What Misato fails to understand is that strange wish in the hearts of some, like Asuka, like Kaji, for death. As if death would afford them comfort, as if ending oneself means pressing the reset button and the afterlife is guaranteed to be a world free of suffering. Who made that promise? What have they got to show as proof? How desperate do you have to be to believe in something so empty and baseless? Like jumping out of a burning house, she thinks, you only take the leap when the alternative is that unbearable. But goddamn it, she would still turn around and take her chance to run through the fire than jump.
Something cold and rotten like resentment blooms in her chest, but she bites back most of the words she wants to say, like prove them wrong then or only cowards think of dying or I'm tired, let's just call it a night.
If at first she stares at Asuka and her nakedness -- figuratively, metaphorically as well, there's poetry in humanity's worst moments -- she slowly lowers her eyes to her own hand on the floor, tightening into a fist. She should reach out to her, hold her, but she can't. Can't. Like an absolute, a physical impossibility.
There are truths that people wiser than her thought best to withhold from her, the act being an exercise in power. What she doesn't know, she can't use. What she doesn't know guides her actions. Now she finds herself suddenly standing in the place of the former, knowing that to tell the girl the truth means to unshackle her, to turn her from a known variable to a wildcard. But if she doesn't, that makes her the same as Ritsuko, as Commander Ikari, as those old men in SEELE.
"Your mother never left, Asuka," her gaze is hard when she lifts it from the floor, weighted with guilt, not quite the look of someone seeking to comfort. She has never been good at that. "NERV took her away from you to give life to the Eva, because without it, the Eva would have no soul. It's the same with Shinji. He knows, I think. Do you understand? Do you believe me?"
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Something cold and rotten like resentment blooms in her chest, but she bites back most of the words she wants to say, like prove them wrong then or only cowards think of dying or I'm tired, let's just call it a night.
If at first she stares at Asuka and her nakedness -- figuratively, metaphorically as well, there's poetry in humanity's worst moments -- she slowly lowers her eyes to her own hand on the floor, tightening into a fist. She should reach out to her, hold her, but she can't. Can't. Like an absolute, a physical impossibility.
There are truths that people wiser than her thought best to withhold from her, the act being an exercise in power. What she doesn't know, she can't use. What she doesn't know guides her actions. Now she finds herself suddenly standing in the place of the former, knowing that to tell the girl the truth means to unshackle her, to turn her from a known variable to a wildcard. But if she doesn't, that makes her the same as Ritsuko, as Commander Ikari, as those old men in SEELE.
"Your mother never left, Asuka," her gaze is hard when she lifts it from the floor, weighted with guilt, not quite the look of someone seeking to comfort. She has never been good at that. "NERV took her away from you to give life to the Eva, because without it, the Eva would have no soul. It's the same with Shinji. He knows, I think. Do you understand? Do you believe me?"