#!written

There is a train that hurtles sidelong, impassively, with no destination or regards for the fledgling hopes and fears of a particularly sad child with sadder eyes, utterly convinced that vindication's only a concept. Shinji cursorily glances at him, then past him — at the unchanging twilight seeping into the boxcar through osmosis, staining the seats, their shivering forms in dying, melted shades of orange (the color of rotting apricots, sweet and at once sickening).

"Who are you?" he asks the sad, reed-thin child in a caricature of him at five years old sitting across the passenger seats, hands shivering over his kneecaps.

(Who are you?) 

The answer reverberates. Leliel is nothing but a misnomer at that point; the boy sitting in front of him is at once himself and not, a contortion of truth that ripples along the walls and pierces the veneer of autonomy. Shinji glances up at the ceiling.

He raises his head again and again, making an honest-to-god endeavor to direct his gaze past his elongating shadow. "Shinji Ikari. That's me."

(I'm you. Everyone has another self within them. Two figures make one individual.)

"Two?"

(The one seen by others and the one who's looking at them. There are many Shinji Ikaris. The one in your mind, the one in Misato Katsuragi's mind, the one in Asuka Soryu's mind, the one in Rei Ayanami's mind, and the one in Gendo Ikari's mind. Each of them are different, but they're all Shinji Ikari.

You're concerned about the Shinji Ikari in other peoples' minds.)

It's all collateral damage. The brightness of the sun settling across the expanse of his vision is exorbitantly painful, a localized region of blindness where he squints and squeezes his eyes shut, but can't detract from the smearing red staining the back of his eyelids.

"I don't want others to hate me." Shinji shies away from his open admission, guilt ensuing the silence in a sieve, because disappointment and failure are synonymous to people who have never discerned a difference between individual value and collective effort.

(You don't want to get hurt.)

"Whose fault?" His words are engorged, sullenly lopsided excuses to scapegoat the blame onto someone else, anyone else that would take on the blame for his mottling ineptitude.

(My father's fault.)

"It was my father who abandoned me." Shinji replies with point-blank insolence certainty, transposing images of forsaken children gradually acclimating to years of betrayal. And then, when left with no ensuing answer, continues without fanfare.

"It's my fault."

Asuka, irascible and despicably intimate, a serrated knife against the flesh that sings: You tend to think you're wrong. That's so self-destructive!

"I'm useless."

Misato, pitying and disconsolate, a distortion of duty and cloying loneliness: You think you're useless, right?

SLAP.

He reels back from Rei Ayanami's backhand demonstration, cheek stinging with the state of the human condition, empathy for others even as her voice remains bitterly monotone.

Rei, honest and composed, expression bleeding with perfidious hope and stringent emptiness, all at once: Don't you trust your father?

"I think I hate him, but I'm not sure now."

Gendo, the profile of his back a silhouette in the montage of his mental psyche: Well done, Shinji.

"Father called my name. Father praised me."

(So you want to live with that happiness.)

Shinji doesn't flinch, doesn't even react to the change in narrative psychoanalysis by anything other than a spasmodic twist of his fingers, curling inwards, always curling inwards and never articulating himself as he means to, as a form of livelihood instead of merely going through the motions. "If I trust his words, I can live."

(By deceiving yourself ... ?)

"Everyone's the same. Everyone lives by doing that." His defiance is acutely defensive, and even as he bolts upright, he shies back, his body in warring conflict.

(If you don't believe you're doing right, you can't live.)

"There are too many hardships for me to live in my world." Ikari retorts, lapsing back and staring away, anywhere that isn't marginally occupied by the sad-eyed child who mocks him with every parenthetical notion of sympathy.

(For example: you can't swim?)

"Humans aren't born to float." Black-and-white concepts of good and bad are detrimental to piloting an EVA or earning his father's approval; he can take a plane or a boat or don a life vest and achieve the same result. Two sides of the same coin.

(It's self-deception.)

"Whatever you want to call it!" Hateful, hateful, hateful.

(You've closed your eyes and shut your ears to unpleasant matters.)

Kensuke, reluctantly responding to his query about Toji and why he'd resorted to brutish ferocity, to pummeling fistfights with the Third Child: In that incident, his sister was —

Misato again, abrasive, her displeasure grating on his ears, spindling nails on a chalkboard: It doesn't MATTER what others think!

Gendo again, facing him now, clear as day, the light around him a filtering halo: Go home.

Shinji violently curls into himself, hands clamped over his ears, and screams.

"NO, I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT!"

(See, you're running away again. You can't live by spinning only a thread of happiness.)

A pause, long and weighted:

On whatever bundle of nerves induces cathartic impulse for menial chores is beyond him, but nevertheless, Shinji takes five on the studying track marathon to clean. Crouching along the floor, his knees smear with static and carpet burn, his fingers snatching around doodads and knick-knacks accumulating in surplus beneath his bed and swiping loose change under the mattress.

Springtime is as exuberant as ever, but the seasons melt in mass exodus and he's left vaguely unsatisfied on the precipice of summer. It's just another year halfway through it's cycle, already worth its weight in pyrite. As fool's gold for the particularly nostalgic, sentimentality came with an expiration date, but he wasn't on the acting on the expectation of dredging up family heirlooms.

Ikari's father threw away everything, leaving recollections solely to the volition of the heart. He's scratching out the old tags stickered onto a ragtag traveling suitcase with his index finger, when a flash of fabric brightness catches in his periphery, the object itself folded up and propped neatly against a scruffy pair of tennis shoes that have nondefinitively seen better days.

Shinji tentatively reaches out.

It starts like this.

He is so very young.

The straw hat falls past his eyes, obscuring his view. With his shirt bunching up at the nape of his neck, he's twisted this way and that to straighten out his disheveled appearance with no avail. The sandals are definitely busted, or maybe faulty, with the way they keep slipping off his feet. The cicadas hum intermittently, the somnolent buzzing of low-happening days encapsulated in the near-cloudless sky, the sun like a shining beacon.

He's learned about that in class, too — that the lemon-yellow drop of gold swung lazily in the sky helps all the trees and grasses and flowers to grow. All of them point heavenward toward it, and Shinji — Shinji, at the height of four years old, wobbily rocks back and forth on his cooling heels, stretching his arms up until his elbows pop.

The sky is wide and endless, depthless enough to drown him, but Shinji will persevere. Maybe he'll grow as well in the sun! So cool. It would be wonderful to be so strong, so brave, so tall. He'd be able to go anywhere he pleased, free as a bird, answering only to himself. But such willful thoughts subside as his mother snaps the umbrella she was idling twirling shut and bends down beside him, willowy legs bent beneath her sundress.

She is so very kind.

His mother is the most beautiful lady in the world, for sure. Her eyes are almond-shaped and her hair fractures softly and her laughter is flyaway wind chimes in a greenhouse made entirely of glass (sparkly and bursting with light, reflecting the entire world). Unwaveringly enough, any mild slipknots of anxiety or tangled dregs of self-consciousness immediately ebb away at her smile. She clasps both hands around his wrist warmly.

Slowly, ever so slowly, they link pinkie fingers like a sworn oath, and he blinks confusedly at his sweet mother whom he loves with his entire heart.

Her voice is like water vapor, drawn out in whispering empathy and abruptly dissipating in the wind. He strains his eardrums to hear her speak.

"Never forget ... ... the promise we made ... ... whatever happens from here on.

... You will be the one who ..."

His voice cracks to respond.

With one small, punctuated gasp he leans too far into the hyperrealism; he lands on the carpet with a particularly leaden thump, staring blankly up at the ceiling for a long, long time. The shock is slow-bidden. Between his clammy palms are a lab coat, the standard type of sartorial attire more befitting of a doctor, or perhaps a scientist, than to a teenager childishly swiping at his eyelids like it'll halt the prickling tears. The condensing memory incurs misunderstanding.

Shinji has no recollections of his mother, after all. She died long before anything like lulling compassion or homespun affection could become anything like a ritual. There are no photographs because his father threw them all away, begrudged his son the right to remember. For far too many times he's sought out to find the love for his mother in his father's eyes and seen only brittle emptiness, letting the ghost of her be his own, solitary secret.

Arbitrarily hollow, he carefully, carefully re-folds the coat (horribly shuddering hands, every ligament shaking) and stows it away in the bottommost drawer of the bureau, closes it shut, and slumps back against it, knob digging into his spine. How strange.

.

Goodbye, Dad.

.

Desmond's still smiling.

Perpetually smiling in that Polaroid snapshot, a solstice blister of a grin out-of-season, unrepentantly sharp, boasting inaudibly at his latest exploit — clearing the freerunning course in five minutes flat, no scrupulous goading necessary. (Did'ja see that?! If Mom's making lasagna for dinner, I'm doubling my portion.)

Worn-out sneaker heels kicked up against the chain-link fence outside their compound, one sweatshirt sleeve haphazardly snagged on the metal (he held an inclination for hoodies even prior to his desertion, as if ad-libbing his sartorial choices was the status quo for common vagrancy), and the corners of his mouth were turned-up before the camera, beaming widely. He was eleven then, not quite hardened into the cynic who pooled his lots into the probability of a future without a backbone, sustained solely by patron tabs at his shitty bar and second-rate apartment complexes, a vagrant in every sense of the word.

Earnestness could undo people, however, unravel any false sense of bravado, the dismally incontrovertible notion of honesty underlying every parable. Even Bill understands that beyond any self-induced escapism, there was a never a way to refute the delineation between contrition and resignation. In layman's terms, he could never deny the blatant truth, solidified on the precipice, in the no-man's land occupying awake and asleep.

Desmond was his son.

Twenty-five years of repressed animosity before Desmond was martyred into being their veritable savior. He was a convergence of faulted hopes and out-of-sync timelines all wrapped up in a Messianic cautionary tale where the hero dies for their noble war, where the hero doesn't even have a sense of religion so much as the sticky subterfuge of a prayer to save them all lining his palms as he dies alone, alone, and it's —

— just another chapter in this endless story. And it'll be your job ... and Mom's, and — and Shaun's and Rebecca's, to keep turning the pages. 

(Remember to laugh, as if there's hope scripted into the story.)

His phone rings, and Bill doesn't bother giving it a passing glance in lieu of vehemently hurling it across the room where the screen s-shatters, blinking in-and-out in distorted syncopation, briefly illuminated.

                12. 21. 2013.

This was a fair trade. Contractual fulfillment. Raise his son to die for the greater good; he understood the terms all along, right? If not a prophecy, then an aimed bullet; if not martyr, then a casualty of war. Assassins were known for their limited life-spans, for their short-circuited deaths in the name of being some contrived paragons of sacrifice. 

His shoulders won't stop shaking.

After all this time, it would be better to heal, to smile back at the boy in the picture. He'd been waiting for so long. That wouldn't do. Desmond wouldn't stand for that. He never was a patient kid to begin with, and if he saw his old pop on the verge of tears, he'd be more prone to make contrived jabs to cheer him up, rather than offer condolences. 

Late afternoon at the bare periphery of the Farm, adjacent to the old sycamore. Penitent Desmond, only a boy, head bowed, fingers and wrists scabbed over in scratches from roughhousing with another child over the proprietary rights of a pudding cup, of all things. (You were right, Dad. I was being an idiot. I'm sorry. As your son, I should know better. I won't do it again.)

And that, that is the point where he scoops him up and forgives him once again, because being Desmond's father and making amends mattered more, so much more than being his Mentor. 

The recollection strangely threatens to undo his resolve. 

.

Goodbye, Dad.

.

Death is a funny thing, visceral and empty, a paradox of a contradiction (365 days to account for, and the pain is still as incapacitating as the initial shock). 

For the longest time, there's only silence, his cell's alarm extinguished at last with a dimming cry of digital metronome. Bill meticulously folds the photograph back, once, twice, three times, then neatly tucks it back into his wallet. It's only then that he registers the stinging pinprick of grief obscuring his vision. It catches him off guard, stemming from some place distinctly detached from the reverberating staccato of his pulse, not a composite of his flesh or his soul, only of debilitated grief, disconsolate and soundless. 

The final journey commences.

Somehow, Lucy Stillman’s already resigned herself to oblivion.

It was a severe kind of existentialism, severing fissures in ribs to split open halos, sanctimony in the cautionary tale of abstract irony. The silence coaxes on desperation, catches onto oxygen and drowns in the dizzy vertigo of timestamp decibels. In lieu of some warming noonday, a solidifying night, evening hurtling into a dusk they no longer have no name for. Unease settles in their bones. (October 10. The date bothers her to the point of unnerving, but that in itself is no reason to put off what she’s sworn herself to, and she pointedly dismisses it as paranoia.)  

They are scabbed over in excruciating apprehension (clotting the capillaries, drenching the limbs), but they complicity trust each other, and so they are unafraid together, only blistered with qualms. Four-cubed was a rounded amiability, and it wasn’t a mutually exclusive issue to fixate belief in their immortality. They are all more than the sum of their parts. By that point, it was a slow and smoky mantra to survive. If one of them fell, the rest would inevitably follow suit (a lesser degree of upended pseudo-fate).

Echoes in glass, resonating underfoot; the fractured undercurrent of warbling footfalls in a temple of blown static, of metallic suns. At the mottled heart of the Coliseum, hazy lights burst into fluorescent rust spiraled around the dais, at the steps leading to their absolution. The Apple of Eden hung suspended on its pedestal, gone sour with potential, with the substantiality of a congealing ultimatum in rippling gold.

On the verge of her end, she knew.

The fizzling air, stagnant with pestilence, was the precursor to harbinger demise, to a fevered velocity of cathedrals severed from history, contritely holy. Fatalism skipping akimbo, itching at her veins — it was unmistakable that Lucy would find her resolution there. Grief, amputated. A sudden resuscitation of irrational alarm at the altar, like commitment issues were the norm after twenty-four years of indoctrination. There’s only shock in lieu of horror, depthless and utterly surreal. And she turns to face Desmond, Rebecca and Shaun bleached incorporeal in the shadow of her silhouette.

And she turns.

She turns.

.

Seventeen days at the bottom of the ocean.

The pulse between seconds, shredded to collapsible detritus.

In the bleak soliloquy of imploring desolation, there are only extremes. Fingers splayed out. Consternation synapsed in a black hole, dense enough to induce an event horizon in the lungs. Eyes snapped wide. The afterimage of hypocrisy burned into the retinas. Throat closed up with asphyxiation.

Lucy is a deer-in-headlights, diaphanous and cracked-open through flesh and plasma, bleeding profusely, belatedly. Her heart skitters nebulously, a still-beating, quivering, ropy mess of flickering dissolution.

Tomorrow, she will plead her case to them in self-immolation; extricate the desecrated loneliness of perennial decades at the tip of her tongue. She will caustically bare her soul in earnest, flesh out her melting dogma and the semantics of martyred subterfuge in the wake of the dawn.

Lucy will always find some way to save them all, because it’s what she’s always done.

I’m sorry.

.

But it’s over.

Too late for fail-safe chances, or what might’ve been, in that deflating interval of straining deafness, breathing beneath strangled ghosts and death-row emptiness, superfluity to sentimentality and everything in between.   

Everything they hope to become, everything they hold dear.

It’s already gone.

.

The first thing Shaun Hastings registers is an unrepentantly raw, keening scream fracturing the silence.

It’s serrated and reeling in anguish (a writhing, drawn-out cry of violently unadulterated pain rising, rising). It crawls out of someone’s throat into sharp acuity, and it elapses into a hoarse, thin wailing.

“Oh, god. Luce, Lucy, sweetheart, Luce, please, please, please, you’ve gotta’ stay with us, no —“

The calling, the calling is a tangled shuddering of muffled sobs and imploring pleas, on and on, unceasing.

He can’t differentiate between any of them, for a splintered, drowning moment. He blindly grasps at his throat, vision spinning into cruel relief from an inertia rush of motion-drunkenness, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose.  

Eventually, Shaun focuses past the distended sobbing and stares torpidly at the red enshrining the threshold, pooling beneath Lucy’s crumpled form.

Death, thickly smeared over her abdomen, lilting rivulets into her jacket-vest ensemble, converging at the point where she bleeds mercurially. Lucy is pallidly ashen in contrast, wholly incongruous to the way the veins should’ve skipped under her complexion, the lulling spontaneity of pitchy reassurance. That was why it mattered to check, to make certain of truth indelible to the tongue. He’d stumbled down beside Rebecca, who continued to weep inconsolably, a tableau of misery.  

“I don’t w-want to hear it. Don’t you tell me she’s dead. She’s — she’s —they’ll make it in time.” She shrivels into herself, a blotchy, scraping movement of red-rimmed, stinging eyes and compact denial. For Rebecca, it’ll always be the five stages of grief. Carving out emotions temporarily satiate the hollowing absence, because she cares so damn much and every life matters, has always mattered. Her avoidance philosophy, the lethargy of bereavement; Shaun knows better than to convince her otherwise.

And still.

Checking Lucy’s pulse was a futilely wretched effort, a decanted rain-check that he’d known wouldn’t be there (known from the brittle stillness of her limbs, biting satire wrought to flesh and warped across her features). Shaun tries all the same, at the skin of her wrist, at the juncture between collarbone and neck, fingers at her temple, searching out a telltale pulse. Anything. Anything.

She isn’t moving.

The entire world seems to be built upon that tiny contradiction.

He doesn’t understand.

There’s no sense of religion or reconciled faith, then, in the condensation of decay. Desmond is incapacitated beside her. He hasn’t stirred once, fallen mutely catatonic. In retrospect, it’s a saving grace. He never would’ve wanted to see Lucy like that, at the end — shattered in a form of ritualistic sacrifice, viscera staining the altar sanguine.

The Apple is discarded, a pernicious, luridly sentient god lolling away from Desmond’s reach by the breadth of fingertips. Neither Rebecca nor Shaun can bear to glance at it, much less retrieve the godawful thing. The heaviness of their burden percolates.

Loss, indomitably, conquered all.