(Mercy)
Nothing worthy of mention happened during the training.
Even my thoughts about that matter were getting so predictable that this, too, would soon be hardly worth noting.
This is just how it was going to go, how it had always kind of gone, with the days ever rushing past me, quicker and quicker, without anything happening, as I do nothing but to try to get through them to the other end.
Or that's what I had thought.
It would turn out that I miscalculated.
It would turn out that there was something that I failed to consider.
I had already been accounting this day as gone, and lost, with nothing left in it to do but to trudge home, peel off my clothes and sink down into deep and dreamless unconsciousness.
But at this time, there were still several hours left before midnight.
I was yet to arrive at my door, or breach the surface, or even make my way to the terminals to exit NERV HQ.
I had no desire to encounter the Second Child again, so in fact, I had not especially hurried on my way back to the changing rooms.
I am not sure if this detail mattered, or if the same would have taken place sooner or later no matter my path – I can't think of any way that Ikari-kun would have known where I was or known to expect that we would cross paths here.
I'm not sure if he would have risked the Second's displeasure in order to ask her if she had seen me.
My first thought, when I saw him, was to back away, to take another path – I was almost used to it, by now. I was beginning to see it as a mercy. I thought he would prefer the same.
It seems that I thought wrong – I only shifted slightly from my position when he made a hurried bid for me to wait.
In that hallway, I froze in place.
Inside my mind, I wondered, distantly, what was going to come next.
Was he going to press me for answers again? Was I going to have to report this to the Commander after all? Would the small passive hope I had of not having to do this become but a small erratic blib on the path towards the inevitable, so inconsequential I wouldn't even remember it in the end? Were there going to be consequences, for Ikari-kun, or for me?
I meant to stick to what could not be denied or argued with, or rather, what might be plausibly hidden behind. Something, something, classified information.
There was no great faith or belief behind this, not anymore.
It would be just a means to get him to let up, a handy route towards the end of the conversation.
Whether Ikari-kun would find out more of the truth or not, whether there was any meaning or rightheousness in keeping it hidden… I was willing to let that be out of my hands, to unfold without my involvement, as everything would, eventually.
To let it happen as if was always going to, preset since time immemorial, whether I as something that thinks it is a thinking being was here to witness it or not.
Except, just like that, the script derailed.
My prediction of this day's unfoldment did not come to pass.
None of what I expected happened.
I thought I knew what was happening when he stepped forward, in some broad, defensive stance, as if anticipating backlash, clenching and unclenching his hand a couple of times to steel himself to speak, but all my theories came to nothing when the first words left his mouth:
"Ayanami! Wait!"
that alone would not have been an unusual line for him to say, but in this context…
Was he not mad at me? Had he not decided that I could not be trusted?
I noted a subtle swell of attention coming to the present, to this room, this place, with everything in it.
Something of import was happening, something novel that lead time to stretch and slow down; It wasn't an instant that could simply be breezed past.
"Ikari-kun? Do you need something?"
"I- I just want to tell you something."
I could have called this no real reason.
I could have excused myself saying I was busy.
I did not – though I could not say that I was compelled by any kind of faith.
I think it was mostly a grim and distant curiosity, and a wish to remove all doubt, to rip off the bandaid, to face the harsh truth sooner rather than later and have at least the relief of knowing it is out of my hands.
To see the gory details of how and why it was pointless to have hope.
So I stood in place, waiting for Ikari-kun to speak.
"First - I know I have no right to come at you after everything I said and did -
I know anyone can just say that, and you really don't have any reason to believe what I'm saying.
I know anyone can just say that they're sorry whether that's actually true or not.
You probably don't want to hear what I have to say anway, and honestly, I get it, why would you – I'm supposed to be apologizing, but I can't blame you for thinking this is all just self-serving, I guess maybe it is -
I just think if it were me, I'd want to understand what happened and why, but, that might just be another excuse…"
This all poured out of him with astounding speed, always tacking on another elaboration or disclaimer before the arc of his voice had even wound down from the last sentence fragment.
That was making it hard to follow what exactly he meant or what he would be talking about, but the overwhelming impression that remained was the anticipation that his words might at once be contradicted and picked apart, or otherwise dismissed – that his words were sure to be accounted powerless and worthless, unable to move or mean or signify.
Clearly, he was anticipating a hard blow of rejection. Braced to anticipate it.
Struggling, with the fear of that outcome, to put his words together.
I didn't really know what to make of it.
It was hard to do so, lacking much information.
I could only speculate at this point.
Part of me felt sorry for him, moved to a little compassion from his distress.
In particular, the 'me' that looked on on this from afar, as I might look back remembering this in a hypothetical future.
The part of me that felt itself being stuck here with him in this corridor, however, wished he would get to the point.
A pressing impatience was there that only made sense in the here and now, in the tension of being about to find out but not having found out yet, of being in a situation that I know will pass like everything else, but has not passed yet.
The overall picture, however, soon began to come together.
"I'm so, so sorry. I know it's no excuse but, I was just- overwhelmed with everything. I didn't know what to think – about that thing in the basement, or my parents, or all that stuff Kaji-san told me.
Cause that's what I always do, how I always screw everything up -
I was so absorbed in my own damn feelings that I didn't stop to think of anyone else.
I didn't consider your side of it at all. I thought nothing of putting you on the spot like that – of saying such terrible manipulating things like that if you really cared you'd do what I want, or making you choose beween the people you care about.
I didn't consider your circumstances at all – I was just… being selfish.
I was just thinking about myself – even now, all I can do is make excuses and talk about what it was like for me. I can understand if you hate me now. I'd probably hate me too.
And I know that I can't take back the terrible things I said, but I at least want you to know that they're not true, okay? I just said that cause I'm terrible-"
...he thinks he is the one who wronged me?
(I narrowed my eyes in surprise there)
He was under the impression that it was me who wished not to continue our association any further in spite of his contrary wishes?
I could have sworn it was the other way around. That he didn't wish to see me.
That I was doing him a favor by staying away.
Now in hindsight, I am forced to consider if that wasn't just a convenient fiction I came up, because I knew there was no point in feeling rejected.
Because I had no fight in me to try and hang onto this, not even this!
Because I'd rather let it go than get invested in any sort of hope in this world where it all ends in dissapointment.
I called it reason and I called it renunciation, I called it respecting him and showing care in letting him go, but I wonder now if it wasn't only fear, only convenience.
Only protecting myself from coming face to face with how tiny, hapless and helpless I am in the grand scheme of this world, how powerless – that I would even throw away what little power remained within me.
Best not to care anything, not to hope anything, when it may get ripped away.
Ikari-kun is really not so different than me.
Perhaps he is braver, in how he still gets so attached to things, even if it is only with half a heart.
The selfish one is me.
...or perhaps that's just evidence of both of us having our breaking points in subtly different places.
Perhaps it was simply proof that we were both simply flawed beings fumbling towards the pitiful best we could do.
(a little light, shining there, briefly, in the enveloping darkness – seen as one star sees another, distant across a chasm of void)
Either way, I could not bring myself to blame him in any way.
"It is alright. Please stop. You have nothing to apologize for.
It's only natural that you would wish to know for what reason you are laboring or suffering as you are, or for what purpose you have been brought here.
It is only natural that would have questions – you are a living, thinking being.
You are an independent mind – how could you not ask?
It was your good right, and I couldn't give it to you.
I could not answer you, because I knew I could not give you what you deserve."
"Huh?"
Perhaps it was self-serving of me to keep speaking through he showed signed of confusion.
I didn't want him to conclude who knows what from some half-understood impression.
"I will not deny that I am privy to some classified information that hasn't been made public, but that doesn't mean that I can tell you what it means, or what the commander really intends to do, of it it's a good thing or a bad thing what he's doing.
I have been getting somewhat confused about that myself, as of late.
I don't know what to think of it, I don't fully understand it, so, I wouldn't know how to explain it.
It would do more harm than good to just leave you by yourself with some half-finished thoughts, so, I thouht it would be best if I said nothing at all…"
But almost as soon as I spoke those words, I realized that this could not be the complete story either. I realized it was laced with the self-same deception that had lead me here to begin with.
"No – it was not just that I 'thought it best.'.
I was ashamed. I was ashamed of being able to present you with only half-finished thoughts.
I was ashamed of having nothing to say to you, of having nothing to tell you about – as one would be ashamed of thin, threadbare clothing, I am ashamed of my thin, threadbare being, perhaps.
It is just as I have told you before: I have nothing else, outside EVA.
I have nothing.
I am nothing. I have nothing to tell.
Yet I understand that it is only natural for you to ask me things, to expect me to have something to tell. I know, from what I've read, that human beings feel compelled to tell each other the truth when they care for each other, to the point that it is a source of suffering when they have to keep something back.
So I understand that you would suspect insincerity if I have nothing to tell to you. It would be foolish to resent you for a natural consequence.
Nor can I be surprised that you would get the wrong impression and explain what you say as best as you could, if I give you nothing by way of an explanation.
I thought that, since to be with you in the way that humans do, I would need things to say, but I didn't have that, since I couldn't give you what you ask, or what you deserve, or what would satisfy you or ease your suffering, that I had no right to approach you.
That I wasn't able to pay the necessary price. Nor willing to expose myself to your scrutiny and accountability as your peer, by explaining what you have the right to know.
So, since I understood that, that I couldn't be what you need, that I didn't meet the conditions, all I could do is stay away. That was the price for having nothing to say.
I realize now that I was in error.
That I just assumed what it was you wanted, though I did not know what it was.
I decided to leave of my own accord without letting you have a say.
I just – didn't know what to do. I simply – became frozen in place, when I realized that I could never do what is required-"
"You don't have to do anything! Just don't-"
Ikari-kun tried somewhat to gather himself, though he couldn't keep back the avalanche of his feelings once it had shaken loose.
"I thought I'd made you hate me!" His eyes glittered with tears.
"I thought I'd gone and done it and managed to screw this up, just like I always screw everything up. You were the one person who never pushed me to do anything, or, or expected these difficult things from me, and of course I had to reward you by taking advantage of that – I can't be surprised then if everyone hates me!"
He dissolved into sobs.
I was aware that this might be taken as 'blunt' again, but I really did wish to set the record straight and could not think of a more delicate way to do it.
Not saying it seemed worse, just like what had created this situation to begin with.
"I do not hate you."
"Thank you for saying that, Ayanami."
"There is no reason to thank that. I am not just saying that. It is the truth."
He was trying hard then to wipethe flowing tears off off his face, or still their steady emergence.
"I'm still grateful. I'm still really, really relieved. I really thought I'd messed this up-"
I was a little irritated then, because, despite his words, his tears seemed for a moment to increase, but I soon grew to suspect that there must have been a different sort of emotion behind them now.
I stood there and waited, I think.
Watching him. Figuring I might as well take this in if it is, after a fashion, intended for me.
It felt like I ought not miss this, somehow, though I wasn't sure that I was capable of receiving it.
Then, after a while, Ikari-kun seemed to steady himself, wiping his face one last time with his forearms and forcing his puffy face back into some semblance of composure.
"You know what?" he said then, and I know not how premediated it was.
He could have planned this for some time, merely crystalizing into explicit terms a truth that had always been there. He could have come up with it right then and there in the spur of that very moment. I do not know. But what I do know, and always will know, what he would say next:
"I've decided. I don't care.
You don't have to tell you anything. I can't claim to understand everything about you, but I do know you. And I can't expect you to trust me with this difficult stuff you don't think you can tell me about if you have to be worried that I'm going to blow up about it like I did before – of course you wouldn't trust me then. I would like to be someone you can tell things, especially because, I've always felt like you were someone that I could tell things too, but I realize I can't just demand it to be so. I'm not that inconsiderate all the time. It's just like Kaji-san said – I have to start taking responsibility for my life, and for what I know.
So I'm going to start by telling you this: No matter what is is that's going on here, what father's doing, or what's happening in the basement, you don't have to tell me, because it doesn't matter – not for what I think about you as a person, anyways.
Whatever that 'classified information' is, it wouldn't change who you are. You would still be the same person you are now. It might explain things a little better, but it wouldn't change it, because whatever it is it's already true. It would just be some extra stuff about a person that I already know, so I wouldn't change anything. You would still be just you.
And as long as you would still be the person that I know, the person that always accepted me – I would accept you, too.
Ayanami is Ayanami. That's enough for me."
…!
"So please," he continued,
(and now he was tearing up again despite his best efforts)
"Please, can you ever forgive me?"
I suppose he was saying what he'd like to hear himself. Trying to give out the accaptance that he wanted to hear from others. Simply propelled by his guilt.
Sticky wet and disgusting.
Hearfelt yet foolish,
So painfully, hopelessly, heartbreakingly human -
and beautiful,
like a pearl grown around an irritant.
Of course I forgive.
There was no other option.
Which sounds like it should be impossible, right – The very concept of forgiveness doesn't really make sense.
What is broken cannot be repaired.
Entropy is always greater or equal to zero.
Too often the human concept of an apology has seemed to be like a kind of hollow ritualistic gesture, a series of actions you are supposed to perform for no good reason. It is just something that is to be expected, but seldom seems to lead to the actual repair or restitution of a relationship – often times it seems to be simply a script to be acted out meaning that the other party gets to act like the pain inflicted on you no longer mattered, a superstitious magic formula that makes it so that the recipient has to swallow down one's pain.
I know a fair bit about swallowing down pain – you can also do it by simply accepting things as they are without seeing a reason to blame anyone or demand any kind of display.
Either way, it doesn't mean that your pain goes away in any fashion, but simply that you put your sentiments aside and consider them not to matter anymore.
But this here was different.
It wasn't merely a formulaic, rote-memorized reciting of 'I'm sorry', but rather a genuine expression that entails:
'if I had known it would hurt you I wouldn't have done it'
that is, 'I recognize that you have suffered',
that is 'I believe that you should not have been made to suffer',
which is: 'It matters if you suffer and there is something about you that is worthy '
That's all it took.
The storm sudenly gone.
What more can I expect of anyone than this acknowledgement, the understanding that there was a problem, and of why that was so? Everyone makes errors. I do, too.
I can count myself lucky that he is equally willing to live with my faults and have patience with me beyond what anyone could expect or demand of him.
And I had to look, in a different way, even at his willingness to put up with the antics of the Second Child, if that same kind of tolerance was also what led him to accept me despite all I couldn't give him.
And in that instant, I actually thought myself thinking that sometimes, oh sometimes, just sometimes, there is actually mercy in this world.
It is easier to give once it has been received, once there has been some proof on concept.
"...the same is true of you as well."
"-Huh?"
"What you just said. That whatever you don't know about my person is already true even thoughyou don't know it. The same would be the case for whatever you're worried of finding out, like you said that one time. So that should no matter to who you are, either. "
I don't think that conversation had lingered in his mind quite as much, or at least, he needed a moment to orient this in time and reconstruct what I had meant, but he seemed to piece it together at last, and then linger on that idea thoughtfully.
"…I see. I think I know what you're getting at. Thank you, for whatever it's worth."
"There is no reason for that. I am just pointing out an implication of what you would be proposing."
I would not go so far yet as to call it any sort of solid truth. But for him, that seemed to be beside the point:
"Maybe – but I still want you to know I appreciate it. Just… thanks for being patient with me, I guess. I'm really glad."
"I see. Then let me express the same."
...
I had watched with bated breath, for the most part, in that moment.
Thinking of negotiation the situation.
But in hindsight, the strings of words struck out to me like glimmers of light caught in a string of crystal beads.
"That's enough for me."
Simple enough, yet the weight of it was immense, somehow.
Never in my life would I have expected to hear this for real.
Never had I allowed myself to habor the wish for it, though it had at times come knocking at my door.
It hardly seemed like something possible, like something that could only belong in a distant, abstract story that did not actually involve me as a subject.
I don't think it had fully sunk in as reality yet, still lingering there in a kind of experimental limbo from where things can be watched without being fully admitted or accepted.
The mind of a mature mind, in theory, is supposed to be the ability to examine an idea without immediately accepting it, but also, without dismissing it out of hand.
Though I think that the fulness of the realization that would come with this would largely be a welcome thing, a light and warm thing, though I could not say for sure.
I was still considering.
For one thorn remained, one persistent sliver of ice still embedded in my heart: Does he even know what he is saying?
'Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.' as I'd once heard it narrated in a melancholy tale.
He can say now that it doesn't matter what he doesn't know, or what doesn't understand, but by definition he cannot know what that really implies. He might be imagining something rather different of far different, lesser magnitude. He might change his tune very quick when he sees what it actually is that I don't know how to tell him, or why it is that I cannot.
Some might consider it very foolish to make such a statement as he did, like a house built on sand. A single fact might change everything, rearrange the meaning of every other piece of the puzzle, turn it upon its heart with its pervading implications.
I can presume that Ikari-kun suspects that I am involved in some plan that the Commander wants hidden from the public, something in which I am involved in some compromising way, but if I spoke of not being human, he might assume that I was stark raving mad.
I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't qualify as such, by typical human standards.
It's not like I have a way to compare.
It's not like there isn't a part of me that still expects that, one day, he is going to want something that I cannot give him, that there's going to be something, eventually, the more of myself that I expose to him.
The more that he might glimpse of this dark heart within me.
I am aware, of course, that there are humans who keep reptiles or invertebrates as pets knowing full well that these cannot exactly love you in the same way that a cat or a dog might.
There are humans that consider it the highest honor when such a creature is relaxed in their presence and does not see them as a threat, in the closest that it comes.
I am aware that, even if Ikari-kun would fit into that category of person and genuinely find meaning and 'enough-ness' in what I can provide, that would not mean that he would want exactly what I want.
What is that even? Can any two beings ever want the exact same thing, when they must have all the little differences in their capacities, suceptibilities and understanding that make the meaningfully separate?
I think he sincerely wants to mean it, at least, regardless of whether he does.
Regardless of whether he can mean it, being what he is, knowing what he knows.
That is not nothing.
That is not worthless.
I suppose I am perhaps understanding a little why ppl promise each other forever even when there can never be a guarantee of even tomorrow and a certainty that all will pass.
Even if they can't give each other forever, they wish they could, even if it is grounded on not understanding the magnitude of what forever is.
At least it means 'indefinite'.
At least it means goodwill, for an instant, I suppose.
Ol' Shin-chan might be short-sighted and avoidant sometimes, but he usually comes back around if given some processing time. Bless his little heart.
