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The waves lap red at the shore, somewhere behind his shoes. Morbid. He doesn’t care if it’s LCL, if it’s blood, if the rules of reality have bent to turn saltwater searing crimson. The sound swallows the silence that burns and rings in his ears, and that’s enough to consider.
The blur and buzz and scream of everyone is gone, syphoned clear from his head, his heart, leaving things peacefully empty. Painfully raw. He doesn’t want to be part of them. Doesn’t want them to see inside of him, down to the rot and fester he holds caged in the pit of his chest. But it hurts to be alone. The quiet, the complete and utter lack of other aches somewhere so deep he can’t pin it to bone and body.
But there is flesh. Crushing, caving, bruising under his hands. He can feel it yielding, the jumpy hitch of muscle snapping tight under pressure, fighting back. The raging pound of a pulse trapped and trying to break free to flow. He’s seeing, not thinking. Feeling, not thinking. Her skin is warm against his, but not as soft as it should be. All the vital things underneath press against his palms, stand strong against where his thumbs dig with all the force his cramping fingers can muster. The tubing, wiring, boning that keeps a soul trapped in a body, keeps that body moving, talking, parading like a doll on its strings. All of it starts to cave under his pressure. This is something he can do. He can put an end to her.
That would feel good.
It will only be a little while longer, he’s sure, before the staunched air, the staunched blood, will dim the light in her eyes.
But then, he feels something brush his face, skin half numb with the adrenaline rush coursing through him, consuming him. And it takes a moment, a last blissful moment of knowing that this is what he wants to do, before the touch pierces through him and shatters whatever haphazard guard he’s managed. It’s her. Her fingers, scraped rough, push up through his hair, then fall to his cheekbone. A bandaged palm rests against his jaw. Only for a moment, she lingers. Then, the cool fingertips fall away again.
Everything in him seizes, muscle pulling tight, lungs constricting and forcing their air free, heart clenching painfully. It feels like even his bones are shrinking, breaking. His skin tingles and burns like fire where he touched her, and it spreads. The flare licks across his face, burning nose and ears, before it flushes down his neck to thoroughly sear him, chest to toes. His skin feels blackened, charred to ash, like it will peel off with the slightest touch.
His eyes burn too, dripping for an instant. Below him, her cheek shines with tears her cold, hard eyes won’t shed. But he has nothing more to give than the few droplets that splatter against her skin; he can’t cry anymore.
The glass that makes him up, transparent and oh so fragile, shatters, and he breaks. Somehow, somehow, he scrambles off of her, like an animal kicked and spurned. All else there is is only a void of white ash, of red waves, and he can’t breathe air so the sea calls to him. Trembling, useless limbs won’t carry him any farther, though, and he collapses only a small ways away, sitting with his legs folded under him, hunched and curled over with his head near between his knees. His forehead presses against unfamiliar ground.
Regret, guilt, fear—all things dark and ugly, bloom a mottled violet blossom that clogs his throat, swells and grows and meshes through his chest. Roots tangle and twist through the soft flesh of his lungs, wrap a tight grip around every curved rib and wrench inward. Stem and thorn and leaf lacerate his trachea in cruel red lines, carved thin and delicate and careful. Soft, fine petals unfurl to bloom at the height of his throat, tickling at his soft palate, blocking up his breath, gagging him. And still, the blossom only grows, feeding on the brutal flow of emotion. With savage efficiency, it chokes him.
He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe—
Shinji.
He feels the voice more so than hears it. Only a whisper, rising up from somewhere deep within like a curl of steam, of mist. So quiet, so soft and subtle it’s nearly drowned behind all the hurt raking through him with pointed edges, all the blood pounding and roaring and pushing through him.
Shinji.
He heaves, body tense and shaking, wracked with the force of it. It feels like he’ll cry, like he’ll vomit, like everything in him needs to come out now. Despite it all, he just can’t, and nothing comes up. His eyes are painfully dry and ache with something deep set and consuming, blinded by the white wasteland all around; he scrunches them shut so he doesn’t have to see. The air won’t pass in or out of his lungs and it’s all he can do to take strangled gasps and coughs when the pressure eases even a fraction, just when he feels reality starting to hum and melt around the edges. He hasn’t the slightest idea when he last ate, but there’s no food coming up either. He needs everything out, needs the roots binding his ribs to cut loose, needs the leaves unfurling all down the length of his trachea to cough themselves up. All he gets is the burn of stomach acid and bile in his nose.
Breathe.
The sound is clearer now, prickling up from the back of his mind. It distracts, minutely, from everything. And he tries to hold tight to it, tries to listen, but the voice and even the memory of it evaporates like fog under the sun. It slips beyond his grasp in seconds. He knows it. He knows who it belongs to, but his head hurts. He can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t think, entrenched too deep.
His whole body crushes inward with the force of a dying star, caving in on itself to squeeze the life out of him, to wring him dry in a final burst of light and heat and crackling energy he can’t afford to expend. He’s dying, that’s the only thing he knows with clarity. Here in this wasteland, he’ll suffocate. Skin with come unstitched, flesh and bone and blood with rot under the stardust. He can’t keep living, not like this.
“Shinji, breathe for me.”
It’s not a feeling anymore. It’s a sound, startlingly real against the dull din of water noise and the sharp, choking gasps he hears wrenched through his own lips. And he knows, now, exactly who it is. At the realization, the clicking together of impossible, ill-fitting pieces, his heart clenches so tight in his chest it could burst.
Kaworu.
So desperately, he wants to obey. Wants to suck in a lungful of air beyond the scattered, intermittent choking he manages now. He wants to be good.
Nails scrapping through the packed ash beneath him, he clenches his fingers to fists and tries. All he can wrestle in is a pathetic, strangled wheeze that forces itself out in a short fit of coughs. Squeezing his eyes shut tighter, pressing his forehead harder to the steadying ground, he keeps trying. He wills his traitorous body to stop shaking, stop fighting, stop growing gardens of weedy hate that aim to choke him out entirely. Though, his will has never been all that strong.
Even so, he tries to keep breathing.
Shinji tries to keep living.
“There you go, that’s better,” Kaworu soothes, a balm to endlessly frayed nerves and overtaxed systems.
Achingly slow and tender, a hand comes to rest on the back of Shinji’s head. And at first, he seizes up, expecting the same cool touch as before, Asuka’s split and scraped fingers digging deep—hard—into his psyche with a single brush. But it’s different this time. Gentle. Surface level. And when the hand cards through his hair, slips lower to cradle his jaw, the feathery touch feels insubstantial, like if he were to push against it, lean into it, he would merely slip right through.
The strange swelling of relief that washes through him makes his eyes ache anew with tears he can’t manage, and his next breath comes loose and watery. Through it, he struggles to keep up the stilted, fragile rhythm he’s gotten ahold of. He’s still wheezing and gasping, but there’s air flowing now, and it feels marginally better.
“Can you lift your head for me? Would you look at me?” Kaworu asks. His thumb trails back and forth against Shinji’s jawbone in time with his heaving breaths. Mercifully, there’s no pressure. He doesn’t push or pull. Doesn’t force anything. He doesn’t push Shinji around without consent the way Asuka does. The way Misato does. That gentleness feels invaluable now, soft on his bruised heart.
Shinji only makes a disapproving sort of noise in the back of his throat, curling into himself a little farther. He can’t look up and find this is all an illusion, all something his mind twisted up for him to keep him sane. If there’s no one in front of him, no one touching him, no one soothing him, he won’t be able to take it.
Kaworu is dead. Shinji killed him. He watched that silver stardust hair mat with blood and filth, head sitting alone on the ruined floor while Unit 01 still cradled his body. He screamed and cried and agonized, tearing his hair out with the grief, the guilt.
This isn’t real. It’s not real. It isn’t. It can’t be.
“Just breathe,” Kaworu reminds him, but Shinji hadn’t even realized he’d stopped. “We have all the time in the world now. You can take what you need.”
He inhales sharp through his nose and grits his teeth, packing so much ash under his nails it hurts.
He just…
Energy sapping, Shinji doesn’t want to fight anymore. Not against anyone. Not against himself. He wants to look. His heart cries and wails and screams that he won’t be able to handle what he sees. He won’t like the deception. He’ll only be embittered. Alone. Somewhere down the wasteland, Asuka is a crimson bloodstain on the pallor of this planet. That’s all he has. That’s not what he wants.
Full of dread and aching, Shinji slowly raises his head from between his knees, skin raw from where he ground it into the hardened ash. When he shakily opens his eyes, the background is still a blur, focus drawn to the white flecks drifting down from his hair. His legs are numb under him, and he pushes himself to sit up with palms planted on the ground.
There’s no phantom sitting before him. No ghost. No deception. No illusion. No tricks.
Nothing to crush his heart and mind to irreparable pieces.
Kaworu is right there. A bit faint, a bit wispy at the edges as though cloaked in mist, but undeniably real. Tangible in the way he still cradles Shinji’s face in one hand.
Disbelieving, he takes a few hiccuping breaths, looking up and down, searching for any imperfect detail, anything to betray the reality of this impossible moment. But Kaworu is perfect. Every last strand of his hair, every slight curve or angle of his face, even the deep shades of cerise poured and crystallized in his irises, it’s all without fault. And those eyes, they find Shinji’s own, crinkled at the corners, framed under sloping brows, gazing out at him with a sort of softness he isn’t ready to see. To feel. It strikes deep into his gut, the care with which someone could look at him.
Carefully, Kaworu reaches out with his other hand, holds Shinji’s face in both of them like he’s a precious thing. And then, careful thumbs sweep under each eyes, deliberate, from inner corner to outer corner. There aren’t any tears to wipe away, yet Kaworu does it anyway. And it’s the strangest thing, but with that press, that touch, Shinji feels the air in his lungs turn syrupy. His eyes don’t mist but flood, and suddenly the world has turned to a blurry wash. Tears he was so certain he didn’t have left stream silently down his cheeks, dripping off his chin or flowing through Kaworu’s fingers, sliding down his arms, and dotting the ground where they drip from his elbows. Now, his throat doesn’t clog, he doesn’t loose his breath in wracking sobs, he only cries, quiet and mostly calm. His overwrought heart still lurches from time to time, and occasionally he gets caught up in hiccuping and wavering breaths, but it feels like coming down. Evening out. And that shore of ease he washes up onto, finally free of the turbulent waves and currents, feels surreal.
Suspended in dreamy tears, he really looks at Kaworu and wonders. Wonders why, wonders how.
“You— You’re not… You’re here,” Shinji says. It takes a few false starts and clearing his throat to get the words out, and they still come as a pitiful rasp. His throat feels raw and wrecked, and his voice sounds just as much so, but it’s enough that he can still say anything at all. “You’re really Kaworu, aren’t you? You’re really real?”
“Does that make you happy? Me being here?” Kaworu asks, all smooth edges and soft eyes. He sounds like he knows the answer already, no worry or waver in his voice, but Shinji tells him all the same. He deserves to know.
“Of course,” Shinji replies with all the enthusiasm he can bring up from tired bones. “Of course,” he says again, quieter, lashes fanning against his cheeks for the span of the first honest, deep breath he feels he’s been able to take in weeks. “But how? You’re…”
An Angel. Dead. Gone.
Slowly, Shinji’s tears calm and settle just as he does. And when they do, Kaworu is there to wipe his cheeks dry with careful hands. Truly, Shinji can’t remember the last time someone did something like that for him without any judgement, any harsh edges, any favor to be gained. He think it must have been his mother, years and years ago, back in a time he only remembers in blurry snapshots, nostalgic scents, and soothing voices.
“I have a theory, if you’d like to hear,” Kaworu says. Carefully, he pulls his hands back to himself, and Shinji finds he misses their delicate warmth. It’s still hard to parse just how he feels about that. But he busies himself with nodding in reply, with listening instead.
“Humanity is a tricky thing to pin down. It lives in people like you, but not in everyone: the cold blooded, those without heart and feeling. But it isn’t only something that lives in what you call humans. You can show it, share it, extend it to others. You can take a kitten in from the rain and give it a warm place to sleep. You can make soup for someone who’s sick. Little acts of humanity.”
With white wasteland and red sea all there is left to show, the planet doesn’t feel so human anymore. If anything, Shinji is sure that all humanity has done is wreck their home. Destroy the place they should have treasured. Hurt the people they should have looked after. He doesn’t say as much though, keeping quiet to listen.
“Feeling remorse for killing an Angel, the very being set to destroy your world, is a pretty big show of humanity, wouldn’t you say, Shinji?” Kaoru asks with a knowing curve to his lips, a questioning tilt to his brows.
Guilt bubbles in Shinji’s stomach, near as strong as it was when he laid sleepless in bed that night, still hearing the snap of a neck echoing in his ears. He doesn’t want to think about that anymore. He doesn’t want to be the person who kills friends anymore. “What does it matter how I felt about it? I killed you,” Shinji says, staring down at his hands. They hadn’t been stained with blood then, and they aren’t now, but he still feels it. Sticky, dripping through his fingers. The weight of a life, slipping through his fingers.
“But you cared about me, didn’t you? You didn’t want to do it.”
“Of course I didn’t want to.” The words all come on one breath, harsh and rough and achingly honest. “I couldn’t do it. For so long, I couldn’t do it.” He’d stood, seconds melting by, bleeding by, just holding Kaworu. It was all he could do to agonize and plead, desperately for the world to allow him another way, give him another option. A way out. And maybe it had, maybe this is it, but he couldn’t see it then. He closed his eyes tight, then a spine crunched.
It isn’t so much a startling realization as a surfacing from murky water. A following of the light. He knew it all along, he thinks, but there’s still a fresh bruise sort of feeling when he says it. “I loved you. How was I supposed to kill you?” His eyes mist up again but he doesn’t cry any more.
“Don’t you think that’s enough to be human? To love somebody, to be gifted their love in return.” There’s so much certainty in those words, so much genuine faith. “You gave me real humanity, Shinji. And this world, one where any heart with the desire to return here can take shape, let me come back to thank you. So even if things have been messy along the way, I’m grateful we’re here.”
Sniffling, Shinji finds it in himself to raise his head, to look at Kaworu. There’s something so ginger and gentle about the shine in his eyes. And his smile feels like sunshine, warm across Shinji’s skin, light in his chest.
“Thank you for creating a world where I could come back as something better. And thank you for loving me. It means more than anything else ever could.”
His hands gently curled in his lap, a shimmer slowly comes to life in the cradle of his palms. It takes time, something that used to be a preciously rare resource but now feels limitless, to form, but it’s well worth the wait. In Kaworu’s hands, he holds a heart. Small like a child’s, beating with a frail pulse, truly a thing of miracles. It doesn’t look flesh and blood, but instead more like translucent glass, tinted with the gentlest flashes of silver and cerise.
Looking, feeling, trying to understand, Shinji tips a little into dizziness. But it’s a good sort of rush, overwhelming in the best way. There’s a part of him that wonders if this is too good to be true, a dream or a fantasy perhaps, but then he remembers the ruined planet and knows. This is a thing fought for and hard won with too steep a cost. He earned this small happiness, fighting tooth and nail. He earned it.
“You helped this heart form,” Kaworu says, holding the delicate thing close. “You nurtured it. You’re the reason I still exist at all.”
Hands outstretched, heart outstretched, he offers his fragile, beating heart to Shinji, as simple as someone would hand over a spare pen or scrap of paper. There’s no more thought behind it. Nerves bundling tight in his chest, Shinji folds and unfolds his own hands, held close to his chest. He tangles his fingers together, scrapes his nails along his palms, the backs of his hands, and tries to say something. All the words dissolves between his teeth. They melt into his tongue, and he can’t clear the frazzled fog in his head. What is he meant to do with a gesture so big? The heart of another is too much responsibility, and he’s sure he doesn’t deserve the trust.
“I- I couldn’t,” he finally stammers, warmth flushing across his face. He doesn’t take good care of his own heart. How could he manage someone else’s?
“If you’re nervous, you don’t need to be,” Kaworu says in the easy way he has about him. There’s a particular stitch of nerves in his own otherwise smooth expression, though. The openness he’s showing here comes at the cost of vulnerability, and Shinji knows that he couldn’t be so brave, if their positions were swapped. He would shrink, retreat like a turtle to its shell, to keep his own already damaged heart as safe as he could.
“I’m not asking you to treasure it,” Kaworu continues. “You don’t have to care for it. You can shatter it if you want, or throw it aside. I really wouldn’t mind it. Whatever you want to do, my heart is yours. If you’ll have it, that is.”
Shinji sniffles again, feeling tears start to pool, but he blinks them back. He fights back the nerves in his chest, too, or as much as he can anyway. If he’s going to do this, it can’t be with shaky hands, with anxieties and doubts and distractions. He needs to be sure.
Once, he scrubs at his eyes with the back of his wrists. They aren’t teary anymore, but it’s for good measure. And, after taking one last steeling breath, he makes up his mind. With more care than he’s ever mustered, Shinji takes the heart from Kaworu’s hands. The fledgling thing feels even more delicate in his grip, and he has to swallow hard at the tangle of nerves and emotion that knot in his throat. There’s a faint warm to the surface he runs slow fingers over, the same sun ray feel as Kaworu’s smile. His pulse, calm and settled, thrums in Shinji’s hands. And while the heart weighs hardly anything at all, he’s sure it is the weightiest thing he’s ever been entrusted with.
An entrancing sort of fascination takes him over as he watches liquid shimmers of sterling dance across the glassy surface. It’s hard to wrap his head around, the theory behind this life he’s been given. He isn’t sure if Kaworu’s story adds up, if love and the right world conditions are enough to form a heart for an Angel. To turn one human. And still, there’s a part of him that wonders if he might be hallucinating. If any of this is even real at all.
He presses, a little, at the center of the heart. It’s hard to untangle what, exactly, he’s testing, if it’s Kaworu’s strength, or his own reality. But the tiniest ping of glass cracking flips his stomach with a violent force. Hairline fractures web out from beneath his fingers, so tiny they’d be near invisible if he didn’t know to look. But he knows. Desperate, feeling horribly sick all at once, he whirls his attention up to see Kaworu. The gentle smile on his face is still intact, but there’s pain written into the slant of his brows and the look in his eyes. A hand curls, too, over his chest with fingers so tense his knuckles have gone white.
Shinji can feel the color drain from his face. When words do come, they come in a rushed panic. “I really didn’t— I didn’t mean to—“
“It’s okay,” Kaworu assures, though the strained quality of his voice pits guilt deep in Shinji’s stomach. Why is he still hurting people like this? What is wrong with him?
“I hurt you more than anyone could imagine. I gave you an awful choice. I made you chose between me and everything else, even your own life, and no one should have to make that decision. So, really, I don’t mind. It’s alright if you hurt me. I’ll gladly bear it.” Slowly, Kaworu’s hand smooths and flattens over his chest, the tension bleeding from his fingers. Eventually, it falls back to his lap, and all the traces of pain are gone from his face.
“I don’t deserve this,” Shinji mumbles. Kaworu’s good will, his unwavering faith, is too much. Surely, it’s too good for someone like him.
Kaworu is firm and steadfast. “You do.”
“I never do anything right,” he protests weakly in return.
“I don’t think that’s true. I liked talking with you, during the few days we had. You made me happy, and I think that’s enough. Not to mention you made this,” he says and gestures all around them. “You helped create an entire world for people to return to when someone tried to rob them of that. You’ve done so much right. Now it’s your turn to be happy.”
For a long time, Shinji considers, turning thoughts over in his head again and again, like sea glass caught in the tide. There’s too much that’s happened, too much to process, but he works on the smaller bits, the easier things. And there is one notion that comes up clear, something that will make him happy, even if it brings uncomfortable heat to his face.
Swallowing back against the embarrassment, Shinji shifts forward to put himself between Kaworu’s legs. “Then please,” he says, voice weak and shaky, “keep your heart and keep loving me with it.” With careful hands, he presses the new heart to Kaworu’s chest, somewhere over rib and sternum. And this time, when he presses, there’s no break, no shatter. The heart only sinks through flesh and bone to find is proper place, all Kaworu’s wispy edges turning to defined lines.
The whole while, Shinji keeps a nervous gaze on Kaworu’s face, reading every shift and change. His brows pinch down at first, eyes squeezing shut at the pressure. A wounded sort of noise comes from high in his throat and a hand holds tight, desperate, to Shinji’s knee. His breath hitches in his throat, and for an agonizingly long instant, Shinji wonders if he’s made a mistake. But then, things slot into place and the pure relief that slackens Kaworu’s body is endlessly reassuring.
For a moment, he only sits, loose and hazy, leaning to rest his forehead against Shinji’s. His breath comes long and deep and easy. And when he eventually lists back enough to look at Shinji, it’s with a dreamy sort of smile and mist in his eyes. “So this is what having a human heart feels like,” he breathes, the words shaped with nearly enough lilt to be a laugh. Instead, they just come languid and sweet, floating like melody on the air.
“Is it okay?” Shinji asks, a little worried. It’s only then that he realizes his hands still rest against the warmth of Kaworu’s chest, like he could anchor the heart in, keep him from rejecting it. He starts to pull away, something embarrassed burning at his cheeks, but Kaworu catches his hands, folds them together with his own. Shinji jumps a little at the contact, but it doesn’t take long to melt with the way Kaworu holds like this is something he doesn’t want to lose.
There’s a considering hum that drifts between them, the sound full and deep, before Kaworu gives his answer. “It’s exhausting to feel so deeply, but in the best way. I wouldn’t want anything else,” he replies, giving a gentle squeeze where their hands are joined. Somehow, it feels a little like a promise, though one Shinji can’t quite understand.
“It doesn’t hurt?” he asks instead of perusing that line of thought.
Guiding softly, Kaworu brings one pair of tangled hands to his chest, smoothing Shinji’s palm flat to where it had just been. The space over his heart. And when he pulls in a deep breath through his nose, eyes shuttering closed for a beat, Shinji feels his ribs expand with it. He can’t explain why that of all things, deepens the color on his cheeks. It just feels strangely intimate to feel someone else breathe, to feel them live beneath his touch.
“It’s a little raw and tender, deep down, but hurts will heal,” Kaworu says, his eyes clear when they flutter open again.
Dredging up from the depth of mostly forgotten memories, Shinji finds the gentle press of his mother’s lips to his skin. A kiss to soothe a paper cut across the pad of his thumb. He’s old enough to know now that it doesn’t work that way, that wounds and scars won’t lessen just with someone else’s care. But there’s still an urge bubbling up in his chest to try and take the pain away.
He’s only kissed someone once before. Now, when he looks, she’s moved farther down towards the shore, toes touched by the tide. She’s laying out on the ground, her back turned towards them. It wasn’t a good experience, then, when he didn’t care and she was bored and bitter.
There’s still a bit of prickling, a bit of dread, that tells him this is wrong. He shouldn’t feel this way about another boy. But one last look at Asuka, at the ruins of the world, reminds him how little that matters. There is so much more wrong out there. This indulgence is just a single drop in an ocean of taboo.
He leans forward, lets his eyes fall closed, and kisses Kaworu.
Right there, right then, he feels vital and alive and so incredibly human.