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When he's nine years old, a girl that looks about his age approaches him on the playground and spends about five minutes staring at him as he plays in the sandbox. Alternating between looking back at her and turning his focus to his toy cars, Kaworu wonders what the staring is about.
It's not the first time he's gotten a weird look from someone and it won't be the last but he wishes she'd get on with it — whatever "it" is. Other kids often stare when they want to ask him about his appearance. Why do you have white hair like my grandma? Why are you so pale? Why do you look like a vampire?
At this point he's learned to anticipate these questions and he'd rather be asked directly instead of what this girl is doing, he doesn't like the awkward feeling of being watched. Maybe that makes him hypocritical, since he always spends a disconcerting amount of time watching other people. But he doesn't care.
Before he can snap at the girl and demand to know what she's staring at, she's getting closer to him with her hands clasped behind her back and a bashful look on her face. Despite her clear shyness, she's terribly blunt — in a way Kaworu himself is always accused of being — when she tells him:
"You're pretty. Can you be my boyfriend?"
It isn't what he was expecting and he frowns as he thinks it over and tries to remember what he can about the girl's proposition. He's seen movies, he's old enough to know what it means to be boyfriend and girlfriend. He thinks of whenever Katsuragi-san visits, of Kaji's insistent kisses and how she has to slip out of his grasp to escape from them.
Is that what dating is? And do people only date each other because of their appearance? He wouldn't say Kaji is necessarily handsome but maybe it's just that Katsuragi-san couldn't find someone prettier. Maybe he doesn't understand this whole dating thing as much as he thought he did.
That only makes his frown deepen. In truth, Kaworu hates not knowing basic things. People treat him like he's a total moron because he lacks what they seem to regard as common sense but it's not really fair. There's nothing he can do if everyone else is apparently operating under some hidden life guide he wasn't offered.
"Sure," he ends up telling the girl. "I'll be your boyfriend."
When Kaji picks him up and he gets in the car, he casually announces this new development as if it's not that big of a deal. Aiming for the easy nonchalance Kaji himself excels at. It makes the man laugh out loud, implying that the idea of Kaworu dating someone is laughable to him. As if he's too clueless for that.
That's when Kaworu tells himself that he'll make this relationship work for as long as he can.
They break up when she asks him for a taste of the watermelon flavored gum he's chewing and he gives her a blank look and then — unceremoniously — spits it into her mouth.
***
By the age of eleven, Kaworu figures out that he's generally considered attractive. In spite of — or perhaps thanks to — his unique qualities, people seem to stare at him whenever he enters a room and he can't go anywhere without turning heads. He doesn't like it at first but Kaji tells him it's a good thing, calls him a lady-killer.
"I never killed anyone," he argues.
It's true that he hates being laughed at and seen as dumb but the years have accustomed him to Kaji's deep laughter whenever he says something he finds "adorable". It still makes him feel stupid but he doesn't think Kaji means any harm by it, at least. Still, he hates it when the teachers and other kids do it.
Being attractive does help in that regard though. He's noticed that when kids that are usually considered ugly ask stupid questions, they're met with something more akin to contempt rather than the slightly mocking fondness he's used to. That's when he realizes being pretty is a good thing, not that it changes how he views himself.
His good looks are just another fact about him that he accepts as objectively true but wholly unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. He's sure he wouldn't lose any sleep if he was ever considered unsightly. It's being weird that upsets him, it's the way people look at him like he's from outer space that has him pacing around in resentfulness.
Sometimes he thinks he's not entirely human. Maybe he came from a test tube and no one told him about it, maybe he's the result of an experiment with alien material. Maybe he came from the moon and that explains how his hair and skin are as pale as the moonlight, why he feels so much like a fish out of water.
Girls find him pretty. Wherever he goes, he gets their attention and sometimes it gets tiring. The good thing is they're not often brave enough to tell him to his face or to make a move but the whispers and the giggling, all that is enough to aggravate him. What does it matter that he's cute? It doesn't make him feel any less inhuman.
Still, he feels their eyes burning holes at the back of his neck and he sighs. Kaji is great at dealing with that, women seem to gravitate towards him no matter where he goes and that's why Katsuragi-san is always so furious. She says he entertains their advances, that he's a hopeless flirt.
Kaworu doesn't get flirting, he wishes people were more honest about what they want from him. It's annoying to deal with so many girls talking to him in such an irritatingly roundabout manner as they twirl their hair, cover their faces and blush profusely. It's like playing a game with rules he has no access to.
Sometimes he walks home with one of them or humors their attempts at small talk or spends recess with them when they're bold enough to ask. But he never feels like he has any control over it, he never thinks of it as playing along. He always ends up more confused about what it means than he previously was.
The girls call him pretty, beautiful, good-looking, gorgeous.
He looks at them and he urges himself to muster up any sort of response, searches deep within his heart to find an answer but there's nothing.
He feels nothing at all.
He's a delicate, pretty thing, a porcelain doll. As hollow as he is perfect.
***
He's thirteen when he dates a girl for a while.
Her name is Mizuki and her hair is soft. She smells like strawberries and every day she rises to her tiptoes to give him a brief peck on the lips. To him, she feels like a last ditch effort at finally feeling something. Kaworu looks at her and he tries to inspire some buried excitement in his chest, tries to get his heart to race.
Tries to find meaning in the cute love notes she writes to him, tries to ignite a fire with the shape of her body in his thoughts. Kissing her, he thinks of the sparks he's seen described in romance movies and shoujo manga. Holding her hand, he longs to feel anything besides mild discomfort at how sweaty her hand is.
Copies the things she does, hoping to get why she does them. He strokes her hair like she likes to do to his but it's nothing much, it's soft but it brings him no solace and no answers. Every day he walks her home and tries to feel something when he lets go of her hand, hoping that maybe this time he will want her to stay.
She smiles and waves at him and he goes through the motions of returning the gesture but he feels nothing.
As soon as she's out of his sight, it's as if she never existed in the first place. She might as well be a closet or a shirt or a piece of furniture with the way he sees her as an afterthought. On Valentine's Day, she gives him chocolate and tells him that she loves him. Surely this will make me feel something, he thinks.
Even if it's dread, fear or pure disgust for himself for using this girl like this when her feelings are as pure and sincere as the cheesy stuff he reads in manga and sees in movies. Instead, he feels static. Kaworu wonders what is it that's so wrong about him and more than that, he wonders why this girl loves him.
Is it because he's pretty? There has to be something more to a feeling as deep as what she calls love. What does it matter if he's beautiful? Can't anyone see that he's an empty shell? There's nothing in him, he tries to find something and he feels like a Russian doll. All he finds is himself again and again and the person he finds is empty.
"I don't love you," he tells her. "Sorry."
When her eyes go wide and he sees the tears clinging to her eyelashes, he so desperately wants to feel some way about it but it's no use. He might as well be dead. Sighing, he hopes that she'll at least hit him for this. But she only shakes her head, wipes her tears with the back of her hand and excuses herself.
They're broken up, he guesses when he gets to school the next day and she has a sad look on her face but doesn't allow her gaze to meet his. Kaworu wants to ask what she thinks she lost, if she was getting anything out of dating a nothing person like him. He tells Kaji he broke up with the girl because that might as well have been what he did.
"What a shame," his guardian tells him. "She was a sweet girl."
***
Sometimes Katsuragi-san stays over and he can hear them having sex through the wall. He's sure she would not do it had Kaji not convinced her that Kaworu is a heavy sleeper and won't wake up if they make noise. It doesn't bother him that they do it and Kaji technically didn't lie, he is a heavy sleeper.
It's just that he hasn't been able to sleep lately. He keeps having this recurring nightmare where they open his chest at an operation table and find that there's nothing in it, no sign of any organs or blood. He's just hollow inside, ever the porcelain doll. Beautiful, white, empty and inhuman.
Most of his days are spent rewatching shoujo anime and reading manga. He tries to feel a connection with what he sees on the screen but he can't. When Katsuragi-san comes over, he tries to subtly pay attention to how Kaji acts around her. He knows he loves her, he wants to know how that manifests.
When they have sex, they say a lot of sweet things to each other. Kaworu is shocked to find out people don't do a lot of dirty talk in bed, he expected them to from the few pornographic material he consumed out of sheer curiosity. They mostly just talk about being together forever. Well, Kaji does.
Katsuragi-san seems not to like it when he talks in the middle of it because it embarrasses her but it's clear that Kaji enjoys going on and on about how much he loves her. They'll probably get married one day, maybe even have kids of their own. And Kaworu will be set aside. But that's fine, he doesn't mind.
There was no one before Kaji came for him. Sometimes he thinks there was no one when he was born, maybe he came out of the earth like someone planted him in there just to see what would happen. Would he flourish in the real world or would everyone be able to tell he's an absolute fraud? He can tell but as far as he knows, other people don't.
As long as he's pretty enough, they don't see past his facade. In fact, they don't even suspect that there's nothing beneath that pretty face. He's getting older, growing taller and now girls call him handsome in addition to pretty, cute, gorgeous and everything else. Pretty like an angel, one of them said.
Would anyone hold him and tell him they want to marry him one day? He wonders as Kaji and Katsuragi-san do the deed in the room next to his. The headboard hits the wall and he tries to imagine what having sex would be like, he's old enough to know people can do it even when there's no love involved.
But he'd like to be loved.
If only he could understand how people do that, how they look at each other and actually feel something. Maybe there's a piece of him missing, whatever they use to connect and it affects his ability to be able to truly get other people. They don't get him either so they can only love the idea of him, his pretty shell.
Part of him wants someone to get to know him, to crack open that shell but he's afraid there won't be anything inside.
Kaworu wants to be somebody, he wants to be human.
It'd be better if it came naturally to him but if it doesn't, that's fine. He can find a way to make it happen, even if he has to force himself to adapt. Even if he has to build an emotion from scratch to feel it in his bones. Eventually, he'll figure out what he's missing and something will click into place.
He'll figure out how to be a person or die trying.
***
Kaworu isn't really broken.
There's nothing off about him, he's just a late bloomer. Those are words he has heard countless times from Kaji every time he talked to him about his internal dilemma. Just give it time, kid. You can't rush these things. It doesn't matter how long it takes, you'll know love when you feel it.
For the first time in his life, he feels it.
Something he could never reach, not as he held hands with pretty girls who said they liked him and not as he pressed his cold lips to theirs.
Love is a knot tied so tightly around his stomach, he thinks he won't be able to breathe ever again and he's willing to die choking on this feeling.
Love is a pair of wide blue eyes peering at him curiously, blinking above round and rosy cheeks that steal his breath from him in a way that makes him finally understand why the girls always had such a hard time talking to him.
Love is a quiet, soft voice that sounds like the most angelic melody he has ever heard in his life and no symphony could ever compare to that voice saying his name.
He never felt anything when Mizuki called him Nagisa-chan. He feels what he can only describe as a multicolored hurricane of emotion when that voice calls his name.
"Nagisa-kun, is it? It's nice to meet you."
Have they just met? It doesn't feel like it. If Kaworu had to guess, he'd say they have known each other since the end and the beginning of the universe as they know it. Their lips moved to form each other's names since the explosion that created this planet, their hands together as they shake hands is the only thing holding the sky up there.
If God exists, He or She has written their names in the Book of Life that dictates the rules of the universe.
Kaworu is sure of it, in a way he has never been sure of anything in his life.
"Hey, now," Kaji chides. "The boy is talking to you, Kaworu. Be polite. You know it's rude to stare."
He turns to Katsuragi-san to say "I swear he's not usually like this" but Kaworu doesn't bother to keep up with what he says after, his ears feel as though they've been filled with cotton. His hand moves up and down and its hold won't allow the other boy's hand to break free of his touch. He'd hold his hand forever, no matter how sweaty it'd get.
"I'm, uh, Ikari Shinji," the angel says. "By the way."
"Ikari Shinji-kun," Kaworu savors the name on his tongue.
I might have been born just to say your name, he thinks but isn't blunt enough to outright say it to a boy he just met. I may have been born just to hold your hand and be the reason your cheeks go pink, I think I was born the moment I laid eyes on you.
For the first time in his life, he feels like a person. His heart is a furnace in his chest and the warmth that radiates off of him has electricity jolting through his very being, setting his soul aflame. He isn't sure but it feels like being reborn. Enlightened by the knowledge of what love means to him, Kaworu smiles.
"You're pretty," he says. "Wanna make out?"
The beautiful boy's face falls. Kaji stares at him and his mouth forms an alarmed smile as he masks his barely concealed shock. Katsuragi-san opens her mouth to say something but no sound comes out. Everyone is silent, open-mouthed and confused but nothing beats the horror on Shinji's face as it gets progressively paler.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kaworu hears a voice that's the closest he has to a conscience as it hisses in displeasure and berates him for being a moron.
It's the first time he experiences what he assumes to be regret.
Ikari Shinji recovers from his startled state right as his mouth twists in a scowl, "You're so weird."
As mortification turns his face bright red, Kaworu thinks he's never felt so intensely human before.