redheadcarrier | I'm now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy

I'm now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy | for wille

It's not fair. Nothing is ever fair. It's always her who has to deal with the fallout of everyone's stupid decisions. Especially Shinji. Always Shinji. He's the one people worry about, he's the one people care for, he's the one who can apparently do no wrong. And her? All she can do is keep failing over and over and over again. She can't beat any of the Angels, it seems; she's had to be saved by Shinji so many times and her sync ratio - her sync ratio isn't getting better anymore. It's getting worse. Everything is getting worse. Did anyone come and cry at her hospital bed after she was injured? No! But Misato spent a month trying to get Shinji out of his Eva (and seemed way too broken up about it).

She can't control any of it. Every last piece of her life is spiraling out of control and even when she tries to force it all back into a familiar, comfortable pattern, it all just seems to backfire. She's in the bathroom now, staring at the tub, body feeling tense and coiled, a feeling of sullen anger and despair growing in her gut. This isn't fair. Why does she have to share this stupid, cramped apartment with these people she hates? Despite the moisture and steam in the air and her recent bath, she feels unclean. Like there are bugs crawling over her skin.

"Why do I have to share a bathub with them?"

She's speaking aloud, voice muted as she tries to force all of it out. To find a target.

"We even have to share a washing machine! And a toilet!"

It all hurts. The idea of having to share her space is becoming an overwhelming facet in her mind. She hates being near them. She hates having to see them every day. She hates everything about this apartment, about Japan, about Misato and Shinji and-

"I hate Misato. I hate Shinji!"

Her voice starts to rise and a part of her knows that Misato can hear her through the thin door and walls of the apartment, but she also doesn't care anymore. Somehting inside of her is finally cracking and breaking under the straing.

"I especially hate Rei! And papa! And mama!"

It all hurts, it's all tumbling out. And she finally vocalizes something she's known for the past ten years of life.

"But most of all - most of all, I hate myself! Why do I have to go through this? Why me? Why?"

The bucket goes flying and it clatters against the wall as her voice trails off into a wail and she sinks back against the wall of the bathroom, face buried against her knees as she tries for force back angry, heated tears, shoulders shuddering with each intake of breath. It is all her fault, isn't it?

She's not good enough. She wasn't good enough for her mother, she's not good enough for NERV, she's not good enough to do anything.

It isn't fair.

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Hiding away and pretending nothing hurts isn't the same as surviving. Misato believes that to cope means to expose one's scars to the sun, study its crooked surfaces without flinching, throw rubbing alcohol on one's wounds and feel the burn without turning one's mind away. A sort of exorcism. She is forever running toward what hurts in an attempt to defeat it, conquer it, tame it.

But who is she kidding? That, too, is a form of running away.

In the silence that stretches between her words and Asuka's, she can hear the quiet rustling of sheets in one of the rooms. See the home she has built: one full of sleepless minds, restless souls.

"I do, huh?"

There's no challenge in her voice. Just admission. It's true. To stop wanting is to stop living, to stop striving means to give up. She can't bear the idea of not wanting something, even if it's only to decide to want it. The feeling comes later. It's the principle of heading somewhere and not standing in place. Only dead fish swim downstream.

"You're right," when she means: you're right, you know, Asuka, about my contrived life and about not caring and about using people only as tools. "Maybe-- I feel a little lonely tonight. Is it alright if I stay here for a bit?"

Pretending that nothing hurts is what Asuka's done best. Or at least what she's tried to do. It was easier when she thought she might earn redemption and love through her piloting efforts; when there was praise forthcoming for doing well in tests and graduating ahead of everyone else. Even during those cripplingly lonely years at college (the wunderkind hadn't had any friends; must 20-year-olds don't know how to handle an eleven-year old who's trying to get a degree), she'd excelled and every positive mark had helped her build her wall, brick by brick.

It had taken her years of her life to convince herself and people around her that she might be worth something. To fool herself into believing it for a little while. And look what that had gotten her - everything torn down around her, a miserable existence in a country she hates, forced to work with people she also hates. Of course, most of all, she hates herself for being such a failure. The silence is filled with the drip-drip of water and Asuka starts too wonder if Misato is going to leave - and then she speaks up.

The words take a moment to register, filtering through her own wallowing misery. You're right.

When had Misato ever said that to her?

Asuka lifts her head to stare at the closed door, as if she can stare a hole through it with her own effort. What's Misato trying to do? Is she trying to fool her? Is she trying to pretend that everything is fine?

But that's not what Misato is doing. This isn't Misato's fake cheerfulness or even the stern disciplinarian. Misato just sounds tired. Alone.

Asuka stares at the doorway and the seconds tick away into minutes. What does she say to that? How does Misato expect her to respond? Does she think that she understands Asuka? That she's like Asuka? What's the angle on this? It takes Asuka a long time to force her limbs to move and she finally stands, damp feet padding against the tile as she crosses over to the door. Her hand goes out to reach for the handle, half of her tempted to fling the door open and yell. To drive Misato away and let her know that her fake sympathy isn't going to help this time. Not that she deserves real sympathy.

Instead, her hand hovers and then drops to her side and Asuka steps forward and slumps into a tired, naked little ball against her side of the door, the cheap wood and blurred glass making Misato an indistinct shape on the other side. The glass is cool against her skin where she leans against it.

Her voice is quiet, almost weak.

"Why?"

Why now? Why try to reach out when she's nothing but a tired, useless rag of a girl? Why pretend? Why does she have to suffer through all of this? Why is she always alone? Why did her mother hate her? Why anything? Why everything?

It's hard not to break into a smile when the door trembles, a steady force meeting her back, a rare gesture of acceptance from a girl so intent on rejecting everyone before any can reject her. Misato thinks she understands that. Methods differ, but the intent remains the same.

Age notwithstanding, Asuka has been an adult, independent, self-sufficient, self-serving, for far longer than should be fair. Misato thinks she understands that, too, the resentment that comes from early abandonment, intentional or otherwise. There's nothing more hurtful to a child -- and she is just a child -- than the constant and inadvertent negligence from adults. She should know better than to continue the vicious cycle.

Why, then? She is complicit now in the reverberations of trauma, that self-propagating spiral, but maybe it's possible to draw the line somewhere. Stop. Turn around. Walk the other way.

She draws her knees closer to her chest, chin tucked against arms folded over her knees, gathering herself to herself to feel more secure in the absence of company. A door can be a wall or a window.

"It's hard to explain," in a way it goes back to the age-old I'm lonely too, but that's the same as wanting something from the girl, who's right, she's always wanting something. "I don't think I've ever asked you what you need from me."

Asuka stays curled against the door, ignoring the chill that's slowly starting to creep into the room as the steam and heat begins to dissipate. She can handle it. She can handle anything.

No, that's a lie. She can't handle it. She can't handle failure. She can't handle losing. She can't handle a single damn thing and she knows it and she hates herself for knowing it. She hates so many things, but it all boils down to her. She hates everyone around her because she knows she's not good enough. She knows that she's a failure, a forgotten, excess, useless child and she hates everyone for knowing it and for leaving her behind, like the piece of human trash that she is.

It's her fault, anyway.

And now here's Misato, asking her what she needs. There's a bitter taste in her mouth. Now, of all times, Misato asks. It's different from before, though. This doesn't feel like Misato pretending to care so she can coax a few more percentage points of performance out of her. But why now? After all this time why does Misato choose tonight to actuall give a damn?

The stupid thing is, she doesn't really know what she wants. Rather, she doesn't know how to put it into words. Asuka doesn't even know if it's what she really wants. Her legs are drawn up against her chest and she's silent, letting it drag out. She can't be open about this; they'll think she's weak. She can't stay quiet; she doesn't want to be alone and forgotten.

Asuka's breath hitches and she feels like she's going to start crying all over again.

"...I don't know."

She feels intensely, horrifically vulnerable when the words finally tumble out of her. And when they do, they don't stop. Every word makes her hate herself a little more; it's sickening, twisted vulnerability that she hates to admit to, but it's all coming out.

"I don't know. I hate this. I hate Japan and I hate being here. I hate you. You just - you never say anything to me that isn't fake. You care more about Shinji than me. You pretend that I'm OK so you can feel better about doting on him."

She sucks in another breath. Her throat feels raw and the tears are coming again. She thought she'd finally gotten them all out, but here they are again.

"I hate myself, you know? I hate that I'm not good enough. But I probably deserve to be ignored, because I can't actually do anything you want me to do. I can't win, so what use am I? That's why you don't care. My own mother-"

She cuts herself off. That's too far, even if Misato probably already knows. Already read the file.

"I just don't want to be alone anymore...!"

The door shakes slightly with the trembling of her shoulders as her voice rises into a wail that's half anger and half complete and utter despair. This is humiliating.

"I wish I was dead."

What she has learned is-- what she is still learning is that vulnerability isn't weakness. Knowledge of suffering makes you all the more capable of kindness to others. Because that's different from being weak. Only knowing isn't enough, that is only the first step of many, and now she realizes after having taken that first one step that the journey may be far longer and harder than she expected, because see, it's the more familiar demons that are the most frightening.

It's hard not to wince when Asuka declares I hate you, a well-deserved sentiment made no easier to hear in person. But the rest of the words that follow could have come from her very own lips. Some days she loses all hope for herself. She is pathetic, too. She's afraid of abandonment so she leaves before the other person could, and yet, she doesn't want to be alone anymore. And the truth is, sometimes she wonders if it may be better for everyone, and herself, if she isn't here. Is it alright to be here? Is it alright for her to stay even if she hasn't figured out why and may never do?

The girl's tirade follows a long silence, long and quiet enough for the sound of Shinji replaying his tape to be heard inbetween.

Her first instinct is to provoke her out of her death instinct, needle her about how pathetic it would be to die. Didn't she say she wants to win? What kind of victory is death? That's just the cowardly way out, you're not a coward now, are you, Asuka? And she knows, that it would work. She has read the files. She knows enough about how people fit together and how they work, but she also knows the striving would destroy her.

"Me too," with a voice barely above a whisper, because the admission is beyond shameful, only shame dies when exposed to sunlight or so she hopes. "Well, I don't really wish I'm dead, I can't afford to, and not for any good reason."

Misato isn't even sure what she's really saying and she regrets each word that tumbles out of her lips, but pushes on with the reckless abandon of one who has nothing left to lose, because there really is nothing left for her to lose.

"I guess, what I'm saying is--" She breaks her fumbling with a sigh. "I haven't been what you need me to be, a mother, or something like that. I've failed. So hate me, god knows I deserve it, but you know, you're not to blame for how others treat you. You don't have to try so hard cause they're not even watching close enough. We're all just caught up in our own miserable bubbles really. All the same."

The silence that answers her at first threatens to swallow Asuka up. Was it all some cosmic joke? Is Misato going to tell her to toughen up? That she should stop being a waste of space? Maybe she'll just got shoved away. Told that she's just as worthless as she thinks she is. As the silence drags on, her fingers start to tighten against her legs and she starts preparing her own, angry retort - except that when Misato speaks it's a quiet, hoarse little admission that sinks into her bones and settles there.

Misato hates herself.

Misato hates a lot of things.

She's like her.

Asuka's trying to rectify that with so many preconceived notions and none of it squares up. Is this a trick? Is this some sort of joke? Or is Misato actually being honest? There's an inclination for her to be suspicious, because no one has ever told her something like that and meant it. It's always been patronizing words from distant adults. People she tries to pretend that she faces on an equal footing when they see her as little more than a disposable tool.

But she listens quietly, eyes locked on the far wall of the room. This feels awkward and alien and strange, but also intensely, oddly comforting. She's not alone in her self-hatred or in how she struggles to find commonality. Is that what this is?

Asuka moves without thinking. She stands and slides the door open, staring at the floor, damp hair sticking to her skin. She's naked, not even covered by a towel, skin still damp from the bath. She refuses to make eye contact with Misato, because she's afraid that she might see falsehood written all over her face.

"I don't want you to be my mother," Asuka says, voice hoarse from the sobbing and crying. Her cheeks are tear-stained and her eyes are reddened to go with them.

"She's dead."

Dead and left her alone. There's a deep breath, a shaky one, that lifts her chest in something that doesn't quite become a sob.

"I just - I don't - I don't want to be left," she continues and every word hurts. Every word is a struggle to get out and it leaves an aching, raw wound in her that throbs and tries to drag her down.

"I don't know. I don't know anymore, Misato-!" There's tears again. They never really left. Her hands are clenched into tight, white-knuckled fists at her sides.

"What if I don't even deserve that? My mother left because I wasn't good enough! Why - why - why should anyone else? If I'm not to blame, who is? Is everyone else just that stupid? Do they just ignore me because they don't care? I'd rather they hate me, because at least they'd acknowledge I exist!"

Stupid Shinji can probably hear this. She doesn't care anymore.

"I don't understand any of it. If they don't want me, they should just die. Or maybe I should."

There's some of her old spark, her old hatred, but it lacks spirit.

Edited 2017-02-17 23:31 (UTC)

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?"

Asuka feels as if all of the air in her has been sucked out. Misato's reached down into her core and torn out something central to her own identity. To how she thinks. How she sees the world. Her eyes, red from tears, are wide and staring. Her legs don't seem to want to work and she slowly slides back down the doorframe until she's folded into a mess on the bathroom floor, mouth gaping. She can't catch her breath for a moment. That can't be true, she saw her mother die, she watched her waste away in that hospital bed until she finally ended it.

But there's something in the way Misato looks at her that tells her it's all completely true.

"I - that's impossible-" Asuka's thoughts are a whirlwind. It can't be true, it shouldn't be true, but she has no idea how the Eva actually works. She just pilots it. She doesn't repair it or run tests. So it might be true. It probably is.

"Why?"

The word tears out of her in a sound that's almost another wail.

"Why would they do that to me?"

They tore away her life. They made her this. All of her own self-loathing and hatred and her wretchedness are because of them. Or did her mother choose to leave? Did she want to be trapped in a titan made of machinery and alien flesh?

"That's not-!"

There's anger in her voice and a childish notion of life ever being fair. She's going to kill them. She's going to kill all of them for doing this to her. And they won't be able to stop her.

Misato feels embarrassed for her, crumpled to the floor and naked, the carpet pulled right under her feet. It's not pity, no, that would imply more sympathy than she can muster. Just shame, because the world expects each person to be strong enough to always pull themselves up on their own, to know who they are and where they're going, always, leaving no room to allow weakness or to allow someone to shatter and be unable to pick themselves up without help. The thought occurs to her again that she should move closer, take the girl into her arms and comfort her like a mother, a sister, a friend would, but she-- can't.

In lieu of that she stands up instead and goes to fetch a towel from one of the cabinets, moves slow and deliberate, despite the momentary hesitation of seeing all the neatly folded cloths stacked by the diligent hands of one Shinji Ikari. It breaks her heart imagining him toiling for hours to keep up the house in the absence of responsible adults. Then it breaks her heart even more to realize that while Shinji begs for love by shaping himself into a dutiful son, Asuka begs for the same by playing the opposite role, and how unfair it is that she finds it so much easier to love the boy than the girl just because she was once him but she was never Asuka.

The towel in hand, she crouches low and offers it to the girl with apologetic eyes.

"People would do anything to save their own hides," adults would bleed dry a million children before they give up their dreams of immortality. A statement that rings so contrived that she needs to bite her lip before continuing.

"You can ask me anything, Asuka, I'll tell you whatever I know."

When she asked Kaji what he knew of SEELE, he warned her of ears pressed to the walls of their world. When she pressed Ritsuko, too, she warned him of watchful eyes. Section Two agents must be raising the volumes on their bugs right now, waiting for her to say the wrong words before busting in on them and dashing any illusions of privacy. But she doesn't care. She doesn't fucking care anymore. They could gun them both down now and she would feel little in the way of loss.

Maybe she's beginning to understand.

Asuka stays huddled on the floor as Misato moves to the cupboard. She feels vulnerable and alone and exposed here, more than she did a moment ago when she made the choice to open the door. Now it feels like a mistake, especially with Misato able to see her and with the way Misato acts - all matter-of-fact and military. There's nothing maternal in her, nothing like a sister or even a friend (why isn't Hikari here) and it hurts. It hurts more than she wants it to, because she's pretended for so long that Misato didn't matter, that her opinion was stupid, that she didn't crave or desire her approval or want her love (she can't be jealous of Shinji, she can't) and this just seems to prove that she's second-best. The unloved child. The extra. She curls in on herself, back stiff and awkward against the door jamb.

At least she's being given a towel. She accepts it without saying anything, head bowed, a curtain of still-damp hair covering her eyes as she wraps the towel around herself with a shiver. She feels more alone now than she did a moment ago. Isolated. Because it isn't as if Misato has to deal with a dead mother or the soul of a parent trapped inside a machine. She hasn't had her whole world torn down around her. What does she know? Why is she doing this? Why tell her, why, why, why?

"How long?"

How long has she known? How long has her mother been there? How long have they kept this from her? Has her whole life been one twisted lie? Because that's what it's starting to feel like.

She's going to kill them.

Every last one of them. Every old man, every selfish bastard who's promised her that if she tries a little harder, if she just does what she's told, she'll be praised and loved. She's going to tear them and their world apart until they feel the hurt she does. Until they understand the pain that pulses and throbs at her very core. Until it's them who are forgotten and trod underfoot and then she'll kill them.

Mama. Why didn't you tell me?

"What about..." Her throat is dry and it comes out in a croak, "What about Unit 00? Or 01?"

Of all her failings, Misato wonders which will hit her the hardest. Her failure at being a daughter, a lover or a mother?

She takes on the coat of a brother in arms more readily than an apron, the captain's hat fits her better, and late nights out at work suits her just fine. She won't ever be the kind to stay up waiting at a dinner growing cold. That was her mother's life, spent crying and pining and waiting to be loved, and it won't be hers because she won't wait for anything. What she still wouldn't admit is how much she is more like her father, as emotionally evasive, as drowned in work, as incapable of warmth. Still she stays crouched near the girl, eyes on the floor.

"A few days," she found it at some point during her continued stretch of sleeplessness, but the days and nights blur together. "Sorry, I lost count."

It occurs to her that perhaps she should apologize on behalf of the other adults too, on behalf of NERV, but she finds she doesn't want to. If she admits to guilt then she admits her part in this entire despicable plan. If she apologizes then she's calling herself one of them when she still has every plan to go after them, destroy the foundations of their power, avert their masterplan.

"They're all the same," except for Unit 00, but she keeps that silent, telling herself it's for Rei's sake, telling herself she doesn't know enough yet. "Would it have been better not to know?"

Asuka hasn't had an opportunity to fail at being a lover or a mother. She's certainly failed at being a daughter, though. She'd like to scream that the world failed her first, but she knows that's not true. If she wasn't a failure, she wouldn't be here, curled up on the floor of a dingy apartment, covered up by a towel and shivering. Her hands clench at the cloth,drawing it tighter and tighter around herself, as if she can shut out the world. She wants to cry and scream and break things. She wants someone to tell her that everything will be fine. She wants to kill the old men who have apparently turned her life into hell, who took away her mother.

She wants a hug.

A part of her wants Misato to comfort her and a part of her would take that, in this moment A way for all of the tension and horrible emotion that's built up inside of her to come pouring out. Catharsis. She's denied that, of course, by her own head and by Misato. There's no where for it to go except into anger and hatred and vicious self-loathing.

Why didn't she see any of this? Why didn't she understand? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Worthless.

"No," her voice comes out in a strained whisper. She's holding back tears again, throat tight, eyes aching. She thought she'd poured all of it out, but there's more, so much more, trying to pour itself out of her. A lifetime of resentment and anger and sorrow, all being brought to a head and she can't get it out. There's no where for it to go. No place for the energy to spend itself.

"Now I know who I have to kill."

What did they expect when they gave a fourteen year old girl the power of life and death?

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I'm now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy | for wille

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