#collaudare

Now who was it that would receive quite the treatment from the steel specialist? Some unlucky girl with lovely ginger hair, it seemed. He approached her, a thought in mind of how to prank this one. Yes...it was perfect...this idea of his...

Now, don't be startled, Asuka, as a hand descends on your shoulder and a tall man leans in, voice a low murmur and almost threatening.

"You should really have hidden all the evidence..."

i am so upse t iam so upset i am so u pset BURY ME HOW AM I SUPP OSED TO REPL Y TO TH IS IN AN AU CONTEX T YOU NERD :((((

Caught in the fluxing uptempo of the derisive hurricane known as Asuka, he’d entrapped himself in a cycle of insecurity, kept himself rigidly bolstered to the broken, parasitical cognition of loyalty. There wasn’t any rationale behind a girl like her, precocious and vibrant and intransigent to any adversary with the mulish audacity to spite her. She shone brilliantly where he faded away from public view as a superficial composite of a wallflower to be transposed as more of a tool than a person (in contest of the claim that Shinji Ikari was an actual human being that could go five seconds without immediately dissenting opinions and percolating regrets).

Even in the light of a Polaroid-perfect existence as Unit-02’s pilot, maybe she was as lonely as him. Even in the case it was only pity, he’d still obstinately clung to whatever weirdly symbiotic relationship they’d formed, and in these times he didn’t feel so alienated. (That wasn’t to imply he was by any stretch masochistic, however; the bullying and teasing comments had a habit of wrenching up half-stupefied conniptions and further fuselage for discombobulated animosity, but given his passive nature, he hadn’t exactly done anything to prevent the current state of affairs.)

After losing Rei and Kaworu, she was the only one left.

And Shinji ran feverishly, heels digging into the concrete and sprinting faster than he’s ever gone in his entire life, lungs protesting and heart thrumming painfully, self-preservation ebbing down a gutter. And even at that distance, her voice rings sharp in his ears, bitter without any discernible provocation. ”Why am I crying? I swore I wouldn’t cry anymore.” she whispers, but her voice is so brutally, cruelly sharp that it cuts away at him, even as he struggles to catch up to her in time. Asuka turns with her eyes blazing, deep and venomous, every facet of her body a flensed nerve. She turns.

Three feet away.

“Why are YOU there, damn you! You don’t DO anything, you won’t HELP me, you won’t even HOLD me, you’re NO ONE! NO ONE! NO ONE! WHY WON’T YOU LOOK AT ME?”

Two feet away.

“STAY AWAY FROM ME! I’M GOING TO LIVE ON MY OWN! I WON’T RELY ON ANYONE! I CAN LIVE ON MY OWN!”

One foot away.

“Don’t let me die.”

His fingers just manage to graze her hand, and then, snapping brokenly from his throat as she slips —

There's no use worrying over her.

Nowadays, Asuka was becoming increasingly unwound. There were no soft curves or gilded humility to her personality, only what she ever bothered to demonstrate for anyone else. The potential for exasperation, heavy and percolating, in the fluctuating static of her breath. Derision itself, mocking and leaden. There was an ethos appeal in short-fused temper tantrums, in the embodiment of anger, and maybe she'd always been that way, but there were those minute glimpses when he'd see — not someone else. In that context, it didn't make sense; it wasn't demonic possession or the vices of a split-personality to catch her smiling; her eyes illuminated in filaments, and she was radiating in that moment, positively aglow.

It could've passed for voyeurism. But he'd seen her for who she was, and in that sifting half-second, it was a mutual understanding that he'd kept himself in a similar manner. Bolted-down on any and all attempts for intimacy, sealed-up whatever semblance of greed and envy and alienation under a tableau of indifference. The difference between an independent person and a person who swallowed down loneliness was perspective.

Gratitude came secondary. 

Asuka doesn't make a habit of calling him (whenever she does, it's always overtly interpersonal, her voice grating over the phone like fractured glass past tapped lines), but he'd never outright refuse any genuine request she made. She wasn't particularly specific about it, but that was irrelevant. It wasn't as if Shinji was ever preoccupied with anything much, nowadays. Anxiety about nothing particular trundled away between whatever passed for nonchalance. Abandoning the gutted condo that was supposed to pass for home, he takes to the streets. 

Hands idly sifting through his pockets, Shinji meanders through five blocks of newly-asphalted pavement, turning a corner down streets in the cut-edge frame of scissoring angles and urbanite decay to the spot they'd mutually agreed to meet up at. She's not waiting for him, of course, but he settles for plunking back onto a bench and waiting out her arrival. After a forty-five minute interval,  he's just about ready to call it quits when he discerns her approach, and by that point he doesn't even bother with subtlety, going straight for sardonic deadpan in a matter of seconds.

A SONG FROM MY CHARACTER TO YOURS

      stripped ♫ shiny toy guns

let me see youstripped down to the bonelet me hear you make decisionswithout your televisionlet me hear you speakingjust for me

A SONG MY CHARACTER WOULD LOVE

      young and beautiful ♫ lana del ray

Epsilon: Do you feel like your character is living a better life now that they’re au’d, or did they lead a better life in their original universe.