Here we are - the second to last chapter! I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read this story so far and I hope that you all find the ending satisfying. This chapter is definitely the most emotional one, I think. With that said -
Enjoy~
"The bathtub isn't a river but I take her there."
- Fish in Exile, Vi Khi Nao
Part 10
Asuka perfected applying makeup at age 11.
She remembers that span of a week well. Her mother slowly decaying in the hospital again, blank-eyed when Asuka went to visit her, blank-eyed when she left. Father already gone a year and calling even less than he did when he was around. The nurses didn't have time for her, not like they did when she was 7 or 8.
So she stole her mother's makeup kit. Her mother kept it beneath the vanity mirror where she would fix herself up before shows, before traveling or going out on the town. Rituals helped keep her in line, or they were supposed to. Asuka liked to sit next to her mother, hear her talk about music, about people she played with and liked, or played with and hated, or wanted to play with as she applied foundation, gave life and length to her lashes.
Asuka spent that week clutching her doll and staring into the streaky mirror of a hospital bathroom applying makeup, staining her lips, coloring her cheeks, powdering her skin. It took days and days until she thought she looked good. A nurse caught her on the first day, scrubbed her cheeks until they were raw and red and stung like she had been slapped. But she got better. Learned the basics quickly, learned what didn't work. She has always been a quick learner. When her mother got better - for some time, at least - at the end of that week, she stopped wearing it. Doesn't wear it normally, saves it for those special occasions. Like concerts. Like recitals. Like Germany.
Like now.
She's locked the door to the communal bathroom in her wing of the dorm building. It's easy for her to ignore the pounding of the other girls outside, the calls of "I'm getting a janitor!", as calmly applies foundation. Rituals help keep her in line, or they are supposed to. The mirror in the bathroom, cheap as it is (like everything else in this school, she thinks) is still better than the one in her and Rei's room. She goes on methodically, focusing on the brushes, on the powders and applicators, taking belly deep breaths to calm her heart. The show is in an hour and a half. She's mortified.
"Asuka." Rei calls through the door, seemingly unbothered by the entire situation. "Kaji wants us in 15 minutes."
"Kaji can wait. I have to be perfect before I step out onto that stage, and I mean perfect. Tonight's the night I show everyone exactly what I can do."
Her hand shakes. She grinds her teeth.
The dress she chose for tonight is the one she wore during her show in Germany. It fits her closely - but not too closely - and ends near her knees in the slightest of flares. The neckline is on the safe side of teasing, the back neat and tasteful, and zippered up. She looks good and she knows it, but of course, the most important part is going to be how she plays. She closes her eyes, tries to imagine the blood pumping around her body, the energy in her hands and fingers and wrists. They must be perfect. they must be healthy. They must not fail her.
She finishes tying her hair up neatly, slips two big clips on either side of her head, and nods to herself. Acceptable. Beautiful. Nerves on fire.
Asuka is halfway through packing up her makeup when she's struck with a desire. It's stupid, but maybe it'll calm her down. At least that's what she rationalizes.
"Rei," she calls, walking towards the door, "You're still out there?"
Through the noise of the other girls' shrill complaints she listens for Rei's peculiar light switch voice to appear and disappear in a single moment, as it does. She's attuned to it now, can single out Rei's voice the way you can always make out a favorite song as it plays quietly through the muffled speakers of a crowded waiting room.
"I'm still here," Rei says. The words, monotone and concrete, still stir something nauseas in Asuka, who stomps to the door and pulls it open, grips Rei around the thin wrist to pull her in, and slams the door closed and locked in such a quick set of movements that the other girls don't even have time to react. Rei, for her part, isn't phased.
Asuka sees her for the first time in the outfit she'll wear for the concert. The dress is, surprisingly, a bit shorter than her own. The straps thinner, the fit looser just below the waist as it flares skirt-like, vaguely ruffled. She holds herself in the same way she always does, a weird combination of aloof and self-conscious, a hand grasping across her chest to hold onto the elbow of the other arm, her shoulders hunched just a bit as if she were hugging herself. Asuka can read the question in her otherwise guarded stare. The black dress grounds her, though, somehow contains all of the airiness that makes up Rei like a bottled fairy.
But there's something beautiful about her too, maybe more now than ever. Rei's beauty is quietly youthful, a blooming meadow hidden in the woods, but the curve of her eyes and the set of her lips take on a maturity in her formal wear that impresses Asuka. She wants what Rei has. Wants Rei, even if she doesn't want to admit it to herself.
"God, have you never used makeup before?" Asuka asks instead. Rei shakes her head and stirs up her wispy locks.
"I figured. Here...right, there isn't a seat...Oh, fine, just stand. There, by the mirror."
When she takes her spot in front of Rei, Asuka is close enough to hear the soft sound of her breathing. She knows that it's a mistake to do this the moment her stupid heart beats even quicker than it had been when anxiety over failing was her only worry. She holds Rei's face in her hands. With a critical eye plans out what she wants to do to the girl to highlight, and not overpower, whatever lays beneath that intentionally blank facade.
"You don't need a lot," Asuka judges. She catches herself halfway through the compliment, throws it in reverse. "Because your skin, it just won't do good with most of this."
Rei, again, barely reacts. Asuka feels the other girl's eyes following her every movement, each stroke and swab. Her skin crawls in a way that might actually feel great.
It's when Asuka's running lipstick along the crest of Rei's upper lip that she realizes she's leaning in, getting closer with every breath, her own lips inches away and greedy to repeat their mistake from the hotel. She bites down hard, starts back. She can't actually like Rei, not like this. She can't want the girl for anything but a sounding board, but a cathartic release, but a joke. Asuka finishes up as quickly as she can holding her breath.
"We're done, we're done!" She pinches Rei's hip, pretends it's for good luck and for nothing else. Her hands are shaking, clenched as they are at her sides. The bathroom suddenly feels smaller, Rei somehow closer. The other girl can't hide the confusion evident in her stare even as she stays silent, miming sensations. Without sound, emotion is only two-dimensional.
"Come on." Asuka straightens her back, exhales hard. "I have a show to star in."
It is 6pm on a Friday night. The stars outside are so bright they're fake, hanging in a black sky manufactured and ordered like light bulbs on a string. There are 10 minutes before the show starts and Asuka sneaks up to the platform where she practices, dodging beneath the rails to avoid the stares of the crew that has set up the lighting for the recital. It's the first time she's seen the auditorium full and alive. The people in their seats sit on permanent dust. Every chair in the place creaks. She can't make out individual faces - just peasant smiles and glassy eyes - not from this high up, but it stings her, bitter and cold, that she's not looking for anyone. There's no one left to come and see her. A ward of the state, a girl without a mother or father. She hardens her heart; it's just one more reason she has to be the best.
A deep breath and she mimes the movements of the piece again. Her left hand fingers madly dance through the measures in her head, her bow hand saws away at air and she bites her lip, internalizes the motions. She fights herself - a part of her knows that Kaji, that Gendo, that everyone is correct; she should reign herself in and control her emotions and the movements they spawn, the flames born from the embers of the furnace of her heart. But she knows too that nothing exemplifies her power - helps her exert dominance - like allowing the music inside to uncoil and explode, a natural event, an unstoppable expression of raw life. The back of her neck sweats. Her throat is constricting when the school headmaster, a lean old man with deep-set eyes, Mr. Fuyutsuki, walks onto the stage while she descends.
Even when she touches the scuffed wooden floor, she feels as if there's truly no bottom.
If this recital has taught Asuka anything, it's that she truly truly is the best musician at the Hakone School of Arts, without a doubt. She sits backstage, legs crossed, arms crossed, eyes narrowed, focused solely on the back of the heads of the woodwind group up on stage massacring Ravel. She almost wants to get up and take those innocent instruments away from the awful idiots. Their play is sloppy. Their timing is off. And somehow, they still managed to be better than the other chamber groups who'd played before them tonight. All of those people out in the stands subjecting themselves to this mess are artless, she thinks, tone deaf. Only a quarter of the way through the piece and her foot is tap tap tapping, she's raring to go. All doubt has left her mind. It's been kicked out. It breaks through her patience like hurricane winds against hastily thrown-together boards over windows.
Rei stands beside her, a quiet, but not calming, presence. What little room Asuka has in her brain right now that isn't sharply focused on the recital is poking at the things she's been feeling about Rei, the way a doctor will prod the space around a wound to see what isn't broken. And broken - wounded - that's what this feels like, whatever this is. She still hates Rei, or tells herself she has to. But nothing is clear anymore. Nothing is decisively one way or another. Ambiguity, like a smudged number on a check, smears any of her attempts to act logically.
The woodwind group finishes, bows, and walks off high-fiving, arms around one another. True shows of friendship. Asuka's disgusted. She rolls her eyes at them, glad when they look away from her timidly. She sees Kaji signal them over from his position in the front of the stage, hears his introduction - their names, their places in the chamber group. Asuka's about to exit from behind the backstage threshold when she feels a tap on her shoulder.
She spins on her heel, not ready to see Rei and unwilling to ignore her all the same. But it's not Rei; Kaworu is trying on an expression of concern for what appears to be the first time in his life, a little smile mismatched with the too-dramatic tilt of his eyebrows.
"You better have a reason to bother me right now. We have a show to play."
"You're so tense you're shaking." Kaworu points out. She huffs, stays silent. She's just gearing up. Containing her energy is as easy as containing her emotions. So, impossible. Out of the corner of her eye Asuka watches Rei turn her face away. Why, she's not sure. "If you just let yourself relax I think it will do you well. None of this matters all that much, what matters is how you feel about it."
Bile claws its way up her throat. It's hard not to spit on Kaworu. He may as well have just called slapped her in the face.
"I am going to prove to everyone in this God-forsaken Hell hole that I am more than this school. You will not get in my way."
She glances over at Rei, who gives her a tiny smile. One of the few she's ever given, it seems. Asuka's knees go weak. She walks to the stage that much faster just to get away from it.
If the view from the catwalk set the mood, it's the view from the stage that sets the tone. Even sitting on a folding chair, she can see the faces of the audience much more clearly: the mothers and fathers, the talent scouts hidden among family members, and - and Gendo, Gendo Ikari, Rei's father, front and center. Her heart beats faster. But that's fine. This will all be fine.
She closes her eyes. Ignores the vibrating thrum of her heart that beats like a hummingbird's wings. Hears Kaji tapping his baton on the music stand in front of him. Hears Shinji cough, hears Kaworu crack his knuckles, feels - somehow feels Rei breathing through her skin, through the atoms sizzling between them. Time is nothing, then, not a chain of events, not a loop. She lifts her violin to her cheek, leans against it. Holds the bow inches above the strings, hovering with the suspense of a slasher's knife. Breaths out.
Kaji taps one last time and she feels at once centered in herself and a part of the group. Split between watching Kaji's baton dance its four-count rhythm and tracing the equation of notes that forms the beautiful music she plays, Asuka doesn't have time for worrying. Doesn't have time for anything but being the best - or, really, keeping herself in the number one place, because no one's even come close to taking her off her game. She slices the strings back and forth, again and again, not holding back in the slightest. The rest are stubborn, though - her chamber group is playing more reserved, more controlled - and well, she has to admit grudgingly, that they're good too. She slows her hands. Just a little. Just enough. Tries to canal the emotion in her heart. Grant the pace a little more respect.
For a moment, it works. Even with the sweat building up on her brow, on her palms, she can do it.
Like happiness, success is fleeting. Her finger slips on the C string. A small slip, doesn't even register on the Richter scale. No one noticed. But she did. There, in front of the audience - there, live on stage - she made a mistake. Everything in her begins to tumble; it breaks and snaps and then there is nothing in her. Blink, vanished. She wants to laugh but suddenly it's impossible to even open her eyes. How can she worry about how much emotion she puts into her music when, in an instant, everything has disappeared inside of her. Pressure hasn't turned her passion to diamond, it's crushed everything down into unknowable rubble.
She drops her bow. Lets go of the violin, which cries out hollow and sharp as it thwacks against the floor. When she hops off the stage she wobbles, nearly falls, the heel of one shoe snapping, but it does not hold her back, her hair whipping behind her as she dashes towards the door, out into the cold night and the colder embrace of solitary despair.
Part 11
There is nothing. There are colors and sounds. There is light, there is darkness. There is nothing. There is nothing.
Part 12
Asuka is later told that five days have passed since the show.
There is nothing, first, before there is the sight of cloudy water ebbing and flowing with the most minute movements of her body. Warm water, soapy but no longer all that bubbly. She must've been in here for a while. The water settles just above her breasts; everything higher up is colder, exposed to the air, and her damp hair prickles her bony shoulders. The distinct smell of chlorine or bleach - something strong and clean and unnatural spikes her nose. She battles with every breath exiting her lungs. She suffers bone deep. Exhaustion has settled into her body, dulled only by how far away her mind has floated from her flesh.
She closes her eyes. Darkness comforts when it doesn't frighten, and right now she craves comfort in a wordless way. From somewhere in front of her comes the measured plop of water dropping out of the closed faucet. The sound rings out loudly in the empty, echoing space around Asuka. Everything is empty in her right now. Finally. Maybe forever. No anger, no anxiety, no ambition. Just a mind like the vacuum of space, just a consciousness like a unfurnished room. Footsteps slap across the floor from off to the right. She doesn't turn her head to look. She just stares at her bare knees through soap-murky water. They look like barren hilltops, the skin pink and creased.
There's a squelching sound coming from above her head, followed by the springy plop of a viscous liquid, and then hands - there are hands and fingers in her hair, gently, smoothly, methodically massaging her scalp, passing through her locks until soapy suds begin to roll down her forehead and spread out against the thin expanse of her shoulders.
She gulps in her first breath in months. She looks up.
A flash-bulb memory alights a shadow in her heart. She thinks of her mother. How her mother bathed her as a child in one of her few expressions of normal parental activity. How her mother would hum pieces she'd play later on in concerts. How Asuka's whole life had been built, structured, on orchestral music and a cultural history that was only half hers, but fully nourishing.
Rei doesn't hum. That's okay, it's just as well. Asuka blames her hot tears on the soap falling into her eyes.
"You've been gone for five days." Rei says, her voice still that high soft monotone as if what she said wasn't out of the ordinary. As if a business week of Asuka's life hasn't vanished.
Five days. Asuka wracks her brain attempting to remember what might've happened, where she might've been. Nothing comes to mind but an overwhelming bleakness spilling forth like so much black water into her every thought. It bubbles up from the hole inside her heart she's yet to fill.
"Where?" she searches for, "Who?". Her voice is raspy from disuse, sharp like a crack in a column of ice.
"There was a search. A lot of people helped. I don't know where you were for most of the time, but I found you up on the platform above the stage." Rei pauses, seems, for once, like she won't just say what is on her mind. Rei is beside her; Asuka doesn't look at her face. It's difficult to imagine that the decision being made has any bearing on Rei's expression, "You were cold, and you were dirty, and it frightened me. I took you here. It was all I could do."
Rei stops talking. Lifts a small blue bucket she'd filled with water and dumps it with great care onto Asuka's head. The soap and the tears are washed away together, indistinguishable from one another.
"I don't remember what happened. So don't ask."
And it's true. She has no recollection, only a dull throbbing pain emanating from her core and a headache like she's been dehydrated for days - which might have been true.
Rei stays quiet, barely a nod. There isn't a window in the bathroom, but Asuka can feel that it is night in the same way eyeless insects can. She has just returned to the bright day of consciousness but she wants to sleep more than anything. To sleep until there is something worth waking up for.
Asuka doesn't notice the next step until Rei has lifted one of her arms out of the water and runs a soaped washcloth up and down its length, passing close to the side of her breast with each movement. Suddenly everything is on fire; her face heats up, her chest glows red in embarrassment. There's an uncontrollable twitch in her lower body that jolts her into a hyper-awareness like nothing before.
"What - what do you think you're doing?!"
"You needed help." Rei answers. If Asuka looks close enough she can see a blush somewhere beneath Rei's pale moon skin. Putting on her most wretched glare, she grabs for the washcloth. She falls short of it; her body is uncooperative, as if her muscles are receiving their orders seconds late. Asuka tries again, quits once more when the stitches in her side pull. It's a pity, she thinks, that she can somehow fall further, that there isn't a bottom or an end to her disappointment and shame. The image of an endless well is almost too cliché, she thinks - rather, she feels like a sinkhole collapsing in on itself, caving in from the sides, degrading into the indeterminate center of a black void.
Biting back the worse insults that come to mind, she lets Rei wash her. There is nothing left to her pride anymore, that stripped corpse. Rei has seen - Gendo has seen - the whole school has seen her failure unheeded. Rei had, it appears, carried her here in the first place, stripped her, filled this tub and set her in it. Asuka has nothing left to hide, because she has nothing left to protect anymore.
The other girl is surprisingly gentle, though still brusque and appropriately prudish where it counts. Asuka appreciates that even if she won't say it. A small part of Asuka is comforted; the softness of Rei's hands, the kindness in her simple domestic task - there are emotions stirring up in Asuka that might've otherwise been battered and barred were she not half-crazed as it is.
Rei is scrubbing her back in soothing circles when she says, near to Asuka's ear, "I saw you in Germany. A few years back."
Asuka's spine goes ridged as steel. She doesn't speak.
"My father had a student who played in the same exhibition. I don't know if you remember anyone else who was there. Father remembers you, though. And so do I."
"So everything was set against me from the start?" she spits, "There was never a chance I was getting into Tokyo-3?"
Rei says nothing. It's not guilt or shame that flits across her face, but pity. Maybe for Asuka. Maybe for herself.
"And you didn't say anything. Not on that line, months ago. Not when we were made roommates."
"You did not speak to me for most of that time. And Father - he told me not to say anything. I am not used to disobeying him."
"That doesn't change anything! You knew - you knew, and your father knew, and I bet even Shinji knew. I've been a joke to you. Some private joke you all laughed at."
Asuka tries to rise up from the tub but her strength and control are still gone. She slips, knocks her elbows against the solid lip of the tub, and flinches in pain. It's all been too much, all of the emotional turmoil in the past few minutes. In the past few years. She settles down, the exhaustion she'd almost forgotten exacting its revenge. It's easier to turn away from Rei than to look her in the eyes. "You make me sick."
"I was impressed when I saw you in Germany," Rei says after a pause. "Not impressed. Inspired. You had so much confidence. You felt everything. And so strongly. I admired you for it then, and I still do now."
"But you let this happen to me anyway, didn't you?"
"If I offered the help, would you have accepted it?"
Asuka had been right earlier. The deep black night sky flattens the view from the windows in the dormitory buildings. There isn't a horizon without light, a lack of a future in the darkness. She stumbles, pushing along the wall like it is a friend offering a hand in her time of need. But she has none - no friends, not any more. She didn't really have any to begin with, she thinks. Rei's steps behind her are uncertain, as if she'd like to reach out but fears being bitten. The inevitability of a futile task weighs Asuka down, lead-bellied, as she heads towards their shared space, the room she and Rei stay in together. Even her body is letting her down. She knows she can't make it out tonight or she'd be heading the other way, out the door and away from the school forever.
Agonizing is hardly enough to describe the length of time it takes to get to their room. Asuka drags herself in, collapses face first onto her mattress and ignores the throb it sets off in her nose. Half her body is still hanging off the bed, and her knees scrape across the scratchy carpeting. She barely feels any of it, and none of it more than the pressure emanating from Rei's presence.
"I didn't tell anyone that I found you yet." she hears Rei cross the room, lean over her body, and then - Asuka's heart stops - tuck the doll from its place beside the wall into the crook between Asuka's shoulder and neck. "You should get some rest before I tell them in the morning. I cannot imagine that you will have a lot of time to yourself tomorrow."
Kill them with kindness - it's a phrase Asuka has heard before, one she's never believed. She preferred, always, to take out anyone who would stand in her way with skill and strength. Direct conquest, immediate consummation. So it's a shock that she cannot, in the end, handle Rei's killing blow here. That her heart is torn from her chest, bloody, still beating, from behind, and held out to her gently in Rei's hand.
Were she not so dry, so utterly diminished, she might be on the verge of exasperated tears right now.
"Who are you, Rei Ayanami? I just don't get it. You don't make any sense to me."
Rei doesn't answer at first. Asuka feels the girl sit next to her, slide against the bed to the floor. She follows suit. Slides down the bed, sits with her knees pulled up to her chest and rests her cheek on the tops of her hands, facing Rei.
Rei sighs, then begins. "I am no one. Father sees me as my mother, when he doesn't see me as a tool. You have seen me in class; I am invisible, to everybody." She offers Asuka an almost wry smile, the most nuanced expression Asuka's ever seen on her face. "But not you. You hate me, Asuka. You hate me. That has been enough, I think."
Simplicity is often over-explored. The simplest things in life are already the most treasured, the simplest explanations the best understood. Asuka's tongue feels almost numb in trying to find the words to tell Rei that her explanation is too simple. That it doesn't fit in with Asuka's own world-view, where hate is hate and attention is the highest goal, and a personality - a self - is the only truth one can rely on.
"I've slapped you, Rei. I've called you names. Have you never been angry? Upset? This is - are you human?"
"That's exactly it. It was not until you, Asuka, that anyone has even tried to make me feel those ways. You've hurt me. You've also made me happy. You've allowed me to make my own decisions in how to treat you. How to react."
Asuka shakes her head, her eyes all but closed. She is so tired, so utterly tired, that all she can think of now is how to get Rei to stop talking. She can't think anymore. Feeling is even worse; like overusing a muscle, or straining your eyes.
Rei continues. "Father - he wanted to pull me out of this school. I denied him that."
Asuka only shakes her head. "I don't want to hear any more. I have to sleep." She pulls herself up, slowly, her joints creaking like old hinges, and Rei, watching her warily, follows. One of Asuka's hands holds her doll. The other, without thought, grabs for Rei's. Asuka collapses on her bed.
"Come, if you're coming." She says.
It is a moment later when Rei slides, hesitantly, behind Asuka. She lays on her back stiff and awkward until Asuka pulls, with the last of her energy, the other girl onto her side so that Rei is curled around her. Spoons her. Rei is physically smaller but tonight is the 'big spoon', with an arm draped around Asuka's chest. She's too warm, her bony knees are awkwardly poking the back of Asuka's thighs, but it all feels right. Proper. The fulfillment of desires she never wanted to have.
Asuka's heart burns like it's been stripped raw. This will be the best night of sleep she will have had in a long time.
Thanks for reading!
Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!