.

And the crow,
He'd mow
Half the grass on the knoll
With nowhere to go
But the heart,
We know
When it's a-needing,
It's careening towards
Being alone.

-Gregory and the Hawk


scene 4

lilies

.

"You heard her, right?"

Ashen hair hadn't made the reflection any clearer, or any more facile. Similar to the blackened thatch pelting over his own face, the angel's eyes had been covered as well. But that was much better than some shared contact of their vision- he didn't know if he actually wanted to see those sanguine bulbs once more. They didn't suit his needs. He only wanted a few words, not a peek.

"She said it herself, you know. I'm a monster. 'That's all you'll ever be'."

Gradually, his eyelids must have clamped over themselves; it was no surprise, the day had been quite cumbersome. The week had been tiring. A little cold, the house owning a small chill whenever she was out there, plundering and sending homes asunder in her desire to find sustenance for them both.

Though time had still remained fluid, malleable, he could still count the tick and the tock of the now ancient house clock. It had been a foreign epoch of time, his body now taking action over dwindling away, naked in that accursed room. He had cleaned. Perhaps a reminder of all he had been beforehand, he had cooked. It was the least he could have done.

Memoirs of the event a few nights prior drenched his brain. The feeling of her flesh laying on his very own, the outline of red light comfortably forming around her. Her face- well, if not for the hydrangea, the symmetry of her joy would have unnerved him. Instead, it only made her more beautiful. The moon's dark tides could never sully the sight of her smile. Such love in those oceans of things they called eyes- yet hatred, as well. Her voice's tone matched that juxtaposition quite well.

"All you'll ever be…"

Those words, unlike sunlight's expressions, did manage to perturb him. And suddenly, he felt abyssal.

His face sunk in against the reflection, forehead from human- well, monster, apparently - to angel connected from their mirroring actions. Lower, lower, his face dropped and skinned against the glass of the shower. It was the only thing that brought warmth to him, he surmised. This place, the rancid stench of abandoned pipes smouldering the room with the dampest warmth. It was something they could never fix- despite her apparent genius, even she knew next to nothing about how to recover this apartment. Misato's legacy would die here, along with the beach-implanted cross soon to rot from soul stew. They might've died there, too. Or maybe just him.

His illness, the sacks of souls oozing out of his pores, had only been growing worse. Worse, and worse, and worse. He could have been more verbose in those thoughts, but that's the truth. It only got worse.

And, almost proving the point in his mind, he struggled against his throat, pale lips preemptively opening as to avoid the taste of iron, of blood, of people. People he would never have known. People he did. A bit of himself, and a bit of Asuka, too.

Hitching his entire body, his spine particularly sore due to the convulsions, his mind could only watch as a few million souls clawed their way out of his throat, the orange substance coating them, imprisoning them, enforcing the fact they couldn't fly away. The mass slithered its way out of his throat, landing like a corpse upon the tiled floors below him. Putrid. He looked around after the fact, seeing multiple more of his deliveries spread all over the washroom.

Maybe that was the stench, then. Not the pipes, but himself.

His nails skimmed against his face as to wash the lives away from his mouth, provenance to his brain that he had still been real, still clearly human despite the deformity exiting what he'd have once used to breathe. An oesophagus raw, heavy, barren and ancient. His nose may not have enjoyed those smells, but it was much more approachable than the skinning feeling of saliva against his throat.

It pained him to speak. But still, he did.

Perhaps only a tiniest gag shooting his body upward, he slowly rose against the same surface he had slid down against. It was a shock the glass had managed to keep its composure this long, his hands slamming against it as his stone eyes faced ones of blood, ones of malice.

The angel had spoken first.

"What I told you was correct. Man is ultimately alone. Your becoming a monster was not something unforeseen. Every human will follow this path, with their fear of loneliness overthrowing their integrity. After all, how else could you have coped? You had murdered your hope. It's why I won't stop repeating this to you. Why I won't stop your metamorphosis.

"Burn it down."

He could have laughed, but then again, he could have cried as well. What difference did it make anyway?

"It's you, isn't it."

He couldn't keep faith in this old fireplace.

"You're the reason I'm like this, Kaworu."

Slender pillars gingerly pressed against each other, the reflection of index fingers matching as the boy pointed at his angel in the mirror. Hair of black failed to cover his vision, and as a result, the angel's red nearly drowned him.

"The reason I own half a mind. The reason I'm seeing you right now. The reason my hair is getting blacker, the reason I'm vomiting fucking souls, the reason Asuka owns those bleeding petals on her face.

"You're the reason why this world is red."

No response arose from those sour lips.

"You're not even real. Something that the sea has cursed me with. Me, trapped with you. Asuka, settling with…"

His teacher arose in his mind. Those days in those fields of nature, where new colours, ferocious and tactile, adorned his young mind.

"Her garden."

The angel appeared discouraged by his denial. His final words only affirmed it.

"Do you still think she's beautiful?"

It was time to leave.

Inchmeal, his body croaked itself away from the shower reflection, eyes of monster and angel still locked in some twisted matrimony. It took a lifetime to tear away, and he felt the room age a little. He almost forgot how brittle time truly was with procrastination.

A few steps toward the door, and the angel in that mirror had finally opened its mouth. Anything to keep him contained, keep them together.

"You see it, don't you? The church upon your spine."

Stone turned to meet crimson for one last time.

"What?"

"It's real. She can see it too."

Oh. How riveting.

"Anything else? Or should I just burn you down, instead of everything else?"

"I love you."

He could have laughed, and he could have cried. But instead, he settled on a smile.

"Goodbye, Kaworu."

And the devil's door slammed shut. His hair had stayed just as black as before.


"Who was that?"

The question bore some semblance of panic to it, but he never gave it any thought. Instead, he merely bit down on some poorly made semblance of frozen chicken, finally realising and absorbing the information of his location. It seemed after his reflection left his presence, he hadn't been nearly as focused for the rest of the day. She just happened to notice. With a mind much more active than his had been, it was clear she'd look for anything to comment on. Upon realising how boring and sickly his "meal" had truly been, he decided the attention she gave would have been a gratifying subversion.

"What do you mean?"

"You were talking to someone, as soon as I came back in."

Oh, so she'd come back around that time. Strange, his ears had only been perturbed by her presence a few minutes ago.

"Kaworu."

Another bite into that sickly meal.

Just outside his cornea, he recognised her face as it recoiled, sinking into a deep invasion of her own psyche.

Soon after a ponderous silence, she asked another question.

"The final angel? The one you had to kill?"

Instrumentality had been the only factor that could have given her that information.

He didn't really have to kill him in the slightest, in all honesty. That regicide was one that, though seemingly woven by whatever force fate had truly been, could have been avoided, and practically nothing would have changed. It had all occurred anyway. The swirling of souls, the knowledge of failure, the feeling of filtering into one. The angel's death only spared him from that putrid future.

If it was done any earlier, the angel would have that church he seemed to own. Or, he wouldn't have cared.

But the truth was fluid, almost as always. So, he remarked only half of it.

"Yeah, that's him."

Her expressions relaxed upon noticing her partner's disdain, perhaps feeling regretful in case this conversation would fall to ruin by her hand. Then again, she could have run her mouth about anything, and it could have been just as burnt as a result. The sun does tend to sting, after all.

Another ponderous silence.

"Do you think you loved him?"

He must've preferred the silence.

"He loved me. I liked that feeling."

"But you didn't love him?"

A face much too revolting, a gasp escaped him as he began to grit his teeth, eyes not as indignant as his mouth. Just perturbed. Always perturbed, if only by her. Gradually, his eyes met that same fury his mouth had incurred.

"You've seen what's inside me. Take a look. What do you think?"

And with abrupt nature, her form shifted on the withered wooden chair, head now leaning against her hand, her left hand, the one unsullied from slithering hydrangea. Her eyes seemed dull, bored, yet nowhere near his figure. Perhaps, she had actually thought about it. Or she hadn't realised this conversation had been potently offensive to him.

"I think you loved him."

Relief swelled inside of him, his eyes shimmering with vague tears as they gently closed, a sigh escaping seconds after the fact.

"Like a child loves a toy."

That ounce of relief seemed to diminish, a candle in a setting far too windy. Only unbridled rage had started to swelter.

His fist ricocheted off the dense oak of the table, an impartial bruise spreading with a rose tint. His eyes, which once had only seemed perturbed, now had been drawn to a dismantled look, visionaries filled with the lustre of anguish, of hell. He had been there, and she hadn't. She had no right to speak of things she couldn't understand, no right in the slightest.

Other than the fact that she really, really did.

Instrumentality was a world of no lies, a chaotic hyperbole performed in front of one audience. Everyone. On show, for each of them to have a peek inside each other, explore each other. An anti-mitosis.

She was one of the first to visit it. She knew far too much before he ever had the chance to know.

And with that fact, his fury started to diminish almost like his relief. His lips, once plump and ready to burst with vile imaginations, now felt emaciated, parched, ruined. Barren. His eyes, once twisted and sketched with a whirlpool ink, calmed into something much more sombre, more grey.

She stared at him with both of her blues, the globe and the ocean-flower residing comfortably to her left. Her mouth had shifted to something slightly open, almost as if a drip of shock had invaded her system. Following it, her eyes sank into the void of the table, the mouth once open portraying gritting teeth. It almost looked like she felt guilty. Maybe his mind had been a little too foreign on that part.

He kept his gaze low, eyes watering as sorrow replaced his blood. Thoughts of sunlight, moonlight, a splinter-ridden bathtub along with her body, naked and gleaming. The tub had been filled with urine, with splits of bark from the decayed home above her. And there was blood, too. So much. Despite being in a mode of godhood, he still couldn't manage to recall whether it was hers or not.

He would have liked to inspect her body, to check for cuts, slivers across her wrists which may have been a signature to her attempted suicide in that bathtub. But he might never have gotten the chance to from their relationship at that time. It barely even was one, anyways. It only galvanised his sorrow further.

"Hey."

Startled from the separation of silence, his eyes looked up, still soft but much more visible than his previous grey.

She towered over him, intimidating only in her shadow eclipsing the primeval light. Mumbling something amalgamated, his shock only grew and spawned a yelp out of him as her waist dropped down onto his, her hands suddenly linked around the back of his neck. Her form leaned forward, giving a slight leeway where he could see the gap between her breasts. Almost like what she demanded from Kaji. But it didn't matter, his thoughts surmised, transforming from thoughts of sorrow and grief to thoughts of warmth, of a deep globe of eternal fire. He always forgot just how warm she was.

How comfortable his summer would be.

She tucked her left hand into the fur of his hair, gently pushing his face into her shoulder as she leaned on his. There, she planted a benign kiss onto his neck, onto his ear, onto his collar. He couldn't tell if it was regret or want she had felt to gain the guts to do this, but he only shooed those thoughts away as her embrace encapsulated him. It made him happy. It made him warm.

And, warmth coinciding with the grief he had felt beforehand, it made him want to sob.

His own hands engaged around her waist, diligently pulling her scent in, conjoining the flesh now only separated by clothing. Slow in his tempo, as not to alarm her already trembling body. He only wanted a little more of her. More, more, and more still.

His feelings swelled. Tears had started to stream before his mind could even recognise it. His body treading the footsteps of his emotions, his grasp on her only grew tighter, more desperate.

"We have to stop doing this."

Her kisses paused as she spoke.

"Putting each other down like this, trying to get these stupid reactions. I should have just left it. I know that must have hurt."

His sobs never stopped her.

"Stay like this. Please, please stay like this for me. Don't leave. Don't you dare leave me, monster."

He never planned to, Asuka.

"Hold me."

And there, he did. Of course he would. Anything to keep her happy, to keep the sun's sweet smile. It made him smile, too. What was life without that feeling? That solace, the one thing he learnt man needed out of their souls.

Was it love?

For him, probably. He couldn't get her angle on the topic, but he assumed it wasn't. Maybe he was just an escape. Something false, an activity made for the passing of time.

But he was fine with that.

He kept on crying anyways, never lonely, never separated.


It probably took too long in that position. They had both started to feel warmth swell into something boiling, more uncomfortable. Thankfully, his tears had paused in their run, and his sobs had started to settle, his eyes still desperately closed against the comfort of the crook of her neck.

Too slow to be allegro, too fast to be lento, her body trembled as oceanic hydrangea separated from his nape, moving sluggishly to look at him. Her eyes seared with blue. His eyes were bulbs, puffy from the stream of tears meandering out of him. Despite the lustre above them, lighting the outline of this decrepit home, his eyes couldn't tear themselves away from hers. It was something to be lost in. Something which had a petrichor he adored the scent of. Though, as swift as the contact came, it was lost by her eyelids soft close.

She sniffled, waving her hand across her face and wiping her nose before staring at him once more, eyes brimming with a passion that he hadn't seemed to spot previously. Almost like they were back breaking down that wall of Jericho, separated only through words. It was that which drew him in. Her cryptic language, a gargantuan sun.

He pondered on a question he had failed to call upon before this sudden union. Her two sides, her apparent dominance over them both, and his relationship between the brothers of man and monster. For some reason, her body's flames and her eye's aqua resulted in a similar conflict; what part of her had won?

The fervent sunlight, or the bottomless ocean?

"Come with me."

Cracking out of that horrid half-mind he seemed to constantly be slipping into, his eyes focused on her motion. Her hand, the one with hydrangea not infecting it, grabbed his own with zeal lacing her intentions. As swift as her fingers visited his own, she pulled him off of his chair, the wood heaving to the ground with a tumultuous smash as panic nestled into his mouth. He yelped as they crashed through their home, the setting of the kitchen switching into something colder, yet a little warmer, luke in feeling. The bedroom, illuminated only by the constant red of the outer soul-sea. It was difficult for him to process the speed, the cross between the two locations.

And just as the whirlwind occurred, he released another yelp as she benignly, yet potently as well, shoved him onto the comfort of his duvet. For a moment, he stared terrified, yet also welcomed, as her face laid inches away from his, both of her hands forcefully linked with his, chain-esque. He could have sworn a blush appeared upon her. That fact caused one to appear on him, too. Though, perhaps realising the brevity and weight of their plight, she moved off of him, instead sprinting to his cabinet, an aged pine somehow holding whatever

item she so desperately wanted to show.

She ripped it apart in search of her something. No other word could similarly describe it, she ripped through it, a slayer in her ambition.

Then, her form began to slow. Her breaths had started to settle. Her hands, once rumbling, now simplified into something more controlled. Gradually, given a few seconds after her siege, her fingers dipped into the cabinet with a nature more tender.

His faith in her never dimmed, despite the situation pertaining a lovecraftian dread. The fear of the unknowable. He never could have understood her intentions, what flowed in the pathways of her neurons. He never could have known what gift she would unveil: it could have been a severed skull, either Rei's or Kaworu's, a mocking of what he stood for. It could have been a lily, a signature of rebirth. Hers, his, it didn't matter. He didn't know. That's why he feared her.

Still, he trusted her now much more than previously. She wasn't just his fireplace anymore, she was his one source of light in this blackened, crimson planet.

Yet, as her hand revealed something strangely shaped, paper twisted at the end with a roach entering the bottom of it, cylindrified and well-rolled, confusion overtook his leering gloom.

A smile dressed her face as she took a step closer to him, a newfound flame in a metal container illuminating the room with a bright, auburn flame. An absolute contrast to the rime of the room before it. It was a lighter. A real one, held in the same hand as the pencil-like, earthy scented paper she had held with such reverence.

"Monster,

His stone focused on her shifting lips.

"Have you ever smoked before?"


His plight had been unimaginable.

His bed, his duvet, he gripped onto it with sound strength as his nerves had a delayed settling. It was the only thing keeping him grounded, from rising without reprisal to the heavens. That wasn't even possible, was it? Yet, he felt like it could have happened at any moment, any second he disconnected from the comfortable material he had now revered as a saviour. It was confusing, to put it in a term humanity could understand. Such a swift transformation from an instrumentalist mind to one without weight, without such gravity. What had done it? What had freed him of sordid woe?

Asuka called it something funny, her pronunciation of it mixing what he assumed to be English with a prideful German tinge. A "joint", he recalled. For some reason, the thought of the word sparked a few giggles out of him.

He went to take another toke.

And once again, just like all the times beforehand, he had choked on the abrupt infiltration of smoke, coughing almost like he was vomiting another packet of souls. And just like that faint buzz of static which seemed to flood his head each time he heaved out those pustules, each choke delivered the same strange distortion.

Except, of course, it didn't disappear, as the sensation his vomit gave him did.

The fact itself sparked a few giggles to rise out of him, the edges of his lips careening outward into an ever-growing grin. Those giggles shifted into chuckles, and those chuckles into wheezes which could've brought tears out of him if they lapsed any longer. The partner next to him, a sun somehow sunnier, took notice of his outburst. In fact, she shared it in full.

Her laughs were evermore vibrant, the same metamorphosis of giggle to cry forming as her back arched from the bubbling laughter nestling in her core. The sight nearly granted him reprieve from the laughter as a much grosser, dirtier feeling overcame him. But he laughed it off anyways, discarding the idea of her ruin by his hand.

It was so warm. All he ever wanted had somehow made its way there; a solitude box, where even the frosted blue tones of the room contained a pivotal flame. The mindly fuzz, where his half-mind state had withered, vanished, slipped. He felt so human, so in touch with the concepts of culture his mind had forgotten.

But then, he took a look next to him.

There, gripping the same duvet, aching with that familiar fuzz, mending with her own post-instrumental disease, was a creature entirely disparate to his concepts of humanity.

The only proof, perhaps, that he wasn't a human at all.

"Have I ever really known you?"

The words escaped his mouth before he could dare imprison them. He hated that it even occurred as he witnessed her bulbous ocean of an eye begin to focus on him, what had once bubbled now flat, sleek, predatory.

Her lips parted. If he was sober, his heart wouldn't have lost a beat. But he was far from sober, and his heart might have missed two. God, she was beautiful. It made this whole conversation so much more difficult to handle.

"What do you mean?"

She was right to ask that. He didn't know what he had meant either; he barely had a basis to start with. Still, the words flowed out of him as though he had planned it all anyway.

"I've seen you. Whatever the idea of "you" really is. You know, wherever we went when I.."

When he ended everything.

"I'd never seen you like that. You were… so brittle. So different from what I knew of you beforehand."

She flopped her head sinistrally, instead staring up at the canvas of a ceiling they had shared. His words never paused.

"That's not my Asuka. You're strong, you're flexible, you're someone separate to the ideals of others. You're the sun itself: an indignant globe of infinite power, burned into everyone's eyes no matter how far you are."

He almost commented on that other part of her. The ocean, as deep and as broad as could be. He hoped vehemently that her sunlight could overpower that ocean, to evaporate it completely through sheer will.

Her lips twisted into a smirk:

"Well, I guess the truth is rather fluid, isn't it?"

Her answer made him doubt sunlight's victory.

Silence overtook them soon after, an infinite blanket smothering each and every move they made. Every breath seemed to catch an echo in their solitude, barely separated from each other in tempo. His eyes flickered past the ceiling, nearer to her character. Her eyes did the same. Though, unlike his own, hers never abandoned his form. Almost uncomfortable, though the fact also made his heart swell.

That swell still solid and well-formed in his mind, he recalled other encounters in which he felt the same pang. When she first called him a monster. When she even just said "no".

When she was laying in that tub, radiant with blood.

"Was it your blood?"

He forgot, her eye still had been focused solely on him.

"You've got to stop being this fucking vague."

Flushed from the exclamative, he made a swift attempt at clarification.

"In that bathtub, I mean. Where you went after that angel, where none of us truly knew. There was blood in it. A lot."

Her face hastily grew bitter, turning away from him. He imagined the grit of her teeth, her fist tightly locked with the bedroom linen and nearly tearing it clean off. And it made sense, of course. No one had the right to witness that part of her. That endless abyss even her destructive mind forced herself to forget. Maybe it was better if he didn't say anything at all, maybe that would've been easier, maybe-

"It was mine."

His heart dropped.

Lower, lower, lower, lower and lower still.

"Why?"

She still didn't turn to face his devastation.

"Oh, come on, you're decent at science. Haven't you heard of equilibrium?"

His nerves still hadn't settled to the sudden confession. Brusque words had only barely managed exit, the shock he felt now an abrupt lifeline he had to rely on for communication. His heart ached. Hers must have, too.

"Physics or chemistry?"

She scoffed.

"Physics."

The state in which opposing forces or influences are balanced.

For a moment, her face leaned over her shoulder, catching a glimpse at his face. He was horrid at interpreting his own expressions, though he assumed it must have been something confused, muddled, conflicted. From the look of her own face, her body flipping to finally give him reprieve from the loss of her contact, facing him closer now than ever before, he must've been right in his assumption.

"Sometimes,"

Her voice brought clarity.

"If one issue is too big, too massive, too powerful for me to confront and fix, I just… Make another one. Like, when I was a kid, I broke one of my Dad's dinner plates. He was so fucking angry, I thought I was about to be flayed alive. For the rest of the day, even after he had moved on and had used another one of the thousands of ugly plates he bought, I'd still feel that pressure. That disappointment. Just a toddler, doing toddler things, right? No, I couldn't handle the shame."

"Then what did you do?"

She appeared as if she was about to jump out of her skin. Perhaps she forgot he was even listening.

"My house was under refurbishment. While no one was looking, I went to one of those slabs of wood they use for god knows what, you know, one with all the nails in and all that goofy construction shit attached to it."

A smile had been plastered over those tender lips. Not one that connoted anything well-mannered- no, it was a rather grim one. One that didn't belong to a plight like this.

"So, I grabbed one of those nails,"

His heart slacked a little more than two beats.

"Lifted it as high as I possibly could-"

And what? Threw it straight into a construction worker's eye?

"And struck my palm with as much strength as I could have possibly given."

She tucked her arm in her chest, her memories seemingly sweet and tidy, warm, a reminder of good times and emotionally-wealthy possibilities.

He just tried not to cry.

She took notice of his disturbed look, her eyes rolling and smile dissipating as her hand gently caressed his cheek, a motion completely juxtaposing what her face emitted.

"Monster, please, it isn't that bad."

"You could've died, Asuka."

"From a nail? I had already gotten my tetanus shot, there's about a one in five hundred million chance I would've died."

"I'm talking about the fucking bath."

His wrath gave her pause, eyes and mouth both parted to lengthy proportions. She might've expected something else to follow that, but instead, his eyes just latched onto hers, his stone seemingly cracking under the weight of her words. And under the destroyed ruins, it almost looked like his eyes reflected the moon above them, shining through the window like all the days before. No, it was more like they embraced it. Devoured it. Became it.

Her arms wrapped around his neck, pulling him in deeper to her cavernous intoxication. If she didn't know how easily he lost to lust beforehand, she certainly did now. And following that quota, all signs of disdain had been annihilated from his system.

Her whispers were sharp:

"And yet, look at me now."

He couldn't do anything but that.

"I'm good as new."

Another silence dawned over them, foreheads touching, moonlight and sunlight eyes still mangled together, omnisciently predicting each other's thoughts, moves, breaths, emotions, lust. He wanted to move closer. In his head, he imagined she might've too, her yearning eyes razing his soul with eldritch prowess. The sun against the moon, perhaps not so much of a checkmate as he would've thought. Their board wasn't just black and white after all, was it? No, it was a meandering blue, a frivolous red, a revolting green, a mystique purple.

An endless, vibrant eclipse.

"...And that's why you're a monster."

A whisper even quieter than the ones previous to this eclipse.

"You're a hound. I'm not some duvet you can rely on when you start feeling ill, in fact, I don't even believe anyone really was. We're just slabs of meat for you to feast on, to feel comfortable within."

He was just about too exhausted to even attempt a response. Her body only shifted slightly further up the bed, enough to the point where his head could lean against her chest.

"You've swallowed up the moon and you don't even realise it. In fact, you've built a wall of stone in your eyes to try and hide it, deflect it, keep it contained."

He felt slumber grip his soul with strength beyond reason.

"But a wolf in sheep's clothing still needs his fix. Eventually, that wall will break. Eventually, there'll be nothing stopping you from eating me alive. I'll be so far down inside you, no one would ever be able to tell where I ended and you began. And no one will. It'll just be you, with a full belly."

Whenever did she start sounding so much like Kaworu?

That angel. That decapitated force of perversion, impurity, a false salvation. The Gabriel of humanity's conscience.

Had he been the source of this? The garden slaughtering her body, the vomit escaping his throat?

The reason why her words made so much sense?

"You're right."

Sparking a jump out of his partner, femininity now fresh in both their minds as he slowly climbed up her form, once again appreciating each naked pore she granted him, his moonlight eyes overwhelming her ocean, as well as her mind of sun.

"I am a monster. I take and leave nothing, and I attempt to run away from that fact. I'm despicable. I destroyed you, and when there was a chance you could've been at peace, I ripped you right back into my life."

Her eyes creased away from his, each attempting to escape into left corners, right corners, anywhere where her embarrassment from his lack of distance couldn't be found. But eventually, his hands had gently directed her chin towards him, affirming that she needed to listen to everything he possibly had to say. A confession. A question, perhaps?

"But,"

Her attention had been called into question.

"I don't want to stay like this."

Why did she look so shocked?

In a reversal of biblical proportions, his hand danced as delicately as it could to her cheek. Her face settling into a confused, embarrassed look of both desire and frustration, her eye locked on with the hand on her cheek, then back at the giver of this affection. Upon their shared contact, the sun and the moon, her face almost pouted, almost whined, almost begged for more.

"Asuka."

Upon hearing her own name, her ideals shattered. The only thing remaining was her yearning eye, and the sea-flowers beside it.

"Don't make me your monster."

She felt his breath tickle her nose.

"Make me your martyr."

Her lust paused at that, he collected. But then, that pout of hers moulded into a grin. One knowing of their future, accepting of his metamorphosis.

"Then kiss me, martyr."

Nothing stopped him from doing so.

And he recalled, their lips connected in brief, warm, lustful parity-

Though it wasn't their first kiss, it certainly felt like one.


Her body had been cradled by his own, his hands desperately wrapped around her waist, a faux-adult replication of a cuddle. Anything to give her warmth, vitality, the knowledge that her weakness was something he adored. Anything to make the sun as bright in the sky as could possibly be.

Anything to keep her ocean shallow.

Barely a ways away from falling to the cumbersome slumber she had submitted herself to, he twisted his head sinistral, visiting the window holding their ruined kingdom out of frame.

And in that darkness, of course, came a reflection off the glass.

And in that reflection, of course, was his fallen angel.

"You still haven't answered me."

Of course he hadn't. How could he? He had cut you off.

"Answered what?"

His voice was a croak, a whisper as to not wake her from whatever dreamscape she had been subjected to.

"Do you still think she's beautiful?"

He peered over the form leaning over him. The scars of her garden, the trodden mess of her hair. The purity of her flesh, her face, her smile, her paper lips he had so horribly wanted to press against his own.

The answer was obvious.

"I don't know what I'd be if I didn't, Kaworu."

"Then why won't she say your name?"

Ah, now he remembered. That night. The red skyline, the promise of fire and ruin fresh in his mind. 'Burn it all', that same angel had demanded. What a stupid, poignantly disgusting order.

"I don't know. I don't care. She's here, in my arms, as lovely as she always has been."

He threw a glare at his reflection once more.

"The ocean to put out your flames."

His angel pondered on that. The thought of his elemental counter, as well as his proxy's usage of his lover's inner torment. Of course, the martyr knew all the angel thought. It was his own reflection, after all.

And soon after the words were spoken, it seemed sleep had been an offer too prosperous to let up.

"You'll come back to me. You always do."

Maybe. But for now, he was warm. And that's all he ever needed.

"You'll burn it all."


AN: sorry lmao, 2 chapters left