I have to say, I think what I've found hardest about writing these characters is that NGE (and, to a lesser extent, Rebuild) develops the characters in such a way that it feels impossible to pull them from their original places, stories, and developmental tracks and still keep the characters intact, while allowing for new avenues of development. Rei especially - there aren't any clones in this story! (Or are there?). I've tried my best, though, and I hope I've done at least an alright job.

As usual -

Enjoy~

"We want to become artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities."

- White Noise, Don Delilo

Part 4

"Goethe, the German novelist, wrote that quartets are like 'four rational people conversing'. Of course, he was writing about string quartets, but I think the point still stands." Kaji says, standing before Asuka and the rest of her group.

It's been a week since the start of the semester and the chamber groups have finally begun meeting up to practice together. Asuka bit her tongue when Kaji showed the group the practice room. It is a cramped place full of instruments and tables, desks and chairs, and an assortment of nameless junk, all of which has been pushed to the sides and to the back to clear an empty space in the center. They are seated on cold, cushion-less metal folding chairs that creak like the joints of elderly people with every shift and movement. She's sure that the acoustics of the room are about as good as those in a screaming crowd.

"What he really meant was that you four have to listen to one another when you play. You have to respond to one another, correct one another, learn how to lead and how to follow. Not to mention, you have to share in the mood the music makes, and the tone and the tempo. Goethe was right - it's just like a conversation."

It's all nonsense, as far as Asuka's concerned. She crosses her arms, rolls her eyes, looking every bit the teenager she is. She knows that every group needs a leader - even orchestras have a First Chair or Konzertmeister if you disregard the conductor. And Asuka intends to lead this group whether they want it or not. There's no other way, not if she wants to prove that she carries something special inside of her. And she does - she knows that too, because there aren't any other options that would make life worth living.

Kaji has them play Mahler's Piano Quartet in A Minor first. The piece's melancholic tones ring hollow in the crowded classroom, and though she is mostly paying attention to what she's playing, Asuka keeps mental notes on the styles and techniques of the rest of her group. Shinji, sitting across from her, has already missed a few notes and whether or not he knows this isn't clear to Asuka. His cello is low and resonant, and each mistake is like the squeak of a wet sneaker against a solid floor, even when he doesn't react. Kaworu sits behind the group pounding away at the piano keys. She can see him out of the corner of her eye, and while his overall skill is probably the highest after hers, the almost flamboyant way he moves - some carnival musician, or a Liberace impersonator - the way his fingers and hands and arms and face are so open and exuberant as they hop, skip, and jump across the keys is so infuriating that Asuka has half a mind to slam the cover of the piano over his digits. And then, beside her, is Rei. Rei might as well be the harbinger of automated musicians. Her style is, at best, robotic, and at worse absolutely soulless. Every movement is measured for efficiency and accuracy, and in that she succeeds; she is perfectly in time and hits each note without a single mistake. But there is nothing there, nothing there at all that is human or expressive or real in her mechanical style. Asuka would find it sad if she weren't already so fed up with this ghost of a girl who has slipped in and out of her life far more often than she would've liked.

"You're playing a little too excitedly, Asuka. Slow it down a bit - listen to how slowly Shinji draws his bow across the strings. Mahler wrote this pace with room to breathe. Use it."

Burning indignation flashes against her chest and she almost barks something back to Kaji. She swallows her words like bitter fruit. She needs to be on Kaji's good side, needs to use him and his connections to give herself a leg up and out of this place. A stepping stone into the musical world. And while she has three years until she graduates, she knows that every day counts, and every action ought to be accounted for. Her sharp eyes take a look at the rest of the quartet for any reaction to the criticism, or to her correction. They don't have any, or at least, they don't show it.

Asuka nods and tries to correct herself, playing the piece as Kaji expects her to. It feels incredibly wrong to hold herself back, to try to control the fire of her passions. She focuses hard on her fingers pressing the strings into the neck of the violin - so hard that even the far-beyond-calloused fingertips are sting in pain. She slows her tempo, and at the same time, her heart begins to beat too fast. But, for the time they play the piece she manages to do it more slowly than before. Her forehead sweats beneath her bangs. Hard as it is to admit, Kaji was right; she felt the true resonance of the melody as she made lighter, less aggressive strokes on the strings, even with the few mistakes she made. How awful, that the man had a point. That she could be corrected by someone without the good sense to shave the stubble lining his jaw.

When the daily practice comes to an end, Asuka is out of the classroom before everyone else even notices. She slips through the door with her head held high and doesn't wait for any of her quartet peers regardless of the fact that they're all headed to the same place. They all share the same classes and the same schedule, something that, only a week into her semester, already weighs Asuka down with the necessity of her having to keep that anger of hers fresh and kindled, ready to flare at each and every one of them if they bother her for the slightest thing. Except for Rei. For Rei, she holds nothing but cold contempt.

Asuka rounds a corner. The hallways are packed like a busy restaurant kitchen. Sweltering, messy, and bustling. She shoves her way into the hall as best she can, all elbows and shoulders, pushing back against the mass of bodies that push back at her. Asuka's ego is large. Her body is not. She shoves against one student and is shoved back too hard this time. Her feet slip from underneath her and screech loudly on the overly waxed floor. When she falls to the floor her knees burn. Her violin case skids across the floor one way; her bookbag slides across the other. No one in the crowd stops to help her. Asuka's pride burns more than her skinned knees, and for an extended moment she stays there on the ground gathering up the will to move, the will to do anything but slam a fist into the floor and cry out at the unfairness of her life.

"What are you looking at?" she glares at the few students who'd seen her stumble. Idiots. Her knees sting as she lifts herself off of the ground. She's dusting herself off when a soft voice, sounding as though it floated in from nowhere, breaks into her attention.

"Here."

And it's surprising - awful, embarrassing, and surprising - when, standing before her, Rei holds out the violin case and bookbag. Rei's standing far and extending her arms out, like she's afraid that Asuka might pounce on her. For good measure, really; Asuka almost does. Falling bruised her pride - this is like being stabbed.

Asuka rips her things from Rei's hands without so much as a thank you. Rei's skin is cold where Asuka fingers touch as she grabs for her things. Cold and smooth, and blemish-less in a way that only spurns on Asuka's thoughts that no, there's no way this girl is human. She's a marble statue, a vinyl figurine brought to life by some sick Pygmalion. Rei startles back, looking unsure of what to do with her hands, but by that point Asuka is stomping back down the halls, only this time with more fire in her step, anger almost cracking the ground beneath her. Students part for her like her ashamed embarrassment is physically pushing them back.

Rei's face had been open when she handed Asuka her things back. Open, vulnerable, a crease of the eyebrow and her pale pink lips parted, all asking a voiceless question of good faith, of sympathy, that Asuka, with her rage as a blindfold, ignored. If she began to pity the girl now - if she began to even give her the time of day, then who would she be?

She'd be normal.

Asuka can't be normal. Asuka has to be extraordinary

Part 5

Asuka is alone in the dorm room for what might actually be the first time since school began. If Asuka barely has a life outside of classes here on campus, then Rei is actually lifeless; the girl rarely leaves her bed when they don't have classes - whether she's reading, or napping, or staring out of the window with a gaze bordering on mindless. The only thing Asuka's seen her doing besides that has been wandering through the halls where the practice rooms are without an obvious goal. Maybe listening to other people play. Maybe sleepwalking through life. Asuka's learned to write her out, erase her presence almost entirely. She hardly even hears the girl breathing anymore. It's white noise. Drowned out, as are the few times she thought she heard sniffling cries in the dead of night when she, herself, couldn't sleep and held back her own unshed tears.

But right now she's all alone, and worse than that, she feels all alone.

Asuka pulls an old toy of hers from the bottom of the dented cardboard box she'd shipped her belongings in and hadn't yet cleared out. It's a small cloth doll in a red dress, with hair of stringy yarn and a head so big it seems to nod, wearing a wide smile that is stitched onto its face. She grips it tightly until her knuckles turn white, and then she brings it close to her chest and holds it as if it were a real child. She shoves the doll back out at arms length, gazes into those black button eyes. Hates it. Hates it, but loves it and needs it. A frustrated growl rips from her throat.

It was a gift from her mother, just like her musical skills. Before whatever used to be her mother disappeared and left the caustic, delusional shell of a person behind. Genius is often said to go along with some form of mental illness or another, and to this day Asuka doesn't know which came first, or if she's walking around with the same timer tick-tick-ticking away in her head. She holds the doll up at eye level, remembers the strength it gave her at that exhibition in Germany, her mother's homeland and the shining spearhead of musical paradise she has held in her head for her whole life.

She best remembers the lights in the place, all trained on her in the tasteful black dress that made her feel, finally, like a professional. Like an adult. Uncountable faces looked on in wonder as she played for the crowd, her wrist sawing with the bow at the taught, vibrating strings, all of the feelings in her body loosened into the atmosphere like a cloud filling the auditorium. She was only one of ten children chosen for this exhibition, but she knew it, and she knew that they knew it: that she was the best there. That she'd be on that stage again: a solo performance, every seat sold out months in advance.

Asuka all but swoons. She spins the doll around in her arms and lands on her bed, holding the doll up into the air as the future flutters before her like a butterfly always just barely out of grasp, but never so far, or so fast, that catching it seems impossible. Her heart feels like warm honey at the thought of how far she'll go one day. If only it would come sooner, she thinks, then she could leave all of this behind - Kaji and those two buffons, and Rei, and this whole crooked, crumbling school.

"Well, I won't get there without practicing." she says to the doll. Held above her head, it seems to nod back to her with that ceaseless smile. Asuka lifts her arm to dump the doll back in the box, but something stops her. Her eyes itch to shed frustrated tears. A breath, and then she hides the doll beside her pillow, up against the cold wall her bed leans against.

She doesn't want to bury her mother twice.

Twenty minutes pass and she hasn't found a suitable spot to practice. The stupid school has a surprising lack of the kind of hidden spots she always chose for that job - no dark corners, no roof access, not even an unused staircase where her notes might sound like they're climbing along with the scale she plays. Forget waiting until she dies to get access to a stuffy, claustrophobic closet of a room like everyone else. The school grounds themselves, featureless, nary a tree in sight except for at the edges, hiding the school gate that surrounds the perimeter, is too wide and windy to play in either. Every time she discovers something new about the place she hates it more. It's nothing like the state-of-the-art Tokyo-3 Conservatory promised to her in pamphlets.

Asuka finds the school's auditorium soon enough. She walks in through the back door. A single set of lights illuminates the stage rising from the pit that the gradually descending seats lead to. She sneezes; the room is dusty, like it hasn't been opened or cleaned since the former semester passed, or maybe even the one before. She's not sure if this is off-limits, but already she's taken a liking to the place. Asuka walks down to the stage and climbs up, standing in the center beneath the lights. She spins, looking out at the empty seats and imagining them full, looking up at the lights, imitation sunspears warming her skin.

But something catches her eye from above. There, in crossing paths and elevated platforms, is the catwalk where tech crews would set up spotlights, adjust the curtain and the like. Quiet, isolated, and strange - the perfect place to practice. Asuka searches backstage for the ladder access the area; it's an old thing, rusting in some places, creaking in others, and she gathers her courage to make it to the top. There, the catwalks spread out like spiderwebs, girded iron protected with thin rails. At the end of one, one that sits right above center stage, is a solid platform perfect for her practice. Unconcerned with getting caught, her footsteps echo with a metal twang as she walks the length of the path to end.

"Perfect." she says to herself.

All alone, at the highest point she can reach, and center stage, Asuka feels in her element. She pulls her violin from the case lovingly, her hand caressing the smooth, rosy wood, and begins to play to an audience she imagines is watching, cheering, even crying at the divine music coiling off the strings - swooping notes and shimmering chords, a harmony of one. Mostly. She corrects what few mistakes she makes each time, but they still seem to chip away at something she cannot begin to put into words that lurks, crawling, deep within her chest.

When the end of the day flips over into evening she leaves her perch, burying the confusion as the clouds conceal the sun, a candle snuffed, a single ember dying off the wick, lighting her way back to the dorms.

Part 6

"Asuka."

The voice cuts in from the dark of sleep. It's ethereal and short lived, like a cloud of breath on a winter morning. Behind the voice comes a more annoying sound - some buzzing or screeching repeating over and over like an alarm clock. Asuka's sleep is always deep and ever troubled; whatever happens outside rarely wakes her up.

But it's too early for that, and she knows it before she awakens to a room barely brighter than the darkness behind her closed eyelids. It's not her alarm clock, that's for certain. But the noise is still wailing. Worse still, she sees Rei standing above her. Little in life is worse than being woken up in the middle of a deep sleep; when the person waking you up is someone you hate, it's hell.

"What are you doing?!" She growls out. She feels a hand leave her shoulder, and realizes that Rei had also been shaking her awake. It's almost enough to make her want to burn the shirt she sleeps in. "What time is it? Why are you even on this side of the room?!"

It's hard to make out anything in the dark of the night, let alone the fleeting emotions of her robotic roommate, but there's a quick flash of hurt, or maybe dismay on Ayanami's face. Best to ignore it, Asuka thinks, sitting up in bed. Now that she can focus, she hears a crowd passing her door river-like, gushing voices and rushing footsteps.

"There's a fire," Rei says, slipping on a pair of sandals she keeps by her bed. She reaches then for a small blanket, wraps it around her shoulders. "Or a fire drill." All thoughts of danger stop for a moment when, in the shadow-light of night, sleepy-eyed and dressed in nothing but a thin white sweater and a pair of athletic shorts, Asuka almost - almost - thinks that Rei Ayanami is cute.

She wants to slap herself for it. In lieu of thanking the girl for waking her up Asuka rips the covers off of herself and runs a hand through her hair. She ignores Rei and pulls open the door, noting that the hallway is nearly empty already, that the last of their dorm-mates have already left. Rei stayed behind for her. She tastes something bitter when she swallows down the thought that she would not have done the same for Rei.

Hearts beat strangely under pressure, misshaping themselves with with every squeeze and strain. Asuka stands at the door she opens and feels Rei's stare asking questions that ghostly voice never would. "I don't think it's a real fire. There's no smoke." She opens the door wider but doesn't yet step out. "Are you coming or not?"

They step out into the chilly night. It's a deeper indigo, nothing like the black sky her room had promised; the moon is a chalk circle drawn hastily, the craters and trenches too white, the thing itself hovering too large and too close over the brick school building and squat dorms. Students and faculty have grouped themselves up into loose collectives like spreading continents, and Asuka finds Shinji and Kaworu standing off to the side of the shivering, chattering students, an islet visible from the coast. Torn between wanting to stand alone and giving Rei the gift of not shooing her away as an unspoken thanks, Asuka makes her way over to the boys, huddled close against the wind chill.

"Good evening? Or good morning?" Kaworu laughs easily. He has an arm around Shinji's shoulder, and the smaller boy is red enough to be burning a fever. Asuka doesn't even fight the desire to roll her eyes. She'd seen their furtive looks across the practice room, watched their closeness coalesce into something grander, and now here is the final point - they're together. She can see it clearly without being told a word, and it sickens her. They have no passion for music if they're wasting it on love.

"This better be over soon." she huffs, folding her arms across her chest to keep herself warm. Shinji looks at her like he wants to say something, but a squeeze around the shoulders silences him, brings him back into the little bubble he shares with Kaworu, who has already given up on getting anything else out of Asuka.

"I'm sure it will be," Rei answers her. A first, really. It's the kind of surprise that comes from the breaking of a pattern. "It's cold out tonight." She pulls the blanket tighter and rubs the top of one arm with her hand, shrugging away at the cold like it should take a hint.

It's only pride that stops Asuka from asking to share the blanket with Rei. A chill has already seeped deep beneath her skin and nestled somewhere close to her heart. She shivers. The goosebumps on her skin raise like little hills, and she feels each as she rubs her arms for heat. Rei sits down on the frosty grass ignoring the wetness and cold as if she can't feel physical sensations the way Asuka has convinced herself the girl doesn't feel anything emotionally. Pale moonlight, a kind of dusty white, settles itself in Rei's hair like a halo, and where it falls on her equally pale skin it gives her an ethereal glow. Asuka's thought this before, but Rei has the look of someone who could, at any moment, vanish or dissolve into nothingness, into the very air she's breathing. Curled up on the ground Rei's frail form is even smaller, more fragile looking. It stirs something nameless in Asuka. Maybe pity. Maybe sadness. Maybe care.

Asuka looks away. She can't waste anymore time on thinking about the girl, or about anything that isn't music. Even now, in the middle of the night, she tries to focus on the notes she can see in her head, on the movement of her fingers against the thin cloth of the over-sized t-shirt she calls pajamas. It's too cold for that, though, and when a cutting wind begins to blow she has no choice but to sit beside Rei and curl her arms around her knees to keep some warmth in.

Asuka hears Kaji's voice behind her; he must've come up to talk to Shinji and Kaworu. He says something about a field trip he's planning for the chamber groups and Asuka scoffs. Useless, like so much else that happens here. A useless distraction.

"We don't need one of those," she twists her body to look behind her. Kaji's lazy smile lights up his face, and his ever-present stubble is illuminated in profile. "All we need is to practice more. My mother, she - "

"I know about your mother. Wonderful player, she was." Kaji cuts her off. "Really, a shame she passed."

"What do you know about that? What do you know about her?" Asuka growls out, low and tinkling like broken glass. She tears at the grass beneath her hands unthinkingly, and then at the dirt below it until it lines the inside of her nails.

"I met her once, actually. Some big tour I was on as a student, maybe your age."

In the darkness, standing above her, Asuka couldn't make out his face. She wants to stand up and punch him, and then maybe punch herself to give those tears in her eyes a reason to be there. She hated her mother, but she respected her. Or her skill. There are days when she isn't sure if she misses the woman, or the music that would flow from the balcony on warm summer days as if carried by the very sunbeams, or if she hates her more because the woman just had to plunge off the deep end of madness and the seat of a chair in a hospital room.

Kaji had no right to speak of her at all, though. When Asuka stands up, fists balled and shaking, it's a pressure on her legs that stops her rampage like an iron clamp. Rei, with those porcelain fingers, has a steady, firm grip so unlike the airy formlessness of the rest of the girl. But Asuka doesn't notice this, not at the time. All she feels is shock. Rage. Whatever of it was turned towards Kaji is doubled and aimed at Rei, who looks to be trying to say something without moving her lips.

"Get off!" Asuka violently pulls her leg out of the grip and stomps off. The grass behind her is flattened by her feet and petrified in the night frost. She feels their eyes boring into her back without looking and it isn't until she's standing at the school gates - her rage disarmed like a soldier stripped of a gun - that she realizes her lack of a plan.

The breeze is colder now, like running through the steel bars of the gate her makes it frigid. She tries hard not to shiver, not to hear the clatter of her teeth. Showing the wound to the enemy is never an option - even animals know this. Eventually people stop staring at her. Except for Rei. It's too dark to see so far away, but she knows the girl with the rabbit-red eyes has not stopped looking at her.

When she calms, when the students are allowed back in the dorms, it strikes her that she never yelled at Kaji. What a mistake that would've been, she thinks, it might've ruined everything. But Rei stopped her. Rei knew, Rei read her, and Rei stopped her with a single movement.

Pathetic. A sharp barb in her heart, an arrow from her thoughts. The crowd shrinks as it snakes back into the dormitories. She lingers behind. Her steps are slowed by that sick stickiness that fills the spaces in her heart where the fire of her anger had been snuffed out. When she makes it back to where she'd been standing with Rei she finds the blanket left on the grass, folded neatly, as if waiting for her.

She hesitates for a second before she picks it up and wraps it around her body. Whatever fleece its made of is warm and stops the cutting wind like a bullet proof vest. It smells of Rei, she realizes, after the undercurrent of lavender and saltwater and something airy which comforts her heart registers as the same scent she smells from the girl's side of the room, or when they're sitting too close in class.

She looks around and glares at nobody. Then, she pulls it tighter around her body.

"I think that you can be a bit more reserved here." Kaji pulls the bow across the strings of his own violin more slowly, with a kind of languid patience reserved for wiping away tears after a sad movie. The more beautiful sound grates on her ears, and, leaning back in her chair, she crosses her arms. It feels a bit ridiculous, what with the bow and the violin she holds sticking out like palm fronds, but it's the least she can do without blowing her lid.

"Why would I be reserved? This piece, can't you hear the emotion, professor?"

He looks at her, studying her, hand absentmindedly playing with his stubble. He smells of cigarettes and cologne, the heady mix filling her space when he leans closer to get a better look at her, though she's not sure why. It's distractingly powerful, a scent that triggers some sepia-toned memory of her father. Scent memory is the hardest to scrub from the mind. It slips away with the scent itself, and comes back just as strong whenever the source returns. She hated her father.

"Sometimes the strongest emotion comes through not in the expression, but in what you're holding back. Play it again for me. Try to control the sound a little this time."

She glares at him. He is wrong, she knows that, but she follows his instructions because doing what you're told is sometimes easier than doing what you want. As she pulls the bow across the strings she feels full of trepidation. Self-consciousness is in the sweat covering her palm, in the clumsy twist of her fingers. Without the security of the way she habitually plays her confidence falters. Her bow slips and screeches against the wrong string. She nearly curses.

"It's fine, Asuka. Let's try that from the top."

"It's not fine!"

Asuka takes a deep breath and lets it out through her nose. The practice room isn't like the one where the quartet plays. This one is small, more of a jail cell than a classroom. The walls are painted a disgusting milky green, giving the base, musty smell a color to associate it with. Scuffs on the floor stretch waxy black from countless chair scrapes. It's all so pedestrian. Distracting. There are no windows to look out of, just the tiny pane of glass in the heavy wooden door like a porthole on a ship.

"Are you alright Asuka? You stopped moving for a second."

She shakes herself out of her reverie. Centers herself, tries to feel where her emotions bubble from and where they burst. Everything is fire, fire on fire, blue flames and white hot ones, weak little orange lights that seem almost cold in comparison. They rage and roast and roar. Control this - how is she to control this? Her fingers depress the strings in the complex arithmetic music is made up from, but she can feel the desire in her very bones to pull the bow faster, to press her fingers harder. In time, without noticing, she shifts her body while she plays - the music is connected to her muscles, pulls her strings. She'd dance, were she standing. But she holds it back. It hurts to do, to keep a hand on that fire.

And then she hears the wrong notes. Feels in her wrists how off-time she is.

"This isn't working!" Asuka stomps her foot. "How - why does everyone think it's a problem for me to express myself? Look at what happens! Look at what happens when I do that!"

Kaji looks at her with an expression full of concern, even hidden behind his usual casual shield, and she feels burned wherever his glance touches. She doesn't want the concern. She doesn't want the pity.

"Forget it," she says. "The rest of them - the rest of the quartet. They're going to have to just match up with the way I play instead of the other way around."

"It's alright not to be perfect, Asuka. No one here expects you to be. You're young, you're learning. This is exactly the time of life when you should be making mistakes."

"But that's the problem! Everyone here is so fine with not being the best they can be! It's sickening," she feels the bile rise in her throat. "Really sickening. I'd rather die than stew in mediocrity. You're our teacher. You're supposed to push us, not coddle us."

"I like to think I'm supposed to nurture, not push." Kaji answers, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. She watches him feel for a pack of cigarettes in his pocket before he stops, lowering his hand slowly, realizing that he can't smoke in the school building. "Please, try again. Slowly, controlled. Take your time. Paint all of your movements with a tasteful touch of that power inside of you, don't just let everything be an explosion of color."

"That's stupid." She shakes her head. "These things are supposed to motivate you," She shakes her head, "Energize you."

A part of Asuka knows that she's making a mistake. Kaji is right, of course, and his point valid. Nothing in life is harder than changing oneself, however; the pain and the process are that of ripping bits of flesh away and watching for the scar tissue to grow into fresh skin shiny and pink, new but a reminder of what was there. She doesn't have that luxury. Her scars are scabbed over, itchy and evident, having never healed.

The bell rings outside in the hall.

"Do what you feel you have to do." Kaji stands up slowly. His dark eyes are open and pleading, but he doesn't force her. "Just think about what I said."

She wants to answer with some barbed remark, but the anger has drained into something more bitter and tired. "Sure, I'll think this whole thing over."

I'm still trying to figure out the right schedule, so expect a new chapter on Monday or Tuesday, and then again on Friday or Saturday. There will be 5 chapters in total.

Thanks for reading!

Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!