Work Text:
The world turns inside out, again, and in hell this is what Shinji sees:
Sunlight, raindrops suspended on the edge of a leaf, glistening downwards, clinging until they tremble forth to wash the ivory of a piano.
It’s a lie that water remembers everything and yet—
There is a sky outside, an eye cracked open, bright as any other day. Here is the interior of a train, perfectly air-conditioned, flooded with light from the windows.
The hands of his father. He pats his father on the shoulder. He kills his father. He fears his father’s fear, until he doesn’t, only misses him, though even that is an abstraction. The wanting feels more like mourning, the sound of fingers brushing over fabric a eulogy without address, recalling nothing known. And then there is his father’s back.
Shinji blinks.
A smiling boy, his mouth the whispered curve of a crystalline wing. He knows without needing to look. There is a translucence to Kaworu’s voice; he hears the words, “Ikari Shinji-kun, what do you wish for?” and sees the shape of that mouth a thousand times past. The light of the eye ripples along the floorboards of the train. The water remembers. Shinji speaks and then he slips to the hard, hot sand. White-blue in the night, where the ocean smells like LCL.
He sees Asuka, different and the same, and the bile rises to his throat from another time, another place. No grave markers this time. How disgusting, to grieve the dead when you always feared the living. He wants to walk into the water then, without stopping. So he folds himself very carefully, very slowly, to the ground. Knees to his chest, he sits. He drifts in and out of sleep. Dreams of a yellow dress, dreams of a kiss that burns his lungs. He wants to die, he dreams of surfacing—
“If you’d just said something!”
“Are you stupid? Isn’t a word unheard as good as one unspoken?” She crosses her arms, she taps her toe, and then turns away altogether.
—he wakes sick from dreams of flame-warped effigies.
He is sorry. He is scared. This time, he waits.
When he thanks her, offers a truth of his own, she curls on her side so that he cannot see her face. And it’s okay. Another time, another place. He remembers, one night she hadn’t liked the view of the sky from the hill. A power cut, the dead city returning the stars. Now, he speaks so she knows he’s still there. And at the end of everything, their silence is hurt. Their silence might be companionable. She hears something, shifting—he hears her intake of breath. And then she is gone.
The air bursts, hell splits open again. The sand erodes and the ocean is bloody and alive as it boils over. He smells metal, hot, cold as an Eva to the touch, and his blood sings. Arms weightless, outstretched, he calls out to the dark, for anyone who needs it.
“Shinji-kun, won’t you be lonely?”
He’s not sure. “No.”
He wants to ask the same question in turn.
LCL, relentless as the juice of a fat grapefruit. He sinks, or rises—it’s all the same—until there’s stillness again, cicada song, a sunset red as any other day. Shinji has been here before, he speaks it so.
A boy is humming, perched on a rock.
For the first time, Shinji realises the shape of it.
He wants to cry. He almost laughs.
Kaworu turns to look at him. “At least I have this nice tombstone.” Then, he smiles. “Shinji-kun, is this a haunting?”
Shinji shakes his head.
“The 18th. I’m glad.”
And the way Kaworu clambers down the rock is artless, how he puts his arms and legs into testing each stone for purchase, coltish as he crosses the water to Shinji. He quirks an eyebrow before he sits. And when he speaks, his voice is soothing as ever, something like resignation wearing the edges. It’s unfamiliar, but again Shinji sees the rock. The jagged edges of its great wings, the knobs of its spine, its neck…its neck. And he understands. And still, Kaworu is smiling, nostalgic—sheepish, almost.
“I’m you. I’m just like you. That’s why I was attracted to you.
“I wanted to give you happiness.”
Kaworu bows his head to his knees, his hair breezes across his forehead. A laugh that sounds like a sigh, the water has darkened the hem of his pants. Time still slows around him, while the cicadas go on chirping.
It’s kneejerk, of course, Shinji believes it impossible. But water remembers. Once there’d been a boy, emerging from a train, with hair the colour of honey and a song. How his fingers had danced along the buttons of his shirt, scarred wrists, still—a song. So, I’m glad we had a chance to swim in the ocean together.
As Shinji stretches his legs out, leaning back, they reach the next stop. The world has shifted again—pockmarked concrete and a night brimming with stars, the city truly dead this time. Kaworu looks up at the sky next to him, hands behind his head, the jut of his ankles visible as he crosses them.
“Say, Kaworu-kun, how’d the piano ever get here, anyway?”
Kaworu’s voice is level, conversational. “I found it where the school had been. It landed upside down during the near-impact. A sorry thing, I wanted to fix it.”
“U-upside down…” Shinji stares at him, his brows knitted. “You fixed it?”
Kaworu hums in the affirmative. “It took a year. I had help, of course.”
Then, Kaworu shifting his weight to lean on his side again, facing Shinji. Shinji wonders if his elbow is scratched resting like that on the gravel. But Kaworu blinks, smile spreading slow, as it always would—like they’ve got time, though they never have.
“Still, I’m sorry, Shinji-kun, you might have enjoyed the cello more.”
And Shinji does laugh.
Doesn’t it hurt? He wants to ask. Your elbow?
Day breaks. Shinji runs a hand over the hollow in the back of the piano, thinks of a boy who has known him and known him again. Thinks he must have been lonely. When he asks how many times, Kaworu only shakes his head, kindly.
“Kaworu-kun, what would you wish for?”
Kaworu brings his hand to his chin, his knuckle covering part of his mouth, and frowns. He stays like that, and a moment passes. “Mm, what is it that the lilin always say?” He shifts his hand, enough for Shinji to see all of his face again. A smile, with his teeth. And he looks very young. “For more wishes.”
It’s Shinji’s turn to shake his head but the answer undoes something in him. He doesn’t want to leave again. “Do you think we can linger here, just for a little bit?” he asks, though he knows the answer.
Kaworu stands up, smooths his pants down. He pulls Shinji up with him so that Shinji can see now, so clearly. Kaworu’s smile making the corners of his eyes crinkle, his brows drawing up, the wet light pooling in his eyes.
Crying doesn’t help anyone, Shinji had said that. But his heart aches and he can’t help the shy way he says Kaworu’s name, once more, to be watched a little longer. And there is nothing more simple than to draw closer, extending his hand, and watch the gossamer fan of Kaworu’s eyelashes, his mouth parting, bewildered. Hair the colour of a rain-damp dove, the glass of his eyes. Kaworu smiles. And Kaworu is crying. And Shinji—they’ve done this before—Shinji teeters forward, brushes his lips against Kaworu’s. Tastes salt. Feels stillness. Until Kaworu shudders out a ragged breath and their noses are sliding, as they find each other’s mouth, again. As Kaworu takes his hands, loosely. Like they’ve got time.
“We’ll meet again,” Shinji says, and he means it even if he can’t.
“I might surprise you, Shinji-kun.” Only a touch, the shiver in Kaworu’s voice. Steadying, still measured.
And the breeze on the nape of his neck is the second-most gentle touch Shinji has known. And Kaworu’s breath is a chasm, so gingerly cradled.
He presses closer again, lets the tributary take him, saltless, away and downstream, towards the world unspooling.
The door rolls down, autolocking.
Ayanami Rei’s hair is matted past her hips, a doll in her hands so crude it makes Shinji freeze for a moment. But flesh and blood, not LCL, for now.
“So there’s a life away from here that you can live too.” He says
“Really?” It sounds like yes and it sounds like no.
And what more is there to say to Ayanami? She knows, doesn’t she? Even if she thinks it doesn’t mean anything to her until someone else says it. The crown of a baby’s head, he wants to say. Where the fur is longer around the neck of a cat, he wants to say. When his cheek had stung so sharp and hot it made his eyes water. When she’d been buried in a room of books, dusty but for the ever-growing pile around her. When Aunty had placed a seedling in the palm of Ayanami’s hand and pressed her fingers, gentle and sure, around it. All the lives Ayanami has grown into, all the ways she has still been Ayanami. I’m sorry, he wants to say. His father is dead. The rice will grow; it will be ready when the leaves burn orange. And he wishes he could wish every Ayanami well.
For whatever reason it may have been, he wants to thank her for it. That day, among the ruins, among the water, among the fish and the screeching penguins, she told him she’d been happy with him as if, for whatever reason, that had been enough.
He tells her not to worry about him, though there’s a part of him, sitting side by side, legs dangling over the scaffolding, that wishes she still might.
“Okay,” she says. “I won’t.” A smile.
“Thank you, Ikari-kun.”
And then he is the last one left in the world.
He spins the spear in his hands and he wants to drop it, he wants to pry the door open. Not a sound in here, not a soul, not even the sense of air on his skin. He doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t want to die.
He brings it to himself. A pin, he thinks. He lets go, closes his eyes. And when his chest seizes, when the sob starts to block his throat, when he wants to apologise again because this is not easy—can’t he do this much?—there is weight around his arms, on his chest, fluttering against his back, and there is warmth. He’s floating, in water, he remembers. The smell of a labcoat, iodine and rubber; burrowing closer, powdery osmanthus blooming in the patch of skin under her neck, growing clammy as he’d press his cheek there. She’d hold him and she’d hold him.
I’m sorry. I’m proud of you. it’s not a fair choice for any of you to make, is it?
He’s pushed and in the LCL, red as blood, red as fruit, it feels like another pair of arms around him. He sees his mother’s face and he understands; he looks just like her, she looks nothing like him. He wishes he could look at her forever.
The spear bears down, plunges through Unit-01, plunges through Unit-13. The sound is wet and it crunches like cartilage. Hell turns inside out and Shinji falls again, reaching, reaching.
~
The same time, the same place. He is watching a train whir past him. One by one, he sees. Asuka, surly under her baseball cap and taking as much space as she pleases, one foot crossed over her knee. Kaworu and Ayanami, angled towards each other. The clothes suit Ayanami well. And Kaworu—
A shift, as if turned by wind. He looks at Shinji, he tilts his head. And Shinji, what else is there to do but smile?