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Chapter Text

"That someone's gaze isn't directed at you doesn't mean the sentiment isn't - and vice versa."

- Hanamonogatari: Flower Tale by Nisioisn (tr. Daniel Joseph)

Part 1

The line Asuka stands on is longer than she expected it to be, regardless of the prestigious academy shining there at the end. Middle school students preparing to graduate, just as she is, wait for their opportunity to perform before a panel of judges and their chance to make it into the Tokyo-3 Music Conservatory High School. Most of them have their instruments clutched in their hands in hard clam-shell cases; even more of them are shaking, shivering, their feet tap tap tapping, the echoes of nervous laughter and chattering teeth bouncing off of the cold concrete in the early morning. Asuka stands firm, arms crossed over her chest with her violin case dangling off of her fingers. She's not like the rest of them. She's not fidgeting. She's not even nervous. Asuka is ready for this. All of the training, all of the time she took has brought her to here and now. She watches the flash of birds passing the curved glass windows, shadows against the light. The same flicker past her face, and then are gone an instant later.

The line inches forward and curves naturally around the pillars that rise and keep the concrete pass-way awning above their heads. A finger taps at her shoulder and she waits a beat before turning her head. Exhibiting power and control are important, even here, even now. This is the pre-interview - standing above the others, standing out among the masses. The girl who tapped her shoulder has a freckled face and smiles at her hesitantly, though the end result is practiced and bright.

"Hello!" the girl says, bending forward at the hip. There's a rectangular case gripped tightly in her hand, probably a flute or a clarinet. "I'm Horaki Hikari. You're here for the interview?"

"Why else would I be here?" Asuka answers. She holds a hand at her hip, the picture of casual confidence. "I'm aiming for a spot in the string quartet. Actually," she corrects herself. "I'm here to get that spot in the string quartet."

"With that attitude, I'm glad I'm not competing against you." Hikari laughs lightly. Her shoulders shake, girlish and open. Asuka can't remember ever feeling that way. "I'm here for the wind ensemble myself."

Asuka considers this. Then, she holds out a hand. "Asuka Langley Soryu. I'm the best violinist in this line."

As the line moves forward they chat. Asuka tells Hikari only what she wants the girl to know, but her voice is loud because she wants the whole line to know, too: tales of her accomplishments, her awards, her participation not only in Japanese concerts, but in an expo in Germany. She paints, in bold words and a fiery tone, a picture of her life that seems to reflect the bright sun outside in its whites and reds, her victories decisive and rewarded. If her interested nodding says anything, Hikari isn't turned off by the bragging. Asuka thinks that she looks genuinely impressed. She's done her job, then, and so she turns the conversation around.

"And you?" she asks, "Have you done any tours or anything?"

Hikari shakes her head. "No, no - I have a lot of responsibilities at home with my sisters. My mother...she passed, so I kind of run the house."

There's a flush of pain that rides up Asuka's core, lapping at the walls of her throat. She forces it down. Her mother is dead too, and in a moment of weakness she wants to say something to the girl. Some congratulations for even being there. For not breaking down. They both understand a specific pain that neither would wish upon anyone else; at least in this, they're sisters-in-arms. But she doesn't. Different units or not, she and Hikari are still rivals. And, as the hot bravado rushes through the grooves in which her chilly pain had already run, Asuka realizes too that she has still gone further than this Hikari girl. That whatever words of encouragement or praise she could utter would be better focused at herself, certainly.

"Well, I suppose I can't blame you for not having the time. Touring doesn't give you the chance to do anything else, really." Asuka shrugs. She remembers the tight time tables she dealt with in Germany around all of those perfunctory people - not that she had any trouble keeping up. But all of the events had been in strict order, one after another, with little room for her to appreciate the time until afterwards. At least after the long beginning and the depressingly long end.

During the conversation their part of the line has all but reached the doors. Asuka moves forward on auto-pilot matching her steps to everyone else's, until the girl in front of her stops short. She bangs into the body standing there and grips the violin case protectively as she teeters, until Hikari, gripping at the corner of her dress, pulls her back. The girl she bumped into picks herself off of the floor and resumes staring out at nothing, out into the crowded early morning streets full of faceless people and vehicles whose windows glare harshly, obscuring the passengers within.

"What was that about?" Asuka yells. She pushes the girl's shoulder, watches her stumble a bit as her body turns. "Why don't you pay attention to where you're going?!"

It takes a second for the girl to fully turn around, and Asuka feels her anger double in that time. "Hey!" she yells again. "Are you just going to stand there? Answer me!"

When the girl finally looks up at her, Asuka finds herself at a loss for words. They are taken from her in anger and in exasperation. The girl is shorter than her by a head, and sickly pale. She looks at Asuka with a blank stare in the most literal way, as if her red eyes breed a silence between them that matches what seems to be the thoughtlessness in her head. Her blue hair is wispy and light, and falls in messy bangs across her forehead. She doesn't say anything; her mouth is shut, sealed like a tomb, and as stony as one too, without an expression. There's something about the way the light settles on her, touches her soft skin and powder-blue hair that blurs the girl at the edges. As if she herself is as light as her hair, as immaterial, and with a simple gust of wind or sharper glare of the sun she might flutter or flicker or fade out of view.

"My apologies." the girl says, and the breeze seems to whisk away her words, or the life in them, before they cross the small distance to Asuka with all the weight of cicada husks. Then she's quiet again. Her face would be a perfect mask - porcelain and paint, alabaster and ink - were it not for the slightest tremble in her wide ruby eyes giving something, something unknowable, away.

The shuffle of feet breaks the silent spell, and the girl moves with the crowd again.

"Whatever. People like you don't deserve to be on this line." Asuka throws out. She can't continue with these distractions. Not with the girl in front of her, and not with Hikari behind her. Instead, she goes over the piece she'll play in her head again. The bars and measures are lined up like soldiers and she hums along in review. Hikari has fallen silent. They're close to the entrance now. One person goes in at a time and leaves before the next is called in. The girl she bumped into enters before her, and in the minutes in between Asuka steels her nerves. She finds that single-minded focus she has always worked with and smooths down the churning in her gut, the fluttering in her chest that would give away her nervousness, could anyone hear it. The blue haired girl walks out of the room as quietly as she enters. She doesn't look at Asuka as she leaves, only clutches the hard-case in her hands tensely.

It's Asuka's turn after that and she marches straight ahead, head held high, ignoring the call of "good luck" that Hikari passes her way. She doesn't need luck. Her trust in her body - the muscles she's formed, the reflexes she's honed - there is no luck needed within absolute personal confidence. She doesn't need luck when she could wear her awards like a general does his medals, pinned to her chest as a testament to her work and sign to anyone who might challenge her authority among all of these other school children. She needs a unanimous decision from the three judges she'll be playing in front of in order to get into the school, but she's not worried even the slightest bit.

The room she enters is cold in temperature and tone, an arctic tundra and white enough to match that image. There's a simple platform to stand on, unadorned except for the black music stand that sticks out like a bug on a tv screen at night. She places her sheet music there. Not that she needs it. The piece is memorized, the notes all but calling to her - pre-loaded into her fingers like she's a music-playing automaton. The three judges at the table in front of the stage gaze up with wildly different views. In the center is an older man whose glasses obscure his eyes, and whose patient frown offers no mercy. To the right, a blonde woman looks on with her pen already hovering over a clip board; her gaze is cutting and critical, as if she's unraveling Asuka right there and then. The third woman has a youthful air, and she gives a small, friendly wave as Asuka pulls the violin from the case, runs the amber-colored rosin against the horse-hair bow, and then gives a few test runs against the strings. They sing like a voice, sharp and resonant, and cut into the empty tundra air of the room.

Asuka levels a fiery glare at all three judges at once. Were she to trade out her white dress for a rockstar get up, she might have an image to sell.

"I'm Asuka Langley Soryu. You might as well sign me up now," she smirks confidently, "You won't hear a better musician today."

Part 2

Asuka is filled with a rancid disgust as takes in her new school. It's a bubbling thing this revulsion, battery acid and boiling flesh that weighs her stomach down into her knees. Students filter into the school beyond the wrought iron gate, where the black paint flicks away to reveal the rust underneath - to show its weakness to the Sun. Above the gate is a sign reading Hakone School of the Arts, and just the shape of those kanji ignites the roiling brew in Asuka until she is physically sick. This is a scandal. An outrage. An embarrassment. A shame. She isn't where she's supposed to be. The morning sun beats down on her back, mercilessly pushing her forward. The concrete beneath her grips at her feet to keep her in place.

Still, she holds her head up high and takes her place among the crowd. She knew she was the best in that line two months before, but now, as she surveys the mish-mashed dregs that file into the school with peasant smiles and glassy eyes, she's assured in that statement. She is absolutely the best player at this school. Her shine and spark, like so many stars, will standout evermore against the backdrop of black-sky peerlessness here. The Tokyo-3 Music Conservatory will regret ever turning her down.

"Overly emotional. Aggressive play overwhelms the music. Arrogance belies weaknesses. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable. A total lost cause" The rejection letter said. She'd burned it after reading it twice. Those idiots - didn't they know that her confidence was her strength? That her emotion and aggression were better than the lifeless rote-playing of every one of those children who lined up with her? She knew a few of the people who had been accepted to Tokyo-3 from competitions and exhibitions, and she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of them - none of them - played with the kind of life and blood that she did.

Asuka takes in the school while she makes her way to the music wing. As if the school's spiritual degradation changes it physically, she notices just how run down the place is. The washed out gray-yellow of the walls, the scuffed floors, whose lack of a shine is only more pronounced in the conspicuous absence of wide windows and natural lighting, the ancient hinges on doors that squeak whenever they open to let people in and out - there's even a smell about the place, something between dust and musk and glue that has, in only a few minutes, already seeped into Asuka's clothing. Hakone School of the Arts ought to be destroyed, she thinks, smashed - crushed - battered - but the visual image is barely a comfort. She's here now. The shining glass and steel modern art of the Tokyo-3 Conservatory are as far away as anything, as that time she toured in Germany, which, though only a few years before, seems all but a dream now.

The music wing contains only one major classroom; smaller group and individual rooms line the rest of the wing like flute tone holes. She flicks her long red hair as she enters and, just as she desired, draws the eye of nearly everyone in the room. They learn from her stride that she's serious; see in her eyes and the set of her jaw her distaste; glean from her clenched fist the hunger gnawing at her for escape. Her budding body carries with it a sense of what she herself would call adulthood, right or wrong. The boys, in mere seconds, want her - though she wants nothing to do with them. The girls stew in that shaded valley between jealousy and desire. Only one pair of eyes hasn't looked her way, and instead gazes out of the window and into the blank-blue of the day. Asuka recognizes her, though it takes a moment. Realization singes her with anger and shame all at once. It's the girl she bumped into in line, the one with blue hair and lifeless eyes. There's an open seat at the front of the room and Asuka takes it. Anything for an advantage, anything to show her teachers and conductors that she is serious. Anything - anything not to have to see that girl she'd looked down on, who, like a scrape or a scar, is a testament to a mistake Asuka made.

Handsomely disheveled, a young male teacher comes in and quiets the students. He's tall and slouches with his hands in his pockets, the image of relaxed confidence. Asuka hates him immediately. Music is supposed to be taken seriously, but the vibe the man gives out is entirely the opposite. Still, she has to latch onto him. She has to use whatever means she can to get up and get out of this school with glowing recommendations.

"Class," he says. Even his voice sounds like the shrugging of shoulders. "I'm Ryoji Kaji. Welcome to your new school. Whether your time here is great or not is up to you, as I'm sure you'll all learn. I'll be heading the chamber music groups, which you will all be broken up into today." he smiles lazily at the classroom, and Asuka folds her hands together more tightly to stop herself from calling him out on his apathy. "After that, you guys will have some time to get to know your classmates."

He knows how to conduct at least, Asuka thinks, while Kaji moves his hands around in the air miming a baton. Students are placed into chamber music groups - string quartets and quintets, smaller wind ensembles, and finally, as his imaginary baton flicks at Asuka, piano quartets. She follows his hand movements and, chagrined, walks between the bunched up tables to the back of the room. She feels the glances of other students on her back, but doesn't lower herself to look at them. They don't even deserve her derision, let alone her attention.

Her heart sinks when she finally takes in the wretches she'll be playing with. There's a young boy with sad eyes and a pathetic way of holding himself; a single earbud hangs out of his ear, as droopy as his expression. He keeps glancing at the boy beside him, who has lanky arms and is wearing what she can best describe as a grin of obscurity. It's the last person in the group that all but sets her off, however. That girl, the one from the line, sits with her head still turned outwards towards the window. She glanced over when Asuka walked up with another blank stare - it borders on more than just a lack of expression, and instead it's almost a non-expression, the purposeful negation of emotion rather than the lack of it - but she has turned back again and now Asuka can only see bits and pieces of her reflection floating against the clear glass of the window.

"Pleasure to meet you," the taller boy greets, holding out a hand after running it through his cloud-gray hair. There's a strange glint to his eyes - he looks like he knows more than he lets on, or like he has removed himself in some way from the reality around him. An angel looking down from above, waiting to carry out some higher judgment. Asuka doesn't take his hand, which casually drops onto the shoulder of the boy beside him, and instead sits cross-armed in a chair around the four person group. "I'm Kaworu Nagisa." the boy continues, ignorant of the burning blush n the other boy's face.

"Shinji Ikari. I hope we get along." the other boy offers with a small smile.

Asuka doubts it very much. She ignores Shinji and glares at the back of the other girl's head. "And you?" she asks, her face scrunching up like speaking to the girl is lemon tart.

"I believe that that's - " Kaworu begins, trying to be the good hearted mediator; how honest he is in taking this role is confused by that ever-present near-smirk. Asuka finds the exuberant way he gestures with his hands as he speaks almost irritating enough to swat them out of the air.

"I didn't ask you. Why can't she answer? You, hey - you spoke to me before. Your name, what is it?"

Once more a silent moment passes like a low cloud over the group, the shade mismatched to the splendor of the day outside and the chatty excitement throughout the classroom. Their table, their group, is already ostracized from the rest: in mood, in intensity, even physically, where they're placed in the back corner and all but obscured by the dusty sunlight covering them like a veil; every one of these is a mark, a welt against Asuka's needling itch for attention, for a hold on every eye in the room. It only enrages her more. She stands and slams her hand onto the girl's desk. When the girl flinches, when she draws in a quick cutting breath, Asuka smirks. She is glad to feel this kind of power. Glad to not only draw attention, but to get reactions. Glad to get her way.

"Rei. Rei Ayanami." she finally answers. Asuka watches Rei's pale pink lips move in the reflection of the window and again her voice has come and gone like there's an electric switch controlling it - the sound coming into existence from nowhere and ending just the same. A voice as controlled as her face.

Satisfied, and yet, not, Asuka addresses the group. "Now I can't imagine that any of you have in interest in being the head here." Silence. Stares. Shinji's mouth opens like he wants to say something, but she goes ahead anyway. "That's what I thought. We're going to do things my way, then."

At the front of the classroom Kaji claps his hands twice and hushes the students. While he drones on about the expectations of the coming year and uses his fingers to list the classroom rules, Asuka finds that she can only give him a bit of her attention. Nervous energy sparks in her chest like embers from a fire. It crackles, her head turns to Kaworu, a hand lazily holding up his chin. As it sizzles she finds Shinji taking notes. But more than anything it snap, and it snaps to the other girl. Rei, beside her, hasn't moved her eyes from the scene outside the window and the courtyard down below. Only the way that her hands, once folded in her lap, now tap in silent thumps, can Asuka guess that Rei may be here, in the room, and not gone to some unknown place deep within her own mind.

She hates that the girl isn't taking any of this seriously.

She hates herself for the hypocrisy of doing the same.

Part 3

The end of the day comes far too slowly and without any of the relief she expects from it. She's tired, irritated, the dry September air and angle of the falling light adding to the painful buzzing in her head, in that spot behind the eyes that seems exclusively made for headaches. All she wants is the sanctuary of the dorm she's been given for her stay at this wreck of a school. Somewhere empty and quiet, where her thoughts, twisted shapes of disappointment and anger, could stretch and linger in the space around her instead of ricocheting inside of her skull. She hadn't been to the dorms yet - the students were ushered to their classes and promised that the goods they'd sent a week before the start of the semester made it safe and sound, and now this herd of young people crowd the walkway between the major school buildings and the prefab dorms lined up in planters' rows. They're squat buildings, the dorms. Little more than breezeblocks stacked on top of one another covered in gallons of plastishine paint and about as inviting to Asuka as the prisons they resemble.

In the last girls-only building, past the oddly-cavernous lobby filled with empty plastic chairs like molded stalagmites, Asuka trudges her way to her own room in the very back. The door looks like all of the others; the scratchy, badly trodden rug leading to it is the same shade of dull gray, and the faded paint around the entrance has the same smudges and smears as the rest. She compares the room number on the crumbled paper in her hand to the plastic sign on the door and then crumples it some more, until the sharp corners of the misshapen ball poke her palm.

The knob is cold as she turns it, the door stuck a bit on its hinges, and so she pushes too hard to open it. She stumbles in. And then, with the icy-hot combo of surprise and despair, Asuka sees what she wanted to see least. It's a shock of blue, a watercolor spill in the corner of the dusk-coated canvas of the room. Rei Ayanami is reading a book on one of the two beds with what may have been a smile, though it flees in time with the swinging door and the soundless fury of Asuka's clenched fist and tensed throat. Rei glances at her and then back at the book without saying a word.

"Why are you in my room?" Asuka asks, the rage in her voice poised on a pinhead.

"The dorms are shared rooms," Rei flips a page slowly with a finger tip. "We've been assigned as roommates." She's as listless as a tired child being dragged around on errands. There's a weight to her body that is also a weightlessness, just the suggestion of her displacement on the bed in this case; a presence made apparent by her lack of a presence overall. Asuka hates the way the girl lives this near-ethereal existence, as if she has no place in this world and exists only as the reflection of something else somewhere else. She hates looking at her in general, at the cloudy outline of the nothing girl. If her anger wasn't best directed through the narrowing of her eyes, Asuka likely would've closed them instead of looking at Rei any longer.

"Like hell we are!" The door slams behind Asuka, who has already made her way into the cramped space. Between the two beds, which are placed against opposite walls, are two night tables and a large double-doored boudoir. The room is painted an off-beige that looks to be too afraid to choose a definite hue. A bookshelf stands at the wall beside Rei's bed - and whether it was there, or whether she brought it with her isn't clear - as is the room's only window, a glowing stamp on the otherwise envelope-flat wall. Asuka's end has nothing but the box she shipped to the school weeks before, full of nothing important. The only important thing she owns, anyway, is her violin.

Still, she cannot accept the terms of this ridiculous rooming situation. Her short march sees her beside Rei's bed, standing over her much like she did earlier in the day in the classroom.

"I want you out of here." Asuka says forcefully.

"These are shared rooms," Rei repeats. "And we're roommates." There's little strength to her voice, however, and the look she gives Asuka is that same one she always wears - a statue's face, her mouth a perfectly straight line, like there's nothing behind those eyes but an infinite empty pit that the girl is falling through, ever further into the depths of an unknowing, unseeing mind. Like she's not even there, her body the last physical evidence of an existence long since vanished in spirit.

It's sickening, Asuka thinks, as that same vacuousness rips away the oxygen that had fueled the fire of her indignation. There's no use in arguing with Ayanami. Asuka's sure her voice is barely echoing off of the walls of whatever makes up Rei's mind. Or maybe it's that old image of a rock falling down an empty well - down, down, soundlessly, and Asuka's not sure if there's enough water at the bottom to make a splash. With a tut of her tongue she goes over to lay down on her own bed. There's nothing to replace the anger now that it's gone, only the hole in her chest that anger so often fills. The hole she works her hardest to hide. Asuka tries to count the dust motes floating in the shafts of sunset-sunlight that come in through the window beside Rei, but it's an impossible task, and anyway, the insignificance of the floating bits of not-much reminds her of her own place in this insignificant school - though, of course, she'd like to be seen as the sunlight itself illuminating that dust, the radiance brightening their impurity and uselessness.

Asuka tries this, but she can't sit still. Inactivity rings in her ears like the sounding of a timer, shrill and piercing and urging her into action. She stands then in the center of the room, hands on her hips, staring at Rei. The air is stale and somehow, though it's warm outside, brisk. It might just be the atmosphere, she thinks, or Rei, if the lifelessness in her body is cold where she - where living, breathing, feeling people are warm. She taps her foot impatiently. Her body is working faster than her mind now, pulling the exhausted thing along like a tired dog on a leash. Before the thought fully forms in her head Asuka rummages through her small box of goods. Moments later she finds the permanent marker she was looking for, and then, like a painter or a photographer, stands with her hands making a camera lens - her fingers a wide square, one eye squinted, measuring the length and width of the room. Rei is looking at her over the pages of her book and, perhaps for the first time, Asuka sees a flash of attention there. Maybe even annoyance. It spurns her on. At the center of the room, on the far wall, she draws a small black dot. Rei's eyes widen, though the rest of her expression is still stone.

"See here, Ayanami - this dot I just drew? This separates our sides of the room. Don't cross it. No matter what. I sure as hell won't."

Asuka watches Rei look from the dot to the other side of the room, where the boudoir sits squarely center, and obviously there for both of them to use. "What about that?"

"We'll split it too. Right down the middle. Don't touch my clothes, don't cross this line, don't even look in my direction. You got that?" Now, with more control, her beloved sense of assuredness comes over her, as if she had gone out in the cold without a jacket and found one, warm and ready to be worn, forgotten on a bench.

Rei takes a breath. When Asuka strains her ear, she can hear the little sigh that escapes the other girl's throat. It sounds, almost, as if she is going to speak. Complain, maybe. Offer some sort of truce. Yell or scream or cry, even. There's a part of Asuka that wants this more than anything; if there's blood in the other girl's veins then they can be friends, or enemies, rivals - whatever, anything that wouldn't make it so that Asuka has to live in this cold room and be reminded of her loneliness by checking it against the fact that there's actually another person with her. Not alone, but lonely. Not solitary, but feeling solitude.

But she says nothing. Rei looks once more over what has become no man's land and then returns to her book. The shuffling sound of the turning page makes up for the quietness of her sigh.

Asuka sinks onto her bed as her spirit sinks with a disappointment it ought to have seen coming, a rainstorm on a cloudy day that still catches you by surprise.

Chapter Text

"We want to become artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities."

- White Noise, Don Delilo

Part 4

"Goethe, the German novelist, wrote that quartets are like 'four rational people conversing'. Of course, he was writing about string quartets, but I think the point still stands." Kaji says, standing before Asuka and the rest of her group.

It's been a week since the start of the semester and the chamber groups have finally begun meeting up to practice together. Asuka bit her tongue when Kaji showed the group the practice room. It is a cramped place full of instruments and tables, desks and chairs, and an assortment of nameless junk, all of which has been pushed to the sides and to the back to clear an empty space in the center. They are seated on cold, cushion-less metal folding chairs that creak like the joints of elderly people with every shift and movement. She's sure that the acoustics of the room are about as good as those in a screaming crowd.

"What he really meant was that you four have to listen to one another when you play. You have to respond to one another, correct one another, learn how to lead and how to follow. Not to mention, you have to share in the mood the music makes, and the tone and the tempo. Goethe was right - it's just like a conversation."

It's all nonsense, as far as Asuka's concerned. She crosses her arms, rolls her eyes, looking every bit the teenager she is. She knows that every group needs a leader - even orchestras have a First Chair or Konzertmeister if you disregard the conductor. And Asuka intends to lead this group whether they want it or not. There's no other way, not if she wants to prove that she carries something special inside of her. And she does - she knows that too, because there aren't any other options that would make life worth living.

Kaji has them play Mahler's Piano Quartet in A Minor first. The piece's melancholic tones ring hollow in the crowded classroom, and though she is mostly paying attention to what she's playing, Asuka keeps mental notes on the styles and techniques of the rest of her group. Shinji, sitting across from her, has already missed a few notes and whether or not he knows this isn't clear to Asuka. His cello is low and resonant, and each mistake is like the squeak of a wet sneaker against a solid floor, even when he doesn't react. Kaworu sits behind the group pounding away at the piano keys. She can see him out of the corner of her eye, and while his overall skill is probably the highest after hers, the almost flamboyant way he moves - some carnival musician, or a Liberace impersonator - the way his fingers and hands and arms and face are so open and exuberant as they hop, skip, and jump across the keys is so infuriating that Asuka has half a mind to slam the cover of the piano over his digits. And then, beside her, is Rei. Rei might as well be the harbinger of automated musicians. Her style is, at best, robotic, and at worse absolutely soulless. Every movement is measured for efficiency and accuracy, and in that she succeeds; she is perfectly in time and hits each note without a single mistake. But there is nothing there, nothing there at all that is human or expressive or real in her mechanical style. Asuka would find it sad if she weren't already so fed up with this ghost of a girl who has slipped in and out of her life far more often than she would've liked.

"You're playing a little too excitedly, Asuka. Slow it down a bit - listen to how slowly Shinji draws his bow across the strings. Mahler wrote this pace with room to breathe. Use it."

Burning indignation flashes against her chest and she almost barks something back to Kaji. She swallows her words like bitter fruit. She needs to be on Kaji's good side, needs to use him and his connections to give herself a leg up and out of this place. A stepping stone into the musical world. And while she has three years until she graduates, she knows that every day counts, and every action ought to be accounted for. Her sharp eyes take a look at the rest of the quartet for any reaction to the criticism, or to her correction. They don't have any, or at least, they don't show it.

Asuka nods and tries to correct herself, playing the piece as Kaji expects her to. It feels incredibly wrong to hold herself back, to try to control the fire of her passions. She focuses hard on her fingers pressing the strings into the neck of the violin - so hard that even the far-beyond-calloused fingertips are sting in pain. She slows her tempo, and at the same time, her heart begins to beat too fast. But, for the time they play the piece she manages to do it more slowly than before. Her forehead sweats beneath her bangs. Hard as it is to admit, Kaji was right; she felt the true resonance of the melody as she made lighter, less aggressive strokes on the strings, even with the few mistakes she made. How awful, that the man had a point. That she could be corrected by someone without the good sense to shave the stubble lining his jaw.

When the daily practice comes to an end, Asuka is out of the classroom before everyone else even notices. She slips through the door with her head held high and doesn't wait for any of her quartet peers regardless of the fact that they're all headed to the same place. They all share the same classes and the same schedule, something that, only a week into her semester, already weighs Asuka down with the necessity of her having to keep that anger of hers fresh and kindled, ready to flare at each and every one of them if they bother her for the slightest thing. Except for Rei. For Rei, she holds nothing but cold contempt.

Asuka rounds a corner. The hallways are packed like a busy restaurant kitchen. Sweltering, messy, and bustling. She shoves her way into the hall as best she can, all elbows and shoulders, pushing back against the mass of bodies that push back at her. Asuka's ego is large. Her body is not. She shoves against one student and is shoved back too hard this time. Her feet slip from underneath her and screech loudly on the overly waxed floor. When she falls to the floor her knees burn. Her violin case skids across the floor one way; her bookbag slides across the other. No one in the crowd stops to help her. Asuka's pride burns more than her skinned knees, and for an extended moment she stays there on the ground gathering up the will to move, the will to do anything but slam a fist into the floor and cry out at the unfairness of her life.

"What are you looking at?" she glares at the few students who'd seen her stumble. Idiots. Her knees sting as she lifts herself off of the ground. She's dusting herself off when a soft voice, sounding as though it floated in from nowhere, breaks into her attention.

"Here."

And it's surprising - awful, embarrassing, and surprising - when, standing before her, Rei holds out the violin case and bookbag. Rei's standing far and extending her arms out, like she's afraid that Asuka might pounce on her. For good measure, really; Asuka almost does. Falling bruised her pride - this is like being stabbed.

Asuka rips her things from Rei's hands without so much as a thank you. Rei's skin is cold where Asuka fingers touch as she grabs for her things. Cold and smooth, and blemish-less in a way that only spurns on Asuka's thoughts that no, there's no way this girl is human. She's a marble statue, a vinyl figurine brought to life by some sick Pygmalion. Rei startles back, looking unsure of what to do with her hands, but by that point Asuka is stomping back down the halls, only this time with more fire in her step, anger almost cracking the ground beneath her. Students part for her like her ashamed embarrassment is physically pushing them back.

Rei's face had been open when she handed Asuka her things back. Open, vulnerable, a crease of the eyebrow and her pale pink lips parted, all asking a voiceless question of good faith, of sympathy, that Asuka, with her rage as a blindfold, ignored. If she began to pity the girl now - if she began to even give her the time of day, then who would she be?

She'd be normal.

Asuka can't be normal. Asuka has to be extraordinary

Part 5

Asuka is alone in the dorm room for what might actually be the first time since school began. If Asuka barely has a life outside of classes here on campus, then Rei is actually lifeless; the girl rarely leaves her bed when they don't have classes - whether she's reading, or napping, or staring out of the window with a gaze bordering on mindless. The only thing Asuka's seen her doing besides that has been wandering through the halls where the practice rooms are without an obvious goal. Maybe listening to other people play. Maybe sleepwalking through life. Asuka's learned to write her out, erase her presence almost entirely. She hardly even hears the girl breathing anymore. It's white noise. Drowned out, as are the few times she thought she heard sniffling cries in the dead of night when she, herself, couldn't sleep and held back her own unshed tears.

But right now she's all alone, and worse than that, she feels all alone.

Asuka pulls an old toy of hers from the bottom of the dented cardboard box she'd shipped her belongings in and hadn't yet cleared out. It's a small cloth doll in a red dress, with hair of stringy yarn and a head so big it seems to nod, wearing a wide smile that is stitched onto its face. She grips it tightly until her knuckles turn white, and then she brings it close to her chest and holds it as if it were a real child. She shoves the doll back out at arms length, gazes into those black button eyes. Hates it. Hates it, but loves it and needs it. A frustrated growl rips from her throat.

It was a gift from her mother, just like her musical skills. Before whatever used to be her mother disappeared and left the caustic, delusional shell of a person behind. Genius is often said to go along with some form of mental illness or another, and to this day Asuka doesn't know which came first, or if she's walking around with the same timer tick-tick-ticking away in her head. She holds the doll up at eye level, remembers the strength it gave her at that exhibition in Germany, her mother's homeland and the shining spearhead of musical paradise she has held in her head for her whole life.

She best remembers the lights in the place, all trained on her in the tasteful black dress that made her feel, finally, like a professional. Like an adult. Uncountable faces looked on in wonder as she played for the crowd, her wrist sawing with the bow at the taught, vibrating strings, all of the feelings in her body loosened into the atmosphere like a cloud filling the auditorium. She was only one of ten children chosen for this exhibition, but she knew it, and she knew that they knew it: that she was the best there. That she'd be on that stage again: a solo performance, every seat sold out months in advance.

Asuka all but swoons. She spins the doll around in her arms and lands on her bed, holding the doll up into the air as the future flutters before her like a butterfly always just barely out of grasp, but never so far, or so fast, that catching it seems impossible. Her heart feels like warm honey at the thought of how far she'll go one day. If only it would come sooner, she thinks, then she could leave all of this behind - Kaji and those two buffons, and Rei, and this whole crooked, crumbling school.

"Well, I won't get there without practicing." she says to the doll. Held above her head, it seems to nod back to her with that ceaseless smile. Asuka lifts her arm to dump the doll back in the box, but something stops her. Her eyes itch to shed frustrated tears. A breath, and then she hides the doll beside her pillow, up against the cold wall her bed leans against.

She doesn't want to bury her mother twice.

Twenty minutes pass and she hasn't found a suitable spot to practice. The stupid school has a surprising lack of the kind of hidden spots she always chose for that job - no dark corners, no roof access, not even an unused staircase where her notes might sound like they're climbing along with the scale she plays. Forget waiting until she dies to get access to a stuffy, claustrophobic closet of a room like everyone else. The school grounds themselves, featureless, nary a tree in sight except for at the edges, hiding the school gate that surrounds the perimeter, is too wide and windy to play in either. Every time she discovers something new about the place she hates it more. It's nothing like the state-of-the-art Tokyo-3 Conservatory promised to her in pamphlets.

Asuka finds the school's auditorium soon enough. She walks in through the back door. A single set of lights illuminates the stage rising from the pit that the gradually descending seats lead to. She sneezes; the room is dusty, like it hasn't been opened or cleaned since the former semester passed, or maybe even the one before. She's not sure if this is off-limits, but already she's taken a liking to the place. Asuka walks down to the stage and climbs up, standing in the center beneath the lights. She spins, looking out at the empty seats and imagining them full, looking up at the lights, imitation sunspears warming her skin.

But something catches her eye from above. There, in crossing paths and elevated platforms, is the catwalk where tech crews would set up spotlights, adjust the curtain and the like. Quiet, isolated, and strange - the perfect place to practice. Asuka searches backstage for the ladder access the area; it's an old thing, rusting in some places, creaking in others, and she gathers her courage to make it to the top. There, the catwalks spread out like spiderwebs, girded iron protected with thin rails. At the end of one, one that sits right above center stage, is a solid platform perfect for her practice. Unconcerned with getting caught, her footsteps echo with a metal twang as she walks the length of the path to end.

"Perfect." she says to herself.

All alone, at the highest point she can reach, and center stage, Asuka feels in her element. She pulls her violin from the case lovingly, her hand caressing the smooth, rosy wood, and begins to play to an audience she imagines is watching, cheering, even crying at the divine music coiling off the strings - swooping notes and shimmering chords, a harmony of one. Mostly. She corrects what few mistakes she makes each time, but they still seem to chip away at something she cannot begin to put into words that lurks, crawling, deep within her chest.

When the end of the day flips over into evening she leaves her perch, burying the confusion as the clouds conceal the sun, a candle snuffed, a single ember dying off the wick, lighting her way back to the dorms.

Part 6

"Asuka."

The voice cuts in from the dark of sleep. It's ethereal and short lived, like a cloud of breath on a winter morning. Behind the voice comes a more annoying sound - some buzzing or screeching repeating over and over like an alarm clock. Asuka's sleep is always deep and ever troubled; whatever happens outside rarely wakes her up.

But it's too early for that, and she knows it before she awakens to a room barely brighter than the darkness behind her closed eyelids. It's not her alarm clock, that's for certain. But the noise is still wailing. Worse still, she sees Rei standing above her. Little in life is worse than being woken up in the middle of a deep sleep; when the person waking you up is someone you hate, it's hell.

"What are you doing?!" She growls out. She feels a hand leave her shoulder, and realizes that Rei had also been shaking her awake. It's almost enough to make her want to burn the shirt she sleeps in. "What time is it? Why are you even on this side of the room?!"

It's hard to make out anything in the dark of the night, let alone the fleeting emotions of her robotic roommate, but there's a quick flash of hurt, or maybe dismay on Ayanami's face. Best to ignore it, Asuka thinks, sitting up in bed. Now that she can focus, she hears a crowd passing her door river-like, gushing voices and rushing footsteps.

"There's a fire," Rei says, slipping on a pair of sandals she keeps by her bed. She reaches then for a small blanket, wraps it around her shoulders. "Or a fire drill." All thoughts of danger stop for a moment when, in the shadow-light of night, sleepy-eyed and dressed in nothing but a thin white sweater and a pair of athletic shorts, Asuka almost - almost - thinks that Rei Ayanami is cute.

She wants to slap herself for it. In lieu of thanking the girl for waking her up Asuka rips the covers off of herself and runs a hand through her hair. She ignores Rei and pulls open the door, noting that the hallway is nearly empty already, that the last of their dorm-mates have already left. Rei stayed behind for her. She tastes something bitter when she swallows down the thought that she would not have done the same for Rei.

Hearts beat strangely under pressure, misshaping themselves with with every squeeze and strain. Asuka stands at the door she opens and feels Rei's stare asking questions that ghostly voice never would. "I don't think it's a real fire. There's no smoke." She opens the door wider but doesn't yet step out. "Are you coming or not?"

They step out into the chilly night. It's a deeper indigo, nothing like the black sky her room had promised; the moon is a chalk circle drawn hastily, the craters and trenches too white, the thing itself hovering too large and too close over the brick school building and squat dorms. Students and faculty have grouped themselves up into loose collectives like spreading continents, and Asuka finds Shinji and Kaworu standing off to the side of the shivering, chattering students, an islet visible from the coast. Torn between wanting to stand alone and giving Rei the gift of not shooing her away as an unspoken thanks, Asuka makes her way over to the boys, huddled close against the wind chill.

"Good evening? Or good morning?" Kaworu laughs easily. He has an arm around Shinji's shoulder, and the smaller boy is red enough to be burning a fever. Asuka doesn't even fight the desire to roll her eyes. She'd seen their furtive looks across the practice room, watched their closeness coalesce into something grander, and now here is the final point - they're together. She can see it clearly without being told a word, and it sickens her. They have no passion for music if they're wasting it on love.

"This better be over soon." she huffs, folding her arms across her chest to keep herself warm. Shinji looks at her like he wants to say something, but a squeeze around the shoulders silences him, brings him back into the little bubble he shares with Kaworu, who has already given up on getting anything else out of Asuka.

"I'm sure it will be," Rei answers her. A first, really. It's the kind of surprise that comes from the breaking of a pattern. "It's cold out tonight." She pulls the blanket tighter and rubs the top of one arm with her hand, shrugging away at the cold like it should take a hint.

It's only pride that stops Asuka from asking to share the blanket with Rei. A chill has already seeped deep beneath her skin and nestled somewhere close to her heart. She shivers. The goosebumps on her skin raise like little hills, and she feels each as she rubs her arms for heat. Rei sits down on the frosty grass ignoring the wetness and cold as if she can't feel physical sensations the way Asuka has convinced herself the girl doesn't feel anything emotionally. Pale moonlight, a kind of dusty white, settles itself in Rei's hair like a halo, and where it falls on her equally pale skin it gives her an ethereal glow. Asuka's thought this before, but Rei has the look of someone who could, at any moment, vanish or dissolve into nothingness, into the very air she's breathing. Curled up on the ground Rei's frail form is even smaller, more fragile looking. It stirs something nameless in Asuka. Maybe pity. Maybe sadness. Maybe care.

Asuka looks away. She can't waste anymore time on thinking about the girl, or about anything that isn't music. Even now, in the middle of the night, she tries to focus on the notes she can see in her head, on the movement of her fingers against the thin cloth of the over-sized t-shirt she calls pajamas. It's too cold for that, though, and when a cutting wind begins to blow she has no choice but to sit beside Rei and curl her arms around her knees to keep some warmth in.

Asuka hears Kaji's voice behind her; he must've come up to talk to Shinji and Kaworu. He says something about a field trip he's planning for the chamber groups and Asuka scoffs. Useless, like so much else that happens here. A useless distraction.

"We don't need one of those," she twists her body to look behind her. Kaji's lazy smile lights up his face, and his ever-present stubble is illuminated in profile. "All we need is to practice more. My mother, she - "

"I know about your mother. Wonderful player, she was." Kaji cuts her off. "Really, a shame she passed."

"What do you know about that? What do you know about her?" Asuka growls out, low and tinkling like broken glass. She tears at the grass beneath her hands unthinkingly, and then at the dirt below it until it lines the inside of her nails.

"I met her once, actually. Some big tour I was on as a student, maybe your age."

In the darkness, standing above her, Asuka couldn't make out his face. She wants to stand up and punch him, and then maybe punch herself to give those tears in her eyes a reason to be there. She hated her mother, but she respected her. Or her skill. There are days when she isn't sure if she misses the woman, or the music that would flow from the balcony on warm summer days as if carried by the very sunbeams, or if she hates her more because the woman just had to plunge off the deep end of madness and the seat of a chair in a hospital room.

Kaji had no right to speak of her at all, though. When Asuka stands up, fists balled and shaking, it's a pressure on her legs that stops her rampage like an iron clamp. Rei, with those porcelain fingers, has a steady, firm grip so unlike the airy formlessness of the rest of the girl. But Asuka doesn't notice this, not at the time. All she feels is shock. Rage. Whatever of it was turned towards Kaji is doubled and aimed at Rei, who looks to be trying to say something without moving her lips.

"Get off!" Asuka violently pulls her leg out of the grip and stomps off. The grass behind her is flattened by her feet and petrified in the night frost. She feels their eyes boring into her back without looking and it isn't until she's standing at the school gates - her rage disarmed like a soldier stripped of a gun - that she realizes her lack of a plan.

The breeze is colder now, like running through the steel bars of the gate her makes it frigid. She tries hard not to shiver, not to hear the clatter of her teeth. Showing the wound to the enemy is never an option - even animals know this. Eventually people stop staring at her. Except for Rei. It's too dark to see so far away, but she knows the girl with the rabbit-red eyes has not stopped looking at her.

When she calms, when the students are allowed back in the dorms, it strikes her that she never yelled at Kaji. What a mistake that would've been, she thinks, it might've ruined everything. But Rei stopped her. Rei knew, Rei read her, and Rei stopped her with a single movement.

Pathetic. A sharp barb in her heart, an arrow from her thoughts. The crowd shrinks as it snakes back into the dormitories. She lingers behind. Her steps are slowed by that sick stickiness that fills the spaces in her heart where the fire of her anger had been snuffed out. When she makes it back to where she'd been standing with Rei she finds the blanket left on the grass, folded neatly, as if waiting for her.

She hesitates for a second before she picks it up and wraps it around her body. Whatever fleece its made of is warm and stops the cutting wind like a bullet proof vest. It smells of Rei, she realizes, after the undercurrent of lavender and saltwater and something airy which comforts her heart registers as the same scent she smells from the girl's side of the room, or when they're sitting too close in class.

She looks around and glares at nobody. Then, she pulls it tighter around her body.

"I think that you can be a bit more reserved here." Kaji pulls the bow across the strings of his own violin more slowly, with a kind of languid patience reserved for wiping away tears after a sad movie. The more beautiful sound grates on her ears, and, leaning back in her chair, she crosses her arms. It feels a bit ridiculous, what with the bow and the violin she holds sticking out like palm fronds, but it's the least she can do without blowing her lid.

"Why would I be reserved? This piece, can't you hear the emotion, professor?"

He looks at her, studying her, hand absentmindedly playing with his stubble. He smells of cigarettes and cologne, the heady mix filling her space when he leans closer to get a better look at her, though she's not sure why. It's distractingly powerful, a scent that triggers some sepia-toned memory of her father. Scent memory is the hardest to scrub from the mind. It slips away with the scent itself, and comes back just as strong whenever the source returns. She hated her father.

"Sometimes the strongest emotion comes through not in the expression, but in what you're holding back. Play it again for me. Try to control the sound a little this time."

She glares at him. He is wrong, she knows that, but she follows his instructions because doing what you're told is sometimes easier than doing what you want. As she pulls the bow across the strings she feels full of trepidation. Self-consciousness is in the sweat covering her palm, in the clumsy twist of her fingers. Without the security of the way she habitually plays her confidence falters. Her bow slips and screeches against the wrong string. She nearly curses.

"It's fine, Asuka. Let's try that from the top."

"It's not fine!"

Asuka takes a deep breath and lets it out through her nose. The practice room isn't like the one where the quartet plays. This one is small, more of a jail cell than a classroom. The walls are painted a disgusting milky green, giving the base, musty smell a color to associate it with. Scuffs on the floor stretch waxy black from countless chair scrapes. It's all so pedestrian. Distracting. There are no windows to look out of, just the tiny pane of glass in the heavy wooden door like a porthole on a ship.

"Are you alright Asuka? You stopped moving for a second."

She shakes herself out of her reverie. Centers herself, tries to feel where her emotions bubble from and where they burst. Everything is fire, fire on fire, blue flames and white hot ones, weak little orange lights that seem almost cold in comparison. They rage and roast and roar. Control this - how is she to control this? Her fingers depress the strings in the complex arithmetic music is made up from, but she can feel the desire in her very bones to pull the bow faster, to press her fingers harder. In time, without noticing, she shifts her body while she plays - the music is connected to her muscles, pulls her strings. She'd dance, were she standing. But she holds it back. It hurts to do, to keep a hand on that fire.

And then she hears the wrong notes. Feels in her wrists how off-time she is.

"This isn't working!" Asuka stomps her foot. "How - why does everyone think it's a problem for me to express myself? Look at what happens! Look at what happens when I do that!"

Kaji looks at her with an expression full of concern, even hidden behind his usual casual shield, and she feels burned wherever his glance touches. She doesn't want the concern. She doesn't want the pity.

"Forget it," she says. "The rest of them - the rest of the quartet. They're going to have to just match up with the way I play instead of the other way around."

"It's alright not to be perfect, Asuka. No one here expects you to be. You're young, you're learning. This is exactly the time of life when you should be making mistakes."

"But that's the problem! Everyone here is so fine with not being the best they can be! It's sickening," she feels the bile rise in her throat. "Really sickening. I'd rather die than stew in mediocrity. You're our teacher. You're supposed to push us, not coddle us."

"I like to think I'm supposed to nurture, not push." Kaji answers, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. She watches him feel for a pack of cigarettes in his pocket before he stops, lowering his hand slowly, realizing that he can't smoke in the school building. "Please, try again. Slowly, controlled. Take your time. Paint all of your movements with a tasteful touch of that power inside of you, don't just let everything be an explosion of color."

"That's stupid." She shakes her head. "These things are supposed to motivate you," She shakes her head, "Energize you."

A part of Asuka knows that she's making a mistake. Kaji is right, of course, and his point valid. Nothing in life is harder than changing oneself, however; the pain and the process are that of ripping bits of flesh away and watching for the scar tissue to grow into fresh skin shiny and pink, new but a reminder of what was there. She doesn't have that luxury. Her scars are scabbed over, itchy and evident, having never healed.

The bell rings outside in the hall.

"Do what you feel you have to do." Kaji stands up slowly. His dark eyes are open and pleading, but he doesn't force her. "Just think about what I said."

She wants to answer with some barbed remark, but the anger has drained into something more bitter and tired. "Sure, I'll think this whole thing over."

Chapter Text

"She exerts a fascination, this must be admitted. But I do not like being fascinated by her." -

Appassionata, Eva Hoffman

Part 7

Asuka returns early from one of her solo practice sessions. The late afternoon sun stains everything golden and still, so unlike the troubled tremor of her heart. She'd made more mistakes than usual. At least no one was around to see or hear her; shame can't bloom without the light of other people's eyes. During every group practice it seems that Kaji can see right through her - like he can visualize all of the notes she and the quartet play individually, as indescribable colored strings he can pick and prod at to discover each and every mistake. He often derides Kaworu for sloppy, unnecessary mistakes. When he points out Shinji's, they're often from a lack of power attention or care. Rei's non-emotional play. Asuka agrees with all of that. She just doesn't when Kaji points out her intensity as an issue, or her energy as harm.

The dormitory building is empty and silent, as it tends to be during the weekend. Students, allowed two days of freedom, spend their days at local eateries, visiting local sights. Losers, she thinks. People without the drive to be perfect, without the determination to practice whenever they can. As she nears her room she can see a plane of light spreading from the half-opened door. It's odd. Rei, who is always in the room when she's not in class, keeps the door closed sepulcher tight.

"That's unacceptable." she hears the voice before she passes the threshold and sees the man standing before her roommate. She stands in place for an uneasy moment. A threat? Some outsider who got through the school gates unheeded?

He's tall and imposing, the man, dressed about as utilitarian as someone can be. Nondescript. Beige pants, forest green coat, both lacking any definition aside from the solid shape of his body. Asuka can't see his face from where she is because his back is turned. He is standing right in front of Rei like he has to become her whole world to reach her. Like his presence itself is a weapon, is crushing, pascals of pressure pushing down on Rei.

Asuka moves to walk in, but it's at that moment that Rei sees her in the space beneath the man's arms. Her eyes go wide infinitesimally , almost a trick of the light, and she barely shakes her head no, no. Asuka freezes. She considers going in anyway. It isn't as if Rei's opinion has ever meant anything to her. But the look in her eyes: dangerous caution, a teetering fear - it holds Asuka where she is. The subtle expressions, the tiniest fold of Rei's bottom lip where it's being chewed is the loudest warning Asuka can receive. It strikes Asuka the wrong way, a piece of art defaced, and for the first time she allows herself a moment to really think about Rei as a person, as another human being in the room. As someone with hopes, fears, wishes, scars, and not just an obstacle, or a robot, or a doll.

She isn't given much of a choice. In the moment that she considered all of this the man has crossed the room and he pushes the half-cracked door all the way open. When he sees Asuka the impassive expression he wears doesn't falter for a moment. But hers does - this is him, the man at the Tokyo-3 Conservatory, the judge who haunted her nightmares and laid claim to the very reason she was at this awful school. There isn't a shred of compassion, or even hatred, on his face when he gazes at her for the quickest moment. He doesn't even asks her to move and instead he walks right past her and down the hall, his frame taking up the entirety of the hallway in spirit, if not in space.

"Why was that man here? Why do you know him? What's going on, Ayanami!?"

Rei is cornered there on her bed, though her face is back to that impassive mask she so often wears. At her side Asuka's hands clench and unclench; she wants the relief of violence. She wants the release of an irrevocable action and is holding back only until she gets the answers she wants. The world feels like it's shifted on its axis. Like everything is a joke being played on her. The whole thing: being sent to this school, losing access to her dreams, the gradually worsening mistakes she's been making - it must all be connected to Rei. Rei as a fulcrum, as a lynch-pin.

"Why was that man here?"

"He's my father." she says quietly.

Asuka slaps her hard across the cheek. It's not a conscious action. It's more like a hinge breaking, or a cord extended far past its limit snapping. Rei's head swings sideways. A red mark blooms on her cheek quickly as vibrant as a tattoo on her pale skin. Blood flowing to the surface. Physical sensations in chromatic expression.

"He's your father." It's not a question.

Rei's eyes are cast to the side, her jaw taught, and Asuka seeis, clearly, the kinds of emotions hidden underneath that blank resolve. She always ignored the few signs before this, the fleeting glimpses of happiness and dismay and sorrow. She's made a mistake.

Asuka continues. "Then what are you doing here? Surely you could get into that school no matter how robotic you play if your dad's a head there."

"He doesn't want me." When Rei finally turns back to looking at Asuka there's something ancient etched into her face. A pain as old as she is, the geological scar of a catastrophic event that reshaped her world. The words are simple and quick, delivered with the same cadence as someone pointing out of a window describing the weather. But still they tear at the rage that has captured Asuka and dismantle it. Take it from her. She knows those words well. She said them to herself when she was old enough to understand that her own father walked away. She'd repeated them when her mother time and time again shifted between bouts of clarity and madness in more and more frequent intervals until, in the end, she went to a place where Asuka could never follow.

Rei goes on, slowly gathering herself back from cowering. Asuka can see her try to restrain herself again, to build that wall of blankness in the back of her eyes, but it's a useless gesture. She's seen behind the curtain and finds it see-through now. Clear. "My father wants me to continue with music because he has made me put so much time into it already," she says. "But more than that, it's because my mother played. I have to continue her legacy, or he will leave me behind like he did with Shinji."

"Shinji? Shinji is - "

"My brother." Rei states. "Father hasn't met with him in many years."

She was right, Asuka realizes, when she felt that her world had shifted on its axis. Everything feels like a joke. Two of the people she hates the most are related to the man who set back her plans for fame and success by uncountable years? Rei, before her, is human? Is more like her than she would pray to ever admit? It's a sick joke, and she's disgusted more than anything by her inability to escape it all. No matter the revelation, she will have to stay at this quicksand school. She will have to work harder to get to the top than ever before and now she has enemies in her very camp.

"This isn't funny at all." she scowls, and her voice loses all of its power. The energy leaves her as quickly as it came, and she collapses, arms spread wide, onto Rei's bed. All she has is the white ceiling above her and she hopes to make her mind blank like that for even a second.

She feels the bed beneath her shift but does nothing about it. Rei leans forward above her, careful not to touch her, and looks down. Her face takes up almost the entirety of Asuka's view. The imprint of Asuka's hand still glows red on the girl's cheek.

"I hate my father too, I think, if it's any consolation."

Asuka chuckles mirthlessly. "Why don't you just quit, then? Just get out?"

"Why don't you?" Rei answers. There's no hostility in her voice, no smirk in the words, and it hits Asuka harder because of that. She doesn't have an answer, so she laughs again.

"Your father said something you were doing was unacceptable when I was coming in. What was it?"

Rei leans back against the wall. Asuka watches her stare up at the ceiling the way that Asuka herself had been. "Father is using me as a spy. He wants me to be...useful, while I'm here, and point out students he should try to bring to his school. He wants the best of the best."

"And? What, was no one here good enough? I mean - "

"I only had one person on the list in the two months we've been here."

"Who?"

"You."

There are only so many times in a day when someone's perspective can be flipped entirely upside-down. Cognitive dissonance is like a pill with a daily limit, and side effects include headache and heartache. Asuka feels a migraine coming on now and an uneasiness in her chest.

"Oh." she gathers what little embers remain of her anger. "I don't want your pity, Ayanami."

"It's not pity."

"You don't even like me. What else could it be? Are you trying to get me out of your hair?"

"You're the one who doesn't like me." Rei says sharply, even with her breathy voice.

Asuka can't answer that. It's true - she's almost subsisted off of her hatred of Rei for the past two months in order to get through each and every day in a school she never even wanted to look at, let alone be a part of. But it suddenly feels like that won't be a viable option any more. In the span of a conversation all of her previous feelings about Rei have morphed into a form unsuitable to the same hatred. Rei is like a mirror, or the silvery surface of a quiet lake, and it has become quickly apparent that Asuka can't hate what she's seen behind the mask - the roiling emotions barely held back, the caldera of feelings contained so strictly, and loosened in quick jets, it seems, at odd moments. As much as Asuka would like to call their differences into attention, she knows that her own outward professionalism, her own quick-to-anger triggers are there, mostly, to hide her true feelings. And, worse still, she knows that Rei knows that. It would've been obvious for months, had she let herself see it. It makes her hate Rei in a different way. It makes her hate Rei like she hates herself.

So she stays silent. If she listens closely she can hear other students coming back into the dorms. Life far outside of herself. The stale smell in the room, almost mildew-y, that has not gone away, is washed out here beside Rei. Whatever the scent was she had caught from the blanket on that cold morning, she smells it here more strongly. Asuka curls onto her side. Her back is turned to Rei, but she can feel the attention the girl is giving her even though those bright red eyes are cast against the ceiling, counting invisible constellations.

A memory blankets Asuka's mind. She sees herself in Germany. Trees so green they look fake shuffle past her window on a slow countryside train. She's alone in the train car because her mother was with a doctor. Again. Asuka couldn't stay in that room with her. The smell of death seemed to permeate from her mother's pores, sickly and cold like the grave, blending with the arid, sanitized air coming from the hospital itself. She didn't even tell her mother she was leaving. Her mother wouldn't have been aware enough to care regardless, and though she had her own money, Asuka swipes train fare from her mother's purse. She purchased a round trip ticket to some town on the edge of the North Sea. All she wanted to see were the waves devouring the sand. She wanted to see destruction. She wanted to be dragged out to sea. Her mother ruined it all again - her one bright night, her one big show, and then, of course, mommy had to snap. She recalls the trees again. Hemmed in on each side. Just the claustrophobic trees, when she wants the oblivion of the open sea.

Asuka closes her eyes hard enough to see bright spots in her vision. When she opens them again Rei is looking down at their joined hands. Her hand is cool and soft, her fingers long since calloused. Asuka closes her eyes again and swears she can feel Rei's heartbeat through her skin.

Asuka doesn't pull away, and neither does Rei. She lays there and gathers her strength until the sun sets.

"I wasn't going to show anyone this place," Asuka begins, "but whatever, I guess you can know too."

The crisp scent of autumn air rushes by with the wind that rustles skirts and hair, revealing the bright white of Rei's thighs to Asuka, who looks away with an apple blush. If Rei notices the reason for the sudden twist of Asuka's face, she says nothing. After looking around for any potential witnesses, Asuka pulls open the double doors of her practice theater. She'd been using the place for nearly a month, but dust and musk hadn't gone away yet. They have, in fact, built up over the time she's used the room - mold or mildew growing in secret behind the plaster walls or beneath the rug, dust stratifying on the chairs and steps in different geological definitions. The single cone of light in the center of the stage is almost solid in the dimness of the rest of the wide, empty room. Darkness multiplies distance, echoes the lack of light like a cave does sound. That the auditorium is cold, colder even than outside of it, is its only major flaw.

"Is this where you've been practicing?" Rei asks. She sneezes a puppy sneeze, short and quick, and sniffles.

"Got a problem with it?"

"I have been curious."

"Where do you practice? Do you practice?"

"In the room, when you're gone."

They stand on the stage side by side, silent, the light bright and growing uncomfortably warm quickly. Asuka hefts her violin case over her shoulder and clears her throat.

"I'm going up there to practice," she motions with her chin to the platform and catwalks, "you do it down here. Should work."

"Asuka, why did you bring me here?" Rei asks. She looks right into Asuka's eyes. She always has - there isn't a shred of embarrassment in the girl: not embarrassment, not shame, not hesitancy. She hides nothing that she doesn't refrain from saying, and that frankness disarms Asuka. That openness of truth pushes her off kilter like a child rolling too fast down a hill. Asuka herself doesn't know why she did, why she felt this disgusting relatedness to the girl after the scene with her father. After the blanket out in the cold. After her things were picked up and her pride was reignited. It just feels right, and a right feeling has been missing from her life for far too long. She almost forgot that things didn't always have to feel wrong.

"Go, if you don't want to be here."

"I didn't say that."

"So get to practicing. I'm not going to look stupid on that stage when we finally have to put on a show, and I won't have you dragging me down either."

There's a beat, and then one of those rare, fleeting birds - Rei's smile - skitters across her face. "Okay, I understand." she says. Then, "Good luck."

"Don't make me sick. I don't rely on luck at all."

Rei finds a folding chair somewhere off stage and sits sits right beneath the spotlight. Asuka watches her pull out her sheet music and begin studying it with the single-minded focus she gives whenever her mind isn't floating in some groundless otherworld. Rei, as always, appears to be otherworldly, and beneath the halo of golden light looks again like she may just flash quietly or shuffle out of existence, exit stage left.

With a flick of shame Asuka catches herself staring. It's almost unbelievable. She doesn't want to believe it, anyway, and heads finally for the ladder. She ambles up it, clutching the violin case in one hand, everything set now to the opening strokes of Rei's bow against the strings. The stretch from the catwalk to her practicing platform looks longer than usual. And while fear of falling never even enters her mind, she is gradually - with each step, with every shuffle - filled with a squirming anxiety. Squishy, slick, it escapes her grasp and wriggles harder in her lungs, through the booming chambers of her heart until all she can hear in her head is the blood pumping there harder harder, the force of a river beating against a dam.

It's just Rei down there, she tries to reason. Who cares if she messes up?

But it's just that. The mistakes have piled up, and now it is not longer a question of if, but when she will mess up. The line has been crossed already from perfect prodigy and inches further into the territory of normal. The illusion, it's mirror-like shattering, glints in the back of her eyes. Her hands shake. She doesn't take a seat. She hopes to be like a rock in a river, diverting the stream of music that comes from some places above her or inside of her, given or formed, into the reservoir she chooses. To change the current, to force it away from mistakes and towards a briny estuary of skill and fame and advancement. She runs the bow against the strings, testing the waters so to speak, holding a wet finger up to the sky to feel the direction of the breeze like she did as a child before blowing wishing flowers and watching her one desire - to be perfect like her mother - fracture and break into dozens of little wishes and fly off into the future she could already imagine.

Later, when she climbs back down the ladder bristling with fury, breathing hard, she repeats the tally in her head: three missed notes, four bars at the wrong tempo, a slip of the wrist, a cough. Rei stands beneath the light and waits for Asuka to reach her, but Asuka silently walks past with little but a hand wave behind her.

"I think you did well today," Rei says She catches up, but falls in step behind Asuka.

Asuka's breath hitches. She keeps walking. She doesn't say a word as they wander in the cloudy dusk to their dorm room.

Part 8

It is two weeks after their previous paradigm shattered. Asuka taps her foot on the ground waiting for Rei to catch up after she marched across campus to the cluttered group practice room. Her breath clouds into the cold air and joins the blanket of gray above her. Rei reaches her and wordlessly, and together, they continue on. It's strange now to look at Shinji when they enter the room and see the features he shares with Rei, presumably from their mother. It's entirely obvious now that she looks with the knowledge of the fact. They have the same wide eyes, full of innocence and a kind of childish grace. The same soft cheeks, the same textured hair and long, thin fingers. Asuka takes her seat at the first chair to the left of their semi-circle. She hands Rei her violin, as she had taken both when they left their dorm. Kaworu smirks like knew this friendship would happen all along, and not for the first time Asuka wants to make him eat her fist. So what - she has a friend now. It can't be all that unexpected. When he turns away from her he is back to playing with Shinji's fingers on the hand that isn't being held. But then she feels his eyes on her again. She narrows her own.

"What?"

"I think you'll find it interesting that I was accepted into the Tokyo-3 conservatory."

Asuka curls her hands into fists. She tries burning Kaworu head off with her stare. "Why should I care?"

"You shouldn't. But I know that you yourself attempted to get in, no? Isn't that why you're always so angry?"

"I'm angry because I'm surrounded by useless idiots like you." She sees Rei staring at her, waiting to see if she explodes, with a hand outstretched to offer care or comfort. She takes a breath. "Why aren't you there, then?"

"They turned me away at the door." he shrugs, but the smirk he often wears is gone. Vanished. "Turns out, they keep the right to take back any acceptance they want. I hadn't even walked in before they told me they found someone better."

"Are you implying the same could've happened to me? Because let me tell you - "

"I'm simply trying to tell you that maybe being here was supposed to happen in the first place. For you, for me, for Rei. For dear Shinji here. And that perhaps we all ought to take this in stride."

"My destiny is to show the world just how good I am."

Kaworu smiles more softly than she has ever seen him smile before. "Those two things aren't mutually exclusive."

The bell ring. A good enough sign as any for her to quit the conversation, She runs amber rosin up and down the length of the horse-hair bow. A seat away, Rei tests the tuning of her own strings. She has reattached her mask. What tell-tale signs of humanity she'd shown Asuka are locked in their dorm room and held tight behind the door; in the outside world she hasn't changed at all. But Asuka knows what to look for. A quiver of her eyes, a hitch in her voice, the tensing of a muscle in her alabaster neck. It's hard to say that she likes Rei. That there's something interesting - fascinating, even - about the girl. But it's harder to lie to herself, or at least to add that lie on top of all of the others Asuka has to balance. Lies like: she is happy to compete here; she is confident in her abilities; she is better than everyone.

Kaji enters through the door and is followed by a cloud of some perfume, a cloyingly sweet smell that obviously belongs to a woman and has obviously rubbed off on him after some back room tryst. Asuka rolls her eyes. His stubble is the same size it always is, and she knows she's correct in assuming that it's a look he deliberately develops. He quiets the room with by clearing his voice obviously and loudly.

"Before we begin practicing, I want to formally announce the piece you four will be playing next month in your first student expo."

A twinge of discomfort flashes beneath Asuka's skin before she wills it away. To her left , Shinji doesn't even try to hide his nervous grimace. Rei's gaze flickers over to her for a quick second. Nonjudgmental. Maybe concerned. Kaji paces slowly from the left to the right and pauses with his hands in his pockets when he stops. Slouching like he's still a college student. Asuka rolls her eyes again.

"For what it's worth," Kaji says, almost hiding a smile. "I took a look at what each and every one of your weaknesses are, and I've decided that you'll be playing Brahms' Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor. It will be hard. I've chosen it to be hard. But maybe it'll all work out."

He hands out the sheet music to each member of the chamber group and then plays the piece once out of the dusty old radio in the back of the room. Asuka follows along with her eyes, already upset as she listens to the awful rendition coming from the speaker. She can hear it, the places where she will need the utmost control - on those quick jumps and manic strings, where even a touch more emotion than already necessary would unbalance the piece like there's too much weight on a scale. It's clear to her too just how easy it would be for the rest of the chamber group to sink the thing, to completely decimate the piece and its movements. Begrudgingly, she has to praise Kaji for the choice. There are few better ways to test their resolve or their improvements - or lack there of. A great choice, actually.

Not that she'd actually tell him that.

"In better news," he smirks. "We're going on a trip this weekend. I've already cleared it with those stuffy higher ups. Think of it as a...bonding experience."

Asuka isn't sure how he's done it, but Kaji rented out a hotel's pool for a few hours. The hotel sits on the edge of a beach that stretches miles across. Gray sand, gray water, gray sky. It's the off season, and the whole place is arid with emptiness as they carry their instruments into the pool room through hallways without even a hint of life. The humidity in here is sticky and uncomfortable. The air is colored with the chlorine. She tastes it in the back of her throat every time she breathes, stinging nettles and bleach. Lights under the water grant the otherwise washed out room the phantasmagorian glow of bright sea-glass.

He asks them to play the Brahms' piece they'd studded for the past week. Something about the quality of the acoustics of the room - the echo off the water slick walls that return sounds doubled and tripled over itself, sound waves amplified by the high ceilings. He wants them to hear the music they make thrown back at them, to hear their mistakes and mishaps, their speed and technique over and over again. It feels like torture.

Asuka's sick. She feels it in her blood, and this nauseas room radiates toxicity from the walls themselves. She feels it in her fingers, which slip from string to string slick with her sweat and discordant - screeching, when the bow scratches out the wrong notes time after time. Her heart beats in her ears louder even than the dizzying echo assaulting her ears.

She hears herself scream, but doesn't feel it folding out of her throat.

"Asuka - " Rei whispers. She stopped playing. Everyone has, and they stare at Asuka.

She hadn't heard her own scream, but underneath it - a current, like the undertow, Rei's voice cut through the remains of her outburst; quiet, bodiless words that appeared in her head instantly, bypassing all of the useless apparatus in her ears.

"Asuka - " Rei repeats, "What is it?"

She almost flings her violin to the ground, but stops herself at the last seconds. They, the quartet and Kaji, are alone in the pool room but she feels watched by the world as if the walls themselves have eyes. Blank, white eyes, blinking at once open, close, watching her.

What is it?, Rei asked. In some working section of her mind, Asuka tries to form complete thoughts by squeezing disparate syllables together in her head, like trying to build a wall without stone and brick and mortar. She watches from that same working part of her mind when Shinji lifts a weak hand to help in a disgusting display of spinelessness. He never leaves his seat.

"This entire thing is ridiculous. Stupid. I don't need some gimmick to know how I'm doing!" She places her things neatly on the chair she'd been sitting on and, trailing what little remained of her pride behind her, walks out of the pool room before saying something to Kaji that she can't take back.

Night has fallen in the hours since she left. Waves crash against the shore and a storm lights up the night sky and she can't tell how far away it is. Distance disappears in the endless, expansive ocean before her. Nothing has a position in the lengthening of forever. Her face burns with an emotion between embarrassment and shame. She rubs at tear trails on her cheeks that she insists to herself are just the result of the ocean breeze. Either way she tastes the stinging salt on her tongue.

She doesn't hear Rei approach her over the roaring of the waves. Rei is always quiet - her element is air: dry and wispy, soundless, her footsteps never really touching the ground, her voice impossible to picture as color. It's the same now as a storm approaches and strikes the rolling ocean with lightning. Asuka wishes she were like that lightening. Bright. Brilliant. Dangerous. Captivating.

"Do you feel better now?" Rei asks. Not, why, not where have you been, not how could you. There is no judgment in her voice, not even now as Asuka's learned to listen beneath it, to find the buried emotion that's carried by everything the girl says. Her lungs squirm. The kindness hurts.

"What are you even doing out here?"

"It's raining."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"You should come in soon. You don't want to get sick."

"I'm the only one who knows what I want."

"What do you want, Asuka?"

She won't answer. She can't answer, not really. It's both obvious and everyday somehow further from possibility. "What do you want, Rei? I never asked you to care about what I was doing. I never asked you to care about me."

"You didn't have to. You have no one else to do that."

"What's it to you!?" Asuka flings herself at Rei. She grabs the collar of the girl's coat in her hand ready to ring her throat. Rei's stare seems to look right through Asuka, through to her core, and it hurts to have anyone or anything that close.

"Your hands are cold. Why don't we go in?"

Rei's eyes are soft and calm and deathless in relation to the rushing ocean behind her. They are the red of shattered rubies; they slice and cut. She looks away. Drops the girl down onto the sand.

She tastes again the stinging salt on her tongue.

The hotel room smells like every other, an identity-less non-fragrance, the hint of freshness beneath heavy cloth. The same smell coming off of the blankets and the pillowcases, the thick curtains, the boringly patterned rug, the fake wood grain, the air conditioner. She thought the hotel might be nicer - from the outside there's something a bit more grand being promised in all of the gloss and shine, but this is boring, this is like some roadside motel. Nothing at all like the villa she'd stayed in in Germany. She closes the curtains in front of the only windows in the room to block out the flashes of lightning that still crack above the sea.

She sits on the edge of the single bed in the room gazing at the blank tv, an old tube machine in a cheap furniture store stand. It wasn't knowledge she actually had, but if Kaji was paying for the place, she imagines it might've been cheaper for him not to buy a room for the girls with two beds. Asuka considers stealing the blanket off of the mattress and sleeping on the floor, but there's a weakness radiating through her body that can be solved only through immediate sleep. Wearing little more than a thin camisole and a pair of panties, the cold air wraps around her shoulder and raises goosebumps. The bed beneath her exposed thighs is itchy. A thought passes through her head, unimpeded and disconnected from the rest, about whether it is okay that she is in her most boring and practical under-things, and if Rei would care about their lack of appeal.

She buries the thought beneath a static of mindlessness.

It's then that Rei emerges from the bathroom just as undressed; she's thin enough that Asuka can count the outline of her ribs. She rubs her hair carelessly with a towel, wiping the rain and salt wind from her wispy locks. Asuka's own damp hair sticks to the back of her neck.

Rei stands in front of her before she even notices. "Here, your hair's wet too."

"Stop, stop, I can do it." Asuka snatches the towel when Rei leans in to wrap it around her head. She doesn't want to be pitied so much, to have all of this attention ladled on her. It all just runs through and dries out, the way rain falls through desert crags and into the heart of the ground without nurturing a thing - disappearing as quickly as it hits the dirt. Rei's expression doesn't change, though her eyes linger for longer than they should before she walks over to the edge of the room and flicks the lights off. Everything then is black, and the black of the night itself sucks even the minute brilliance of the alarm clock's red numbers away until they look flat, two dimensional, the vitality draining as the seconds tick by.

"Your violin is in the closet." Rei answers the question that Asuka hadn't yet asked.

The space across from her on the mattress sinks, but just barely. Rei is light, frail and light, and nearly weightless. It's like she doesn't exist, not really, not in any physical way outside of Asuka's head. At this point she would hardly be surprised if that were the case, if she were making this whole thing up.

She doesn't want to consider what it would say about her if she hated her own imaginary friend.

"What did Kaji say when I left?" She huffs. "Never mind, it doesn't matter. I just want this trip to be over with."

That weariness has soaked into the very marrow of her bones. Even sitting up hurts, sends waves of pain barely countered by the anger that fills her for so many hours of the day. She climbs up the bed and lays her head on the crinkling pillow, stares up at the infinite night between herself and the ceiling.

"We're heading back to the dorms. You don't like being there either."

"I know. I know! You don't have to remind me, Ayanami. I don't need your help. I don't need any of this."

It's too dark to see in any clarity but there's a slight change in Rei's breathing that might be regret. Maybe sadness. When Rei sinks into the bed beside her, also facing up at the ceiling, the silence between them is expansive. Abyssal. Asuka hates it, hates that the first person she's connected with on even the smallest level in forever might have been offended at her words. She hates, just a little bit less, that she feels anything about Rei at all.

She twists to lie on her side and face Rei before her mind catches up with the actions. There's a beat, a slow second where she watches the girl in profile. Rei has a soft face: oval and feminine even if her features are somewhat plain. Her long eyelashes match the cornflower blue of her hair, and her eyes, watching nothing on the ceiling, still keep her thoughts hidden behind a flat shine. Rei's breasts are small, molded delicately like the rest of her, but their shape is entrancing and they heave when her chest expands with her breaths. Asuka finds herself taken by the sight.

Then taken by Rei's eyes, when she finally turns onto her own side to stare back at Asuka. Rei's mouth is closed, her lips darker than her skin in the night, flush with blood. The urge to speak is filling Asuka. She needs to fill the distance, color the silence with words or nonsense and Rei sure isn't going to do that.

So she leans in and kisses Rei. She captures the girl's lips, and those two lips might just be the warmest thing on the girl's body. They're wet too, and soft, and surprisingly Rei kisses her back with nearly as much energy. Maybe Rei had been waiting to do this for a long time. Maybe Asuka herself had. But it's better than silence, and the sound of Rei's breathing sends chills up her spine. Her hands hold the other girl's face where she had once slapped Rei, and the irony doesn't escape her.

It was a mistake, though, to do this. A mistake. Her chest trembles in slow waves that grow into rapid quakes. This kiss is right. It is very, very wrong. The fog of her confusion only deepens until she's lost in the emotions that fill her rib cage and sink her stomach and curdle her brain. The shaking in her chest reaches her shoulders, travels up her arms and down to her hands until she can't grasp Rei's face tightly enough but she's trying she's trying because Rei is all she has right now, she's all that exists outside of Asuka and her tears are timed to the rumble of thunder outside that rattle the window. Rei's hands brush through her hair so gently that Asuka chokes as she cries. Everything is a barbed wire loop, everything is a burning circle, everything is at once too much and too little to matter at all, now and never. Her tears are hot and angry and bitter and she hates herself more than ever before because even this, even something she can't lie to herself about desiring, is being ruined by her own heart.

"Maybe, some day, you won't feel like you have to cry so often." Rei whispers against her lips after Asuka's stop moving. It's incredible that Rei can say things like that so normally, so straightforward. The redhead can taste her own tears. She's sure Rei can too.

"Shut up." She answers before turning her back to Rei and curling into herself.

Outside of their room the storm stretches still further into the horizon over the ocean. They cannot see the flashes - the curtains are too thick - but Asuka believes she can feel the lightning scar the sky in jagged wounds that time themselves to the stuttering beat of her heart.

Part 9

She sees it as punishment, having to study here in this dank room with Shinji of all people. The Hakone School of the Arts' library is a small, cramped space where blocky, disheveled bookshelves don't tower so much as they crowd and push like commuters on a rush hour train. The mold smell that permeates the rest of the school is concentrated in this one room, as if the place had once been flooded and the books that survived festered with sickly mildew. Asuka sees the table where Shinji sits from where she stands, and she knows that whether she squats between the sticky-floored aisles or shares the table with her spineless classmate, she can't leave.

"Asuka?" Shinji calls out from his seat. He's been watching her for a minute or two now, his eyes sticking to her in a way she isn't sure is perverted, but sure makes her uncomfortable. His voice is like a wilting flower, struggling to stretch to her ears and ending in futility, bent and weak. She hates it, hates him, but they were paired up and she has no choice but to tolerate him. She's on thin ice as it is, what with the scene she caused at the hotel. Shame, like mold, only grows more as darkness and wetness compounds it. Asuka needs the sun to shine on her again to clear out all of the blight.

"What." It's barely a question.

"I think I have enough books on Brahms if...if you'd like to share."

She looks him up and down, huffs a sigh, and pulls out a chair beside him. It scrapes against the floor and Asuka takes some pleasure in the way Shinji cringes at the sound.

"Do you want to take the early life section, or?"

"I don't need your help, I can do the whole thing myself if I have to."

"But Mr. Kaji said that we should split the work? We were paired together to learn more about Brahms to help us with - with understanding what we're playing."

"He said that because he doesn't trust you dimwits to actually be able to do a full report. I'm sure he knows that I can."

She watches Shinji open his mouth to speak, then close it while he thinks of something else to say. Again, the way she can shut the boy down, how uncomfortable he looks when she's around - she loves it. Loves the power. At least here and now she doesn't feel as if she can't do the one thing she's been training her whole life to do.

"I'm sure that's true," he finally says. It looks like he has more to add, an and or a but, some conjunction that could connect his thoughts to hers, and yet nothing else comes out of his mouth. It's easily evident that Shinji has problems connecting to others. The slump of his shoulders when he's out of class, like he's hiding his head to avoid his classmates, the nervous jitter of his eyes when he's in public - Kaworu not withstanding, Shinji must be very lonely. Even his own sister avoids him. Asuka knows what it's like to be alone. A life like an empty plastic package retaining the shape of what was there, and a constant reminder of what won't be back.

What she doesn't understand is how Shinji just curls up, a scared cat in a cardboard box on the side of the road. How he lets the world tower over him and casts his eyes to the ground. Weakness is a stench on him, like body odor, and she can smell it from a mile off sour and rank. She's managed to keep herself clean of that. At least, she's tried her hardest.

"Anyway, just pass over a few of those books, alright? Don't get them sweaty, the way your hands always are."

"Hey!"

She drags her finger down the pages and her eyes follow, a wake of words that don't hold water in her mind. Brahms had an interesting life, sure - a child prodigy so skilled in both composition and performance that he struggled to balance his time between the two - but she doesn't see how knowing any of this is important. Brahms wrote some good music, but he's dead now. He's dead, and it's Asuka's time to shine.

"He isn't known for it," Shinji states, interrupting Asuka as she completes a paragraph. She looks him over, eyes narrowed, but says nothing. "But Brhams knew some cello too. I'm kind of happy to learn that."

He doesn't look at her as he says this. He's smiling at his paper with strange focus, genuinely happy about the little factoid he just picked up as if it were an interesting rock on the sidewalk.

"Yeah?" she humors him. There isn't much else to do in the tiny library, and she's all but given up on the paper for now. Brahms and his life are too far away for her to care about even if his music is timeless. A paradox, the content overcoming the creator, the contextual brackets of time falling away in showsheets to reveal the true worth beneath.

"I like to think that, maybe once, he was just like us. Doing his best, trying to live up to this big shadow of musical history. His father," Shinji chokes on his words, though he looks far from crying. His face is red, his hands clenched. If there is anything in this boy that isn't pathetic, this is what it's borne. Asuka's not too impressed. Surprised, maybe. "His father was also a musician. I wonder how Brahms felt."

"Your father, that Gendo guy. Is he a musician?" Asuka asks. She assumes he is, but it's not a given. Perhaps he just likes control. Perhaps he is envious of what he can't do, and desires to own those who can.

Shinji's fearful eyes, large and brown and shaking, snap to Asuka. "You know?"

"Rei's my roommate. And your sister."

"Daddy's little girl, you mean." Shinji says with a tone that implies some grinding disgust. At Rei. At his father. Maybe at himself.

"You know her well enough, if that's what you think."

"Father was a musician, but he hasn't played anything professionally in years. Supposedly after mother passed, or so I'm told. He's focused only on raising the best student in her place since then."

"And you weren't enough."

"I don't care anymore." Shinji says, obviously lying to himself and Asuka alike. "He never wanted me in the first place."

Between them, the unfinished report and the open books lay all but forgotten. Asuka wonders if Kaworu and Rei are working as poorly as she and Shinji. Then she wonders why any of it matters at all.

"Who cares what you're father thinks?" she looks him in the eye as she says this. "It means nothing. Do everything for yourself and forget everyone else." Asuka declares. It feels like the right thing to say. It's what she herself wants to believe. There are days when she does. There are far more when she doesn't.

Avoiding her eyes, it looks more like Shinji is going to ignore her. Still, as he flips through another biography, he says with the smallest of smiles, "Thank you, Asuka."

It's a warm sentiment. Sweet in a way she didn't expect. Sticky, but like a cinnamon bun and not the floor in the room. Wholesome.

It catches her off guard, a line drive when you expect a pop fly. Something venomous flows to the tip of her tongue like acidic spit, but she can't get it past her teeth. She hates Shinji. She hates all of this. The angry rebuttal still never forms. She turns back to the work instead. Easier to be buried in the words of a dead man than face the live one beside her.

When the color scheme of the day shifts to evening hues her eyes are drawn to flashes of blue and gray at the library entrance. Rei is standing beside Kaworu, her face composed, her red eyes settled on Asuka resolutely, assuredly, rightly. Something uncomfortable itches in Asuka's chest as if she swallowed stinging nettles that roll around her ribcage. Beneath her breath she mutters something about impatience and slams her books closed, gathers her things in a messy pile she shoves into her book bag. Organization is never a priority for the rushed in the way it is a privilege for those who take their time.

"We did good today," Shinji looks up from collecting his own things with hopeful eyes. Again, the sentiment prickles Asuka's skin. All of this...niceness, team work. She's unsuited for it.

"The report doesn't matter. What matters is how we do at the show next week. Don't get a big head."

Asuka pushes past both of her other band mates and into the crowded hall; with the emergence of the evening, students coalesce into a mingled mass on their way to and from the cafeteria. This stupid report threw off her usual schedule and she wants to eat so that she can get on with her life. It isn't a surprise when Rei catches up and keeps in step. She didn't have to look to know that the girl would. At this point she can sense Rei through some primitive receiver in her brain, a left over from the ancient past. It's not as if she could rely on hearing Rei, or on seeing past the hazy aura of her existence. Asuka has to rely on her other senses: the animal warmth of Rei, the human scent mingling with whatever fragrance Rei calls her own. Or on taste. Her eyes flick to Rei's pale pink lips. She looks away, red faced. On touch. Asuka's body reacts instinctually, some buzzing blood around her heart, a singing in her skin, Her hand drifts until it slides against the soft porcelain of Rei's skin. Then she jolts it back to her own body, clutches her teal skirt tightly in a fist, coughs.

"Have a good evening, Asuka." Kaworu calls with his smirking voice. She knows he saw the whole thing. She knows that he knows that she knows he saw the whole thing. It takes most of her self control not to turn around and slap him.

But it's while she travels through the dusty halls and cramped passages of the school listening to Rei discuss the boring ins-and-outs of her far more successful afternoon with Kaworu that Asuka is struck - blindsided - by the fact that she truly feels content. Feels uninhibited, untroubled joy in the simple turn of events as they fell before her in neat rows: the comfortingly mundane day of classes, the after-school project and conversation with Shinji, being picked up by Rei (which was an unplanned and gently pleasant surprise). The boring, innocent delight of knowing there's someone waiting for you to share your uneventful day with as it becomes an uneventful night. The domestic bliss of an unexceptional life.

This is the first time she has had so much to lose, and despite that, like discovering a vulnerable animal alone in the rain, it is unexpected and humbling and pitiable all at once.

It's the most terrified she has felt in a long time.

Chapter Text

"The bathtub isn't a river but I take her there."

- Fish in Exile, Vi Khi Nao

Part 10

Asuka perfected applying makeup at age 11.

She remembers that span of a week well. Her mother slowly decaying in the hospital again, blank-eyed when Asuka went to visit her, blank-eyed when she left. Father already gone a year and calling even less than he did when he was around. The nurses didn't have time for her, not like they did when she was 7 or 8.

So she stole her mother's makeup kit. Her mother kept it beneath the vanity mirror where she would fix herself up before shows, before traveling or going out on the town. Rituals helped keep her in line, or they were supposed to. Asuka liked to sit next to her mother, hear her talk about music, about people she played with and liked, or played with and hated, or wanted to play with as she applied foundation, gave life and length to her lashes.

Asuka spent that week clutching her doll and staring into the streaky mirror of a hospital bathroom applying makeup, staining her lips, coloring her cheeks, powdering her skin. It took days and days until she thought she looked good. A nurse caught her on the first day, scrubbed her cheeks until they were raw and red and stung like she had been slapped. But she got better. Learned the basics quickly, learned what didn't work. She has always been a quick learner. When her mother got better - for some time, at least - at the end of that week, she stopped wearing it. Doesn't wear it normally, saves it for those special occasions. Like concerts. Like recitals. Like Germany.

Like now.

She's locked the door to the communal bathroom in her wing of the dorm building. It's easy for her to ignore the pounding of the other girls outside, the calls of "I'm getting a janitor!", as calmly applies foundation. Rituals help keep her in line, or they are supposed to. The mirror in the bathroom, cheap as it is (like everything else in this school, she thinks) is still better than the one in her and Rei's room. She goes on methodically, focusing on the brushes, on the powders and applicators, taking belly deep breaths to calm her heart. The show is in an hour and a half. She's mortified.

"Asuka." Rei calls through the door, seemingly unbothered by the entire situation. "Kaji wants us in 15 minutes."

"Kaji can wait. I have to be perfect before I step out onto that stage, and I mean perfect. Tonight's the night I show everyone exactly what I can do."

Her hand shakes. She grinds her teeth.

The dress she chose for tonight is the one she wore during her show in Germany. It fits her closely - but not too closely - and ends near her knees in the slightest of flares. The neckline is on the safe side of teasing, the back neat and tasteful, and zippered up. She looks good and she knows it, but of course, the most important part is going to be how she plays. She closes her eyes, tries to imagine the blood pumping around her body, the energy in her hands and fingers and wrists. They must be perfect. they must be healthy. They must not fail her.

She finishes tying her hair up neatly, slips two big clips on either side of her head, and nods to herself. Acceptable. Beautiful. Nerves on fire.

Asuka is halfway through packing up her makeup when she's struck with a desire. It's stupid, but maybe it'll calm her down. At least that's what she rationalizes.

"Rei," she calls, walking towards the door, "You're still out there?"

Through the noise of the other girls' shrill complaints she listens for Rei's peculiar light switch voice to appear and disappear in a single moment, as it does. She's attuned to it now, can single out Rei's voice the way you can always make out a favorite song as it plays quietly through the muffled speakers of a crowded waiting room.

"I'm still here," Rei says. The words, monotone and concrete, still stir something nauseas in Asuka, who stomps to the door and pulls it open, grips Rei around the thin wrist to pull her in, and slams the door closed and locked in such a quick set of movements that the other girls don't even have time to react. Rei, for her part, isn't phased.

Asuka sees her for the first time in the outfit she'll wear for the concert. The dress is, surprisingly, a bit shorter than her own. The straps thinner, the fit looser just below the waist as it flares skirt-like, vaguely ruffled. She holds herself in the same way she always does, a weird combination of aloof and self-conscious, a hand grasping across her chest to hold onto the elbow of the other arm, her shoulders hunched just a bit as if she were hugging herself. Asuka can read the question in her otherwise guarded stare. The black dress grounds her, though, somehow contains all of the airiness that makes up Rei like a bottled fairy.

But there's something beautiful about her too, maybe more now than ever. Rei's beauty is quietly youthful, a blooming meadow hidden in the woods, but the curve of her eyes and the set of her lips take on a maturity in her formal wear that impresses Asuka. She wants what Rei has. Wants Rei, even if she doesn't want to admit it to herself.

"God, have you never used makeup before?" Asuka asks instead. Rei shakes her head and stirs up her wispy locks.

"I figured. Here...right, there isn't a seat...Oh, fine, just stand. There, by the mirror."

When she takes her spot in front of Rei, Asuka is close enough to hear the soft sound of her breathing. She knows that it's a mistake to do this the moment her stupid heart beats even quicker than it had been when anxiety over failing was her only worry. She holds Rei's face in her hands. With a critical eye plans out what she wants to do to the girl to highlight, and not overpower, whatever lays beneath that intentionally blank facade.

"You don't need a lot," Asuka judges. She catches herself halfway through the compliment, throws it in reverse. "Because your skin, it just won't do good with most of this."

Rei, again, barely reacts. Asuka feels the other girl's eyes following her every movement, each stroke and swab. Her skin crawls in a way that might actually feel great.

It's when Asuka's running lipstick along the crest of Rei's upper lip that she realizes she's leaning in, getting closer with every breath, her own lips inches away and greedy to repeat their mistake from the hotel. She bites down hard, starts back. She can't actually like Rei, not like this. She can't want the girl for anything but a sounding board, but a cathartic release, but a joke. Asuka finishes up as quickly as she can holding her breath.

"We're done, we're done!" She pinches Rei's hip, pretends it's for good luck and for nothing else. Her hands are shaking, clenched as they are at her sides. The bathroom suddenly feels smaller, Rei somehow closer. The other girl can't hide the confusion evident in her stare even as she stays silent, miming sensations. Without sound, emotion is only two-dimensional.

"Come on." Asuka straightens her back, exhales hard. "I have a show to star in."

It is 6pm on a Friday night. The stars outside are so bright they're fake, hanging in a black sky manufactured and ordered like light bulbs on a string. There are 10 minutes before the show starts and Asuka sneaks up to the platform where she practices, dodging beneath the rails to avoid the stares of the crew that has set up the lighting for the recital. It's the first time she's seen the auditorium full and alive. The people in their seats sit on permanent dust. Every chair in the place creaks. She can't make out individual faces - just peasant smiles and glassy eyes - not from this high up, but it stings her, bitter and cold, that she's not looking for anyone. There's no one left to come and see her. A ward of the state, a girl without a mother or father. She hardens her heart; it's just one more reason she has to be the best.

A deep breath and she mimes the movements of the piece again. Her left hand fingers madly dance through the measures in her head, her bow hand saws away at air and she bites her lip, internalizes the motions. She fights herself - a part of her knows that Kaji, that Gendo, that everyone is correct; she should reign herself in and control her emotions and the movements they spawn, the flames born from the embers of the furnace of her heart. But she knows too that nothing exemplifies her power - helps her exert dominance - like allowing the music inside to uncoil and explode, a natural event, an unstoppable expression of raw life. The back of her neck sweats. Her throat is constricting when the school headmaster, a lean old man with deep-set eyes, Mr. Fuyutsuki, walks onto the stage while she descends.

Even when she touches the scuffed wooden floor, she feels as if there's truly no bottom.

If this recital has taught Asuka anything, it's that she truly truly is the best musician at the Hakone School of Arts, without a doubt. She sits backstage, legs crossed, arms crossed, eyes narrowed, focused solely on the back of the heads of the woodwind group up on stage massacring Ravel. She almost wants to get up and take those innocent instruments away from the awful idiots. Their play is sloppy. Their timing is off. And somehow, they still managed to be better than the other chamber groups who'd played before them tonight. All of those people out in the stands subjecting themselves to this mess are artless, she thinks, tone deaf. Only a quarter of the way through the piece and her foot is tap tap tapping, she's raring to go. All doubt has left her mind. It's been kicked out. It breaks through her patience like hurricane winds against hastily thrown-together boards over windows.

Rei stands beside her, a quiet, but not calming, presence. What little room Asuka has in her brain right now that isn't sharply focused on the recital is poking at the things she's been feeling about Rei, the way a doctor will prod the space around a wound to see what isn't broken. And broken - wounded - that's what this feels like, whatever this is. She still hates Rei, or tells herself she has to. But nothing is clear anymore. Nothing is decisively one way or another. Ambiguity, like a smudged number on a check, smears any of her attempts to act logically.

The woodwind group finishes, bows, and walks off high-fiving, arms around one another. True shows of friendship. Asuka's disgusted. She rolls her eyes at them, glad when they look away from her timidly. She sees Kaji signal them over from his position in the front of the stage, hears his introduction - their names, their places in the chamber group. Asuka's about to exit from behind the backstage threshold when she feels a tap on her shoulder.

She spins on her heel, not ready to see Rei and unwilling to ignore her all the same. But it's not Rei; Kaworu is trying on an expression of concern for what appears to be the first time in his life, a little smile mismatched with the too-dramatic tilt of his eyebrows.

"You better have a reason to bother me right now. We have a show to play."

"You're so tense you're shaking." Kaworu points out. She huffs, stays silent. She's just gearing up. Containing her energy is as easy as containing her emotions. So, impossible. Out of the corner of her eye Asuka watches Rei turn her face away. Why, she's not sure. "If you just let yourself relax I think it will do you well. None of this matters all that much, what matters is how you feel about it."

Bile claws its way up her throat. It's hard not to spit on Kaworu. He may as well have just called slapped her in the face.

"I am going to prove to everyone in this God-forsaken Hell hole that I am more than this school. You will not get in my way."

She glances over at Rei, who gives her a tiny smile. One of the few she's ever given, it seems. Asuka's knees go weak. She walks to the stage that much faster just to get away from it.

If the view from the catwalk set the mood, it's the view from the stage that sets the tone. Even sitting on a folding chair, she can see the faces of the audience much more clearly: the mothers and fathers, the talent scouts hidden among family members, and - and Gendo, Gendo Ikari, Rei's father, front and center. Her heart beats faster. But that's fine. This will all be fine.

She closes her eyes. Ignores the vibrating thrum of her heart that beats like a hummingbird's wings. Hears Kaji tapping his baton on the music stand in front of him. Hears Shinji cough, hears Kaworu crack his knuckles, feels - somehow feels Rei breathing through her skin, through the atoms sizzling between them. Time is nothing, then, not a chain of events, not a loop. She lifts her violin to her cheek, leans against it. Holds the bow inches above the strings, hovering with the suspense of a slasher's knife. Breaths out.

Kaji taps one last time and she feels at once centered in herself and a part of the group. Split between watching Kaji's baton dance its four-count rhythm and tracing the equation of notes that forms the beautiful music she plays, Asuka doesn't have time for worrying. Doesn't have time for anything but being the best - or, really, keeping herself in the number one place, because no one's even come close to taking her off her game. She slices the strings back and forth, again and again, not holding back in the slightest. The rest are stubborn, though - her chamber group is playing more reserved, more controlled - and well, she has to admit grudgingly, that they're good too. She slows her hands. Just a little. Just enough. Tries to canal the emotion in her heart. Grant the pace a little more respect.

For a moment, it works. Even with the sweat building up on her brow, on her palms, she can do it.

Like happiness, success is fleeting. Her finger slips on the C string. A small slip, doesn't even register on the Richter scale. No one noticed. But she did. There, in front of the audience - there, live on stage - she made a mistake. Everything in her begins to tumble; it breaks and snaps and then there is nothing in her. Blink, vanished. She wants to laugh but suddenly it's impossible to even open her eyes. How can she worry about how much emotion she puts into her music when, in an instant, everything has disappeared inside of her. Pressure hasn't turned her passion to diamond, it's crushed everything down into unknowable rubble.

She drops her bow. Lets go of the violin, which cries out hollow and sharp as it thwacks against the floor. When she hops off the stage she wobbles, nearly falls, the heel of one shoe snapping, but it does not hold her back, her hair whipping behind her as she dashes towards the door, out into the cold night and the colder embrace of solitary despair.

Part 11

There is nothing. There are colors and sounds. There is light, there is darkness. There is nothing. There is nothing.

Part 12

Asuka is later told that five days have passed since the show.

There is nothing, first, before there is the sight of cloudy water ebbing and flowing with the most minute movements of her body. Warm water, soapy but no longer all that bubbly. She must've been in here for a while. The water settles just above her breasts; everything higher up is colder, exposed to the air, and her damp hair prickles her bony shoulders. The distinct smell of chlorine or bleach - something strong and clean and unnatural spikes her nose. She battles with every breath exiting her lungs. She suffers bone deep. Exhaustion has settled into her body, dulled only by how far away her mind has floated from her flesh.

She closes her eyes. Darkness comforts when it doesn't frighten, and right now she craves comfort in a wordless way. From somewhere in front of her comes the measured plop of water dropping out of the closed faucet. The sound rings out loudly in the empty, echoing space around Asuka. Everything is empty in her right now. Finally. Maybe forever. No anger, no anxiety, no ambition. Just a mind like the vacuum of space, just a consciousness like a unfurnished room. Footsteps slap across the floor from off to the right. She doesn't turn her head to look. She just stares at her bare knees through soap-murky water. They look like barren hilltops, the skin pink and creased.

There's a squelching sound coming from above her head, followed by the springy plop of a viscous liquid, and then hands - there are hands and fingers in her hair, gently, smoothly, methodically massaging her scalp, passing through her locks until soapy suds begin to roll down her forehead and spread out against the thin expanse of her shoulders.

She gulps in her first breath in months. She looks up.

A flash-bulb memory alights a shadow in her heart. She thinks of her mother. How her mother bathed her as a child in one of her few expressions of normal parental activity. How her mother would hum pieces she'd play later on in concerts. How Asuka's whole life had been built, structured, on orchestral music and a cultural history that was only half hers, but fully nourishing.

Rei doesn't hum. That's okay, it's just as well. Asuka blames her hot tears on the soap falling into her eyes.

"You've been gone for five days." Rei says, her voice still that high soft monotone as if what she said wasn't out of the ordinary. As if a business week of Asuka's life hasn't vanished.

Five days. Asuka wracks her brain attempting to remember what might've happened, where she might've been. Nothing comes to mind but an overwhelming bleakness spilling forth like so much black water into her every thought. It bubbles up from the hole inside her heart she's yet to fill.

"Where?" she searches for, "Who?". Her voice is raspy from disuse, sharp like a crack in a column of ice.

"There was a search. A lot of people helped. I don't know where you were for most of the time, but I found you up on the platform above the stage." Rei pauses, seems, for once, like she won't just say what is on her mind. Rei is beside her; Asuka doesn't look at her face. It's difficult to imagine that the decision being made has any bearing on Rei's expression, "You were cold, and you were dirty, and it frightened me. I took you here. It was all I could do."

Rei stops talking. Lifts a small blue bucket she'd filled with water and dumps it with great care onto Asuka's head. The soap and the tears are washed away together, indistinguishable from one another.

"I don't remember what happened. So don't ask."

And it's true. She has no recollection, only a dull throbbing pain emanating from her core and a headache like she's been dehydrated for days - which might have been true.

Rei stays quiet, barely a nod. There isn't a window in the bathroom, but Asuka can feel that it is night in the same way eyeless insects can. She has just returned to the bright day of consciousness but she wants to sleep more than anything. To sleep until there is something worth waking up for.

Asuka doesn't notice the next step until Rei has lifted one of her arms out of the water and runs a soaped washcloth up and down its length, passing close to the side of her breast with each movement. Suddenly everything is on fire; her face heats up, her chest glows red in embarrassment. There's an uncontrollable twitch in her lower body that jolts her into a hyper-awareness like nothing before.

"What - what do you think you're doing?!"

"You needed help." Rei answers. If Asuka looks close enough she can see a blush somewhere beneath Rei's pale moon skin. Putting on her most wretched glare, she grabs for the washcloth. She falls short of it; her body is uncooperative, as if her muscles are receiving their orders seconds late. Asuka tries again, quits once more when the stitches in her side pull. It's a pity, she thinks, that she can somehow fall further, that there isn't a bottom or an end to her disappointment and shame. The image of an endless well is almost too cliché, she thinks - rather, she feels like a sinkhole collapsing in on itself, caving in from the sides, degrading into the indeterminate center of a black void.

Biting back the worse insults that come to mind, she lets Rei wash her. There is nothing left to her pride anymore, that stripped corpse. Rei has seen - Gendo has seen - the whole school has seen her failure unheeded. Rei had, it appears, carried her here in the first place, stripped her, filled this tub and set her in it. Asuka has nothing left to hide, because she has nothing left to protect anymore.

The other girl is surprisingly gentle, though still brusque and appropriately prudish where it counts. Asuka appreciates that even if she won't say it. A small part of Asuka is comforted; the softness of Rei's hands, the kindness in her simple domestic task - there are emotions stirring up in Asuka that might've otherwise been battered and barred were she not half-crazed as it is.

Rei is scrubbing her back in soothing circles when she says, near to Asuka's ear, "I saw you in Germany. A few years back."

Asuka's spine goes ridged as steel. She doesn't speak.

"My father had a student who played in the same exhibition. I don't know if you remember anyone else who was there. Father remembers you, though. And so do I."

"So everything was set against me from the start?" she spits, "There was never a chance I was getting into Tokyo-3?"

Rei says nothing. It's not guilt or shame that flits across her face, but pity. Maybe for Asuka. Maybe for herself.

"And you didn't say anything. Not on that line, months ago. Not when we were made roommates."

"You did not speak to me for most of that time. And Father - he told me not to say anything. I am not used to disobeying him."

"That doesn't change anything! You knew - you knew, and your father knew, and I bet even Shinji knew. I've been a joke to you. Some private joke you all laughed at."

Asuka tries to rise up from the tub but her strength and control are still gone. She slips, knocks her elbows against the solid lip of the tub, and flinches in pain. It's all been too much, all of the emotional turmoil in the past few minutes. In the past few years. She settles down, the exhaustion she'd almost forgotten exacting its revenge. It's easier to turn away from Rei than to look her in the eyes. "You make me sick."

"I was impressed when I saw you in Germany," Rei says after a pause. "Not impressed. Inspired. You had so much confidence. You felt everything. And so strongly. I admired you for it then, and I still do now."

"But you let this happen to me anyway, didn't you?"

"If I offered the help, would you have accepted it?"

Asuka had been right earlier. The deep black night sky flattens the view from the windows in the dormitory buildings. There isn't a horizon without light, a lack of a future in the darkness. She stumbles, pushing along the wall like it is a friend offering a hand in her time of need. But she has none - no friends, not any more. She didn't really have any to begin with, she thinks. Rei's steps behind her are uncertain, as if she'd like to reach out but fears being bitten. The inevitability of a futile task weighs Asuka down, lead-bellied, as she heads towards their shared space, the room she and Rei stay in together. Even her body is letting her down. She knows she can't make it out tonight or she'd be heading the other way, out the door and away from the school forever.

Agonizing is hardly enough to describe the length of time it takes to get to their room. Asuka drags herself in, collapses face first onto her mattress and ignores the throb it sets off in her nose. Half her body is still hanging off the bed, and her knees scrape across the scratchy carpeting. She barely feels any of it, and none of it more than the pressure emanating from Rei's presence.

"I didn't tell anyone that I found you yet." she hears Rei cross the room, lean over her body, and then - Asuka's heart stops - tuck the doll from its place beside the wall into the crook between Asuka's shoulder and neck. "You should get some rest before I tell them in the morning. I cannot imagine that you will have a lot of time to yourself tomorrow."

Kill them with kindness - it's a phrase Asuka has heard before, one she's never believed. She preferred, always, to take out anyone who would stand in her way with skill and strength. Direct conquest, immediate consummation. So it's a shock that she cannot, in the end, handle Rei's killing blow here. That her heart is torn from her chest, bloody, still beating, from behind, and held out to her gently in Rei's hand.

Were she not so dry, so utterly diminished, she might be on the verge of exasperated tears right now.

"Who are you, Rei Ayanami? I just don't get it. You don't make any sense to me."

Rei doesn't answer at first. Asuka feels the girl sit next to her, slide against the bed to the floor. She follows suit. Slides down the bed, sits with her knees pulled up to her chest and rests her cheek on the tops of her hands, facing Rei.

Rei sighs, then begins. "I am no one. Father sees me as my mother, when he doesn't see me as a tool. You have seen me in class; I am invisible, to everybody." She offers Asuka an almost wry smile, the most nuanced expression Asuka's ever seen on her face. "But not you. You hate me, Asuka. You hate me. That has been enough, I think."

Simplicity is often over-explored. The simplest things in life are already the most treasured, the simplest explanations the best understood. Asuka's tongue feels almost numb in trying to find the words to tell Rei that her explanation is too simple. That it doesn't fit in with Asuka's own world-view, where hate is hate and attention is the highest goal, and a personality - a self - is the only truth one can rely on.

"I've slapped you, Rei. I've called you names. Have you never been angry? Upset? This is - are you human?"

"That's exactly it. It was not until you, Asuka, that anyone has even tried to make me feel those ways. You've hurt me. You've also made me happy. You've allowed me to make my own decisions in how to treat you. How to react."

Asuka shakes her head, her eyes all but closed. She is so tired, so utterly tired, that all she can think of now is how to get Rei to stop talking. She can't think anymore. Feeling is even worse; like overusing a muscle, or straining your eyes.

Rei continues. "Father - he wanted to pull me out of this school. I denied him that."

Asuka only shakes her head. "I don't want to hear any more. I have to sleep." She pulls herself up, slowly, her joints creaking like old hinges, and Rei, watching her warily, follows. One of Asuka's hands holds her doll. The other, without thought, grabs for Rei's. Asuka collapses on her bed.

"Come, if you're coming." She says.

It is a moment later when Rei slides, hesitantly, behind Asuka. She lays on her back stiff and awkward until Asuka pulls, with the last of her energy, the other girl onto her side so that Rei is curled around her. Spoons her. Rei is physically smaller but tonight is the 'big spoon', with an arm draped around Asuka's chest. She's too warm, her bony knees are awkwardly poking the back of Asuka's thighs, but it all feels right. Proper. The fulfillment of desires she never wanted to have.

Asuka's heart burns like it's been stripped raw. This will be the best night of sleep she will have had in a long time.

Chapter Text

“I couldn't bear to have in the house a woman who has the right to be kind to me, to comfort me when things go wrong.”

- Johannes Brahms, in a letter

Part 13

This is the second time she has woken up beside her roommate. The light of the morning is harsh, slanting in the bright valley between the bottom of the blinds and the top of the sill. Her head is pounding; it feels like it must've been doing so even as she slept. Like she received unconscious notifications of pain that popped up unceasingly upon waking. She is still curled up, hugging her doll to her chest, and as she returns to the waking world she's grows aware of Rei behind her. Of knees pushed into her thighs, breasts pressed against her back, a face buried in the hair falling over the nape of her neck. Warmth, human warmth like she's never felt it before. She lies there, unsure if this is a horrible nightmare or the birth of some brand new dream. She practices moving her body, stretches her arms high, flexes her digits, extends her legs. She doesn't exactly care if Rei is woken by her movements, but refuses a cathartic moan anyway. Still, she watches one of Rei's bright red eyes opens a crack.

"Let's get this over with." Asuka says. Rei gazes at her unquestioningly.

"I'll go and tell Kaji you're back."

"I'm going too. You'll only be sent back here to get me anyway."

One meeting with the police, one long, thorough exam by the school nurse, and a grueling discussion with her government case worker later, Asuka is guided to her final talk by one of the headmaster's aides, a young man with shorn hair named Hyuga. She's sick of speaking. Tired of all of the interrogations. She thought that being at this school was punishment enough, but if she has to be lectured at one more time she will poke holes in her own eardrums. Her body might as well weigh a ton; she is all but dragging herself through the halls following Hyuga. Rei is a silent soldier beside her.

It's awful to admit how much she needs that.

Rei had been at her side all day, filling in the time between the failure of the search-and-rescue team and the missing spaces in Asuaka's memory about when she was found. Celebrated as a savior, the compliments and praises bounce off of Rei's purposeful bluntness. What a difference it was, having someone to support her, someone in her corner. Asuka's chest spent the day buzzing and vibrating, her heart beating harder whenever Rei answered something, or gave her a meaningful glance in the midst of these questionings. She wouldn't accept the obvious reason for this. Even after the previous night...it was too empty of a world if the only person she could trust didn't think of herself as a person in the first place.

They follow Hyuga into a small office with a sign reading counselor on a plaque beside the door. It's a messy room, especially considering that it's a professional office, and Asuka scoffs as she walks in.

"What a sty," she rolls her eyes.

The desk is strewn with odds and ends, the floor dotted with any number of tissues and paper balls that avoided their fate ending in the trashcan. Hanging on the coat rack were shorts and pants layered like tree boughs. There's a miasma so thick it is almost visible, a familiar scent, some perfume or fragrance someone sprayed out of a hose rather than spritzed, and then topped with cigarette smoke. She wrinkles her nose. There doesn't seem to be anyone in the office, though Asuka can't be sure that there isn't someone hiding behind that coat hanger, or between the messy stacks by the bookshelf.

Hyuga scratches his head, the look of an exasperated parent aging him in spite of his apparent youth. "Geeze, always late, isn't she? I'll go find her. You two wait here."

With little better to do, Asuka plops down in the uncomfortable plastic chair in front of the desk; Rei follows suit, a three-dimensional shadow whose coordination is slowed in the viscous flow of time. More uncomfortable than the chairs is the silence stretched out between them.

"I can't wait for this to be over." Asuka grumbles, crossing her arms over her chest. It's said at, and not necessarily to, Rei, but the other girl answers.

"Have you decided what you're going to do now?"

"That's a good question." the voice comes from behind them - young, laced with the remnants of a dying yawn. "Exactly what I was going to ask."

Asuka turns to the voice to see a woman with long, dark purple hair standing in the doorway. She's wearing a black cocktail dress beneath a shortened red leather jacket, neither article all that appropriate in a school. There's something familiar about her face and hair, that particular shade of purple, and when Rei offers the woman a small nod, it all clicks into place.

"You! You were at Tokyo-3 too." Whatever weakness had stuck around from the day before burns away in the flames of her exasperation and outrage. Everyone - it seems like everyone has been in on the joke that has been her life ever since she'd auditioned for a spot at the Tokyo-3 Conservatory.

"Oh, you remembered! Misato Katsuragi, that's me! Yeah, they - uh let me go. Conductor Ikari isn't the easiest guy to work with." Misato shrugs her shoulder at Rei with a light grimace. "No offense."

"None taken."

"Anyway, Ryoji wanted me to talk with you about what happened."

At the mention of Kaji the familiar scent, that heavy perfume, thick with lavender and cloyingly sweet, is made more clear - on more than one occasion Kaji had smelled like that, clearly not his actual choice of a fragrance, and though she had no hard evidence, Asuka was sure that the two adults had something going on between them. Another joke. She's getting sick of it now, of conspiracies and secrets, of the hidden threads of some unseen net pulling everything around her into a mass of amalgamated bodies.

"You all saw what happened."

"Why is the question. Not what."

"It's not a secret." she scowls, "I'm the best musician in this place, but I'm being forced - tricked - into giving up the thing that makes me better. And look at what it's done! I'm making mistakes! I can't even play right anymore! I might as well just be some nobody out on the street."

She'd stood up somewhere in the midst of her tirade, fists shaking at her sides, but she doesn't notice until Rei's hand - cool and calm and sturdy - is wrapped around her wrist. She stops speaking, glares at the hand like it's a creature she only just discovered, and is unsure about whether or not it's dangerous. She doesn't shake it off.

Asuka continues, "I want out. If I can't play the way I want, then there's no point. I'll make it on my own."

The hand on her wrist goes slack and falls away like cut rope, heavy and useless. Asuka draws in a quick breath. It's surprising how a heart can so suddenly feel pricked and barbed from the smallest actions. It's like the world is made of razor wind and pointed rocks. Asuka steels herself. She can't feel bad; she can't feel anything towards the girl beside her, not if it comes at the cost of her future.

Misato quirks an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed by the impassioned speech. "So that's it? You're just going to quit? Run away?"

"It's not - it's not running away! It's setting off on my own, it's - "

"It's being weak, Asuka." Misato cuts in. The suddenly hard edge to her voice doesn't sound like it belongs there, like she's putting it on, but then, Asuka doesn't actually know this woman. She feels trapped, and it's only a fear of just how much better she actually is compared to how she feels that stops her from turning and running right out of the room.

And if she did, she would have run into Kaji. The man grunts, leaning on the door frame in that overly casual way of his, arms crossed, stubble still at a too-perfect level. Asuka glares at him too - she's had enough of trying to be good, of trying to get on his good side. She's sure it's already too late anyway.

"I wonder," he begins, scratching at his chin, "if you aren't just afraid that if you take our advice on how you play, you might find that you really can play better. Wouldn't that mean that, up til now, you haven't been playing your best?"

The words hurt like being pelted with ice, cold and bruising, clear enough to see that they are what they are. She glares at the messy floor. Not a word comes to her tongue, not a sound flutters up her throat. Those words weren't the truth when she could write them off as her own delusions. Ignore them, the way she ignores other genuine emotions to undercut them instead with manufactured anger and discontent. But hearing them out loud, seeing that she, in fact, could hide nothing from these people - that she was little more than an actress among them, rather than a musician - it silences Asuka. Removes any trace of confidence or the chance of escaping from this awful situation gracefully.

"Thank you, but I think I have this handled." Misato points at Kaji, who shrugs.

"I'm just here for moral support." He quips. He takes a cigarette out of the pack in the pocket of his shirt before sighing, remembering where he is. "Rei," he says, placing the thing back in the box. "What do you think of all this?"

Rei folds her hands in her lap, seems to contemplate their folds and faults. Her lack of an answer creates a vacuum in the room, drawing attention into the void of wordlessness. Asuka's heart beats against her ribcage like a prisoner slamming his hand on plate glass. She wants to know the answer. In that moment she has never wanted anything more.

"I believe that Asuka ought to do what she thinks is best for herself."

"You're an idiot, Ayanami. " Asuka shakes her head. She doesn't know what she was hoping for, but immediately knows that that wasn't it. Maybe she was hoping for direction. Maybe she was hoping to be saved.

"I'm leaving. I don't need this place. I'll make it on my own." she glares at each of the other people in turn unflinchingly, then leaves the room and tries to leave her feelings behind too.

Asuka knows her own scent now. Normally it is one of those particular parts of your own chemistry that is unknowable, except in those times when you return to old, familiar places - places that were once yours - homes and cars, bedrooms - when what hits you, before nostalgia and homesickness, is the particular scent you carry around. An identifier. An aspect of yourself. A secret.

But she knows it now, because it is the lingering scent beneath what she knows to be Rei's. That almost sterile, aquatic thing of lavender and silver water and the pale light of the moon. And Rei is there, all over Asuka's pillow, under her blanket, coating the thin sheets she's rolling up into a ball to throw into that box at the foot of her bed, the one she never finished unpacking as if she knew the whole time that she'd leave, that this school would be a temporary place. The scent is in her own hair, it's all over her own clothing. She didn't want to find out her own this way. She didn't want to remember Rei through any of this.

Asuka leaves her school uniforms lying on her bed like starch-white snake skins. The teal skirts are unflattering and wide. She wouldn't need them anymore, never liked them in the first place. She feels more like herself as she steps into a pair of tight navy-dark jeans and dons a cherry-red track jacket. Shedding this cursed place with every action. Shedding herself, the self stained by the walls and the mildew scent and the stares. Shedding Rei.

Rei hadn't moved after Asuka declared her plan. She is likely still sitting in that chair now, staring dumbly at her own hands as if they ever had the power to do anything at all. Asuka bets that Misato and Kaji are laughing, glad to be rid of her. Well, whatever. She's taking her genius with her.

Asuka packs her doll last. Places it at the top of the pile in the box, and she watches the light reflected from the window fade away out of those black button eyes as she closes the box's flap and seals it with tape.

"Asuka."

Rei's voice come from the doorway, that same-old soft pitch without its steadiness, wavering like tassels. A twitch in Asuka's stomach wants her to answer. She doesn't. She checks the wardrobe that had once separated their halves of the room for anything she might have left.

"Asuka."

The voice is closer now. Not directly behind her - Rei has always had the good sense not to get too close when Asuka is angry, the proper instinct that Asuka's an animal with a biting maw and ready talons. She's closer, though. Asuka can feel her presence, the one that, not so long before, she didn't even think existed. She still does not answer. Slams the wardrobe doors shut, flicks her hair out and knocks against Rei's shoulder on her way to leave the room.

"Asuka Langley Soryu. Please, answer me."

"What?! What, Rei? What do you want?"

"I want you to stay."

It wasn't what Asuka had been asking, but she's tossed nonetheless, like a battering ram impacted her ribcage. The sound of Rei's footsteps, the flat slap against the floor, are all she can hear before the soft pressure of Rei's hand settles itself on her shoulder.

"You don't mean that. You don't want anything. You're nobody, Rei, You said it yourself."

Rei's face twists up in hurt more openly than ever before. Her hand falters on Asuka's shoulder. It falters, but only for a moment. She adds her other hand to Asuka's other shoulder, pulls Asuka in closer. That scent is back now, overwhelming. She sees herself reflected back in the facets of Rei's ruby eyes. There's desperation there. She's unsure if it's hers or Rei's.

"I was nobody. Maybe I still am. But you have helped me to discover what I want, Asuka. And what I need."

"No one needs me! Not my mother, not my father, not Tokyo-3, not this school - no one. So don't you lie to me, Rei"

The tears come now, without her control and without her desire. She's burning up, gripping Rei's shoulders in the same way that Rei's gripping hers. Curls her fingers into the muscle and skin until she sees Rei flinch. She wants to show Rei all the pain that's been stuffed into her body. She wants to give it to Rei, to give it all away and find the her that lies beneath it, a stranger even to herself.

"I am the only thing I need." Asuka growls.

"I want you to need me too." Rei answers. She seems to be giving up, her arms losing their strength, and Asuka feels it, fears it, because if this is all some lie, some trick.... But Rei pulls her in close, presses her forehead against Asuka's, like a child leaning against a window to watch the snow.

There has always been a hole in Asuka's heart. She feels it in those moments when anger and discontent recedes, when the ocean of her own sadness escapes this hole. She feels it now pouring out at the edges, washing her voice down into the nothingness at her center where everything real in her lies.

"You're an awful liar, Rei."

"I am correcting a lie right now. Do not do what you think you ought to. Do what I want you to do."

Tremors run through Asuka's body like they're racing to her heart. She grips the side of Rei's face. Smashes her lips against Rei's, repeating a mistake she swore never to make again. And this time, Rei is not so passive. Her lips move against Asuka's with a desire that seemed impossible in Rei, and one that doesn't lie. Rei is delicious. She's never thought that about a person before but it's all she thinks now - the girl's lips are chapped and unevenly wet, and she's an amateur at this, but she tastes - she tastes like Rei ought to taste.

They pull apart. Asuka, on instinct, licks her lips.

She drops her backpack to the floor.

She drops herself to the floor.

"Will you stay, Asuka?"

Rei kneels down in front of the girl. Leaves breeze-light kisses on her forehead, on her cheeks, her ears, her nose. Her hands - the backs and the palms, her fingers, the fingertips each one at a time. They burn. Everywhere that Rei touches burns. Bright white, blinding, eating away at every inch of her. She can't think. She doesn't want to feel anymore. Her breathing is shallow, sharp. Sweet.

"Will you?"

Part 14

Tokyo-3, the grand jewel of Japan, offers every one of its avenues to Asuka to plunder as she sees fit. It's not a futuristic city, but a strikingly modern one utilizing the the very best of mankind's engineering to be the safest, most customizable city mankind has ever seen. A necessary change, a growth after old Tokyo disappeared overnight in an apocalyptic natural disaster. Old Tokyo didn't have skyscrapers that could respond to tsunami and typhoons by disappearing beneath the ground, or fully collapsible, modifiable lanes and highways to weather the worst of an earthquake. She feels safe here, at least physically. All of the glass and steel - fragile and brittle though they seem, gives Asuka a taste of progress that Hakone lacks.

It's the summer and Asuka is free. She strides through the streets of the city with a sense direction and confidence few around her match. She's not running through the crowds, chased by the clock or some social nervousness. Her shoulders are straight, her back strong, her chin held high.

A cloudless blue sky has made the entire world an infinite expanse in her eyes, though it also allows the sun to beat down like a pile driver of heat. She's glad that the yellow sundress and hay-white straw hat give freedom and airiness in equal measure. A water bottle sweats in her hand. She checks her phone for the time. There's a good hour left, long enough to pop into the coffee shop on the corner for something sweet and cold and altogether too expensive.

She steps out of the heat and into the artificial arctic air of the cafe. It's busy, but she squeezes her way past loiterers and customers waiting at the service counter to get their orders. The coffee shop's decor is insecurely chic, confused if it is pushing the limit with its sleek table sets, all lightweight aluminum and new age wood veneers, or setting a classic mood in the corners where timeless, comfortable leather recliners wait to engulf customers with upholstered softness.

She reaches the front of the line with her order at the tip of her tongue when she is hit with a wave of familiarity as her eyes meet the barrista's. Behind her, people in the line shuffle in place awaiting their turn. A child cries somewhere in the dining area. A man on a bicycle flashes past the large windows.

"I know you." Asuka says. The girl behind the counter looks at her questioningly before something of a practiced smile spreads across her face.

"Oh!" she exclaims, "How have you been? It's...hmm, it's Asuka, right?"

Asuka doesn't even pretend to know the girl's name. Thankfully, she wears a name tag.

"Hikari," she nods. "We auditioned on the same day."

"How's the Tokyo-3 Conservatory? How are you? Did you - "

"Hey! Get a move on!" a voice calls from the line. Asuka glares at the man, but Hikari bows in apology, a serious expression to match.

"My apologies, sir. Asuka, why don't I take your order and then I'll go on break in a few minutes and I'll meet you?"

Asuka sits on one of the sleek, uncomfortable chairs and questions her decisions as she does so. She doesn't want to see this Hikari girl, barely recognized her, but in the past few months she's been attempting to, if not calm down, at least be a little kinder. A little more controlled. She slurps the frozen drink. Ignores the stares from the people at the nearest tables.

"Sorry I took so long," Hikari casually unties the green apron she's wearing, then drapes it atop the chair she takes a seat on. Her freckles are dark and dotted against her wide, smiling cheeks.

"Anyway, how are you?"

"I'm fine. Better than fine." she answers, never one to keep from bragging. Even unintentionally. "You?"

"Oh, I'm alright, I - "

"Did you get into Tokyo-3 Conservatory after you auditioned?" the question slips through Asuka's teeth. It's the one tenuous connection she has to this girl, painful or not.

Confusion, and then a kind of pleasant recognition, show themselves on Hikari's face.

"Oh, no," she laughs. "That one judge was so frightening! The big man. I'm sure you know the one. I tried my best, but I suppose it wasn't meant to be." She says, smiling down at her hands. "I'm in a general high school now. but I joined the band anyway. I can't really get away from music, you know? And now I can still help my family out at home."

"How are you working here anyway? Neither of us are working ag - "

"Shh, shhh!" Hikari covers Asuka's mouth with her hand. "I might have fudged the numbers a bit, but we really need the extra income, so..." Hikari looks around the room to see if any of her coworkers have heard, but calm downs when she sees the rest of them aren't paying attention to her. "As a bribe," she giggles, "I'll give you a discount. I'm sure you come here often, seeing as how the Tokyo-3 Conservatory is so close by."

Asuka almost lies. She considers it, sees the situation play out in her head in real time as if she's living it there and then. The praise she'd receive. The hidden envy. But she's trying to be good about this too, lying less. Being more truthful to herself and others. "I didn't get into Tokyo-3."

"Wait, really?" Hikari asks, genuine surprise in her voice. "You know, I looked you up online after that audition. You just seemed so confident, and you mentioned something about Germany...I watched a video of you playing there, in Germany. You really are something special. It's surprising that you weren't accepted."

"Let's just say that the option was never there in the first place." Asuka says through gritted teeth. She squeezes the drink in her hand and only realizes what she's doing when some of the icy liquid spills over the lip of the covered cup and all over her hand. She takes a deep breath, wipes her fingers off with a napkin, sucks off the rest. "But I don't need that place to be great. Watch - you'll see me in five years headlining a world tour."

Most of Asuka actually believes this and whatever in her doubts it. is, like a dangerous bacteria, being fought each moment of each day by her mental immune system.

Some days are better. Some are worse.

"I believe it," Hikari nods. She checks her phone, gives a little wink of apology. "Sorry, I don't have a lot of time. What school accepted you, then?"

"Hakone School of the Arts," she rolls her eyes. Over at the pick-up counter, a man grabs for his coffee but knocks it over. Hot coffee, a whole black river of it, pours down the lip of the counter and slaps on the floor in a waterfall.

"I think I ought to help them clean up. I have to be a star employee, like I'm a great class rep!" Hikari stands up, slings her apron back on as if it's a superhero's cape. "It was nice seeing you again, Asuka. Stop by sometime if you're in the area."

"Yeah," she takes a sip, gets up from the table too. "I'll see you around."

Hikari returns to the real world. Asuka leaves for one where she makes the rules.

She checks her phone again and curses under her breath at the few minutes she has left to make it. She pushes her way through the crowded streets, catches a flash of blue she knows instinctively now, but it's only the sky, peeking through the tinniest space of a down-hill alley between buildings. It's an unforgettable blue, tied so closely with Rei in her head that she has no control over how her heart skips in response. It's stupid. Unnecessary. Distracting.

She walks faster.

Like a shining beacon, the stairway leading to the pedestrian overpass crossing before the Tokyo-3 Conservatory building and its curved waves of steel and glass comes into view. They seem to lead up to the sky itself, the blue flat against the height of the landing. Asuka jogs the steps two at a time. She wipes the sweat from her forehead at the top, takes a sip of the remains of her water bottle.

"You're late."

Sitting on a bench, flipping through a book, Rei tilts her head up at the sound of Asuka's steps. The light seems to bend around her. To flicker and fade, highlighting the blue of her hair and the red of her eyes and the moon-pale skin until, even doing something as simple as reading a book, she appears sylph-like - sifting into the sunlight itself. Asuka's swallows thickly.

"I'm not late. You guys can't start without me. I'm the leader here, after all."

The way her heart beats when Rei smiles should be criminal it breaks so many speeding records. She marches forward to the girl, a woman on a mission. Places one leg on the bench and leans forward into Rei's space. Grasps the book in her hand.

"Put the book down when I show up, Rei."

"Will you make me?"

Rei smirks - she actually smirks, and Asuka can't help but to pull the girl in firmly by the chin and kiss her hard. Deep. This is a taste she hadn't yet grown bored of, hoped that she never would. It hadn't happened in the months since she decided to stay. Since she and Rei had begun opening up to one another until there was nothing left unknown between them. Unspoken, perhaps. But not unknown. This smirk is just one consequence of Rei's growth from muted tones to vibrancy, just as Asuka's attempts at kindness and self control are.

When she pulls away - her fingers trailing the soft skin of Rei's face before her hand drops - she asks, "Where are the boys?"

"A little ways down, closer to the Conservatory. They're setting things up now."

"And you got away without helping?"

"As did you. My job was waiting for your arrival."

"I had to see my case worker," Asuka flicks her hair, "Actual work. Boring. That guy is so stuffy."

Rei stands up and holds her book against her side, face expectant and softly smiling. For the majority of the time Asuka has known her, Rei's default expression has been little more than a flat, reserved blankness, Asuka finds that she gets a thrill seeing any new expression at all on Rei's face. There's a library there, pages and pages, covers and covers, waiting to be explored and discovered, treasured and categorized: happy Rei, her smile wide and bright; sorrowful Rei, with glassy eyes and trembling lips; lustful Rei, burning red and pouting sensually. Asuka takes pride in knowing that she is the only person to see Rei make that last face. There, in the twin beds they pushed together, lying among a nest of blankets and pillows, aglow in the soft light of a lamp covered with a thin red t-shirt that throws the room into the color of a beating heart. Willing. Accepting. Hers.

But those aren't thoughts she should be thinking right now, and they aren't feelings she wants Rei to catch onto. Gotta keep up the hard exterior she's forged, at least out here under the sun.

"Come on, we should help those idiots." Asuka says. Rei nods. Without words, without even conscious thought, they each reach out to grasp the others' hand. The heat and humidity clearly make this a bad idea in less than a few moments, but she's not going to drop Rei's hand, not now. The girl accepts her. Maybe she was the first person to ever do that - her skills, her attitude, her issues - Rei didn't look away from any of it and Asuka wasn't about to let her.

Shinji and Kaworu are awash in the bright sunlight reflecting off of the railings of the overpass, of the curved glass of the Conservatory building before them, of the powdered black music stands and beige folding chairs they're setting up. In a way, they too seem unreal, like their continued existence has only been a figment of Asuka's psyche, brought to bear whenever she needs subjects she can roll her eyes at. They are real, though. She isn't sure she wants to be the one to invent a coward like Shinji. The boy waves to both of them, though, and even offers his sister a direct and joyful smile. Little steps paving a path to better relations. Maybe he isn't a complete coward.

It helps that Rei hasn't spoken to Gendo in months.

"How'd your meeting go, Asuka?" Shinji asks.

"It's none of your business, is it?" then she shrugs, feeling the side-eye Rei throws her way. The silent pressure of it, the welcome weight of expectation. "Fine, I guess. I can return to Hakone with the rest of you when the semester starts. Apparently I'm not a 'flight-risk' any more."

"I never thought I'd hear you be happy about being at Hakone." Kaworu, flipping through sheet music, looks at Asuka without even hiding his smirk.

"If I left Hakone, there wouldn't be a single worthwhile talent in the place."

"I see. I'm always so impressed by your confidence, Asuka. Truly astounding to me. I almost wish dear Shinji here had even a tenth of that."

"H-hey!"

Beside her, Rei giggles and the sound brings out Asuka's own snort of a laugh. It feels right. More than she ever could have imagined, it feels right to be here among these people. Friends, even if she won't call them that to their faces. She's glad she stayed. Glad she was convinced to stay with kisses as bribes. She's certainly paid them all back in full.

Asuka hadn't anywhere to go back to in the winter between their first and second semesters, cornered by her own fractal psyche and the lack of a place to belong, It was not charity she wanted to accept, but she could hardly turn down Misato when she offered to let her stay there until the dorms reopened. Rei, too, stayed with Misato, abandoned by and personally abandoning Gendo following the catastrophic music show. And despite her greatest fears - of boredom and anxiety, antsy skin and disrespectful glares - , things went well. Domesticity calmed Asuka in a way that the high-profile life she lived with her globe-trotting, emotionally frustrating mother never did. The effect was so great her caseworker let her stay at the school with the express concession that Misato took guardianship of the girl. She did so gladly.

"Alright, conductor Kaji wants us to film the entire time we play here. Our choice of doing it in front of the Conservatory is, I anticipate, going to give us a bit of an edge on the live-recital films the other chamber groups in class will have, so let's make sure everyone is in their right place in the frame." Kaworu says after he stops laughing. He leans down into a black duffel bag to pick up a tripod and from a canvas bag slung across his body he pulls a small video camera.

"Let's get this out of the way. There's no point to summer homework for students like us." Asuka rolls her eyes. "We're good enough not to need it."

"We haven't had much of a chance to see each other since the summer began. This is a nice opportunity for that, I believe." Rei offers.

"I see you every day, Rei."

"I was talking about the entire group."

"I don't care about the entire group."

"I can tell when you are lying. You know that well, don't you?"

The heat blazing her cheeks has little to do with the weather. Asuka stomps over to where the boys have carefully placed their instruments - Kaworu using a plastic keyboard - and finds her violin. The cherrywood color almost matches her burnished hair. The tang of the red-orange is the same. She knows - has known for a while that she can't lie to Rei.

She's immensely happy about it.

It was Asuka's idea to play here in a place where all of the students and faculty of the Tokyo-3 Conservatory could hear it all, could see the four of them underneath the bright sun, elevated high above the road. A last insult. A final send-off to a place that shunned her and hurt Rei, that crushed Shinji and abandoned Kaworu. A place they didn't need. A place she no longer wanted.

"Alright, a little to the left, Asuka. Rei, make sure you stand straighter. Shinji?" Kaworu pokes his head out from the camera's viewfinder, winks. "Perfect, as always."

"Kaworu!"

Close as it is to the building, the overpass is still too far to see inside the windows from where they stand; the glass making up the walls is wine-dark and reflective. Asuka likes to think she can feel Gendo behind the glass, stern-faced. Pissed. She hopes he is. She lifts her bow, clears her voice.

"Are you all ready? On my count. 1, 2, 3 - "

She brings the bow across the strings. Holds back the innate fire in her heart and plays the piece in the pace it demands, rather than the one her body begs for. She's been practicing for months now. It's still difficult. Still impossible to hold the fire in her hands. But she tries anyway; failure is only a stone on the path to perfection.

A crowd begins to form - first around them, on the overpass, and then below them, pouring out from the Conservatory building. Students look up at them, heads tilted, ears open. The pressure mounts in her muscles as the desire to just go all out, to explode in movement and brightness, is all she can feel. But she doesn't. She won't. Bizet's Piano Quartet No. 1 Op 15 deserves better. She, Rei, the listeners - everyone deserves better.

Her finger slips on one of the strings and the wrong note tumbles off the violin. Time stands still like it's waiting for Asuka to react, as if it has taken a backseat in the ride of reality. She is thrown off for a second at the mercy of her runaway heart. A panic builds, but she breaths deeply and glances side-eyed at Rei. Rei looks back, smiles softly. Another deep breath. She will not give up. She will not run away.

Asuka is trying. It's more than she can say about what she did before.

She listens for Rei beneath all the music. Hears her own notes curling around Rei's. Leading the sound, leading the group. They play on into the shining blue day with true joy There will be bigger stages in the future. But this might be a good starting point, she thinks.

It will be a good starting point, she knows, on her way to Perfection. And she's glad - maddeningly glad - to take Rei along into that glowing beyond.