Archive of Our Own ^beta

Introduction

The ring was too heavy, and it fell too quickly.

When the black surface of the river had been dashed apart like volcanic glass to reveal Gaghiel, pale, eyeless, abyssal, and expectant, Shinji had collapsed himself protectively around his cargo to place the back of his neck in the path of the splinters that rained down. After a few seconds, he reemerged with his provisions for the underworld still pressed firmly to his chest, and he stared directly into the light of Gaghiel’s core, located in the back of his throat. It was the only source of illumination, and Shinji envisioned it as a lantern, or a beacon. He wondered: if he were to go forward, place his head between the outermost row of serrated teeth, and let Gaghiel’s upper jaw descend upon him from its current suspended position, would he be able to convince Adam when he arrived at his feet that he had arrived there by invitation?

Gaghiel broke the trance when he curled his massive tongue up toward the roof of his mouth, blocking his core and rearing back as if Shinji had greeted him with fire in place of the dull shine of the ring in his outstretched palm. After what had happened to Kaworu, though, Shinji couldn’t say he blamed him.

There was so much about the ring that was “too.” It was too dull, clouded over with a patina of fingerprints, and the appearance of the metal itself approached brass rather than the gold that Leliel had assured him it contained. Excepting his thumb, its circumference was too big for any of his fingers; the only thing that had held it on his index finger (and tentatively at that) had been the joint of his knuckle. And yet, he couldn’t help but feel that he’d been able to slip it off too easily. When he’d finally looked down to see the thin, wishing well layer of coins littering the space beneath Gaghiel’s tongue and realized Gaghiel had actually been requesting his fare, the ring fell too quickly after Shinji tossed it, the parabola of its trajectory should have been larger, there should have been more time for him to rescind his payment and pluck it back out of the air, it shouldn’t have skittered and settled into the corner of Gaghiel’s hoard like that, and it certainly shouldn’t have looked like it belonged there.

There was something he must have forgotten, he thought as Gaghiel’s tongue, then his teeth, then his tapered head crashed back into the water. What was it he’d forgotten? he asked himself amid the bleary haze in which he’d been walking ever since Kaworu died. What was it he’d forgotten? he repeated while Gaghiel’s dorsal fins breached the surface one by one until the ridge of his back completed the bridge to the opposite bank of the dark river. Shinji’s breath seized when he ventured his first shaky step onto Gaghiel’s damp, frigid hide.

“What if Gaghiel decides to drown me while I’m crossing his back?” he had asked Leliel before he’d begun his journey.

Leliel’s human body had paused in thought before she cut straight to the quick of his question to address the one he’d really been asking.

“You only wish it could be that easy,” she’d said.

 Exposition

“My siblings want me to tell you that that your incessant crying is getting tiresome.” Unlike his previous visits, this time Sachiel didn’t even bother to move his host’s mouth to fit his speech. Instead, he emitted his toneless echo of a voice from the man’s throat straight out through his slack jawed mouth, which he closed between statements. Apparently, his disdain for Shinji right now was such that he had forgone all pleasantries, retaining only the barest angelic decorum of protecting Shinji from the intensity of his true form with the shield of his borrowed skin.

Shinji didn’t even notice; his face was still buried in his hands, his fingers and sleeves smeared with the soot and burn marks from the incense stubs spilling off his writing desk onto the floor as well as the ink of the bottle he’d smashed in his haste to sweep a clear space for his hurriedly assembled shrine. The pieces of the bottle still lay where they’d fallen, and the residue of their innards that had initially clung to them had long since drained away, soaked, and dried into the floorboards, mixed here and there with sticky incense remainders and splatters of candle drips. The stain would have been larger had it not been for the papers strewn on the floor. They had greedily drunk the ink to the point of disintegration in order to compensate for their shortage; the fragmented lines of verse written on them had been left to languish half-finished in the wake of Shinji’s grief.

He had been well into the second set of candles, the second coat of wax on his desk, and the third circuit of invocations to all of Kaworu’s fourteen siblings when Sachiel had arrived at his door in the middle of his appeal to Sahaquiel. He had come, he’d said to Shinji, in order to assure him that his siblings had heard his prayers, that they were answering his prayers, and that their answer was “No.” Shinji had crumpled into his chair, finally closed his reddened eyes, dropped his head into his hands, and hadn’t moved since.

“But you’re his children,” he kept insisting. “There has to be something you can do.”

“Bardiel says you ought to just pray to Adam directly.” Shinji knew intuitively that there was an intended mocking tone in that statement that Sachiel’s calm delivery had filtered out. They all knew the reason why he couldn’t pray to Adam directly: Adam would never give back his favorite child, and especially not to Shinji. Adam’s paternal pride in his creation had even manifested in Kaworu’s crane form; the feathers had matched the exact shade of Adam’s ribs, out of which he’d lovingly carved his youngest progeny before granting him body and breath. (“You know, I hadn’t noticed until now, but your feathers are a different shade of white than the other cranes I’ve seen,” Shinji had remarked once upon a time. “Yes,” Kaworu had said. “My father is very pleased with them.”)

In the face of this obstruction, Shinji fell back into the words he’d retreaded hundreds of times over during his prayers. “Please, I love him.”

“Israfel says the correct tense of the word ‘love’ in this case is the preterite. You ‘loved’ him.” Sachiel paused, then said, “Armisael would like to add that you must not have loved him very much anyway, seeing as it was your indecision that led to Tabris’ death in the first place. ”

Shinji did not argue the second half of Armisael’s statement, but reiterated, “No, you’re wrong, I still love him.”

“Arael says you’re very presumptuous.” Another pause as Sachiel once again listened to the complementary half of his other running dialogue. “Ramiel seconds her opinion and asks: did you think that loving a child of Adam would exempt you from the rules of death?”

“No,” said Shinji, taken aback.

“Sandalphon is calling you a liar, and Sahaquiel agrees with him. She says if that were true, then you wouldn’t have hesitated to grant his wish, and you wouldn’t keep pestering me and my siblings about asking our father to bring him back to you as if this whole ordeal weren’t the consequence of your poor judgment.”

Shinji raised his head to look past the fear-widened eyes of Sachiel’s still conscious host and spoke directly to the angel himself, even as his own eyes began to burn from the contact. “I didn’t think that loving Kaworu — ”

“Tabris,” corrected Sachiel, and the echo in his voice was suddenly reinforced with the assertion of his thirteen remaining siblings. “My siblings, but Matarael especially, would like to stress that you’re not allowed to use that name anymore. You are to show us deference and call him by the name our father gave him if you have any hope of swaying our position.”

Shinji shrank back from the reprimand, but continued, however timidly. “I didn’t think that loving Tabris would exempt me,” he said. “Nor am I arrogant enough to believe that Adam would allow him to return just because I love him.”

“Ireul says you certainly act like it, what with you calling us at all hours of the day and night.”

“I’m sorry,” Shinji said meekly.

“Shamshel says you’re the most desperate supplicant he’s ever seen, and we should be more sympathetic to your state. Gaghiel and Zeruel disagree.”

“I didn’t — ” Shinji tried to begin again. “It’s just… I just thought…” Unable to gaze directly at Sachiel anymore, Shinji pulled his knees in so he could speak into them instead. He pushed his kneecaps against his aching eyes to relieve them of the lights that still floated behind his eyelids. “I thought that Adam might let Tabris return because Tabris loved me, and he’d want to come back of his own free will. But if you can definitively tell me that he doesn’t love me anymore, I won’t ask anything more of any of you.”

None of Sachiel’s siblings responded, or if they did, Sachiel didn’t relay the their words to Shinji. Shinji wrapped his arms even more tightly around his legs and counted the seconds before he received his sentence (fourteen, for each one of the angels in attendance).

When fourteen seconds had passed, Shinji heard a voice, and it was Sachiel speaking for himself.

“Tabris was undoubtedly his favorite,” he said evenly, “but Leliel is Lilith’s, and she stands highly in Adam’s regard as well. If she’s feeling generous, maybe she’d be willing to speak to our parents on your behalf.”

Shinji suppressed the growing flicker of hope in him by regulating his breathing to starve it of oxygen, a task which became increasingly difficult for every additional second Sachiel spent listening for a reply. He restricted his breaths to a moderate rhythm in common time, and drew in as little with each inhalation as possible until he grew dizzy with both the anticipation and the hypoxia.

Finally: “Leliel will speak with you tomorrow night.”

Although Shinji lay tensed and aching and awake in his bed while he waited for Leliel, he was grateful for the excuse not to sleep.

He never saw Kaworu’s body after he died, as Adam had whisked him away before Shinji could see him, and Shinji supposed that was a mixed blessing. He’d imagined what it looked plenty of times, though. In his dreams, which were nearly all variations on the same theme, he would gently gather Kaworu’s wounded crane body into his arms, taking great care not to break his spindle legs, and Shinji would attempt to soothe him by stroking his neck each time he tried and failed to tuck his head beneath his missing wings. “Stay with me; it’s just a little bit further, and then your father will be able to heal you,” he promised and promised again when Kaworu grew agitated that the river wasn’t growing any closer. Sometimes, Shinji accidentally jostled the wound on his side, and Kaworu would fight him momentarily and try to squirm out of his arms, but he always conceded after several seconds of exertion.

But still the river eluded them, and Shinji would wonder if mirages could be a forest phenomenon as well, and then Kaworu’s body eventually grew too heavy for him to carry any longer. The moment Shinji laid him down to rest, he’d feel fingers grasping at his clothing as Kaworu, human again, echoed his own apologies with his other hand pressed against the entry point of the arrow Gendo had shot into his side.

“I’m sorry, Shinji,” Kaworu would struggle to say through the fluid filling the lungs he’d prized for giving him the ability to sigh Shinji’s name and sing his music. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sing duets with you anymore with my lungs like this; this is all my fault, I should have seen this coming, I’m sorry…”

To which Shinji would reply, “You don’t need to apologize, Kaworu; none of this is your fault. If anything, it’s mine because I waited too long, so I’m the one who should be sorry. Don’t worry about the music; we’ll just have to write instrumental duets together from now on, but we’ll get through it together.” He would pry Kaworu’s fingers from his clothing so that they could ensnare his own. “Good things will always happen if we’re together.”

“They will, won’t they?” Kaworu would say through a pained smile that he tried to rearrange into a facsimile of his usual tranquility.

“They always have before.” Shinji’s thumb would rub the surface of the silver ring on Kaworu’s middle finger in reassurance.

And then Kaworu would rest his head on Shinji’s chest to listen to his heartbeat while Shinji listened to Kaworu’s breath, until the strain on his lungs became too much to bear.

“Shinji.”

“Yes?”

“You have to pull the arrow out.”

“I can’t. You’ll bleed even more.” He would lift Kaworu’s body a few inches, urging him to stand so that they could walk to the river together. “I need you to live; you’re so much better than me. I’ve never deserved you. I can never match the prices you’ve paid for us, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to rearrange things so that I’m the one suffering the consequences for once. And I’m too weak to carry you, but let me help you up, and then you can lean on me while we walk.”

“No, please, Shinji, it’s what I want.”

“Kaworu, I can’t.”

“Please, my father said that I can’t marry you if I still have any feathers left.”

Then Shinji’s hand would inevitably find itself at the end of the arrow, fingers wrapped around the fletching, readying himself to remove it as painlessly as such a thing could be done. He’d think, maybe he could still save Kaworu’s lungs if he drained them of the blood. But then, during the process of willing his mind to be present for the extraction, he’d get a proper view and feel of the fletching, and he’d realize that it was made of Kaworu’s crane feathers, and he’d think, if he couldn’t pull out Kaworu’s wings, then how could he possibly pull out an arrow? And if he couldn’t carry a crane, how could he possibly find the strength to carry Kaworu now? And his resolve would immediately bleed away with Kaworu’s life.

By some merciful providence, when Shinji began to hallucinate from the draught Sachiel had given him, his dreams were not included in his visions.

“You have to drink this in the evening, otherwise when Leliel arrives, you won’t be able to see her,” Sachiel had told him when he returned to Shinji’s home the day after his conference with the angels. “It’s Lilith’s blood. It will thin the barrier separating your consciousness from others’, so make sure you isolate yourself after you ingest it.”

The liquid contained within the ampoule was the light orange color of blood plasma, and though Sachiel had given him the minimum dosage, the side effects had been immediate and violent. Shinji spent the next three hours shaking and sweating despite the chills that convulsed his body. At the zenith of his fever, when his vision began to double, he contemplated the seams that the walls formed where they met. He reached for them, intending to part them, to sweep the now-billowing walls away like a bridal veil to find the entrance that led directly to the underworld.

But first, a deceptively lucid voice in his mind told him, he needed the feathers.

He groped for the box atop his dresser, his hand passing through the several identical boxes he saw in his frenzied state. The clatter the real one made when he knocked it to the floor after several seconds’ fruitless clutching caused his ears to ring and his head to ache. Once he’d carefully lowered himself to the floor, he rubbed his upper arms to temporarily chase away the chills that impeded his concentration, and this time his palm landed with a satisfying slap on the lid. He still groaned at the abrasive scraping the box made when he dragged it toward him, though the necessity of the situation pushed his body’s protests aside. That same necessity drove him to nearly tear the lid off its hinges, and when he found the interior bare, he would have cried at the sight had he not already spent all his tears.

He needed the feathers. Kaworu becoming a grounded bird was what had given Gendo the opportunity to shoot him in the first place; Shinji had pictured too many times the way his fragmented wings must have beaten against his sides in his vain attempts to fly away. So then, if Shinji could find all of the feathers, he could drop them into the underworld, let them drift down to whichever riverbed Kaworu was roaming now, and then Kaworu would be able to fly again, back through the veil and back home to Shinji. But now someone had stolen them.

It had to have been his father. Shinji placed his palm to his burning forehead and pushed his head into an upright position against the dresser against which he’d slumped his body. When he’d gathered his faculties in more or less the same place, he found all the proof he needed in the sheaths of papers thrown carelessly to the floor, the shards of fainty blackened glass at the foot of his writing desk, and the consequent inky smudges of handprints that stained all his ransacked books and clothing. His must have fainted somewhere in the depths of his sickness, and his father must have broken in while he was unconscious to insure himself against Kaworu’s revival. Shinji pulled himself to the windowsill, and if he stared into the darkness for long enough, he thought he could make out the silhouette of a person.

He needed the feathers. Drunkenly, he crawled to the door, and he willed his legs not to give way as he readied himself for departure. He slipped several times, and eventually had to pause, kneeling, leaning his hands and the side of his head against the barrier of the door. “Don’t just stand there, help me,” he said to the shadow swimming in the flickering light of the room’s lantern.

“That’s what I’ve come here for,” a voice whispered beside him. “My first piece of advice is not to look for Tabris out there. You won’t find him, and you’ll only go mad from the assault of everyone else’s passing thoughts.”

“I’m not looking for Tabris,” Shinji said. “I’m looking for my father.”

“Your father is dead. You know that.”

Shinji gritted his teeth. “Then tell me where I can find him. He has Kaworu’s feathers.”

“ ‘Kaworu,’ ” the voice repeated scornfully, in a cadence that suggested the name was unwieldy on her tongue, “Arael was right. You are very presumptuous, aren’t you?”

Her words nudged Shinji’s senses a degree further toward clarity. “Are you Leliel?” he asked.

“Yes. And Tabris’ feathers are irrelevant to anything, so my second piece of advice is the same as the first: don’t go outside. Or do; I’m sure my siblings would enjoy that.”

“I know. They’ve told me. But I don’t remember hearing you say anything through Sachiel yesterday. Don’t you hate me too?”

“I prefer to observe. It’s a favorite pastime my late brother and I had in common. That was before he met you, anyway. He’d always loved humanity from afar, as an abstraction, but he was quite besotted with you. Eventually my siblings and I learned to disregard his voice in our collective consciousness, because you became all he ever thought about.” Leliel’s disembodied voice gave a soft sigh, and her anthropomorphic form melted into a dark pool to join the inkstains on the floor. Apparently she, like Sachiel, didn’t think Shinji was worth the pretense of effort. “And now we have to contend with you asking after him morning, noon, and night. I suppose the two of you complement each other very well that way.”

Shinji’s hands shook against the door. “And does he still think about me?”

Leliel’s shadow gave a waver that might have been a shrug. “None of us have been able to hear him since he died. But this is about you, anyway. You’re the one being evaluated.” Another sigh. “He gave up so much for you, you know. Many of my siblings resent you for that. Ramiel is still indignant. She keeps asking me to ask you what you ever forfeited for him at every opportunity she gets. But you don’t need to concern yourself with her. My siblings aren’t privy to this conversation.”

“You can tell Ramiel,” Shinji said fiercely, “that I never asked him to give up anything for me. In fact, I pleaded with him not to.”

“I know. Tabris was always very willful that way. I think being Father’s favorite spoiled him a bit. Still, you’ll never convince my siblings. But… you can convince me.”

“Is that so?” Shinji’s jaw was growing sore trying not to let his teeth chatter while he spoke.

“If you can prove to my satisfaction that you really loved my brother — ”

“Love,” said Shinji. “I love him.”

Apparently, exasperation was something that Leliel did not convey through sighing, but it was still palpable in her silence. “… Love, then. If you can prove to my satisfaction that you really love my brother, then maybe I’ll ask my parents to give you an audience.”

Shinji laughed weakly. “My current state doesn’t prove anything to you?”

“You’re an artist by nature. For all I know, your grief could be partially or entirely performative.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“I told you, to help you,” Leliel’s voice replied with a tincture of impatience. An exhalation of a breeze rustled the unfinished pages of lyrics beside her as she regarded their contents. “I can’t trust your words, as I’m told you’re rather good with them. Therefore, I’m going to have to look inside your mind, and then if I judge you to be honest, I’ll see about making your case to my father.”

“I was only ever good with words because I was my best for him," Shinji murmured. "But I'll still agree to whatever your terms of the contract are." 

“As payment for my services," declared Leliel, "I’ll take one of your memories of Tabris either way. It’s not such an unsavory price to pay, though. You won’t remember that I’ve taken it, so it’s not as if you’ll miss it terribly.”

“Have it. I have more than enough,” Shinji said, and he was so quick to answer that the beginning of his response overran the tail end of Leliel’s proposition. She didn’t address his rudeness; in fact, Shinji thought that she seemed pleased.

“That’s the spirit,” she said. The shadow on the floor drifted across the room to stop at Shinji’s feet, then began to draw itself upward as if by a siphon until Leliel had concentrated herself into a human outline once again. She placed her umbral hands on Shinji’s temples, and his fever broke.

“Wake up,” said Sachiel, and when Shinji obeyed, he saw both Sachiel and Leliel standing  above him, the both of them occupying human hosts this time.

“Go get something to drink,” Leliel said, and she was much better at playing human than Sachiel; there was no delay between her mouth moving and the words she spoke, and she went through the trouble of including facial expressions in her interactions. “You’ll need to replace the water you lost from my visit last night. You’ll also want to continue to eat and drink your fill throughout the day, because you won’t be able to consume anything in the underworld. Come back once you’ve composed yourself, and we’ll give you the rest of your instructions.”

Over the duration of that day, Shinji drank to replace his sweat, and he drank to replace his tears, and he drank to replace the blood Sachiel instructed him to drain for Zeruel’s offering. At dusk, he arranged his required baggage before the two angels so that they could confirm his readiness. It was comprised of his salvaged songs, a crudely sewn doll stuffed with straw and a lock of his own hair, a phial containing a mixture of rabbit’s blood and his own blood, and the unfinished cloth woven from Kaworu’s own feathers.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Leliel said once she had approved his preparations. “Technically, Gaghiel isn’t supposed to allow living beings to cross the river to the underworld. I’ve instructed him to make an exception just this once; however, your fare is going to be much more costly than that of the standard wayfaring soul’s.”

“Then what should I take?”

“I think that for your purposes, that ring on your finger will do nicely.” She stopped to give Sachiel a knowing smirk that he didn’t reciprocate. “Gaghiel’s very partial to gold.”

“Kaworu, I can’t.”

“Please, Shinji. It’s what I want, I promise. Do I need to tell you every night?”

“There’s still time to let them grow back.”

“My father won’t negotiate; he says he absolutely won’t let me marry you if I have any feathers left. Here, Shinji, feel them, count them again; it’s only another ten nights’ worth, see?”

“It’s not right that you should be the one making sacrifices all the time.”

“If you insist, then you can write the music for our wedding.”

“I’m serious, Kaworu.”

“As am I. Spending half of one’s time as a crane isn’t much of a blessing; my siblings shouldn’t be nearly as surprised as they are about this. And besides, I’ve been counting, and in ten nights’ time there will be a full moon. The first time I met you as a human, there was a new moon, do you remember? It has to be a sign; the timing is perfect.”

“You’ve been keeping track? Did you plan that when you persuaded me to become your accomplice?”

“No. Because if I’d had my way, I would have had you start sooner. Please, Shinji, we’re so close, and you only have one more left for tonight.”

“You’re sure? You don’t want to save the full moon for our wedding?”

“Of course not. We’re getting married during the day so that we can properly celebrate my becoming a human by having everybody see me with you. But we can’t have a wedding to begin with unless all my feathers are gone. If I’d truly had my way, I would have done it myself, but that’s my father for you. He must have been counting on your concern for me to hinder my transformation.” 

“Because he’s concerned for you, too.”

“No. Just possessive.”

“Still, I wouldn’t want you making any irreversible decisions out of spite.”

“It’s a decision I make out of love, I assure you. The spite is a just a nice gratuity. Now then, the sun is coming up soon; do you think you can manage the last feather for tonight?”

“… I suppose so.”

“… Shinji? Are you crying? Is it because I’ve been too insistent? Don’t cry; if you don’t want this, then you can just tell me, it’s all right.”

“No, it’s just — every night, I have to look at your back, and there’s less feathers every time I look, and now that we’re almost finished I can see it now more than ever… I keep remembering how your wings were so beautiful, and then I can’t stop thinking about how you shouldn’t spend your life with someone like me; your siblings must hate me… And I deserve it, don’t I?”

“No. Your heart is deserving of love. You deserve everything good that will come in the future. You deserve my name, and my ring on your finger, and everything else I can give you and so much more than that. I’m so lucky. And you don’t have to take the last feather out if it’s hurting you this much. I’d meant for these to be happy occasions, but I’ve been selfish; this isn’t what you wished for.”

“No, Kaworu, I’ll do it.”

“No. I don’t want you to associate these memories with such unhappiness. We can try again later when you’ve had more time to think about it, if you decide that you still want to.”

“I’ll do it. If this is truly what you want, Kaworu, then it’s already a happy memory for me… Ah, I’m sorry, I’m so nervous that my hand keeps shaking…”

“Why don’t you let me put my hand over yours? That way you won’t be breaking the rules. We’ll do it together, all right? Is this better?”

“Yes. But will you tell me more about our wedding to make it easier?”

“Here — do you feel that? I have a heartbeat now. Soon, when my transformation is complete, it’ll be fully matured, and I’ll have an actual heart to give to you by the time that we get married. And in the meantime, I’ll ask my father to let me have a piece of gold from his cache as a wedding present, and when I sell the cloth I’m weaving, I’ll spend some of the money to have the gold made into a ring that’s sized exactly for you. One of my siblings who lives in the sky will drop it into my hands during our vows, and when I place it on your finger, I’ll lean down to your ear and sing the vows you wrote for us in a language that only my siblings and I know, but everybody there will understand that I’m saying that I love you. They’re all going to be so envious of me when you repeat those words back to me, and even after we’ve been married for years, everyone will remember our wedding for being the only one where the angels themselves bore witness… See, that wasn’t so bad now, was it? I’ll go and put it in the box with the rest of the feathers. It’s nearly morning. You should get some rest now. You don’t need to keep staying awake with me like this, you know; in just a matter of days we’ll have all the time in the world to spend together. Go to sleep, Shinji, I’ll see you in the daytime when you wake up.”

Kaworu hadn’t been there when Shinji woke up. When Shinji woke up, Gendo had already shot him and cut him open to exsect his angel core. When he found an avian heart in its place, he’d only had several seconds of time to experience the disillusionment before he was struck down by a bolt of lightning from Kaworu’s eldest sister, Ramiel. Shinji heard later that Sachiel was the one to whom Adam had given the privilege of finishing Gendo off, and though no one had been there to watch, people would still balk years later at the deep gouges Sachiel’s claws had scored into the earth near the riverbank.

Zeruel’s eyes were two white stars in the dark hollows of his skull. Shinji had managed to break free of their hypnotic effect just in time to dodge Zeruel’s swipe at his head, and now Zeruel’s bone white titan arms raked deep trenches into the dark soil in his agitation. His jaw snapped hungrily. Shinji regarded the trenches that paralleled Sachiel’s and thought that yes, this was definitely Sachiel’s brother.

He didn’t hesitate to pull the phial of blood from his bag and break it open to drench the doll, which he then tossed in front of him for Zeruel to tear apart. “Zeruel is violent,” Sachiel had warned him. “Before you can give him anything else, he’s going to want blood.” Zeruel had ripped the doll apart methodically — to send him a message, Shinji supposed — first the right leg, then the left leg, then the arms in the same order, then the head, and then he finished by biting the torso in half. It took him a mere few seconds to complete this process after the offering had been made, and Shinji took the silence that followed as his cue to kneel before him. Cautiously, he stretched out his upturned hands to demonstrate that he meant no harm, then his right hand began to tug at the end of the bandage on his left so that he could unwind it to reveal the cut he’d made.

“See,” he said, holding his palm out before Zeruel’s face. “It was my blood.” And he tried not to shudder in revulsion when Zeruel’s tongue licked the wound to verify his claim. The angel backed away a little, though he didn’t shift out of his attack position, and continued to stare Shinji down on all fours.

“Give him a memory that’s tied to your music,” Leliel had said. “You’ll only be able to stay his appetite temporarily, but the blood will make him drowsy enough that if you sacrifice some of your music and a memory of Tabris to go with it, you can induce sleep long enough to slip past him.”

Shinji slowly unwrapped the silky white cloth that he’d used to package the music they’d written together, and he rifled through the pages until he found the one he’d chosen ahead of time with Sachiel and Leliel’s guidance. “Choose a moment that wasn’t vital to your relationship. You’ll want to save those for Adam.” He extracted the sample, lovingly folded the remaining papers back inside Kaworu’s feathers, tucked them back inside his bag, and then began to shred the second part of Zeruel’s blood-and-ink libation into strips, which he let Zeruel snatch from his hand one at a time. With each soporific line of music devoured, the stars in Zeruel’s eyes grew a bit dimmer, and the memory tied to those lines of music grew dimmer in Shinji’s mind as well, and right before the paper had been depleted, Shinji had just time enough to reassure himself that it was all right, Kaworu would forgive him, and besides, first kisses weren’t such an important milestone in the grand scheme of things, anyway.

He must be so weak, Shinji thought, to be gasping already from the pain he imagined for someone else. In the delay between the decision forming in his mind and the impulse reaching his fingers, Kaworu heard his anticipatory gasp, shifted his shoulders to ask what was wrong, and this ended in Shinji’s fingers wrenching, rather than plucking, the quill free from the wing. Kaworu shuddered, though Shinji suspected he’d caught and minimized the involuntary reaction as best he could so as to spare Shinji’s feelings. Shinji quickly held his thumb to the pinpoint wound to ease the sting, and it came away bloody.

“I’m sorry,” he kept repeating while Kaworu gently worked the feather out from between his fingers. “I told you this was a bad idea.”

Kaworu was quiet. He handled the feather delicately as he held it up against the incoming moonlight for contemplation. Slowly, he ran his middle finger, the one with his ring, up and down the vane, making inaudible glissandos on the harp string barbs.

“Kaworu? Say something; did I hurt you?”

Kaworu ruffled the affronted wing. “Not too badly. But perhaps you ought to move to a different section when you pull out the next one.”

Several minutes passed, and when Shinji hadn’t progressed past caressing the rachises of his primary feathers as an act of contrition, Kaworu dispelled them entirely. He replaced the feather Shinji had been stroking with his own fingers, and tugged Shinji’s hand invitingly as he stood. “Come with me,” he said. “I think it’s finally time I showed you what I’ve been working on.”

Shinji stumbled several times trying to match pace with Kaworu as they traversed the distance back to his home, and to the doorway of the room Kaworu occupied for hours at a time each night.

“Don’t look in here just yet,” he’d told Shinji the first night he emerged from the room after he’d claimed it for himself. He’d smiled comfortingly at Shinji’s guilty expression, having caught him with his ear at the door a few seconds prior. “I’ll show you eventually — in the near future if I’m fortunate — but for right now, I want to keep it a surprise.” The next day, Shinji found he’d enchanted the door to shut him out during the day and keep the sound in during the night, and every time Shinji ventured a furtive trip there while Kaworu was otherwise occupied, Kaworu would sweep in, take his hand, and distract him with kisses and urges to return to the measure at which they’d left off writing their duet last night.

“Of course he’s too good to be true,” Asuka, one of the singers for whom he wrote, and the first person who had identified Kaworu for what he was, had said. “You of all people should know; they’ve always got something sinister that they’re hiding. You thought the gods would send you a muse and there wouldn’t be a catch?”

“She’s right,” Kaworu had agreed that night when he’d finished his business in the room. “You are far too trusting. And while your willingness to love is one of the many things I adore about you, you may want to be a bit more wary. Especially since everyone knows what I am now. I imagine there are people who are quite jealous.”

“And what if I decide I should be wary of you?”

“I wouldn’t blame you. But it would break my heart a bit,” Kaworu had replied, though there was levity in his voice. Shinji allowed himself to be lured away again, and again after every following attempt, and he never did follow up on his half-hearted threat.

Now, Kaworu was practically running with Shinji in his excitement to reveal his secret. He slid open the door and pulled Shinji inside with both hands to stand proudly before a loom. Upon it was laid out an unfinished length of pearlescent cloth. “It’s made of my feathers,” he said proudly, wrapping his arms around Shinji. He nestled his head against Shinji’s neck in a facsimile of the way he would hide it beneath his wings as a crane. “That’s what I’ve been saving them for, when I put them away in the box. This is where they go.”

After the few seconds’ time that Shinji took to be well and duly awed, he said in a voice to match, “It’s beautiful,” and he could feel how pleased with himself Kaworu was by the smile against his neck. “What is it for?”

“You worry about me entirely too much,” Kaworu said. “Always going on about how you’re not worth my time because there’s not much money to be found in songwriting. As if you needed to pay for it in the first place. We can work on that later.” Over Shinji’s shoulder, he looked down at the feather he was still holding. “But when I started working on this, I thought that maybe I could assuage some of your anxiety, at least temporarily. I’d been planning — prematurely, I’ll admit — on selling the cloth when I was finished, so that you wouldn’t have to fret about not having enough money for a wedding. Then, well… you know what happened.”

Shinji remembered well how distraught Kaworu had been.

“But now,” Kaworu said, looking up at Shinji hopefully, “We can have another chance. We can really have this if you want it, Shinji. Please say you will.”

Shinji stared at the loom wordlessly, and Kaworu began to shift around with anxiety. He thought of Kaworu shutting himself away every night, occupying himself with his hopes for the future to carry him through the monotony. He thought of all the sinister things he’d imagined: Kaworu hiding away a monstrous form or some sort of angelic sacrifice or a paramour. “You are far too trusting,” Kaworu had said, but in truth, Shinji had been the contrary, and he took Kaworu’s face in his hands and kissed him in atonement. “I will,” he said.

They resumed with Kaworu’s rematerialized wings on the floor near the loom. The removal of the second and third feathers went much more smoothly than the first, and Shinji would lay them reverently at the floor at Kaworu’s side. However, his nervousness quickly overwhelmed him despite his excitement, and he couldn’t bring himself to remove a fourth. Kaworu was understanding of his unease, teased him lightly about every groom getting wedding jitters at some point, and told him they didn’t have to do this all at once. “We’ll just do three each night like this,” he said. “It’ll be like a countdown.” Then he turned around and gently tilted Shinji's head back so that he could give Shinji a kiss for each of the feathers he'd been unable to remove. 

There were highs and lows that came with the process. Shinji needed another round of convincing the night that Kaworu’s outermost feathers had gone, and the underlying bone of his wing had crumbled into dust between his fingers. But he received recompense for the melancholy a few nights later, when he walked in to Kaworu’s room after his nightly transformation to see him holding his hands to his chest in disbelief, tears of happiness welling in his eyes. “Shinji, feel,” he’d instructed, substituting Shinji’s hands for his. It had been slight, even less than the faint pulse beneath the skin of one’s wrist, but there was a heartbeat there.

The bowl that had been set out for him on the white beach contained the same orange draught that Sachiel had given him before, yet Shinji didn’t hesitate to scoop the bowl up with both hands and drink it in one swallow.

“My father tricked me,” Kaworu had said listlessly. “They keep growing back.” It had been the only time Shinji ever saw him cry.

Initially, the white behemoth that emerged from and was made of the sand hadn’t had a head. Shinji waited for the excess to cascade off its body before he forced out a small, feeble, “Adam?” His vision was beginning to blur again when the violet face bloomed forth like a bruise on its white skin, and he made himself count three times to confirm that there were indeed seven eyes.

The seventh eye opened. “Ikari Shinji,” the creature said in two synchronous voices.

Shinji knelt in submission, and it was a happy coincidence that it kept him from fainting. “May I speak to Lilith first?”

The seventh eye closed, and the three remaining eyes on its left side blinked open, as if awaking from a deep slumber. “Why?” Lilith asked. “Your business is with Adam.”

“You’ve moved Adam before,” Shinji said, thinking of Kaworu’s near hysteria before Lilith had modified the terms of the deal.

“Yes, but you are not my son,” said Lilith dispassionately. “Therefore, I have no obligation to you. I suggest you don’t delay any further, otherwise the first impression you make upon Adam will be unfavorable.”

Shinji pressed his hands to his temples, hoping to summon some of the same curative magic that Leliel had worked, but it only amplified his awareness of the blood pumping in his ears. Through the fear that paralyzed his tongue, he said, “May I speak to Adam?”

The right eyes opened as the left eyes closed with immaculate coordination. Shinji waited, but Adam didn’t deign to offer anything as greeting.

“I think Leliel has told you why I’m here,” Shinji eventually said, bowing his head so that he didn’t have to meet Adam’s eyes. He hoped the posture might be misconstrued as a sign of piousness.

“You cannot rely on Leliel to make your request for you,” said Adam. Unlike Lilith, his antipathy was audible in his voice.

“I…” Shinji began, and he had to lower his head closer to the ground to fight off the nausea. “I wanted to know if Tabris ever thinks of me.”

“That is not something you are entitled to know.”

Shinji swallowed. “I ask because I would see him return to me if he wished it.”

Again, Adam did not speak, and when Shinji carefully raised his head, he saw Adam looking down at his upturned hands. His expression might have been pensive.

Finally, “Children are easy enough to create,” he mused. Sand began to spill out from his palms, and the grains coalesced into the shape of human legs that dangled between his colossus fingers before, like raindrops, they became too heavy and fell to the ground, where they crumbled back into the dust whence they had been formed. “I have many children who regulate the underworld. But each one of the angels is extraordinary. As my messengers, they are able to live above ground, and they are given the privilege of distinct forms. Lilith and I spent years crafting each one of them.” 

Shinji thought of Pygmalion slaving away at his sculpture.

“I perfected Tabris over the span of fifteen years before I allowed him to walk on the surface for the first time,” said Adam nostalgically before his voice turned cold again. “He was my greatest creation, and you undid my work in less than three. What makes you think I could ever forgive you for that?”

“I already know you will never forgive me,” Shinji said through his labored breathing. “I also know that you love Tabris. What I want to know is if he wants to come back to me badly enough for you to let him go.”

“Tabris knows not what is good for him. He gave up too much too quickly to someone who couldn’t bring him happiness because he was too eager to fall in love. You gave up nothing for him. You did not deserve him.”

“I know,” said Shinji quietly. “But I thought that I made him happy.” He unconsciously traced the love line on his left hand with his right thumb, the way that Kaworu often had during the quiet moments they spent just enjoying one another's company. "I thought... that he thought that I was enough for him." 

“You thought? If you are so confident, then prove it.”

Shinji swayed as he sat up to reach back into his bag. Once more, he unwrapped the bundle of music and pushed the topmost page forward with shaky hands. “I forfeit the memory of the first night that I met Tabris.”

The paper was swallowed by the sand. Then there was silence, as if Adam were chewing it over and judging the flavor.

“Infatuation,” he declared it. “Merely the product of fascination at meeting someone for the first time before they reveal their defects. This proves nothing, and such a small sample would not convince me, anyway.”

Shinji wasn’t sure to what exactly Adam was referring, but the stack of papers in his arms still had a weighty heft to it, so it must not have been very important. He dried the cold sweat on his hands on his clothes to avoid further soiling the rest of the music. “I forfeit every song we wrote together,” he said, tossing the papers to a nonexistent wind. One by one they sank into the sand where they fell, and he nearly fell onto his side from the combined lightheadedness that resulted from the fever and the blankness creeping like an expanding sore in his mind.

For the briefest moment, he blacked out, and when he came to he was able, albeit sluggishly, to gather together his scattered senses well enough to remember that he was in the underworld, and that this was Adam, and that he had come to make an offering in exchange for… something. He’d forgotten something, he knew, the aching muscles in his neck straining as he looked up at the giant standing before him. What was it he’d forgotten?

“I’m sorry,” he nearly slurred. “What was I about to do?”

A blinking motion made its way one at a time down the vertical column of Adam’s three eyes. “You fainted when you drank Lilith’s blood; you’ve only just arrived, and you were about to give me your first offering to prove that you made Tabris happy.”

“Right,” Shinji said weakly. “Tabris.” During his journey, he’d kept one memory at the forefront of his consciousness. “Don’t you dare,” Sachiel had said, “refer to him by any other name but Tabris in the presence of Adam.”

He groped around in his bag, found only the cloth, and he cursed himself. He ought to have brought more than that; he could have sworn that he did.

“This is all I have,” he said, burying his face in it, hoping to find shelter in its comforting, protective charm.

“Speak clearly when you talk to me,” commanded Adam.

Shinji let the cloth slither back down into his hands reluctantly. “I said that this is all I have.” His fingers clutched at it the same way Kaworu clutched at his shoulders and fingers and clothing to fight the pain in his dreams.

“Please say you will.”

“In that case, then you should know what I want,” said Adam.

Shinji emitted a dry sob and rested his face in the cloth again, trying to force himself to reach the acceptance stage prematurely and tell his own heart, in the same brusque cadence of Adam’s voice, that this would be the last time he did so.

Adam allowed a block of his shoulder to slough off as a cautionary signal. Shinji started when it burst into powder upon impact. “I’ll give you one warning,” Adam said. “I have no patience for crying. Make up your mind or I will leave.”

The fabric was resentfully untwisted from Shinji’s fingers and thrown onto the sand. “I forfeit the cloth Tabris wove for us and every memory that goes with it.” He scrambled away when Adam leaned down to pick it up, and the last thing he saw before the pain in his head blinded him was the white of the cloth being absorbed into a white palm that rendered it nearly invisible as Adam reclaimed his child’s feathers.

“Why are you here?” the giant asked when Shinji awoke on a foreign white beach.

Shinji turned over, and the effort of moving his body was Herculean. Everything ached. “I don’t remember,” he said.

“Then I have no use for this.” The giant’s body began to dissolve into the sand.

“Wait,” said Shinji. It paused, torso still intact.

“What is it?”

He pushed himself to his feet and collapsed again. He repeated this several times before he could finally stand, knees beset by tremors. “There’s someone I love who you have. I know there is.” He took a precarious fawn step toward the creature. “Give him back to me.”

“No.”

Shinji fell forward and clawed ineffectually at the sand that was quickly falling away from the retreating torso. “Give him back to me,” he demanded.

“If you really loved him,” the giant said before it completely disintegrated, “then you would have died to be with him again.”

Shinji wrapped his arms around himself and listened to the sound of the red waves rolling into the shore.

There was the slosh of something walking through the water.

Shinji snapped his head up and saw a crane. It was standing on top of the surface, lifting its feet as it walked in its customary apprehensive stride. He fell over himself as he tried to run toward it, and when he began to wade through the freezing water he didn’t notice when his body began to go numb far more quickly than was natural. He continued to push himself forward, and he was rewarded with the sight of the crane turning into someone familiar, who smiled and whose eyes lit up when he saw Shinji, and those eyes matched the hue of the red water.

Shinji reached for him. “Have you been there the whole time, Kaworu?”

His body melted into the water just as he was about to throw his arms around the false Kaworu’s neck.

One hour later, Shinji crawled back out of the pool, shivering, and though much of his mind was still frustratingly blank, he didn’t have long to wait before a white cloth was wrapped around him, and he remembered Kaworu’s voice when he leaned down to his ear to say, “Congratulations, Shinji. You passed the test.”

Shinji leaned back into arms that he couldn’t feel. “Have you been there the whole time, Kaworu?”

Development

“Not just yet,” Kaworu said, pulling the edge of the fabric forward to drape over Shinji’s eyes. “There’s one last trial: you’re not allowed to look at me. Well, right now there’s not much of me to see,” he looked wistfully down at his pantomime embrace, and he readjusted the circumference of his arms so they didn’t pass through Shinji, “but as we get closer to the surface, there will be more.” Unbeknownst to Shinji, Kaworu finished his statement with a stage kiss, holding his lips right above Shinji’s cheek for several seconds. “I’m sorry. This was the only thing I could return to you, since they were my feathers, so I’m allowed to do whatever I want with them.”

“No, it’s wonderful; thank you,” Shinji said. “But how could I possibly make it all the way back to the surface without looking at you?”

“I’ll take you back,” Kaworu said. “Tear off a piece of the fabric and use it as a blindfold, then you can just follow my voice.”

Shinji’s head shook beneath the cloth, and Kaworu had to quickly replace it before it could slip off completely and Shinji could see him. “I couldn’t do that to you,” Shinji said. “I’ll tear the blindfold from a piece of my clothing instead. Also…”

In the absence of the usual encouraging smile he would give Shinji after such pauses, Kaworu had to put all his warmth into the way he said, “Go on.”

“… After we go back home, when you finish weaving it, I don’t want you to sell it anymore.”

“Oh?”

“After all this,” Shinji said, “I don’t think anybody else should have it.”

Kaworu looked at him fondly as he set about tearing away at one of his hems for the blindfold. “Heralding my transformation into a human by making me save for our wedding like everyone else? I’ll be honest, Shinji, I was hoping for something a bit more romantic.” Shinji’s reflexive elbow jab struck right through the air where his abdomen would be, and he laughed while he allowed his cloth to slide back into his hands.

“I can’t thank you enough,” he said once Shinji had been temporarily blinded. He bestowed several more imitation kisses to the fabric covering Shinji’s eyes. “For loving me enough to come back for me, for falling in love with me in the first place, for bringing me that music the first night that we met… oh,” he said, a split second after Shinji exhaled a similarly regretful sound. “Oh, don’t blame yourself for that, Shinji, because I know you are.”

“I’ve forgotten so much about us,” Shinji mourned, “when it was all so important to me. How could I? That’s not something I should have been able to forget at all.”

“But you didn’t forget me,” said Kaworu. “Don’t make that face. There is nothing for me to forgive.”

“You can’t promise that you’ll feel that way tomorrow.”

“I suppose that technically you’re right; I cannot predict the future. But I have said it once before, and I’ll say it again: I’m so lucky. How many couples are fortunate enough to relive their first kiss? It won’t do to cry over those memories, Shinji. We have the rest of our lives to make more. Now,” he said, running a weightless finger over the spot on Shinji’s thumb where his ring used to sit, “follow my voice. I’ll tell you where to walk, and I’ll warn you against hazards should there be any. And in the meantime, I’ll tell you a story about us.”

“Shinji, your bird looks sick; his feathers are all falling out,” people had taken to saying, as if it were something Shinji could have possibly gone without noticing. As if for the past three days, Shinji hadn’t been lifting Kaworu’s body to constrain him every time that Kaworu tried to pull at his feathers again.

“Kaworu, don’t do this. I’m not worth putting you through this much pain,” he would say, arms in a straitjacket bind around his wings. 

“I want to be a human,” Kaworu had been saying to Shinji for weeks now. “I want to become Nagisa Kaworu for good.” Some days prior, he had come to Shinji after his transformation, breathless with exhilaration, as he told him that Adam had agreed to let Kaworu remain a human if he could pull out all of his feathers. Shinji cautioned him against rushing into his decision, though he never enacted any measures against it, and Kaworu had spent the time since in a perpetual blissful air. He took to keeping a box nearby during the day, the kind with a coin slot in the top, into which he deposited the feathers he removed. As anxious as a child watching his coins accumulate, he checked the contents in intervals of mere hours. He’d even begun to preen more. Preening was something he did in Shinji’s presence to begin with, as he always wanted passersby to marvel at the two of them together should the occasion arise; however, now there was much more than his vanity at stake. Shinji deserved (should he accept, although, selfishly, Kaworu couldn’t bear to imagine otherwise) a wedding that a cloth made from nothing less than the finest raw materials could buy.

Eventually, he began to look to other cranes’ discarded feathers, because he knew his current supply of his own wasn’t sustainable. But no sooner had he committed to gathering them than he began to suspect that something was amiss. He’d frightened Shinji so badly the night that he came to him, livid that he had been tricked and on the verge of breaking from being thrust back into cold reality after he’d let his warm, starry-eye visions of the future expand. “They keep growing back,” he’d grieved, and though Shinji had spent the rest of the night and a good part of the nights to come telling Kaworu that there was nothing to forgive, that just having him near during the daytime was already more than he expected of him or deserved, the attempted remedies never managed to completely flush out the dolor that infected his mood.

Until one night, when Kaworu, nearly glowing, announced to Shinji that he had received a second chance. “I talked to Lilith,” he said. “She made an amendment to the deal my father presented me. I can still be a human.” 

“What was the amendment?” Shinji asked, and his brow quickly fell from concern to suspicion when he saw the guilty look on Kaworu’s face.

“I suspect that you’re not going to like it much.”

“I also suspect that I won't like it much, but try it, in any case.”

Kaworu took Shinji’s hands and smiled down at them. “Lilith said that I didn’t have to get rid of all my feathers, just my wings.” A rare note of self-consciousness in his voice clashed with the even-tempered tone he’d been trying to establish. He didn’t used to need to affect that tone.

Shinji was observant. “But?”

“But… she says that you have to be the one to pull them out.”

“No,” Shinji had said firmly, dropping Kaworu’s hands and returning to his reading. Kaworu hadn’t tried to press the issue further that night, and Shinji hadn’t been angry enough to either prevent Kaworu from reading over his shoulder or resist his ingrained habit of making sure Kaworu had finished the page too before he turned it. In fact, the initial sourness left over from Kaworu’s suggestion had already been sufficiently diluted after twenty minutes’ time for Shinji to accept his hand again.

But although Shinji may have insisted that there was nothing for him to forgive, he certainly didn’t forget, either. “No,” he said when Kaworu tried again the next night.

When Kaworu had given a desperate plea of “Why?”, he received his answer in the form of a curt “I won’t let you give anything else up for me.”

“What if I want it?” Kaworu asked the night after that, to which Shinji said, “What if you change your mind?” and refused to hear Kaworu’s appeals of “I won’t.”

And the night after that: “There must be something I can do to convince you.”

Shinji lifted Kaworu’s head up from where it had been resting to listen to the heartbeat Kaworu so envied, and he could tell that Shinji was trying to put as much steel as he could summon into his voice. “Ask me again,” he said, matching his tone to the stern way he gazed into Kaworu’s eyes, “when you’ve thought of something that I can give up for you.” Kaworu was fairly certain that the kiss Shinji gave him immediately following this condition was intended to sand away the uncustomary sharpness of their interaction, but the effect didn’t reach him, and that statement continued to needle him over the course of the next week.

“I finally thought of something you could give up for me,” he said without preamble when they had reached a pause writing their latest duet.

“I was wondering when you would bring that up,” Shinji said.

Kaworu began by taking Shinji’s hands again. He rubbed the writing bump on Shinji’s right middle finger that Shinji hated to be reminded of, and then he mimicked the action on the left hand. His thumb slipped over to the ring finger before Kaworu raised his eyes to Shinji’s face. “You could give up your name. I’ll become Nagisa Kaworu if you’ll become Nagisa Shinji.”

The following morning, Kaworu brought Shinji a ring in his beak.

“It’s only a placeholder,” he explained that night when Shinji teased him about it only fitting on his thumb. “I picked up my father’s hoarding habit a while back; this was only one of two that I could find.”

“Then where’s the other one?” Shinji asked, though Kaworu was sure he must have known what was coming before he found the silver ring in his palm.

“I know it’s a bit frivolous,” Kaworu said, “but I was hoping you could put it on me for a matching placeholder.”

Shinji did, and that night Kaworu admired the way it looked on his finger as he started weaving.

“Ah, wait here,” Kaworu said when they reached Zeruel’s cavern again. While he ventured forth to greet his brother with an offering, he allowed the strains of forgotten duet music he’d been holding inside him to finally escape through his regenerating vocal cords. He returned to Shinji feeling lighter from the encounter, both physically and emotionally, and when Shinji asked him what he’d done, he promised to tell him later. In the meantime, did Shinji have any other stories about them that he wanted to hear?

“I’m so jealous,” Kaworu said, pushing his ear up against Shinji’s chest. “Ah — sorry; that was too forward, wasn’t it? I still haven’t quite figured etiquette out.”

Shinji swatted languidly at one of the myriad fireflies hovering around the river before he settled himself back into his patch of grass. The song he’d intended to work on during his visit lay untouched where he’d left it last night, serving out its dual purpose of meal ticket and makeshift bookmark all at once. The book in which it was currently stationed had been given a brief riffling through at Kaworu’s hands, then had been promptly tossed aside when Kaworu decided there were much more interesting things to do with Shinji.

“You’ve spent all your time watching people and you still don’t know?” Shinji asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Kaworu replied candidly. “You’re the first and only person with whom I’ve really interacted. No one’s ever interested me the way that you do, as an individual, not just a member of an interesting species.”

Shinji flushed, though Kaworu could barely see it in the dark, and changed the subject. “Anyway, what were you jealous of?”

Kaworu tapped his chest with his index finger. “Your heartbeat. My siblings have told me about them.”

“You don’t have one?”

Kaworu shook his head. The lantern light made the outliers in his hair light up gold. “Here, feel,” he said, and placed Shinji’s hand over his missing heart. “My siblings and I don’t get to have anything like that, since we have our cores. Apparently,” he added wryly, “there’s a rumor that you can gain an angel’s powers by eating their core. But I don’t think anyone’s fool enough to try robbing any of my siblings, assuming they can even find them in the first place. And nobody knows about me, except you.” Kaworu smiled, leaned in close. “And I know I don’t need to worry about you, because all you need do to gain anything within my power is ask.”

This time, the red of Shinji’s face was quite visible, which made Kaworu’s smile cross the border into laughter. “And it lets you turn this adorable red color,” he said, pressing his forehead to Shinji’s affectionately. “There are so many benefits to having hearts. How does it feel? Does it give you any advantage, being a musician? Is it any good for keeping time?”

“Not really,” Shinji said. “And no one paid any attention to my songs until I started writing them with you, anyway. So there must not be any correlation.”

Kaworu leaned over him. “How could anybody not be enchanted by your music?” he wondered. “I knew I wanted to meet you ever since I saw you writing it by my river.”

“You didn’t listen to it, though,” said Shinji as he picked a stray blade of grass, which he’d been straining in the dark to see, out of Kaworu’s hair. Even after it was gone, he let his fingers linger there. “I think… that before, my songs used to always be so literal, because I’d only write about things that I saw, so I ended up referencing nature for most of the song and then making something up about it being a metaphor.”

“Is that why you were watching me that day?”

“Yes. My imagination isn’t as strong as my occupation probably requires. And I was so self-centered — I don’t mean to say that I thought I was such an extraordinary person. I mean… I remember that I really struggled with imagining anything outside myself. But ever since I started writing with you, I don’t feel so restricted anymore. Maybe it’s because you’re so straightforward with what you feel.”

“Well, now that you bring it up,” Kaworu began, leaning so far down that his eyelashes could brush against Shinji’s skin if he blinked, “I couldn’t help but notice that recently, all the songs you’ve been bringing to work on with me have been love songs.”

“I hadn’t noticed, but I suppose that they have been, now that you mention it.”

Kaworu nudged Shinji’s nose with his own, a bit demurely. “Might there be a reason for that?” He counted measures of cicada droning in the background while he waited for an answer.

“Maybe,” said Shinji, and he nudged back before he let Kaworu kiss him for the first time. 

By this point, Kaworu’s constitution had begun to leach back into his form, so much so that he had needed to switch from guiding Shinji with his left hand to guiding him with his right so that Shinji didn’t need to be reminded of his ring. While they walked, he savored the tangible weight of their joined hands swaying between them, and he was impatient to apply his newly restored solidity.

“Indulge me,” he said when Gaghiel accepted his payment, and proceeded to carry Shinji across his back.

After they reached the other side of the river, Kaworu set him down and once again took Shinji’s right hand in his left.

“If you gave yours up, then it was only right I do the same with mine,” he said. “And besides, it was only a placeholder, anyway.”

Looking back, Kaworu thought, he probably should have asked Leliel to contact Shinji for him in the first place, seeing as she was so much better at playacting. That, and Kaworu didn’t need to remind her to make sure her hosts were unconscious first.

Sachiel hadn’t taken his admonitions very harshly. He seemed to think agreeing, however begrudgingly, to contact Shinji at all was already spoiling Kaworu terribly. And besides, he’d thought to Kaworu, the indelible stain of "eldritch" that remained on him in any of his forms probably worked in his favor this time. When Sachiel had gone to deliver the commission and the adjunct instructions to bring it to its true client by the river at night, Shinji had seemed to catch on that there was something otherworldly at work, because he’d agreed to the foreboding request much too quickly. Either he had tapped into the vein of what they were, and he knew what was good for him, Sachiel said, or he didn’t know and was just an idiot with no sense of self-preservation.

Even though it wouldn’t have any effect on the form Shinji saw when they met (and Kaworu hoped dearly that they would), Kaworu preened throughout the entire day before the night Shinji was supposed to return to his river. He stood in the same place where he’d been the morning that he saw Shinji looking at him the first time, and he practiced for their meeting by imagining Shinji standing there on the bank again and trying to look at him without turning his neck back to hide under his wings.

“I’ll tell you the rest of the story soon, Shinji, and make sure to remind me if I don’t,” Kaworu said, his voice beginning to get that breathless quality again. He gripped Shinji’s fingers even more tightly to stave off the urge to pull him up the last few stairs. “Just a bit more.” On the second to last step, Kaworu let his enthusiasm get the better of him and lifted Shinji into his arms to carry him to the top and out to the surface.

“Surface” really was an accurate denomination. Traversing the barrier that separated the realms of the living and the dead induced the same involuntary gasping reaction that emerging from underwater warranted. The chill and nearly nonexistent atmosphere of the underworld was washed over with a thick, rich, heady summer haze for them to fall into, and even though it was nighttime, in place of the blackness in the underworld there was indigo, and fireflies and stars alike hung in it comfortably.

Kaworu pulled Shinji to the ground, and in the same motion, pulled the blindfold away with one tug.

“Welcome home, Ikari Shinji.”

“Hello, Ikari Shinji,” Kaworu said slowly, shyly in the face of Shinji’s awed expression and his inexperience with spoken language. “I’m…” He swallowed from the effort of trying to push the name past his lips for the first time. “My name is Nagisa Kaworu.”

Recapitulation

It took several kisses to his eyelids, cheeks, and nose, and several “Open your eyes, Shinji"s and  "It’s me”s for Shinji to feel sure that there were no more tricks, it really was Kaworu, it wasn’t one of Leliel’s visions or one of Kaworu’s other siblings imitating his voice, and it really was safe to open his eyes now. “Kaworu,” he said, and this time, when he went to throw his arms around Kaworu’s neck, Kaworu was really there to catch him and give him his second first kiss.

“I’m here, Shinji. I’ve been here the whole time.”

That quickly gave way to their second second kiss, and their third, and their fourth, and soon after they lost count, and Kaworu had to move his kisses down to Shinji’s jaw and neck because they were both crying too much to kiss properly anymore, and that was the second time Shinji had ever seen him cry.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to wait until the next full moon,” Shinji said once they’d both managed to push their tears back behind the waterlines of their eyes.

“I don’t think I can either,” Kaworu agreed, and he guided Shinji’s hand down his back to feel the last of his feathers, revealing the dual scars on his side from the arrow wound and the place where he’d removed one of his ribs to give to Zeruel. (“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he would tell Shinji later. “There’s not much pain involved when one’s body isn’t entirely there to begin with.”)

“Where did you go after you died?”

“I wandered the rivers in the underworld, mostly. There are quite a few of them, and the scenery can be nice in some places.”

“Adam and Leliel wouldn’t tell me, but did you think of me when you were in the underworld?”

“Of course I did. My father kept trying to restore my feathers, but I wouldn’t return to my crane form. Because I knew you would find me.”

“You put too much faith in me.”

“And you put far too much trust in me. Maybe that’s why we’re so good together, and good things always happen when we’re together.”

“They do, don’t they?”

“They always have before. Are you ready?”

“Yes. But could you tell me more about the first time we met to make it easier?” 

Kaworu said he would, and set about cleaning the sand from beneath Shinji's fingernails so that they could begin.

One by one, Shinji plucked the remaining thirty feathers while Kaworu told him more stories about the two of them, and one by one he slipped them to Kaworu for safekeeping, trading old memories with the promises to make new ones. The last one was wrapped securely in the cloth composed of its brethren, and then Shinji turned Kaworu so that his back was facing him, and he kissed the remaining red spots that he could see in the dim light of the rising sun.

Exhausted, they made their way home together at dawn, hand in hand, reveling in each other’s matching pulses, and Shinji woke up in the daytime to the sun in his eyes and Kaworu kissing his neck.

Coda

A little more than a year later, Shinji and Kaworu walked back home, hand in hand once again. They arrived at their door, and before Shinji had even gotten a chance to open it all the way, Kaworu swept him up in his arms. “Welcome home, Nagisa Shinji,” he said, and carried his new husband across the threshold.