I've been having a bit of a hard time balancing the updates - maybe they're a bit too close together? Then again, this has always been an issue of mine, and those who followed "To Discover What Follows" as I posted it can probably attest to that. On the other hand, I'm really excited to be posting this, so all in all,
Enjoy~
"She exerts a fascination, this must be admitted. But I do not like being fascinated by her." -
Appassionata, Eva Hoffman
Part 7
Asuka returns early from one of her solo practice sessions. The late afternoon sun stains everything golden and still, so unlike the troubled tremor of her heart. She'd made more mistakes than usual. At least no one was around to see or hear her; shame can't bloom without the light of other people's eyes. During every group practice it seems that Kaji can see right through her - like he can visualize all of the notes she and the quartet play individually, as indescribable colored strings he can pick and prod at to discover each and every mistake. He often derides Kaworu for sloppy, unnecessary mistakes. When he points out Shinji's, they're often from a lack of power attention or care. Rei's non-emotional play. Asuka agrees with all of that. She just doesn't when Kaji points out her intensity as an issue, or her energy as harm.
The dormitory building is empty and silent, as it tends to be during the weekend. Students, allowed two days of freedom, spend their days at local eateries, visiting local sights. Losers, she thinks. People without the drive to be perfect, without the determination to practice whenever they can. As she nears her room she can see a plane of light spreading from the half-opened door. It's odd. Rei, who is always in the room when she's not in class, keeps the door closed sepulcher tight.
"That's unacceptable." she hears the voice before she passes the threshold and sees the man standing before her roommate. She stands in place for an uneasy moment. A threat? Some outsider who got through the school gates unheeded?
He's tall and imposing, the man, dressed about as utilitarian as someone can be. Nondescript. Beige pants, forest green coat, both lacking any definition aside from the solid shape of his body. Asuka can't see his face from where she is because his back is turned. He is standing right in front of Rei like he has to become her whole world to reach her. Like his presence itself is a weapon, is crushing, pascals of pressure pushing down on Rei.
Asuka moves to walk in, but it's at that moment that Rei sees her in the space beneath the man's arms. Her eyes go wide infinitesimally , almost a trick of the light, and she barely shakes her head no, no. Asuka freezes. She considers going in anyway. It isn't as if Rei's opinion has ever meant anything to her. But the look in her eyes: dangerous caution, a teetering fear - it holds Asuka where she is. The subtle expressions, the tiniest fold of Rei's bottom lip where it's being chewed is the loudest warning Asuka can receive. It strikes Asuka the wrong way, a piece of art defaced, and for the first time she allows herself a moment to really think about Rei as a person, as another human being in the room. As someone with hopes, fears, wishes, scars, and not just an obstacle, or a robot, or a doll.
She isn't given much of a choice. In the moment that she considered all of this the man has crossed the room and he pushes the half-cracked door all the way open. When he sees Asuka the impassive expression he wears doesn't falter for a moment. But hers does - this is him, the man at the Tokyo-3 Conservatory, the judge who haunted her nightmares and laid claim to the very reason she was at this awful school. There isn't a shred of compassion, or even hatred, on his face when he gazes at her for the quickest moment. He doesn't even asks her to move and instead he walks right past her and down the hall, his frame taking up the entirety of the hallway in spirit, if not in space.
"Why was that man here? Why do you know him? What's going on, Ayanami!?"
Rei is cornered there on her bed, though her face is back to that impassive mask she so often wears. At her side Asuka's hands clench and unclench; she wants the relief of violence. She wants the release of an irrevocable action and is holding back only until she gets the answers she wants. The world feels like it's shifted on its axis. Like everything is a joke being played on her. The whole thing: being sent to this school, losing access to her dreams, the gradually worsening mistakes she's been making - it must all be connected to Rei. Rei as a fulcrum, as a lynch-pin.
"Why was that man here?"
"He's my father." she says quietly.
Asuka slaps her hard across the cheek. It's not a conscious action. It's more like a hinge breaking, or a cord extended far past its limit snapping. Rei's head swings sideways. A red mark blooms on her cheek quickly as vibrant as a tattoo on her pale skin. Blood flowing to the surface. Physical sensations in chromatic expression.
"He's your father." It's not a question.
Rei's eyes are cast to the side, her jaw taught, and Asuka seeis, clearly, the kinds of emotions hidden underneath that blank resolve. She always ignored the few signs before this, the fleeting glimpses of happiness and dismay and sorrow. She's made a mistake.
Asuka continues. "Then what are you doing here? Surely you could get into that school no matter how robotic you play if your dad's a head there."
"He doesn't want me." When Rei finally turns back to looking at Asuka there's something ancient etched into her face. A pain as old as she is, the geological scar of a catastrophic event that reshaped her world. The words are simple and quick, delivered with the same cadence as someone pointing out of a window describing the weather. But still they tear at the rage that has captured Asuka and dismantle it. Take it from her. She knows those words well. She said them to herself when she was old enough to understand that her own father walked away. She'd repeated them when her mother time and time again shifted between bouts of clarity and madness in more and more frequent intervals until, in the end, she went to a place where Asuka could never follow.
Rei goes on, slowly gathering herself back from cowering. Asuka can see her try to restrain herself again, to build that wall of blankness in the back of her eyes, but it's a useless gesture. She's seen behind the curtain and finds it see-through now. Clear. "My father wants me to continue with music because he has made me put so much time into it already," she says. "But more than that, it's because my mother played. I have to continue her legacy, or he will leave me behind like he did with Shinji."
"Shinji? Shinji is - "
"My brother." Rei states. "Father hasn't met with him in many years."
She was right, Asuka realizes, when she felt that her world had shifted on its axis. Everything feels like a joke. Two of the people she hates the most are related to the man who set back her plans for fame and success by uncountable years? Rei, before her, is human? Is more like her than she would pray to ever admit? It's a sick joke, and she's disgusted more than anything by her inability to escape it all. No matter the revelation, she will have to stay at this quicksand school. She will have to work harder to get to the top than ever before and now she has enemies in her very camp.
"This isn't funny at all." she scowls, and her voice loses all of its power. The energy leaves her as quickly as it came, and she collapses, arms spread wide, onto Rei's bed. All she has is the white ceiling above her and she hopes to make her mind blank like that for even a second.
She feels the bed beneath her shift but does nothing about it. Rei leans forward above her, careful not to touch her, and looks down. Her face takes up almost the entirety of Asuka's view. The imprint of Asuka's hand still glows red on the girl's cheek.
"I hate my father too, I think, if it's any consolation."
Asuka chuckles mirthlessly. "Why don't you just quit, then? Just get out?"
"Why don't you?" Rei answers. There's no hostility in her voice, no smirk in the words, and it hits Asuka harder because of that. She doesn't have an answer, so she laughs again.
"Your father said something you were doing was unacceptable when I was coming in. What was it?"
Rei leans back against the wall. Asuka watches her stare up at the ceiling the way that Asuka herself had been. "Father is using me as a spy. He wants me to be...useful, while I'm here, and point out students he should try to bring to his school. He wants the best of the best."
"And? What, was no one here good enough? I mean - "
"I only had one person on the list in the two months we've been here."
"Who?"
"You."
There are only so many times in a day when someone's perspective can be flipped entirely upside-down. Cognitive dissonance is like a pill with a daily limit, and side effects include headache and heartache. Asuka feels a migraine coming on now and an uneasiness in her chest.
"Oh." she gathers what little embers remain of her anger. "I don't want your pity, Ayanami."
"It's not pity."
"You don't even like me. What else could it be? Are you trying to get me out of your hair?"
"You're the one who doesn't like me." Rei says sharply, even with her breathy voice.
Asuka can't answer that. It's true - she's almost subsisted off of her hatred of Rei for the past two months in order to get through each and every day in a school she never even wanted to look at, let alone be a part of. But it suddenly feels like that won't be a viable option any more. In the span of a conversation all of her previous feelings about Rei have morphed into a form unsuitable to the same hatred. Rei is like a mirror, or the silvery surface of a quiet lake, and it has become quickly apparent that Asuka can't hate what she's seen behind the mask - the roiling emotions barely held back, the caldera of feelings contained so strictly, and loosened in quick jets, it seems, at odd moments. As much as Asuka would like to call their differences into attention, she knows that her own outward professionalism, her own quick-to-anger triggers are there, mostly, to hide her true feelings. And, worse still, she knows that Rei knows that. It would've been obvious for months, had she let herself see it. It makes her hate Rei in a different way. It makes her hate Rei like she hates herself.
So she stays silent. If she listens closely she can hear other students coming back into the dorms. Life far outside of herself. The stale smell in the room, almost mildew-y, that has not gone away, is washed out here beside Rei. Whatever the scent was she had caught from the blanket on that cold morning, she smells it here more strongly. Asuka curls onto her side. Her back is turned to Rei, but she can feel the attention the girl is giving her even though those bright red eyes are cast against the ceiling, counting invisible constellations.
A memory blankets Asuka's mind. She sees herself in Germany. Trees so green they look fake shuffle past her window on a slow countryside train. She's alone in the train car because her mother was with a doctor. Again. Asuka couldn't stay in that room with her. The smell of death seemed to permeate from her mother's pores, sickly and cold like the grave, blending with the arid, sanitized air coming from the hospital itself. She didn't even tell her mother she was leaving. Her mother wouldn't have been aware enough to care regardless, and though she had her own money, Asuka swipes train fare from her mother's purse. She purchased a round trip ticket to some town on the edge of the North Sea. All she wanted to see were the waves devouring the sand. She wanted to see destruction. She wanted to be dragged out to sea. Her mother ruined it all again - her one bright night, her one big show, and then, of course, mommy had to snap. She recalls the trees again. Hemmed in on each side. Just the claustrophobic trees, when she wants the oblivion of the open sea.
Asuka closes her eyes hard enough to see bright spots in her vision. When she opens them again Rei is looking down at their joined hands. Her hand is cool and soft, her fingers long since calloused. Asuka closes her eyes again and swears she can feel Rei's heartbeat through her skin.
Asuka doesn't pull away, and neither does Rei. She lays there and gathers her strength until the sun sets.
"I wasn't going to show anyone this place," Asuka begins, "but whatever, I guess you can know too."
The crisp scent of autumn air rushes by with the wind that rustles skirts and hair, revealing the bright white of Rei's thighs to Asuka, who looks away with an apple blush. If Rei notices the reason for the sudden twist of Asuka's face, she says nothing. After looking around for any potential witnesses, Asuka pulls open the double doors of her practice theater. She'd been using the place for nearly a month, but dust and musk hadn't gone away yet. They have, in fact, built up over the time she's used the room - mold or mildew growing in secret behind the plaster walls or beneath the rug, dust stratifying on the chairs and steps in different geological definitions. The single cone of light in the center of the stage is almost solid in the dimness of the rest of the wide, empty room. Darkness multiplies distance, echoes the lack of light like a cave does sound. That the auditorium is cold, colder even than outside of it, is its only major flaw.
"Is this where you've been practicing?" Rei asks. She sneezes a puppy sneeze, short and quick, and sniffles.
"Got a problem with it?"
"I have been curious."
"Where do you practice? Do you practice?"
"In the room, when you're gone."
They stand on the stage side by side, silent, the light bright and growing uncomfortably warm quickly. Asuka hefts her violin case over her shoulder and clears her throat.
"I'm going up there to practice," she motions with her chin to the platform and catwalks, "you do it down here. Should work."
"Asuka, why did you bring me here?" Rei asks. She looks right into Asuka's eyes. She always has - there isn't a shred of embarrassment in the girl: not embarrassment, not shame, not hesitancy. She hides nothing that she doesn't refrain from saying, and that frankness disarms Asuka. That openness of truth pushes her off kilter like a child rolling too fast down a hill. Asuka herself doesn't know why she did, why she felt this disgusting relatedness to the girl after the scene with her father. After the blanket out in the cold. After her things were picked up and her pride was reignited. It just feels right, and a right feeling has been missing from her life for far too long. She almost forgot that things didn't always have to feel wrong.
"Go, if you don't want to be here."
"I didn't say that."
"So get to practicing. I'm not going to look stupid on that stage when we finally have to put on a show, and I won't have you dragging me down either."
There's a beat, and then one of those rare, fleeting birds - Rei's smile - skitters across her face. "Okay, I understand." she says. Then, "Good luck."
"Don't make me sick. I don't rely on luck at all."
Rei finds a folding chair somewhere off stage and sits sits right beneath the spotlight. Asuka watches her pull out her sheet music and begin studying it with the single-minded focus she gives whenever her mind isn't floating in some groundless otherworld. Rei, as always, appears to be otherworldly, and beneath the halo of golden light looks again like she may just flash quietly or shuffle out of existence, exit stage left.
With a flick of shame Asuka catches herself staring. It's almost unbelievable. She doesn't want to believe it, anyway, and heads finally for the ladder. She ambles up it, clutching the violin case in one hand, everything set now to the opening strokes of Rei's bow against the strings. The stretch from the catwalk to her practicing platform looks longer than usual. And while fear of falling never even enters her mind, she is gradually - with each step, with every shuffle - filled with a squirming anxiety. Squishy, slick, it escapes her grasp and wriggles harder in her lungs, through the booming chambers of her heart until all she can hear in her head is the blood pumping there harder harder, the force of a river beating against a dam.
It's just Rei down there, she tries to reason. Who cares if she messes up?
But it's just that. The mistakes have piled up, and now it is not longer a question of if, but when she will mess up. The line has been crossed already from perfect prodigy and inches further into the territory of normal. The illusion, it's mirror-like shattering, glints in the back of her eyes. Her hands shake. She doesn't take a seat. She hopes to be like a rock in a river, diverting the stream of music that comes from some places above her or inside of her, given or formed, into the reservoir she chooses. To change the current, to force it away from mistakes and towards a briny estuary of skill and fame and advancement. She runs the bow against the strings, testing the waters so to speak, holding a wet finger up to the sky to feel the direction of the breeze like she did as a child before blowing wishing flowers and watching her one desire - to be perfect like her mother - fracture and break into dozens of little wishes and fly off into the future she could already imagine.
Later, when she climbs back down the ladder bristling with fury, breathing hard, she repeats the tally in her head: three missed notes, four bars at the wrong tempo, a slip of the wrist, a cough. Rei stands beneath the light and waits for Asuka to reach her, but Asuka silently walks past with little but a hand wave behind her.
"I think you did well today," Rei says She catches up, but falls in step behind Asuka.
Asuka's breath hitches. She keeps walking. She doesn't say a word as they wander in the cloudy dusk to their dorm room.
Part 8
It is two weeks after their previous paradigm shattered. Asuka taps her foot on the ground waiting for Rei to catch up after she marched across campus to the cluttered group practice room. Her breath clouds into the cold air and joins the blanket of gray above her. Rei reaches her and wordlessly, and together, they continue on. It's strange now to look at Shinji when they enter the room and see the features he shares with Rei, presumably from their mother. It's entirely obvious now that she looks with the knowledge of the fact. They have the same wide eyes, full of innocence and a kind of childish grace. The same soft cheeks, the same textured hair and long, thin fingers. Asuka takes her seat at the first chair to the left of their semi-circle. She hands Rei her violin, as she had taken both when they left their dorm. Kaworu smirks like knew this friendship would happen all along, and not for the first time Asuka wants to make him eat her fist. So what - she has a friend now. It can't be all that unexpected. When he turns away from her he is back to playing with Shinji's fingers on the hand that isn't being held. But then she feels his eyes on her again. She narrows her own.
"What?"
"I think you'll find it interesting that I was accepted into the Tokyo-3 conservatory."
Asuka curls her hands into fists. She tries burning Kaworu head off with her stare. "Why should I care?"
"You shouldn't. But I know that you yourself attempted to get in, no? Isn't that why you're always so angry?"
"I'm angry because I'm surrounded by useless idiots like you." She sees Rei staring at her, waiting to see if she explodes, with a hand outstretched to offer care or comfort. She takes a breath. "Why aren't you there, then?"
"They turned me away at the door." he shrugs, but the smirk he often wears is gone. Vanished. "Turns out, they keep the right to take back any acceptance they want. I hadn't even walked in before they told me they found someone better."
"Are you implying the same could've happened to me? Because let me tell you - "
"I'm simply trying to tell you that maybe being here was supposed to happen in the first place. For you, for me, for Rei. For dear Shinji here. And that perhaps we all ought to take this in stride."
"My destiny is to show the world just how good I am."
Kaworu smiles more softly than she has ever seen him smile before. "Those two things aren't mutually exclusive."
The bell ring. A good enough sign as any for her to quit the conversation, She runs amber rosin up and down the length of the horse-hair bow. A seat away, Rei tests the tuning of her own strings. She has reattached her mask. What tell-tale signs of humanity she'd shown Asuka are locked in their dorm room and held tight behind the door; in the outside world she hasn't changed at all. But Asuka knows what to look for. A quiver of her eyes, a hitch in her voice, the tensing of a muscle in her alabaster neck. It's hard to say that she likes Rei. That there's something interesting - fascinating, even - about the girl. But it's harder to lie to herself, or at least to add that lie on top of all of the others Asuka has to balance. Lies like: she is happy to compete here; she is confident in her abilities; she is better than everyone.
Kaji enters through the door and is followed by a cloud of some perfume, a cloyingly sweet smell that obviously belongs to a woman and has obviously rubbed off on him after some back room tryst. Asuka rolls her eyes. His stubble is the same size it always is, and she knows she's correct in assuming that it's a look he deliberately develops. He quiets the room with by clearing his voice obviously and loudly.
"Before we begin practicing, I want to formally announce the piece you four will be playing next month in your first student expo."
A twinge of discomfort flashes beneath Asuka's skin before she wills it away. To her left , Shinji doesn't even try to hide his nervous grimace. Rei's gaze flickers over to her for a quick second. Nonjudgmental. Maybe concerned. Kaji paces slowly from the left to the right and pauses with his hands in his pockets when he stops. Slouching like he's still a college student. Asuka rolls her eyes again.
"For what it's worth," Kaji says, almost hiding a smile. "I took a look at what each and every one of your weaknesses are, and I've decided that you'll be playing Brahms' Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor. It will be hard. I've chosen it to be hard. But maybe it'll all work out."
He hands out the sheet music to each member of the chamber group and then plays the piece once out of the dusty old radio in the back of the room. Asuka follows along with her eyes, already upset as she listens to the awful rendition coming from the speaker. She can hear it, the places where she will need the utmost control - on those quick jumps and manic strings, where even a touch more emotion than already necessary would unbalance the piece like there's too much weight on a scale. It's clear to her too just how easy it would be for the rest of the chamber group to sink the thing, to completely decimate the piece and its movements. Begrudgingly, she has to praise Kaji for the choice. There are few better ways to test their resolve or their improvements - or lack there of. A great choice, actually.
Not that she'd actually tell him that.
"In better news," he smirks. "We're going on a trip this weekend. I've already cleared it with those stuffy higher ups. Think of it as a...bonding experience."
Asuka isn't sure how he's done it, but Kaji rented out a hotel's pool for a few hours. The hotel sits on the edge of a beach that stretches miles across. Gray sand, gray water, gray sky. It's the off season, and the whole place is arid with emptiness as they carry their instruments into the pool room through hallways without even a hint of life. The humidity in here is sticky and uncomfortable. The air is colored with the chlorine. She tastes it in the back of her throat every time she breathes, stinging nettles and bleach. Lights under the water grant the otherwise washed out room the phantasmagorian glow of bright sea-glass.
He asks them to play the Brahms' piece they'd studded for the past week. Something about the quality of the acoustics of the room - the echo off the water slick walls that return sounds doubled and tripled over itself, sound waves amplified by the high ceilings. He wants them to hear the music they make thrown back at them, to hear their mistakes and mishaps, their speed and technique over and over again. It feels like torture.
Asuka's sick. She feels it in her blood, and this nauseas room radiates toxicity from the walls themselves. She feels it in her fingers, which slip from string to string slick with her sweat and discordant - screeching, when the bow scratches out the wrong notes time after time. Her heart beats in her ears louder even than the dizzying echo assaulting her ears.
She hears herself scream, but doesn't feel it folding out of her throat.
"Asuka - " Rei whispers. She stopped playing. Everyone has, and they stare at Asuka.
She hadn't heard her own scream, but underneath it - a current, like the undertow, Rei's voice cut through the remains of her outburst; quiet, bodiless words that appeared in her head instantly, bypassing all of the useless apparatus in her ears.
"Asuka - " Rei repeats, "What is it?"
She almost flings her violin to the ground, but stops herself at the last seconds. They, the quartet and Kaji, are alone in the pool room but she feels watched by the world as if the walls themselves have eyes. Blank, white eyes, blinking at once open, close, watching her.
What is it?, Rei asked. In some working section of her mind, Asuka tries to form complete thoughts by squeezing disparate syllables together in her head, like trying to build a wall without stone and brick and mortar. She watches from that same working part of her mind when Shinji lifts a weak hand to help in a disgusting display of spinelessness. He never leaves his seat.
"This entire thing is ridiculous. Stupid. I don't need some gimmick to know how I'm doing!" She places her things neatly on the chair she'd been sitting on and, trailing what little remained of her pride behind her, walks out of the pool room before saying something to Kaji that she can't take back.
Night has fallen in the hours since she left. Waves crash against the shore and a storm lights up the night sky and she can't tell how far away it is. Distance disappears in the endless, expansive ocean before her. Nothing has a position in the lengthening of forever. Her face burns with an emotion between embarrassment and shame. She rubs at tear trails on her cheeks that she insists to herself are just the result of the ocean breeze. Either way she tastes the stinging salt on her tongue.
She doesn't hear Rei approach her over the roaring of the waves. Rei is always quiet - her element is air: dry and wispy, soundless, her footsteps never really touching the ground, her voice impossible to picture as color. It's the same now as a storm approaches and strikes the rolling ocean with lightning. Asuka wishes she were like that lightening. Bright. Brilliant. Dangerous. Captivating.
"Do you feel better now?" Rei asks. Not, why, not where have you been, not how could you. There is no judgment in her voice, not even now as Asuka's learned to listen beneath it, to find the buried emotion that's carried by everything the girl says. Her lungs squirm. The kindness hurts.
"What are you even doing out here?"
"It's raining."
"Tell me something I don't know."
"You should come in soon. You don't want to get sick."
"I'm the only one who knows what I want."
"What do you want, Asuka?"
She won't answer. She can't answer, not really. It's both obvious and everyday somehow further from possibility. "What do you want, Rei? I never asked you to care about what I was doing. I never asked you to care about me."
"You didn't have to. You have no one else to do that."
"What's it to you!?" Asuka flings herself at Rei. She grabs the collar of the girl's coat in her hand ready to ring her throat. Rei's stare seems to look right through Asuka, through to her core, and it hurts to have anyone or anything that close.
"Your hands are cold. Why don't we go in?"
Rei's eyes are soft and calm and deathless in relation to the rushing ocean behind her. They are the red of shattered rubies; they slice and cut. She looks away. Drops the girl down onto the sand.
She tastes again the stinging salt on her tongue.
The hotel room smells like every other, an identity-less non-fragrance, the hint of freshness beneath heavy cloth. The same smell coming off of the blankets and the pillowcases, the thick curtains, the boringly patterned rug, the fake wood grain, the air conditioner. She thought the hotel might be nicer - from the outside there's something a bit more grand being promised in all of the gloss and shine, but this is boring, this is like some roadside motel. Nothing at all like the villa she'd stayed in in Germany. She closes the curtains in front of the only windows in the room to block out the flashes of lightning that still crack above the sea.
She sits on the edge of the single bed in the room gazing at the blank tv, an old tube machine in a cheap furniture store stand. It wasn't knowledge she actually had, but if Kaji was paying for the place, she imagines it might've been cheaper for him not to buy a room for the girls with two beds. Asuka considers stealing the blanket off of the mattress and sleeping on the floor, but there's a weakness radiating through her body that can be solved only through immediate sleep. Wearing little more than a thin camisole and a pair of panties, the cold air wraps around her shoulder and raises goosebumps. The bed beneath her exposed thighs is itchy. A thought passes through her head, unimpeded and disconnected from the rest, about whether it is okay that she is in her most boring and practical under-things, and if Rei would care about their lack of appeal.
She buries the thought beneath a static of mindlessness.
It's then that Rei emerges from the bathroom just as undressed; she's thin enough that Asuka can count the outline of her ribs. She rubs her hair carelessly with a towel, wiping the rain and salt wind from her wispy locks. Asuka's own damp hair sticks to the back of her neck.
Rei stands in front of her before she even notices. "Here, your hair's wet too."
"Stop, stop, I can do it." Asuka snatches the towel when Rei leans in to wrap it around her head. She doesn't want to be pitied so much, to have all of this attention ladled on her. It all just runs through and dries out, the way rain falls through desert crags and into the heart of the ground without nurturing a thing - disappearing as quickly as it hits the dirt. Rei's expression doesn't change, though her eyes linger for longer than they should before she walks over to the edge of the room and flicks the lights off. Everything then is black, and the black of the night itself sucks even the minute brilliance of the alarm clock's red numbers away until they look flat, two dimensional, the vitality draining as the seconds tick by.
"Your violin is in the closet." Rei answers the question that Asuka hadn't yet asked.
The space across from her on the mattress sinks, but just barely. Rei is light, frail and light, and nearly weightless. It's like she doesn't exist, not really, not in any physical way outside of Asuka's head. At this point she would hardly be surprised if that were the case, if she were making this whole thing up.
She doesn't want to consider what it would say about her if she hated her own imaginary friend.
"What did Kaji say when I left?" She huffs. "Never mind, it doesn't matter. I just want this trip to be over with."
That weariness has soaked into the very marrow of her bones. Even sitting up hurts, sends waves of pain barely countered by the anger that fills her for so many hours of the day. She climbs up the bed and lays her head on the crinkling pillow, stares up at the infinite night between herself and the ceiling.
"We're heading back to the dorms. You don't like being there either."
"I know. I know! You don't have to remind me, Ayanami. I don't need your help. I don't need any of this."
It's too dark to see in any clarity but there's a slight change in Rei's breathing that might be regret. Maybe sadness. When Rei sinks into the bed beside her, also facing up at the ceiling, the silence between them is expansive. Abyssal. Asuka hates it, hates that the first person she's connected with on even the smallest level in forever might have been offended at her words. She hates, just a little bit less, that she feels anything about Rei at all.
She twists to lie on her side and face Rei before her mind catches up with the actions. There's a beat, a slow second where she watches the girl in profile. Rei has a soft face: oval and feminine even if her features are somewhat plain. Her long eyelashes match the cornflower blue of her hair, and her eyes, watching nothing on the ceiling, still keep her thoughts hidden behind a flat shine. Rei's breasts are small, molded delicately like the rest of her, but their shape is entrancing and they heave when her chest expands with her breaths. Asuka finds herself taken by the sight.
Then taken by Rei's eyes, when she finally turns onto her own side to stare back at Asuka. Rei's mouth is closed, her lips darker than her skin in the night, flush with blood. The urge to speak is filling Asuka. She needs to fill the distance, color the silence with words or nonsense and Rei sure isn't going to do that.
So she leans in and kisses Rei. She captures the girl's lips, and those two lips might just be the warmest thing on the girl's body. They're wet too, and soft, and surprisingly Rei kisses her back with nearly as much energy. Maybe Rei had been waiting to do this for a long time. Maybe Asuka herself had. But it's better than silence, and the sound of Rei's breathing sends chills up her spine. Her hands hold the other girl's face where she had once slapped Rei, and the irony doesn't escape her.
It was a mistake, though, to do this. A mistake. Her chest trembles in slow waves that grow into rapid quakes. This kiss is right. It is very, very wrong. The fog of her confusion only deepens until she's lost in the emotions that fill her rib cage and sink her stomach and curdle her brain. The shaking in her chest reaches her shoulders, travels up her arms and down to her hands until she can't grasp Rei's face tightly enough but she's trying she's trying because Rei is all she has right now, she's all that exists outside of Asuka and her tears are timed to the rumble of thunder outside that rattle the window. Rei's hands brush through her hair so gently that Asuka chokes as she cries. Everything is a barbed wire loop, everything is a burning circle, everything is at once too much and too little to matter at all, now and never. Her tears are hot and angry and bitter and she hates herself more than ever before because even this, even something she can't lie to herself about desiring, is being ruined by her own heart.
"Maybe, some day, you won't feel like you have to cry so often." Rei whispers against her lips after Asuka's stop moving. It's incredible that Rei can say things like that so normally, so straightforward. The redhead can taste her own tears. She's sure Rei can too.
"Shut up." She answers before turning her back to Rei and curling into herself.
Outside of their room the storm stretches still further into the horizon over the ocean. They cannot see the flashes - the curtains are too thick - but Asuka believes she can feel the lightning scar the sky in jagged wounds that time themselves to the stuttering beat of her heart.
Part 9
She sees it as punishment, having to study here in this dank room with Shinji of all people. The Hakone School of the Arts' library is a small, cramped space where blocky, disheveled bookshelves don't tower so much as they crowd and push like commuters on a rush hour train. The mold smell that permeates the rest of the school is concentrated in this one room, as if the place had once been flooded and the books that survived festered with sickly mildew. Asuka sees the table where Shinji sits from where she stands, and she knows that whether she squats between the sticky-floored aisles or shares the table with her spineless classmate, she can't leave.
"Asuka?" Shinji calls out from his seat. He's been watching her for a minute or two now, his eyes sticking to her in a way she isn't sure is perverted, but sure makes her uncomfortable. His voice is like a wilting flower, struggling to stretch to her ears and ending in futility, bent and weak. She hates it, hates him, but they were paired up and she has no choice but to tolerate him. She's on thin ice as it is, what with the scene she caused at the hotel. Shame, like mold, only grows more as darkness and wetness compounds it. Asuka needs the sun to shine on her again to clear out all of the blight.
"What." It's barely a question.
"I think I have enough books on Brahms if...if you'd like to share."
She looks him up and down, huffs a sigh, and pulls out a chair beside him. It scrapes against the floor and Asuka takes some pleasure in the way Shinji cringes at the sound.
"Do you want to take the early life section, or?"
"I don't need your help, I can do the whole thing myself if I have to."
"But Mr. Kaji said that we should split the work? We were paired together to learn more about Brahms to help us with - with understanding what we're playing."
"He said that because he doesn't trust you dimwits to actually be able to do a full report. I'm sure he knows that I can."
She watches Shinji open his mouth to speak, then close it while he thinks of something else to say. Again, the way she can shut the boy down, how uncomfortable he looks when she's around - she loves it. Loves the power. At least here and now she doesn't feel as if she can't do the one thing she's been training her whole life to do.
"I'm sure that's true," he finally says. It looks like he has more to add, an and or a but, some conjunction that could connect his thoughts to hers, and yet nothing else comes out of his mouth. It's easily evident that Shinji has problems connecting to others. The slump of his shoulders when he's out of class, like he's hiding his head to avoid his classmates, the nervous jitter of his eyes when he's in public - Kaworu not withstanding, Shinji must be very lonely. Even his own sister avoids him. Asuka knows what it's like to be alone. A life like an empty plastic package retaining the shape of what was there, and a constant reminder of what won't be back.
What she doesn't understand is how Shinji just curls up, a scared cat in a cardboard box on the side of the road. How he lets the world tower over him and casts his eyes to the ground. Weakness is a stench on him, like body odor, and she can smell it from a mile off sour and rank. She's managed to keep herself clean of that. At least, she's tried her hardest.
"Anyway, just pass over a few of those books, alright? Don't get them sweaty, the way your hands always are."
"Hey!"
She drags her finger down the pages and her eyes follow, a wake of words that don't hold water in her mind. Brahms had an interesting life, sure - a child prodigy so skilled in both composition and performance that he struggled to balance his time between the two - but she doesn't see how knowing any of this is important. Brahms wrote some good music, but he's dead now. He's dead, and it's Asuka's time to shine.
"He isn't known for it," Shinji states, interrupting Asuka as she completes a paragraph. She looks him over, eyes narrowed, but says nothing. "But Brhams knew some cello too. I'm kind of happy to learn that."
He doesn't look at her as he says this. He's smiling at his paper with strange focus, genuinely happy about the little factoid he just picked up as if it were an interesting rock on the sidewalk.
"Yeah?" she humors him. There isn't much else to do in the tiny library, and she's all but given up on the paper for now. Brahms and his life are too far away for her to care about even if his music is timeless. A paradox, the content overcoming the creator, the contextual brackets of time falling away in showsheets to reveal the true worth beneath.
"I like to think that, maybe once, he was just like us. Doing his best, trying to live up to this big shadow of musical history. His father," Shinji chokes on his words, though he looks far from crying. His face is red, his hands clenched. If there is anything in this boy that isn't pathetic, this is what it's borne. Asuka's not too impressed. Surprised, maybe. "His father was also a musician. I wonder how Brahms felt."
"Your father, that Gendo guy. Is he a musician?" Asuka asks. She assumes he is, but it's not a given. Perhaps he just likes control. Perhaps he is envious of what he can't do, and desires to own those who can.
Shinji's fearful eyes, large and brown and shaking, snap to Asuka. "You know?"
"Rei's my roommate. And your sister."
"Daddy's little girl, you mean." Shinji says with a tone that implies some grinding disgust. At Rei. At his father. Maybe at himself.
"You know her well enough, if that's what you think."
"Father was a musician, but he hasn't played anything professionally in years. Supposedly after mother passed, or so I'm told. He's focused only on raising the best student in her place since then."
"And you weren't enough."
"I don't care anymore." Shinji says, obviously lying to himself and Asuka alike. "He never wanted me in the first place."
Between them, the unfinished report and the open books lay all but forgotten. Asuka wonders if Kaworu and Rei are working as poorly as she and Shinji. Then she wonders why any of it matters at all.
"Who cares what you're father thinks?" she looks him in the eye as she says this. "It means nothing. Do everything for yourself and forget everyone else." Asuka declares. It feels like the right thing to say. It's what she herself wants to believe. There are days when she does. There are far more when she doesn't.
Avoiding her eyes, it looks more like Shinji is going to ignore her. Still, as he flips through another biography, he says with the smallest of smiles, "Thank you, Asuka."
It's a warm sentiment. Sweet in a way she didn't expect. Sticky, but like a cinnamon bun and not the floor in the room. Wholesome.
It catches her off guard, a line drive when you expect a pop fly. Something venomous flows to the tip of her tongue like acidic spit, but she can't get it past her teeth. She hates Shinji. She hates all of this. The angry rebuttal still never forms. She turns back to the work instead. Easier to be buried in the words of a dead man than face the live one beside her.
When the color scheme of the day shifts to evening hues her eyes are drawn to flashes of blue and gray at the library entrance. Rei is standing beside Kaworu, her face composed, her red eyes settled on Asuka resolutely, assuredly, rightly. Something uncomfortable itches in Asuka's chest as if she swallowed stinging nettles that roll around her ribcage. Beneath her breath she mutters something about impatience and slams her books closed, gathers her things in a messy pile she shoves into her book bag. Organization is never a priority for the rushed in the way it is a privilege for those who take their time.
"We did good today," Shinji looks up from collecting his own things with hopeful eyes. Again, the sentiment prickles Asuka's skin. All of this...niceness, team work. She's unsuited for it.
"The report doesn't matter. What matters is how we do at the show next week. Don't get a big head."
Asuka pushes past both of her other band mates and into the crowded hall; with the emergence of the evening, students coalesce into a mingled mass on their way to and from the cafeteria. This stupid report threw off her usual schedule and she wants to eat so that she can get on with her life. It isn't a surprise when Rei catches up and keeps in step. She didn't have to look to know that the girl would. At this point she can sense Rei through some primitive receiver in her brain, a left over from the ancient past. It's not as if she could rely on hearing Rei, or on seeing past the hazy aura of her existence. Asuka has to rely on her other senses: the animal warmth of Rei, the human scent mingling with whatever fragrance Rei calls her own. Or on taste. Her eyes flick to Rei's pale pink lips. She looks away, red faced. On touch. Asuka's body reacts instinctually, some buzzing blood around her heart, a singing in her skin, Her hand drifts until it slides against the soft porcelain of Rei's skin. Then she jolts it back to her own body, clutches her teal skirt tightly in a fist, coughs.
"Have a good evening, Asuka." Kaworu calls with his smirking voice. She knows he saw the whole thing. She knows that he knows that she knows he saw the whole thing. It takes most of her self control not to turn around and slap him.
But it's while she travels through the dusty halls and cramped passages of the school listening to Rei discuss the boring ins-and-outs of her far more successful afternoon with Kaworu that Asuka is struck - blindsided - by the fact that she truly feels content. Feels uninhibited, untroubled joy in the simple turn of events as they fell before her in neat rows: the comfortingly mundane day of classes, the after-school project and conversation with Shinji, being picked up by Rei (which was an unplanned and gently pleasant surprise). The boring, innocent delight of knowing there's someone waiting for you to share your uneventful day with as it becomes an uneventful night. The domestic bliss of an unexceptional life.
This is the first time she has had so much to lose, and despite that, like discovering a vulnerable animal alone in the rain, it is unexpected and humbling and pitiable all at once.
It's the most terrified she has felt in a long time.
Thanks for reading!
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