Chapter Text
“I believe I have made what can be considered a friend,” Rei announces. She's on the brink of being excited, but not quite there yet.
“Asuka, right?”
She nods. “She can be sort of unpleasant to me, but that’s just how she acts. It works out well. I don’t have to talk much, because she is bad at being quiet.”
“You could certainly say that, yes.” He watches her fidget with her nails. She’s been less busy lately, although you can still tell it bothers her when she sits still. Kawory gets fidgety at times too, when he thinks too hard about it.
“Caring about people is strange. It’s hard, sometimes. I never… I never worried about anyone else, until you came along.” It’s strange, thinking about Rei caring about him. He supposes he could always feel it, but feeling it and hearing it are two different sensations. Feelings are easy to disrupt.
“Your life here must have been miserable,” he reasons. Kaworu has always cared about people, to his own deficit, even. He can’t imagine what it would feel like not to have that.
“Not miserable. A bit boring, maybe. I found solace in entertainment,” she shrugs. “I never did tell you why I’m down here, did I?”
“You didn’t. Although if you’d prefer not to speak on it, I won’t hold it against you.”
“Her name was Miriam,” Rei starts off, something distant in her eyes. “Three months and seven days old. August 13th,” She pauses, for a moment so long he’s not sure if she’s going to keep talking, but she does. “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It’s very cruel. So unreasonable. I don’t know why I saved her,” she says, her voice shaking so microscopically that it’s hardly there. He notices, though. “It’s happened millions of times before, it’ll happen millions of times again. I don’t know why I saved her,” she says again. “But I wasn’t meant to. There’s a divine plan that not even I could understand. I thought if I only saved one of them, no one would notice.”
“But they did.”
“They did,” she nods.
“That has to mean that you did care about someone, right?” He reasons. “Enough to end up here, anyway.”
“You could be right. I’m not sure I would have done it though, if I were to have known.” She sighs. “But that doesn’t matter, now. We’re both here.”
“Maybe that isn’t the worst thing in the world.”
“It’s bothering you again. I can tell,” Shinji cards his hands through Kaworu’s hair. “You don’t have to tell me. I feel like I’m doing something wrong, though. Am I?”
“Of course not,” he looks up at Shinji, head resting in the others’ lap. He doesn’t know what he does to tip Shinji off for the life of him, but apparently, it’s something. They’ve been seeing each other almost every day, and without fail, Shinji notices every time. “Do you really want to know? I will tell you, you know. I only think you’ll think less of me for it.”
“I won’t.”
“Sometimes, I feel like I was only put here to make you happy,” he says, ignoring how correct that statement was. “I don’t know. This sounds bad, but sometimes when I see you being happy on your own, I sort of wonder what you need me for.”
“That’s…” Shinji chuckles. “Sort of a dumb thing to worry about. No offense,” he sighs. “Think of it this way. What do you need me for?”
“I guess I don’t need you for anything. … I like you.”
“And I like you,” Shinji shrugs. “There you go, we did it. We won at dating.”
“I didn’t know you could win,” Kaworu knits his eyebrows. He would have to do some serious research on being the winner of boyfriends.
“You can’t, I was joking. But still,” he smiles a little. “I know that telling you not to worry doesn’t actually make you stop worrying. I love you, though. You have to remember that I’m not dating you on accident. I decided to do it because I wanted to.”
“All I’m saying is that it’s creepy, ok? He’s always staring all… creepy-like,” Asuka whines, shuffling her Uno cards in her hands. “Your boyfriend is a serial killer or something. Look at that look he’s giving us right now. Suspicious.”
“He is not a serial killer, he just… doesn’t blink a lot,” Shinji defends.
“That’s not better!”
“Why would I want to kill cereal in the first place?” Kaworu asks. Rei informs him that that isn’t what that means.
“You have the weirdest taste,” Asuka grumbles, putting a card on the coffee table a bit too violently.
And so, Asuka and Shinji continue to squabble. Kaworu keeps playing the game wrong, and Rei wins 4 times in a row. It’s nice. It’s sort of mind-numbing, but in a pleasant way.
Kaworu realizes that he barely remembers what his life used to be like. If it could be called a life at all, at least. He looks out the window, and he sees stars. They don’t look like home, anymore. They look like distant, burning chemicals, and he can no longer comprehend just how far away they are. Lights on the horizon are simply that, and he is home.