then Kaworu snorts kind of cruely into the dark, like that was either the funniest or most disgusting thing he's heard tonight. There's a sense of relief that comes with finding out that the two of them aren't connected in any way.
"Not likely." Kaworu says suddenly. "I'm kind of pretty gay."
And in that wide open moment Shinji feels so comfortable replying me too.
He doesn't say it, of course. Because deciding on a sexuality finally is too handsome a luxury for him to afford. He watches Kaworu, who is not only scary and kind of beautiful, but now gay, and now twenty thousand leagues above Shinji who might as well be rusting on the ocean floor. He is strange and now he is wise. Shinji is jealous and also he is something else. He doesn't know what.
He has to look away now.
"Good." Shinji swallows hard and finds himself with a headache. "I mean, because...She's definitely into you, and…" Shit. Was that public information? "...Uh. If you were straight you'd probably be into her, and she's...She's…"
Asuka mutters a mushy string of words into a decorative pillow and Shinji's heartbeat speeds up to a pace that most professionals would panic about. He pokes her bare leg and doesn't lose a finger, which means she's beyond passed out. He breathes easy for a few seconds. They watch her slip further into dreams.
"Difficult?" Kaworu guesses.
And from the safety of his head, Shinji is screaming yes . Yes, jesus christ yes.
"...Kind of."
For a long few seconds they're still watching her, Shinji praying silently for Asuka to never find out that he let her lay passed out drunk in some crummy old bed while he shit talked her with a guy she wanted to bang. And to Shinji, that sounds like a goddamn dream. He loves her, sometimes. Sometimes he wants to see her hurt.
"Are you into her?"
Shinji turns his head and opens his mouth to start up the denial train and finds that Kaworu is looking straight at him. Suddenly he knows that Kaworu was never watching Asuka with him. Not at all.
"Sometimes." This is the right answer, but the honesty doesn't feel clean and weightless in his chest. It feels wrong. Dirty.
Kaworu nods, and it is so hopelessly impossible to read. Not that Shinji can read people, but there are no telltale signs of any emotion. Disgust brings a slightly narrowed eyebrow, and an unentertained scoff. Disappointment is a tight smile that you don't really mean. Not caring looks like not caring.
Kaworu just nods.
"That's alright." He says. Like he knows that this is a festering wound that needs to be treated with kind phrases. And the thing is, it almost works for a second.
But not totally. Shinji lets the silence settle over again because he is very sure that he has done something to bring this conversation to an end. Only he can't leave. He's clutching the old quilt with dirty fingernails and chewing the tip of his tongue raw. Some kind of anticipation is murdering him. Only he doesn't know what kind. But he isn't uncomfortable.
"Can I ask you another question?" Kaworu keeps talking but Shinji already knows his answer. "Please don't feel obligated to say yes."
Shinji waits three seconds so not to seem desperate.
"Yes." He says desperately.
"Do you like her right now?" Kaworu asks.
Shinji thinks about it.
Then he watches the door. The light that it lets in. He watches that light wash the wall behind this strange man in yellow warmth. Like an aura. Shinji doesn't believe in shit like that. But he believes that it is good in here. He believes that he kind of feels something. Believes that it is warm in here, both physically and in bizarre ways that he hasn't known often before. Believes that the night will be long. Believes that he sort of wants it to.
And then he thinks of Asuka for a split second and physically feels the color red. He knows his answer.
"No."
Stranger smiles, barely even at all. Shinji tries it and it kind of feels good. He doesn't know what this is. He has absolutely no idea what is going to happen. He isn't worried about it. This is not the end.
"Do you wanna go downstairs now?" Kaworu asks suddenly, but somehow there is no suddenness in it at all.
Shinji swallows air.
"With you?"
Kaworu is smiling, kind of still. He's touching Shinji. Has been for a long time. His hands aren't flirty or intrusive or threatening on Shinji's arm. They're just there. They're existing there for a reason that the alcohol in his blood wants to call fate. Shinji is smarter. He knows not to call it anything.
"If you want." He replies. "I think we'd be really good at walking downstairs together."
Shinji nods. They don't go yet. They will when they want to because they don't need to just yet. It's warm here. It's pretty here.