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Your name is Asuka Langely-Soryu and you’re having a very bad day. An absolutely horrible day. It feels like the horribleness seeps through your skin, then your muscles and squirms its way into your bones. You’ve already thrown things across the room. You’ve paced while listening to loud music. You’ve snapped at Shinji. Nothing good has come out of any of those and you’re still feeling like absolute shit. You’re starting to feel convinced that nothing will feel better until you... Well, we all know where those words end up.
You pushed your face into the pillow on your bed, grabbed it with your nails (you pretended that you had a full manicure but you never have one for more than a day before breaking a nail or chewing the ends up) and screamed as loud as you possibly can.
You wished your voice had gone out.
You wished a lot of things, none of which had ever come true.
You wished that you’d give up on this wishing shit already, but that’d be another failure in your repertoire. You already had more than you could count, but enough that you could list them for days.
But back to the many, many things you’ve tried to do to help your day feel marginally better.
1) Throwing things across the room didn’t work. It only made Shinji knock on your door and ask if everything was okay in there. Of course you’re not okay, why would you be doing this if you were okay?!
2) Pacing in your room and listening to loud music didn’t work. You stubbed your toe and, in a fit of increased rage, threw your headphones and mp3 player across the room. A repeat of point one, basically. A second knock at the door.
3) Shinji finally opened the door partway and asked meekly if you needed anything. This guy just doesn’t know when to give up. You stormed over there like a four foot ten force of nature and gave him a piece of your mind. You could tell he wanted to run away. Good. He closed your door while apologizing so quiet you could hardly hear him and you turned around to do literally anything else instead of watching him leave.
It was almost midnight and you hadn’t slept. You often did this. Staying up for hours, sometimes days. You looked at the ceiling. You looked at the books on the floor, their pages folded under each other, crushed by the impact of the ones above them. You related to that.
Crushed by the Impact.
You didn’t want to get up, so you leaned off the side of your bed and fished around for a pen on the floor. You grabbed the notebook that Misato had given you, insisting that journaling was second best to professional therapy. You had looked blankly at her, but accepted the gift. Easier than arguing about it. You were glad you took it now.
Crushed by the Impact, you wrote. You drew a cross underneath the words. That got the message across, you decided, and let the notebook drop from your hand back onto the floor. The pen was next, falling gracelessly down. Another good phrase. You grabbed them both off the floor and scrawled out another message.
Falling gracelessly from the hand of God.
Your handwriting was purposefully hard to read on that one, especially near the end. The next wasn’t much better looking, but you didn’t want any infiltrations.
Do not say the Lord’s name in vain, for He will not forgive you.
Midnight came and you heard a knock at your door. It wasn’t Shinji, he had a weird way of knocking that literally oozed indecision and patheticness. You felt bad saying all these things about Shinji sometimes. You had realized a while ago it was probably because you saw something of yourself in him. You were just as pathetic as he was, even if no one said it to your face. You figured it was better to tell him the truth than let him live ignorantly.
No, this knock wasn’t from Shinji. It was stable, methodical. Only one person knocked in that specific pattern. You knew everyone’s knock in this building by heart. Sometimes it felt like life or death when the wrong person came to the door. But for all of its unique sound and rhythm, you hardly heard this one at all.
Rei was standing outside of your room.
You felt unsettled in her presence. You wondered how she felt in yours. Before opening the door, you tried to steel your mind for this encounter. She can’t hurt you if you hurt her first, right?
She looked at you. Her eyes were empty as usual and you tried to avoid looking directly at them. You asked “what do you need,” but she didn’t respond verbally. She just nodded her head, her eyes staying still, not fixed on any object, not looking at anything. When her head came up her eyes seemed to be pointing at the floor, though. You turned and stepped into your room. She followed, and closed the door behind her.
“You planning to stay in here?”
No response.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to talk I guess. I can talk enough for the two of us.”
Something in her silence was actually starting to make you feel safe instead of scared. Your heart was lowering its guard, while your mind screamed, “don’t fucking trust her, don’t let her get any closer to you, you know what happens when you let them get close to you,” like a creature who’s been beaten and starved. You knew that this battle was happening inside of you, but your primary self (different from your heart or your mind, this was you) relaxed and let it play out in the background, sitting down on your bed and smoothing out the sheets. You know, if she needed somewhere to sit. She stood a few feet away from the door in the middle of the room, still looking down.
“Hey, you can sit if you want.”
That seemed to jolt her awake for a second. Her eyes flashed fear. You recognized that micro-expression from the hours you spent looking at the mirror until your face didn’t look like your own. You swallowed, your mouth had accumulated anxious spit. Even though the look in her eyes was tiny and barely lasted a second, you felt like it’d burned itself into your own already. She walked to the bed and sat down. Your mind started racing, but your primary self tried not to listen, just looked ahead and avoided looking at Rei. But every time you did look at her, she was looking at you. She was so tiny, so frail. Like you could hold her in your hand. Grip her body with force and shatter her like glass. You felt uncomfortable with the places your thoughts were going. God, no wonder you were so fucking insufferable to be around. No wonder everyone was scared of you. No wonder Rei was scared when you invited her to sit by you. You really could break anyone at any moment. You were lucky they hadn’t shown any cracks yet.
You looked at her and you could feel the storm beginning. It was the predecessor to crying, when everything was getting ready to fall apart. She locked eyes with you, and you tried so hard to tear your eyes away. You really did. You succeeded after a while, but then you started sobbing, and you looked at her again, and it got worse. She’d never really seemed to show anything, nothing you could read. But tonight was different. Maybe it was the witching hour, and the spells surrounding the two of you had faded, leaving you both vulnerable and different. You had let her come this close, and she’d shown you something you didn’t even think was real. She had a soul, somewhere inside there. It felt so different from her usual self, but you felt different from your usual self too. And her eyes showed an emotion, and this time it wasn’t just a spark, it was a full, lasting glow. The glow was of concern, worry. It felt warm.
Against your mind’s better judgement, and against your heart’s guard stopping its descent, you collapsed onto her. The world stopped. You viewed yourself from far away. Watched as she awkwardly moved her arms, figuring out what to do. She used them to pull you onto her lap and you almost panicked, almost flew back into your body to claw her apart. But nothing happened. Your horror receded as she held her arms around you in an embrace.
Even though the day had been absolutely horrible, your morning was shaping up to be alright.