Chapter Text
Everyone around me dies.
Or rather, everyone he wants to stay alive dies.
He’s back in the sandpit. The day is hot, but no warmer than usual. As long as Shinji’s remembered, it’s been a season called ‘summer’, and he finds it weird that there would be a name given to something that always is.
Tiny, child’s fingers pat at the sand pyramid, packing particles more closely together, but mainly just putting those digits to use.
What are your hands for?
He smiles as other high voices filter in around him. If he thinks hard enough, he can pretend that he’s a part of them, and if he pretends hard enough, then he might forget that he’s kneeling in damp but warm sand, far away, far, far away...
The pyramid falls.
The red sunset momentarily blinds Shinji’s eyes, flickering every few seconds with the whizzing by of a telegraph pole as the train steams down its track.
Two figures sit opposite him, and the sunlight casts a pale yellow tint to both of their heads, paints their hair orange. Shinji feels his chest contract sharply.
“Kaworu?” he croaks out, but he can’t move, can’t reach forward.
“He is not wholly here yet,” the other figure says, and Shinji slumps at her voice. “His soul cannot be reached.”
Kaworu, at a second, closer inspection, is sitting strangely, his head tilted low and bobbing with every shudder of the carriage underneath them. His arms lie loosely at his sides, and his knees bend without any strength, rolling and jumping with every movement.
“Then what good is it to me?” Shinji whispers, and the train falls away beneath him.
The mattress squeaks under him as Shinji raises his head slowly, regarding the core on the bedside table quietly. It’s something that he’s stabbed at, shot at many times before, and yet, there it stands, innocent and red and warm.
He picks it up and rolls it between his fingers, and then holds it against his chest. Tears prick against his eyes but he clenches his teeth and forces them away again, burying his face in the pillow and cradling Kaworu’s core tenderly in his palms.
Then what good is it to me? he had said, but he still can’t bring himself to let go.
With a sigh, Shinji turns over until he is facing the ceiling, he knees tucked up and his hands crossed over his chest, and the core resting just above his heartbeat, its warmth slowly seeping through his undershirt.
His white school shirt lies rumpled and tangled on the floor some few metres away, looking as if it was discarded in a hurry.
That’s a lie. It was very carefully tucked away inside-out so that the bloodstains wouldn’t show.
Shinji’s eyes are half closed, but they open again and his head tilts to the side when he hears a faint rustling from the kitchen, and shortly after, soft footsteps.
“Here.”
Rei sets down a tray, pours tea into a mug, and hands it to him. She kneels down next to the bed and he sits up to accept it, his hand closing around the handle of the mug, then glances down to hers.
“You burned your fingers,” Shinji says dully, and Rei blinks, looking at her red and raw fingers as if in a new light.
“Yes.”
Shinji’s first sip of the tea sends a path of heat from his throat to his belly, despite the slightly bitter taste. There are too many tea leaves, and water had soaked in them for too long. “Why?”
“I was making tea.”
He laughs softly, because he’s too tired to cry, now. Of course.
After the first taste, the tea is easy to swallow. Shinji gulps it down and drowns in it to avoid the bitterness, and is pleased at the warmth spreading in his chest. The aftertaste is as bad as he expects, but he takes it without complaint, and folds himself back together onto the bed. Liquid sloshes around inside his stomach.
“So it’s over now,” Shinji says quietly, after a moment’s pause. Rei still clutches her mug in her hands, and stares calmly into its depths, and he doesn’t know if she’s heard him or not because her red eyes – so much like Kaworu’s – don’t flicker, don’t make any sign of acknowledgement.
Shinji wants to hate her, because she stood by while his father murdered Kaworu, she didn’t lift a finger or say anything – and he would have listened, he would have, he loved Rei, more than he would ever love Shinji – but she is also the one who brought him away from NERV and away from everything, and gave him back what little there was left of a silver haired Angel.
No, a silver haired angel. There’s a difference, and he’s both.
And Rei’s done all the thinking, she’s taken charge in away Shinji never thought was possible, and after everything, the only feeling he can drum up is a faint sense of relief. He doesn’t know when Ayanami became Rei, but he supposes it’s come with his sudden lethargy, his dull aching. He’s fading in the background and he doesn’t have to move, doesn’t have to act or think or hurt himself any more than he already has, because Kaworu’s there, right at his side. In his hands.
Why does he still feel the jagged claws of hurt tearing at him, then?
Why does he feel so bitterly bereft?
“It’s not.”
Shinji squeezes his eyes shut and holds the core closer to his chest. Don’t make me move again, he thinks. Don’t make me hurt.
“It’s not.”
*
Rei holds a music box in relaxed palms, and through the muted clockwork ticking, a soft tune plays, spinning and looping slowly, slowing down with each repetition until it comes to a stop. She gazes at it through half lidded eyes as the last of the tinkling tune plays out. The streets are not quite empty, and a few people send curious glances in her direction as she walks by, music trickling through her fingers.
It comes to a stop, and so does she.
“Do you start anew or do you go back to the beginning?” Rei asks aloud, but it’s quiet, and goes unnoticed amongst the daily routine of the outside world.
She shifts the box in her palm, lifts a hand, and starts to twirl at the mechanism, winding it up again with a few deft turns. It sits taut between her fingers, ready to flicker into life again, as soon as she lets go.
The soft chimes of the music box fill the air again as Rei continues down the street, hands curled firmly close to her heart.
Don’t you get tired? Don’t you ever hasten towards the end because you know it’s inevitable?
Rei stops again as she reaches her destination – the foot of a tall building. She gazes up, up to the top floor, and then stows away the music box into her carry bag, stepping inside and moving up the stairwell. Sun glances off the windows of the building, leaving impressions behind her eyelids when she blinks.
Or do you slow down to make your last moments count?
Misato answers the door the second time Rei buzzes, and the door slides open to reveal a mess of dark hair, wide but bleary eyes, and the faintly stomach-turning scent of alcohol.
“Rei?” Misato says, blinking wearily at her. She rubs at her eyes and waves her in, lurching unsteadily after. “What’s the occasion?”
Rei sweeps through the living room, stepping lightly over empty beer cans, and crosses down the corridor to Shinji’s room. She glances briefly at the childish placard over the door, then slides the panel open, flipping the light switch on.
“Shinji’s not home,” Misato says from behind her, pressing the heel of her palm to her forehead. There’s a dry, bitter sort of chuckle, and she thuds dully against the wall, bracing as if suddenly overtaken by dizziness. “He hasn’t been back for a few days.”
“I know.”
Ignoring the way Misato’s head turns and swivels at her simple statement, Rei steps inside, looking around, hands folded together in front of her. She glances this way and that, peering into the corners of the room. There’s nothing she needs to step over here – Shinji keeps his room almost absurdly neat, with spare clothes tucked away neatly into drawers and clutter kept to a minimum. If it wasn’t for the few personal items – a picture frame, a phone, a jar of rosin atop a shelf – the room would look bare, uninhabited.
Rei turns her head over her shoulder. “Where is Shinji-kun’s cello?” she asks softly.
Misato drags herself through the doorway. “Underneath the bed,” she replies slowly, and watches as Rei kneels, pushing up the covers and sliding the case out. She hauls it upwards by its handle and pulls with a strength contradictory to her slight frame.
“Are you taking that to Shinji?”
Rei hoists the case tighter, adjusts her bag, and reaches the doorway again. The light switch is flicked off. “Yes.”
Misato sees her to the door, a low, quiet chuckle burbling up as she reaches the threshold. Rei pauses and looks back, a faint question in her eyes.
“Isn’t it funny?” Misato says. “I ultimately fail everyone in the end. I’ve done what I could as a captain, a major, a mother. And I still fail in the end.”
Rei says nothing.
“Have I been too afraid? Should I have reached out more, or should I have been colder?”
Rei sees her blink rapidly, pressing knuckles against her eyes.
“That’s all I’ve ever known,” Misato whispers. “Being cold.”
She steps forward, reaches out, lays a cool hand on Rei’s bare forearm. Her fingers shake a little but firm in the end, tightening. “Take care of Shinji for me,” Misato says, and closes her eyes. “Help him...help him be happy again.”
Rei carefully sets the cello case against the door, and places her hand atop Misato’s.
“Your wishes are with me,” she says, picks up the cello again, and leaves the apartment.
*
Kaworu doesn’t know how long he sits squeezed into a tight a ball as possible, but it feels like it’s been an eternity. His body has started to form again, pale white fingers flexing and glowing with the dull red cast upon it by the thick mist. He’s glad to see himself again, to know that he’s real, but the pressure against his body, his skull, his back, his legs – it’s unbearable, and he’s clenched up and in pain with no one to hear him, and he doesn’t know what’s happening.
Then, there’s a click.
The fog writhes and screams around him and abruptly loosens, shrinking away. Kaworu cracks open his eyes and unwinds his limbs. Those eyes widen as he sees a ghostly outline of himself rise up, out of his body, stretching and yawning and sighing and collapsing on all fours to the ground.
The figure slowly turns, and Kaworu sees flinty red eyes and a wide curving smile, silver hair brushing the bridge of his nose.
“Adam?” he says, uncertainly, around a painful lump in his throat.
“Tabris,” Adam greets, and his mouth stretches into a sharp grin.
They’re mirror images of each other, and Kaworu doesn’t know why, why, why now? His throat burns and he is a separate entity and he isn’t sure if Adam is a figment of his imagination or not, or if the fog has already crushed him into oblivion – he welcomes it, if it’s true, because he’s failed again and he’s left Shinji behind.
Again.
“Are you ready?” Adam asks, and Kaworu shakes his head, hunches back down again. He’s never ready and he’s never been ready, and with each consecutive turn of the windup key he’s been losing it, losing all the ground he’s gained and wondering if it’s possible to be an insane Angel.
But surely he’s doing something right if Shinji still lets him in?
Kaworu looks at Adam with tears in his eyes and clenches his jaw and pinches his nose. No, he says wordlessly. Let me stay. Don’t make me face him again. Don’t let me live with my guilt and his innocence. I’m selfish and I can’t. I can’t do it again. I can’t. I can’t.
*
Smudges of sleeplessness and sadness stain the underside of Shinji’s eyes like smeared dirt, bags of shadows, plainly visible in the morning light. He tears away his vision from the mirror and spits out frothy toothpaste and water and saliva into the sink, rinsing out his mouth and pretending that the clenched hands around the rim of the bowl don’t shake horribly.
He spits his mouth dry and then presses his forehead to the mirror, taking cold breaths through his lips. His hands unclench with some difficulty, and he uses one of them to dive into his pocket, curling around something rectangular and firm.
Next. Click.
Shinji pulls himself up with a monumental effort when nothing plays, shifting his centre of gravity from his head to his shoulder blades as he leans back against the wall, pulling the SDAT out of his pocket. He gazes blankly at it for a few seconds, uncomprehendingly taking in the scene, then shakes his head and looks at the readout.
Track 26.
Rewind. Click. Buzz.
Shinji honestly doesn’t know if he can bear to sleep anymore. He remembers the last full, good sleep he had, curled up against a solid, gentle pillar of strength, love, compassion, and compares it to the sleep he had just woken from.
Unsettling, jagged, fragmented. Asuka and Touji had leered at him through distorted glass, and he had seen Rei looking at him silently, veins creeping up her arms and choking her as they passed through her airway, settled smugly on her face –
And then he had felt the fine blood splatter on his clothes, the light flick of liquid that almost felt like being sprayed gently with water.
Shinji grips his head and shakes it, fingers scrabbling desperately through his hair, trying to push it away. Away. Out of sight, out of mind. Before he knows it, he’s bent over double, dry heaving, his stomach twisting but nothing coming up, just hot, sour air passing through his throat. He chokes on his own saliva.
Sliding bonelessly to the floor, Shinji presses trembling lips together, a hand reaching up to clutch over his mouth. He rests his forehead on the cool tiles and makes a small sound in the back of his throat as wetness drips through his eyelashes and lands on the ground in a tiny little puddle. His hands have no strength, and even as he imagines Kaworu before him, he slips through Shinji’s fingers again, plunges to the ground again, and disappears, gone in the cloud of memory.
Shinji swallows down the strangled cry forming in his throat and staggers to his feet, hugging the wall for support and lurching shakily out of the bathroom.
In Rei’s bedroom, Shinji collapses next to his cello case and a music box standing at its side, squeezing his eyes shut against the plastic and scraping his fingers over its grainy surface.
The two had been left there sometime in the morning, sometime between the night, Shinji’s restless sleeping, and the morning. They had been there, in the middle of the room, along with a freshly laundered white shirt, free of bloodstains.
He’s been ignoring them all morning, but now he sits against his case, pulling the back of his hands across his eyes, bringing his breathing under control again.
He picks up the music box, wondering where Rei got it from, and slowly winds it up. Before letting it go, he plucks the earphones from his ears and sets his SDAT aside, trading one piece of music for another.
Shinji lets go, holding the box in his lap carefully, and listens as the clockwork starts ticking. The first bar of music plays, and he holds his breath, his face lighting up in recognition. He looks down at the music box, a sort-of wavering smile tugging at his lips.
Pachelbel’s Canon.
He remembers playing it once, in grade school, on the cello. It had been the most boring part, the most simple part – just four crotchets, repeated over and over and over again, and he’d gotten fed up with it, sick of the piece.
Until his aunt had suggested that he do something different, something new. To take on the melody instead of repeating the same bar ad infinitum, to turn the piece into something with meaning.
The next time he practised with his ensemble, Shinji had played the melody in canon with the first violin, ditching the rest of the cellos and soaring high.
The conductor had scolded him afterwards, but Shinji had smiled for the rest of the day.
He sets the music box on the ground, still tinkling away, and stretches out flat on his back, wriggling until his hand touches the leg of a chair. Struggling a little, Shinji pulls it towards him and sits up again, now leaning forward to undo the clasps on his cello case.
He hasn’t played his cello in an age, and it tells when he flicks a finger across the strings. With a small intake of breath, Shinji lifts the cello up and sinks down onto the chair, securing the endpin. He applies rosin to his bow quickly, and then relaxes into a languid tuning process, the feel of vibrating wood beneath his fingers sinking deeply into him and giving him...stability? Comfort?
Shinji can’t tell but he doesn’t mind, his brow smoothing itself out as the four strings hum contentedly beneath his bow, singing in tune once more. On the floor, the music box slowly peters out, the last refrains of the canon dying away with barely a whisper. Shinji raises his bow and sits up straight, his knees tilted apart, and continues where the box left off, the melody gliding underneath his fingers, rich with the low sounds of the long stringed instrument.
He loses himself in it for an endless expanse of time, the push and drag along the strings and the dancing of his fingers across the fingerboard coming naturally, flowing through him with the easy grace of a learned musician. His eyes flutter shut as the music swells, as he carries all four parts of the canon with him, in his bow, in his fingers, in his mind.
The last note stretches forever and Shinji’s finger shakes with fatigue on the vibrato, but he’s smiling as he lets go of the note, sinking further into the chair with a soft sigh, his nerves singing, and it’s only when he opens his eyes again that he realises he’s also crying, his cheeks damp with escaped tears.
He had been wondering if Kaworu played the violin.
*
Kaworu hadn’t realised that he had fallen asleep, and when he wakes, it’s to orange bubbles floating past his face, caressing his hair, his chin, his cheeks. His eyes snap wide open in that instance, and he whips sluggishly from side to side, staring out into the gloom, trying to see.
No.
He lifts his hands, pressing them flat against the clear glass tube surrounding him, pushing, slapping, scraping his nails across the surface. Bubbles explode from his mouth as he lets out a choked off noise, half a snarl and half a whimper.
No.
He is born in a glass womb of LCL. The doctors of SEELE wait nervously before an angelic monster, one that never dies, never ceases, only returns, again and again and again and again to a world he wants to hate but can’t, he can’t –
NO.
His eyes dart about furiously and he writhes in his glass container, the thrashing sending beads of air and froth swirling around, obscuring his vision, painting everything orange.
Kaworu’s mouth opens wide, and even as LCL rushes in he expels it, gurgling furiously, desperately, a harsh, high scream tearing from his throat. The doctors of SEELE clutch at their ears and fall to the ground.
“NO!”
The glass shatters and explodes and crumples on itself, flinging outwards as the pressurised LCL bursts forth, a roaring torrent that crashes against the floor and washes gently against the feet of cowering humans. Kaworu steps off the raised pedestal, naked and trembling like a leaf, his breath coming in short, almost hyperventilating pants. He glances around again, looking at the world around him through clear vision and unmarred eyes, and clenches a shaking hand to his chest.
No longer In This World –
– but the Next.
Kaworu falls to his knees and opens his mouth and howls again, his throat raw and aching and his eyes burning with the hot trail of tears and his hands beating on the ground, turning red as they are sliced open by glass shards. He screams again and again and again, not stopping until each breath is drawn to its last shuddering gasp, each cry torn and broken and turned into a whispery moan by the end. He shakes and sobs on the ground, damning himself with each wretched intake of breath and coughs out an exhale, saliva dripping past his mouth and pooling on the floor together with his tears and the LCL.
It’s gone.
Every moment, every damned second all counts to nothing, all disappears into the empty gullet of time, space, whatever keeps him going and going no matter how many times he fails. Everything is useless. Everything.
Kaworu struggles to look up, past drenched locks of silver hair. His fingers close around a large shard and he drags it towards himself, raising it in the air, cutting himself around it, aiming it towards his heart.
At the last second he stops, a fresh wave of pain and despair washing over him, and he limply lets the shard fall through his fingers, splashing back onto the ground.
He sucks in another ragged breath and lets out a choked, high pitched sob, falling back to the ground.
I’d just be reborn again, Kaworu laughs, and laughs and laughs, and doesn’t stop laughing until he chokes and coughs and heaves, pushing air back into his lungs.
I’m over. I‘m over the edge. I’m over. I told you I couldn’t live like this for much longer. I’m losing myself. I’m insane.
Tears leak from his eyes as Kaworu pushes himself painstakingly off the ground, lending red to the whites of his eyes, making his vision blurry. He crawls back onto his knees and back onto his feet, his arms swinging loosely in front of him, and bares his teeth in a pained mockery of a smile.
“Take me to New Tokyo-3,” he whispers softly, roughly, to the silent room. “Take me...to Shinji, again. Let me see him...again.”
His heart breaks for the boy who doesn’t know him yet, and his heart breaks further for the boy he’s just been parted from.
*
“Shinji,” Rei says, and puts down her bento. “Your pocket is glowing.”
Shinji blinks and closes the case on his cello before looking down at his chest pocket. A faint hum of red peeks through the material, and he fishes it out hurriedly, moving across the floor to Rei. He holds Kaworu’s core out in the palm of his hand, and the two of them watch it.
The little ball is glowing a bright red, brighter than any core Shinji’s ever seen glow, and brighter still, seemingly turning white. He winces and shields his vision from the view, and it’s only when it dies down after a minute that he can look again.
He wishes he hadn’t.
Kaworu’s core is a lifeless, dull red, a desaturated, almost burgundy colour, and there’s no warm pulse, no heat that Shinji had only just gotten used to. He rolls it on his palm, fighting down a rising panic, then lifts it in his fingers, shaking.
“Rei,” he says, and his voice is uneven, cracking. “What does that mean?”
Rei bows her head, and Shinji only has to look at her frame to know the answer.
“He’s gone, Shinji,” she says very, very quietly.