The Sound of Heaven
By Kay
Disclaimer: I wouldn't own NGE if I was paid to do it. Too much mind-fuckery, however pretty the lights are.
Author's Notes: Kaworu and Shinji SLASH implied, though honestly, if you get past the first section it could be taken entirely as what I tend to normally view it, anyway-- a deep bond of love and trust, overall. AU shoot-off near the end of the series, so spoilers for that if you haven't managed to wade your way through the horrific angst, and even though I'm completely disregarding the last few episodes and the movies, especially during my first work with this fandom, I hope you enjoy it. It's more spiritual and not-very-exciting than anything I normally do, I think. BUT SHINJI NEEDS LOVE. Or at least some freakin' vacation time.
I really hope you enjoy. Thank you so much for reading, and I would be pleased to have any feedback or criticism of any kind. :)
Sometimes I think the end is near again Was it just a dream I cling to?
And what tears I lose, I give
A gift, to you, to remember me by when moons are swallowed
Looking outside the window and tracing the curve of dawn
For a moment, I thought I could taste happiness
And you were there, laughing
The sound of heaven against my skin
Sometimes Shinji dreams that he's just waking up.
In this dream, the Third Child does not exist. The world is on the verge of summer, a yolk-yellow sunlight drifting through the white curtains Shinji's mother gifted to him upon moving out of home. It isn't a place that needs NERV or SEELE; there are no angels here except those caught in stained class and porcelain figures propped up on the fireplace at Christmas. He hasn't spoken to his father for two years, but there is no hate lingering in his thoughts—rather, it seems unimportant, a chore brushed out of his mind ages ago. What matters here, now, is how the sheets have soaked up the warmth of the morning, and Shinji doesn't want to get out of bed even if he should. There is no urgency, but he really should. Some things just have to be done.
If he strains to listen, he can hear the wind chimes laughing on the porch. The ones Kaworu say remind him of the seashore. When Shinji's fingers brush the empty dip in the mattress beside him, he only sighs and tumbles into the dent—here is lingering heat here, a presence.
In the kitchen, someone is humming while making breakfast. The skillet is sizzling too loud to recognize the melody, but it is pleasant and familiar.
There is nothing that Shinji needs to do today. If he stays here, just like this, soon Kaworu will come to get him. Shinji thinks about sleepy, amused claret eyes and soft touches to his hair before clasping a pillow—it smells like rosemary and soap, like him—to his chest. The waiting is always the worst part, but it's worth it.
Kaworu never makes him wait too long, after all. It never becomes unbearable.
'Ah. I've forgotten the date,' Shinji realizes, bemused, but then he closes his eyes and sinks back into his dreams and it doesn't matter at all.
Shinji has had plenty of nightmares since joining NERV. The metallic tang of blood caught in the corner of his mouth. The stench of machine and flesh twisted absurdly together. Screams. Toji's empty, hollow eyes. The Angels towering above him, waiting as he is powerless to do anything except fall. His father.
It's not the nightmares that scare him, though, that steal his breath and bring the sting of tears to his eyes. When he wakes up at night alone, weeping, it's not because he's afraid. Shinji can live with the fear. He can eat it every meal and still swallow more because he's discovered the truth; no amount of fear can kill you. It only makes you wish you were dead.
'I was probably born to meet you.'
He thinks he probably deserves this.
The world seems especially worthless with the last of the angels dead. Shinji knows there are things he should be concerned about—trails he will face, the doll that has replaced Asuka, his father—but the future is glass. It breaks easily. It shows you something opposite, but still truth. What seems to be coming could only be a reflection skewed, reversed, only to sink out of sight before hitting. So instead Shinji tries to follow the footsteps of those still alive.
If you can breathe, you can speak. If you can walk, you can eat. If you can run, maybe you can find something out there that doesn't carry the shadow of death at its heels. If you are worthy of something, you can be free for a while.
Shinji remembers the first days. 'Don't run away, don't run away.' He walks to the bank and clears out the account he never touched. 'Don't run away.' He doesn't even bother to leave a note for Misato, though later he regrets that the most. Even though she must have known all along. Misato, who knows Shinji better than himself, who may have let him go.
Maybe if he'd been a better person, Shinji would have stayed. Maybe in another future, he's a better person. Shinji hopes so.
He wonders, just before stepping on the train to take him out of this place, what his father thinks of this. But really, it doesn't matter anymore. And Shinji can't bring himself to turn back, not with the memory of his mother and Kaworu in his mind, each smiling, their faces obscured by a halo of sunlight too bright for this city that stands on its head.
Really, he's just looking for something. Anything. The promise in Kaworu's kindness.
They could find him if they wanted to. But maybe SEELE has greater things of more importance than a little boy, Third Child or not, playing a tantrum—because they don't. Shinji spends months waiting for it to happen. Sometimes he can't sleep because he's so taunt, so ready to be taken back, that it takes hours before the violent quivering in his bones will calm. Whatever he dreads, it doesn't happen.
Sometimes the guilt hits him so hard that Shinji's sick with it. When he's curled around the sink, dry heaving, face damp with tears and sweat, aching over the doubts and curdled memories, he wonders what the hell he thinks he's doing. The things he's done; they are unforgivable, every one of them. The place he should be—
Mostly, however, Shinji simply observes the sea.
There are still a few fishing villages by the ocean—untouched by the grim future, still clean, still with sweet air and white-speckled beaches. Shinji settles in one of them and buys a tiny four-room house (more shack than house) where he can hear the waves crash against the pier if he leaves the windows open. When he runs out of money for fresh fruit and rice, he joins one of the fishing boats. The men are weather-beaten like leather, with booming laughter and the sort of handshakes that break Shinji's fingers. They think it's funny; and it is, seeing such a scrawny, pale-faced boy trying to lift heavy crates and grimacing at the squirming fish they pile up on deck. But they accept him with an uncanny grace as family, and that's something Shinji has paid too many prices for in the past—to have it for free now is ironic, painful, and wonderful at once.
These are good people, Shinji thinks, and is startled when they require nothing more from him than dinner at their cabins or nights spent joking over the lantern-light in the boat. There are no ulterior motives, nothing required except… Shinji. It is not NERV, where even Misato, even Rei, even… all of them, all of them with brief and flitting kindnesses, all of them accidentally taking pieces back and leaving Shinji with less than before, somehow.
Here on the edge, the world is unconditional.
There is an innate goodness in people, just like Kaworu said. A need to forget the loneliness; a shyness at first contact, a longing for affection. Shinji sees pieces of him in these people, these gruff men and homebody wives who gently ruffle his hair in the market.
When the sallow sunset paints the sea orange, Shinji sits on the shore with his legs drawn up to his chest, just watching. Thinking about what he has learned. Thinking about what he hasn't.
"It isn't what you do that makes a person good," Kaworu says. "It is the quality of your soul."
Shinji has done too much to be redeemed. He can feel them under his skin all the time, remorse and guilt, bleeding, swelling up inside like a blister. There isn't anything of Ikari Shinji that hasn't been dragged through the rot of mankind. He is a disgrace. Ugly. Weak. A monster.
"You could be anything," Kaworu tells him gently, "and still, for you, there would be no greater love than mine."
Shinji dreams of Kaworu sometimes. The ache buries itself deep, a flaring pain when morning comes and there is nothing except the wind brought on by the currents from the eastern Pacific to greet him.
Whatever emptiness lingers in Shinji, he struggles with it every day as he works and begins to repair his smile. It's getting so that, if he can simply forget for an instant, it seems as though it were never broken.
He thinks Kaworu and his mother would have liked it.
"A skinny boy like you needs more vegetables," the vendor at the market tells him each Tuesday when Shinji comes to shop. Inevitably, at least three shiny apples will make their way into Shinji's basket despite his protests, and sometimes even salted beef or a chocolate bar with almonds. Shinji once panicked because he hadn't understood how to respond to such gestures—but it's been four months since he's settled for good and now he practices his grins. Humans don't have much time—it's why they heal faster, from impossible depths.
The sun has put stripes of color over his arms and knees. In an Eva, Shinji could never see the color of the sky. Now he feels as though he walks with his eyes perpetually fastened to the sun, a sort of wonderment hovering over his heart. Near the ocean, the world is always bathed in blues and greens. The purple of bruises. The gold of the proud. He'd forgotten beauty.
Shinji is still insecure and shy. He has trouble speaking. Sometimes the words get so caught up in his throat that they fall out unexpectedly, little bursts of heartfelt desperation or anger. The fishermen take it in stride—when Shinji suddenly starts crying over his dinner, apologizing in stutters between his hitched sobs, they smile and offer him more tea. Once, a tall giant named Tatsuya had shoved his favorite hat over Shinji's hair, knocking it askew. "Gets mighty lonesome on the edge," he'd muttered, and Shinji still doesn't know if he meant the seashore or their own minds.
His feet get scars. From the rockbed, when he's looking in tidal pools. There are stones the same color as Asuka's eyes caught in them sometimes, little baubles he keeps on a crooked shelf next to his bed.
Unexpectedly, he's not happy, but it's not like it was in Tokyo-3. Here, Shinji sees the stars as something worth watching. Here, Shinji takes a second stand, another home, and this time will stay to protect it. Here, he can sense a bit of Kaworu that doesn't remind him of the blood, the part he finds that, inevitably, irrevocably, he loves.
"This is a good place," Kaworu observes in his dreams, perched on the railing to the porch outside Shinji's bedroom. He'd holding one of Asuka's stones in his hand, admiring the reflecting shimmer of blue. Against the lavender twilight spread of the sky, he seems to be made of smoke. Shinji's afraid Kaworu will disperse into curves of gray and red if he touches him. The colors make him dizzy.
Misato is laughing on the beaches. Shinji can hear her. Suddenly he misses her, a sharp stab to his belly. He misses Misato. Her easy warmth, her brash laughter.
"Ah, here it is," Kaworu murmurs, touching the space where Shinji's heart should be beating under his flesh and bone and flannel pajamas. "Do you remember how it felt when you piloted an Eva?"
Shinji doesn't think about it. "Like I was going to die. Safe. Afraid. Warm. Full of too much. Empty."
Kaworu smiles. "Do you remember how it felt when you first saw me?"
Shinji wants to repeat the same words, but there should be a difference—there has to be, he thinks desperately, and almost laughs when he finds it.
"Good," he answers.
It's not that Shinji's hoping or even expecting it. It's just that, every so often he looks at the road leading out of town and to Tokyo-3. It curves up over a hill; the village is swallowed in its wake. He can't see past it. He doesn't need to, he already knows what's out there and there's nothing that soothes him.
Sometimes he looks at the road, though, and shades his face to peer at a glimmer in the air that catches his eye. And it's not that Shinji is needing or even considering it. It's just that sometimes he's at peace, but sometimes the hope catches him in the chest like a sledgehammer.
If one day he looks up and there is a figure melting out of the mirage of the sun—a tall, lanky streak against the blue freckles of the sky. If he sees an understanding smile; unconditional fondness. Friendship without knowledge. Pale whites against smoke and blood. Lifelines. If it should walk down this road, to Shinji.
'Because of you, my life was meaningful,' Kaworu had told him before putting a trust in him.
If he comes, Shinji will show him the truth—that all along it was Shinji who needed, and found, meaning in the mirror.
Shinji's search is over. Whatever future comes, he believes it won't be so bad to die here. Parts of him are still with Misato, and Asuka, and Rei, and his father. With his mother, in the Eva. Parts of him always will be. Shinji can't forgive himself for them no matter how quickly time takes their memories away, like acid eating at plastic. But now, he believes that maybe it's okay. Ikari Shinji is the Third Child—he'll always be the Third Child.
He can also be so much more, and less, than the Third Child.
On warm nights, Shinji wriggles his toes in the seafoam that rushes up on the sand. Asks his mother and Kaworu questions, like they can hear them. Things like, "What should I do tomorrow?" and "What would you think of me now?"
Mostly he just hums a song, because a song is good.
Sometimes Shinji dreams that he's just waking up.
In this dream, nothing has changed. NERV and SEELE are in tattered pieces. The world is on the verge of destruction. Misato is grieving. Asuka is lost. Rei is pieces of a whole hidden away. Ikari Gendo is the stone upon the earth. No one is spared; even in the sea, the darkness may spread up on the bank any moment and take them all. They are all alone. Every single one.
But Shinji wakes up and in the blackness, he reaches out and touches a hand. Fingers clasp his own tightly.
"A song supplies us with joy," Kaworu says. "It is the sound of heaven and even heaven can hear you."
"Yes," replies Shinji.
When it all falls apart, in the end, Shinji listens and hears it welling up inside. In the sun. In the ocean. In the people. In the air. In his chest. In the earth. In the fire. In a smile. In the cold. In the warmth. In the seashell. In the sky.
The song. His song. Kaworu's song.
The morning is chilly, infringing inside his little cabin like an invader. Shinji wears a woolen sweater that keeps dipping off of his shoulder. If he strains, he can hear the sea pushing at the rocks.
There is a knock at the door.
Shinji puts down the bowl he'd been washing and goes to answer it. On the porch, the wind chimes are laughing.
"Hey. Were you waiting for me?"