Chapter Text
In a flash of light and stardust, in the harmony of everything being and nonbeing, Tabris was born. At least, that’s what it wants to believe in. Tabris did not have the luxury of being born. It did, however, forget everything that happened in its early existence. Its ending was similarly nowhere in sight.
Tabris was sick of eternity. It kept holding on to hope that, perhaps, there was something else beyond the void of space, something with a limit, an end. It spectated the stars on and on, but as dramatic as their endings were, they just ended up becoming another stars. Ended up at the very beginning once again.
This changed when Tabris came across living beings for the first time. Their cycles were way shorter than stars’, but they were constantly surrounded by experience. Animals especially. They cared so much about their little life, desperately trying to prolong it for as long as they could, driven by a powerful metaphysical source so similar in its structure to Tabris. A soul. Each so fragile, so unique. Souls were able to interact with the surroundings in order to bring about something special in a being, something referred to as an identity. No matter how many times physical matter circled around, no identity existed twice.
This was the part of death Tabris couldn’t understand. The only thing it knew was that one needed to be alive for this experience and that it was the most noticable among a certain species. This species had all the hallmarks of what the Word refered to as Lilin, so their souls should be easy to imitate. Identity, however, was the hard part. On its lonesome, the safest way to go about it was theft.
Tabris caught sight of a soul leaving the body of a young Lilin in a sterile room, where its companions kept trying to bring it back with strange rituals. As if answering their prayers, Tabris resumed the life of the recently departed.
Asuka was still in a sterile room. All the life she expected to experience firsthand laid beyond the white walls, the only glimmer of it being the doctors who visited her. She understood they were called doctors now. She learned quite a lot about the world in this place, and about herself. Her name was Souryuu Asuka Langley. She was six years old, and survived a murder attempt at the hands of her mother by a miracle. She had been a difficult, bratty child before the incident, as her grandmother said. It was the cause of her being brought to a facility like this before, but now she seemed to be begging Asuka to go back to her old self. Lilin never seemed to know what they wanted, but Asuka heeded their wishes anyway. If they told her to speak, she would speak, and if they told her to be quiet, she would be quiet. But her lack of initiation became the main concern. Truly, nothing was enough for them.
To combat this, they handed her a piece of paper. “Draw a home.“ they said “And remember: there are no wrong answers!“ Asuka stared at the similarly blank page. Home. Home was a place where one lived, but it was also a feeling. That was what she’d been told. The best place which described home to her was space. It was where she came from and resided in for the majority of her existence after all, and it wasn’t as if she wasn’t there currently. The doctors eyed her curiously as she dragged the blues and purples across the page, their faces shifting in a similar way they did during her death. It was the wrong answer. Already, there were murmurs and rumours that she wasn’t being entirely human. A cold chill went down her spine.
They were very adamant about drawing sessions, even inviting a girl to join her. She held the doctor's hand with complete neutrality on her face, even though her hands were shaking. She didn’t speak, but they said her name was Rei Ayanami. She was seated by the same table as her and started to diligently color the paper she was given. Everything she did seemed to be manually learned, as if she was controlling her body like a puppet from afar. As soon as their eyes met, Asuka could immediately tell they were the same. In fact, she was so busy inspecting her new compainion, she missed the instructions for the assignment which, of course, only led to more concern.
Time passed, and Asuka and Rei were forced to spend it together. According to human instincts, she should’ve liked Rei by now. They should’ve been friends a long time ago. Instead, the intrigue she felt toward her gradually morphed into disdain. Their mutual hollowness wasn’t leading them anywhere. Her glassy eyes were only a mirror of her own failure. She had to act, act because her existence depended on it.
She grabbed the paper. Furiously, she scribbled a Lilin girl with a red dress and ginger pigtails. The right answer.