exsiliumlogs | [closed] We are never ever ever

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[closed] We are never ever ever

Who: Asuka and Kaworu
What: Asuka feels like making up with Kaworu and venting about her last talk with Kaji. She goes looking for him.
Where: Apartment 1001
When: Sept. 11
Warnings: ANGST

She hadn't thought about Kaworu in a while. Her anger at him had dulled with time (she had to admit, it wasn't really his fault in the first place). Besides, it had been eclipsed by her absolutely disastrous talk with Kaji last month. She was still dealing with that particular episode in the same way she dealt with everything else: she suppressed it or stewed in it. Just like she ignored the nightmares and her mother and her memories of Tokyo-3.

It worked. Most of the time.

She'd thought that maybe Shinji would know where to find Kaworu. Despite their last encounter, Kaworu was really the only person in the city she felt like she could talk to. Well, him and Utena, but she'd vanished earlier in the month and she didn't know where she was. So that left Kaworu, even with the ugly taste of being abandoned on her tongue. She hesitates in front of the apartment for a moment and then knocks. Well, here she goes.

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The one who opened the door wasn't Shinji, but Kaworu.

The sight of her on their welcome mat was so unexpected that he stared for a few moments. Kaworu certainly wasn't dressed for company; in fact, it looked more like he just got up. He was wearing socks and sweatpants and no shirt, and it would appear that he hadn't glanced in the mirror to fix his bedhead yet. In his right hand was a mug steaming with fresh coffee.

"Asuka..." he said finally. Now that the surprise had passed, a smile crept onto his face. She was probably here to see Shinji, and maybe she'll turn heel and stomp away after finding him here instead, but... he'll grasp at this chance to see her, even if it was only for a moment.

"...Are you looking for Shinji-kun? He isn't here at the moment."

Do you want to come in? was what he wanted to say.

Asuka gaped for a moment, mouth hanging open slightly .She hadn't expected Kaworu to be here - she'd jsut wanted to ask Shinji if he knew where the Angel was these days. Seeing him so at home was a shock. Wait, where they living together?

"W-wait-! No! I'm not looking for Shinji!"

So this was the awkward part. Well, the other awkward part.

"...I was looking for you."

That earned her another surprised blink. His smile even wavered for a moment.

Had she... cooled off since their last conversation? No. There had to be more to it than that. But this means that maybe she would come inside. Maybe she'd spend some time with him, and talk with him. Kaworu's lengthy separation from Asuka had been extended by Asuka herself. If this could be its end...

"Do you want to come inside?" he asked after regaining his confidence. He tilted his mug slightly, inviting her in. "There's coffee."

"I don't want coffee right now," Asuka replied, a bit too quickly. After another moment of standing in the hallway, not sure of where she ought to put her hands or what she should really do, she brushed past him and headed inside with a scowl.

"And put a shirt on!"

Ah, she must be feeling better.

He turned to watch her stomp inside, smiling like she'd just come back from a long vacation. The door shuts with a click.

"I wouldn't have expected you to come visit me," he said casually as he followed her. After setting his mug on the kitchen counter, he escaped into his room to find a shirt, continuing to talk from beyond the open doorway. "I hadn't considered you'd come looking for me here, though..."

Sometimes, these things work out. When he emerged from his room again, he was wearing a plain orange shirt. His hair still looked messy and flat on one side, though.

She denied coffee, but he still felt like he had to be a good host. Asuka is here; he needed to treat her properly - not even for her own benefit, but to be satisfied with himself.

"How about tea instead? Mmm... you can tell me what you were needing me for while I make it for you."

"Well, Shinji is always hanging off you...!" So obviously she'd come here. She let out a harumph and flopped onto his sofa without much fanfare, expression still set in a scowl. She glanced up when he came back in (with a shirt, finally) and then shook her head, "Who said I needed you...?"

Well, she did, in not as many words. She worked her jaw and then settled back in her seat, still looking sour.

"...maybe I just want to talk."

Kaworu grinned at her affectionately over his shoulder as he removed a box of tea bags from one of the cupboards. In other words, she needed to talk to him about something. Kaworu couldn't have been happier.

"Ah, you're right. Sorry for assuming."

Showing his back to her again, he shuffled through the selection in the box. 'Calming chamomile'... that sounded appropriate.

"Was there something in particular you wanted to talk about, or just chatting? It's been... a while."

"Thank you," Asuka replied a bit stiffly. She didn't know how to breach the subject. How was she supposed to talk to Kaworu about Kaji and what he'd done and how everything was even more messed up than she thought it was?

It was not going to be an easy conversation.

"...just stuff, I guess."

She paused and forced the words out, feeling that familiar tension in her chest, the one that tried to tell her she shouldn't be talking.

"I saw Kaji again."

That man? Kaji.

...Who is that?

The sound of water gushing from the sink filled the silence as Kaworu tried to place the name. It wasn't until the kettle was nearly filled that he realized who she was talking about.

That suspicious, disagreeable man from Seele? The one he'd met for an uncomfortable conversation back in the spring, who he's diligently tried to avoid since?

After he set the kettle on the stove, he finally turned around.

"You know him?" he asked softly. "I only met him once he arrived in Exsilium. He did mention working with NERV's pilots."

"He was my handler."

The words spilled out. She fidgeted (she was terrible at hiding discomfort) and tried to get comfortable again.

"And... I liked him."

She didn't want to elaborate on how much, but the memory of just how far she was willing to go for him stung and she felt her eye start to water before she clamped down on the feeling.

Those words alone were enough to arise serious concern in Kaworu's heart, but her obvious discomfort seemed to multiply it exponentially. After a moment of hesitation, his feet began to move, bringing him around the kitchen table to the couch.

"What happened?"

Not back then. Now. Just now. Right? Whatever it is that he did that's brought her here.

Asuka stared at her hands, fingers flexing and then twisting together in her lap. This was stupid. Why was she here? Why was she even talking to him about this? She squeezed her eye shut, took a breath and then tried to force herself to continue.

"...he's always treated me like a kid, even though I liked him. And since he got here, he's ignored me - so I called him out and he invited me over and we were talking-"

She doesn't say about what or why.

"-and he..."

Her stomach twisted at the thought. He looked at her, without so much as asking. She swallowed down a mouthful of bile.

"...he just decided he was going to look at my eye."

There was a lot more to it than that, of course. But it was a very long story.

Anger started to simmer and swell up inside his heart. Before he could even push the idea away, he was imagining that clever man exposing her. What reason could there have possibly been for such a thing? Kaworu was not so mad to forget that this was Asuka, and this could easily be only a fraction of the story in more ways than just length. But what acceptable justification could there be? He certainly could not imagine it, not with that man in the other party's shoes.

His feelings were quickly covered and buried to cool down later. He could be an immovable rock for her right now, if that was what she needed. It wasn't what he'd hoped their reunion would be like, but that hardly mattered now.

Kaworu took a few steps back from the couch again to pull a chair for himself from the kitchen table.

"Why would he do that?" he asked, very carefully, exploring for more information.

"I don't know!" Her voice comes out a bit shriller then she hoped it would and she raises a hand to brush at the bangs over her eyepatch.

"He just - I don't know! Why would he think that's OK? And I just - I realized that he'd never really cared about me anyway. And all I'd ever been was... a joke."

Although a part of her hates herself for admitting the vulnerability to him.

As much sympathy as Kaworu had for her, and as much as he was solidly cemented on her side of this, he was starting to feel that something like this made quite a lot of sense. Perhaps he did not know Kaji very well - but from Asuka? Clinging to a person like that... an aloof older man. And Kaworu knew that when Asuka clung to him, she must have done it with every ounce of genuine desperation she had.

Surely an adult Lilim would see it as a joke. Did Kaji?

He did not move from his chair, as much as he wished there was some physical gesture that he knew would comfort her.

"It wasn't okay. I wouldn't know why he would feel compelled to do such a thing without asking," he agreed. He really wanted to know more now. "What happened after he did that? Did he say anything?"

"...I yelled at him," Asuka lifted her shoulders in a tight little shrug, "I told him I hated him. I told him - I said a lot of things."

Her voice hardened, "And I meant all of them. And... I cried. And then he told me about his terrible childhood, like it meant something."

She left out that she'd hurled things at him and generally been vindictive and horrible. Because it was Asuka - if the narrative in her own head was good enough for her, it ought to be good enough for everyone. Right?

If only he had a more complete picture of what happened. For now, and maybe forever, what Asuka could tell him would have to do. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and knitted his fingers together to think.

This was her conversation to control. Kaworu was heistant to dig deeper than this. Would it be better to nudge her floodgates open, or would it be better to give her superficial support for now? She sounded bitter and angry and terribly wounded.

As if giving him an excuse to delay his decision, the kettle on the stove began to whistle.

"I feel a bit in the dark," he said slowly as he stood and moved to retrieve the water. "I don't know anything about your relationship with him. Do you feel guilty for saying you hated him and yelling?"

"No!" Asuka's voice was back to being shrill, "I do hate him!"

Of course, she'd said the same thing about Shinji. But that was different. With Kaji it's a sense of betrayal, a violation of her boundaries, a sense that she'd never been anything but a joke.

"I don't feel anything."

Of course, that wasn't true. It still hurt.

He sighed. Steam rose up over his shoulder as he poured water from the kettle.

"You often say you don't feel anything. But I find that when you say that, you are actually overwhelmed with feelings." Asuka wouldn't have come here if she was uncomfortable with the possibility of hearing Kaworu call her out on her posturing. "You had invested quite a lot of hope in this Kaji person, hadn't you?"

A moment later, he was at the couch again, daring to come closer to her than he had before. As he sat, he passed her a hot cup of tea.

"What was it about him that you liked?"

Sometimes she felt like she was using Kaworu as a therapist (she was) and she hated the idea. Well, more that she was two minds of it. She hated it and she liked it. It helped, even if it's hard. She wanted to push past so much of what holds her back, but it was very, very easy to fall back into familiar patterns and old habits.

She accepted the mug of tea without much comment and simply let it warm her hands, expression locked into a frown.She may have flinched slightly when he called her out, but she didn't snap at him for it, either. Progress.

"...I don't know. He - he was..."

She didn't want to say it. She didn't want to face this aspect of herself. She fell silent for a minute. Longer.

"...he was in control of everything. He was collected. He was... adult. Ugh, that sounds stupid. Forget I said anything!"

But that was what it was about. She'd been stuck in between two different worlds; she ignored and scorned her peers in her age group because they couldn't keep up with her and because they were "children", but the older students at her university had a decade or experience on her and didn't want much to do with a thirteen-year-old wunderkind. And the adults in her life had treated her like baggage to be shuttled from place to place. Very valuable, important baggage, but still baggage.

So she'd felt isolated, alone. Kaji had been a doorway for her, a chance to finally prove she belonged.

Kaworu shook his head, took a long sip of his coffee, and pulled his feet up onto the couch so he could sit cross-legged. No, this needed to be addressed. She was embarrassed to be confessing these things, but running away from it again isn't going to help.

"It may sound stupid to you, but it sounds pretty normal to me. There's no shame in how you felt about him, Asuka. Lilim frequently try to fill the gaps in their hearts with people they think can make up for their perceived inadequacies. Of course..."

He took another sip. The coffee had gone cold, but the milk and sugar still tasted good.

"...the risk of approaching your problems that way is betrayal."

Shinji did the same thing and was hurt the same way. Ah, how irresponsible Kaworu had been... Still, it was really remarkable how similar they were. He looked back to her with adoration on his face.

"No human in this world is in control or collected. Adult is a biological state characterized by sexual maturity, not a state of mind. Instead, these qualities... they're qualities that some members of your kind are very good at emulating." People like Kaji.

Asuka dropped her gaze when Kaworu mentioned filling in gaps. She hated to think of herself like that (and she hated herself because she knew it was true). She relied on others, even when she tried not to. So where did that leave her? Was she just worthless? Sometimes she thought so. Soemtimes she just wanted to go back to that long period in Tokyo-3 where she'd stayed in bed for days on end, sedated and quiet, kept alive by machines and force-feeding.

It had been easy not to care about anything. But what kind of existence was that?

"So, I'm an adult! Why wouldn't he treat me like one?"

"Why are you so desperate to be treated like one?"

His smile had faded now, his expression morphing into sincere concern. She missed the point he had meant to make entirely. The problem is this idea of adult, isn't it.

"You are hinging your concept of yourself on the way you are treated by others - which will always be out of your control." That's the true mark of a child.

Kaworu leans off the couch to set his mug on the coffee table as he continues. "The Lilim's power comes from their ability to shape their own futures."

Edited 2013-09-16 22:47 (UTC)

Asuka's grip tightened on the mug, the heat seeping into her, almost too hot for her to really hold onto.Her shoulderes tightened, feet and knees pressed closer together. Then she shot her gaze up from her mug to stare at Kaworu, voice raising for brief moment, "Because I can't-!"

She cut herself off before she got any further, brow furrowed as she dropped her gaze again. She'd gone through this before with herself. With "god". With whatever entity had spawned Third Impact. She'd been forced to look at herself, to examine why she hated others, why she hated being alone, why she relied on them despite that. Saying it out loud proved harder than simply admitting it to herself. It meant risking judgement, it meant risking being hurt. It meant the possibility of losing someone's love.

"...because I need their respect. That's all."

There. That was safer.

Edited 2013-09-16 23:05 (UTC)

Kaworu shifted, crawling closer to her on the couch.

"But you don't need their respect. You're giving them so much power over you, and for nothing."

As he spoke, he reached out, gently pried the mug of tea from her hands, and set it safely on the coffee table.

"You don't need to hope for approval that will never come from someone uninterested in giving it. You don't have to be an adult. You would feel better, have less weight on your shoulders, if you lived life free from these pretenses."

He took her hands in his. They hadn't been this close since the night she broke down and cried against him. It wasn't that Kaworu intended to induce that kind of utter misery from her again. She just needed the same support right now.

"That Asuka is already beautiful. A hardy desert rose, blossoming in the wilderness, far from any oasis."

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