Author's notes:

Somen noodles are typically served cold in Japan, and with a dipping sauce made from a katsuobushi base—Katsuobushi is a way to dry, ferment, and smoke slapjack tuna. Many of the same ingredients are seen in miso soup (which is typically made from Dashi, a staple of Japanese cooking.)

The Japanese split their breakfasts—typically—into two sorts: Japanese-style, which include fish, rice, and soup, and Western-style, which may include standard western staples such as toast, cereal, or oatmeal.

I bet you thought I was gone, didn't you? I don't know what timespan the next will be in, but I can pretty well guarantee it won't be another year.

Chapter 4

When Shinji finished, they ate. Though Rei had provided the food, Asuka cooked for them—a simple meal of cold somen noodles and a cheap powder-based dipping sauce which nonetheless filled the entire apartment with the mouth-watering smell of ginger and fish; a savory odor which seemed to scream at Shinji and Rei, Went fishing today, and you know what I caught? FISH. MEAT.

There was, of course, no meat, and in truth the scent was as false as the fish it portrayed; a moneyed observer might have thought, rather, that Asuka had been cooking chalk and ginger. But to Shinji, whose only protein in the last week had been from the peanut sauce bouillon he had made (whose actual protein content he was entirely unsure of—he knew only that they were free with the purchase of rice) it was almost as good as the

breakfast is ready
As the what?
(Breakfast is ready who?)
As the Japanese-style breakfasts he could not afford? Had never
(have you been here your whole life)
been able to afford?
Maybe we should go fishing.
You would have to find money for fishing line.
I could do it. Defiant. Like a child, really.
You can't even afford to pay the electric bill. Every yen you have goes towards food and expenses. The girls too. Even this dinner will set us back.
I could ask for a raise.
Hah. You're a useless worker. You'd be fired for just broaching the idea.
Then Asuka could—or Rei; she has money from something, doesn't she? She paid the electric bill today with—
Naïve boy.

They ate in silence as heavy as it always was, but different, too. To Shinji, anyway, it seemed as though they were straining their ears, trying desperately to hear the echoes of happiness which had, for a brief while, filled their whole lives.

He wondered if they could.

The space between dinner and sleep was usually filled with the dull, unyielding buzz of the television. For a while, Asuka had tried to keep it at least mildly interesting by watching a different channel every night, regardless of what was on, but they had soon run afoul of the fact that they picked up only seven channels, and poorly, at that. For a while after, they had tried keeping up with certain shows, involving themselves in the storylines, pretending to themselves that they could empathize with the pretty angst of the drama actors. Eventually, though, even that went afoul as the other areas of their lives—all of which, it seemed, were connected with money (it was funny, really, how little one appreciated everything you could do with money until one could not do any of it anymore)—quickly fell into the half-mindless routine that kept them all sane. Sometimes Shinji kept up with plots now; most of the time he didn't. He often fell asleep in the middle of shows; sometimes he slept there until morning; more often, he woke in the middle of the night and made his way to the bathroom, brushing his teeth in the pitch-black, and then fell back asleep. Sometimes he remembered this in the morning; more often he didn't bother thinking about it.

Neither Rei nor Asuka asked Shinji to play the cello again after dinner, and Shinji was grateful for this. It had felt good during, yes—the floaty, airy feeling as his mind went blissfully and totally blank, in strange contrast to the half-dull feeling that he carried with him most of the day—but after he had felt tired, almost as though after sex, or at the very least, masturbation.

(how would you know?)

It had left him with a pleasant feeling, but also the feeling that any more that night might have been unpleasant. He had been satisfied, and, he felt, so had the girls, and there was nothing more he needed except for a good nights' sleep.

So that night, the television did not hum dully, images blurring in front of him half-watched and almost wholly unnoticed. That night, they watched television and reacquainted themselves with characters they only half-liked. They still flipped idly through the channels during commercials—one thing all of them silently agreed with was that commercials were things to be avoided; at some point they simply began to fill one with a dull, painful ache to know that one could not even afford the big savings at one's own store—but there was more animation in their movements. They even spoke.

An anime. Cartoons shouting masculine taunts at one another, telling each other to come on, show me your true power. Asuka: "What are we, ten?"

Shinji: "How old are we?"

Asuka: "Not ten." Flip.

A commercial for a…something. Shinji didn't even have time to see what it was; or maybe he simply tuned it out reflexively. Flip.

A woman stood in a dark alley, her hair the size of the eighties. Her stalker moved towards her with murderous intent and a butcher's knife the size of his paycheck. She screamed and Asuka changed the channel.

The news. A beautiful woman with dark hair reports on the Antarctic. Flip.

A drama. Pretty high school students with pretty problems. Love. Friendship. Betrayal. Rei: "This seems quite petty."

Asuka: "Nice to look at, though."

It seemed strange to Shinji to hear that. When was the last time any of us expressed a sentiment like that? She must feel it somewhere, but…

Shinji: "I think Rei and I would both prefer something else."

Asuka rolled her eyes and said, "You have two minutes to find something better." She set the remote down—none of them dared damage it; it was possibly the only portable electronic device in the whole apartment, which had earned it an unspoken status somewhere near godliness—and stood, walked to the bathroom.

Rei looked at Shinji for a moment, her gaze unblinking, giving her red eyes a strange, almost demonic quality. She said nothing.

"What…what would you like to watch, Rei?" Speaking suddenly seemed a strange, foreign thing. His voice did not shake, but his chest did.

(what is this)
(is this fear)

"Anything is fine," was what Shinji had expected her to say. When was the last time Rei had expressed an opinion about…anything, really?
(she wanted to hear you play)
But she said, "I think it would be good to watch the news."
(she only ever wanted to hear you play)

"The…news?" Shinji frowned. He had no interest in affairs foreign or domestic, but he didn't deliberately separate himself from them as some did, either. He just never seemed to have the energy or time to think about them. Nobody ever raised his taxes, nor did they lower them. Everything in the city just sort of seemed to…run. Operate smoothly. His store had never been robbed, nor, to the best of his knowledge, had Rei's or Asuka's. He had never been attacked from an
(stay away from the)
alleyway. If there was crime, he never heard about it. He never really heard much of anything.

But if she wants to watch the news, I shouldn't object. And he didn't. Not able to recall the channel, he simply flipped until he found the beautiful woman again, who was still talking about the Antarctic.

It took Shinji a couple of seconds to realize that he couldn't entirely understand what the woman was saying. It was not that he could not understand the content of the woman's speech, as though she were discussing some arcane topic like subatomic particles or the weather, but rather, the words he knew in his heart her mouth was making seemed not to translate entirely through the speakers; as though one of them had blown a something, and now projected only a dull hum punctuated by bursts of static whenever her lips moved.

But how was that possible? The speakers had worked fine on the other channels. The reception seemed fine. Is there something wrong with the television?

He glanced over at Rei. She seemed utterly enthralled by the program, or at least utterly occupied. (Sometimes as much as any of them could hope for.) If she noticed the fact that no words were actually being spoken, she did not say anything.

If she's enjoying herself, I'd better not interrupt her.

Was she really enjoying herself? It was hard to tell with Rei, whose face seemed utterly passive ninety-nine percent of the time.

He looked back at the television, his mind beginning to zone out. The woman on screen continued to buzz at him. He decided he would just get used to it.

She adjusted her focus a little, and for just a second, it was like she was looking him in the eye. Something clicked in his head.

He looked closer.

She seemed to strain her own sight, as though trying to see him better. Was she just struggling to read the teleprompter?

She looked familiar.

Shinji knew no famous people. Certainly not a newscaster as beautiful as this.

Then her lips moved in a familiar shape, and for just a second, the static cleared just slightly. She said something, and it made him gasp. Rei looked over at him for a moment, and he looked back at her.

After a second, she looked back at the television screen.

The woman was definitely looking at him.
(that's absurd)
(is it?)

A second later, the sound of a door opening knocked him out of the revere he had developed without noticing, and the sound of running water reminded him, for the second time that day, that he did not live by himself in some sort of fantasy land, where the women were magical and needed no facilities and the stunningly beautiful news anchors spoke your name on the television.

Because that was what she said, wasn't it? It sounded like she said your name.

"What the hell is this?" Asuka said. "News is better than what I had on?"

Shinji and Rei said nothing, but rather gave Asuka the run of the remote again, and minutes later he was zoning out again, the strange behavior of the television already fading from his mind, pushed to the back of his head with a huh.

It came back when he slept that night.

Because, the trouble was, the instant Shinji went to sleep, he was awake again. He laid his head down on the pillow, the world outside of his apartment as dim as the world inside of it as it always was once per day, and he closed his eyes, and as soon as they shut, light began to pour onto his face. He sat up, yawned, and looked around. Everything was the same as it always
(when did we get a kitchen table?)
Rei and Asuka were sitting at the kitchen table in the center of the room, watching the television in the corner, propped up on its stand. Shinji took a deep breath, and the apartment smelled...not fresh, precisely, but not musty, either.
(where am I? Am I still dreaming?)
Shinji pinched himself. It hurt.

"What the hell are you doing, idiot?" Asuka called from the table. "Do you smell that?"

Shinji took another breath. He smelled fresh again. For some reason, it made him a little bit happier, just breathing like that.

"You don't smell it, do you?" Asuka said with a look of disbelief on her face. "Should I spell it out for you?"

"What?" Shinji said, surprised, for some reason, that his voice worked.

Asuka pointed towards the kitchen. There was a pan on the stove, and it was smoking. At this point, something in Shinji which he would hesitate to call instinct, if only because it was embarrassing for a man to have such an instinct, kicked in and he ran towards the stove, shut it off, and looked into the pan.

Fish.

I'm cooking fish on a stove. I have fish. Meat.

"Is it still edible?" Asuka's voice came from the table.

"Huh?" Shinji shook his head and looked into the pan. The fish was burned on one side, but to him still looked like something handed to him from an angel. "Yeah…I think so."

"Well, then bring it out here. should be up soon."

Shinji almost missed this, but did not.

"Wh…what?"

"What?"

"What did you say?" Even amidst his confusion, Shinji found it difficult to ask this.

"I said, should be up soon." Shinji could see Asuka's lips moving, and he knew in his head that she was speaking proper Japanese, but it did not sound like anything. "The hell is wrong with you this morning?" She took an impatient look towards the bathroom. "Christ, that woman is fucking lazy."

It's not a bathroom its 's room.

Rei spoke. "You should call her, Shinji. If she's late, she'll be scolded again."

Shinji blinked. Call her? I don't even…how?

"Call her."

Rei met Shinji's eyes. They were inexpressive as always, but …also different. They were serious. Completely serious.

Call her.

Shinji walked towards the
(room)
bathroom, and instinctively reached for the doorknob.

"The hell?" Asuka snapped. "Don't wrench her door open! You know she sleeps naked, and the last thing I need this early is to see that."

Shinji recoiled, exasperated. What am I supposed to do?

He did the obvious thing. He knocked, first timidly, then, upon receiving no answer but also no scolding, more boldly, going so far as to rap on the hard, smooth plywood

(we have rotting wood what the hell)

with his knuckles. It didn't give him splinters as it ought to have.

Unfortunately, this was about as bold as Shinji felt, and he still received no response.

"Call for her, Shinji," Asuka said again, her voice impatient. "It's like an alarm clock, you just say her name and she kind of bolts upright, you know? That's how I keep her from falling asleep in the shower."

(I wonder if she ever does anything when she finds her asleep in the shower)

(thats the second sexy thought I've had in less than two days. Am I dying?)

"Call for her, Shinji," Rei said. "You will awaken."

Shinji blinked, shaken. "What?"

"She will awaken," Rei said as if she'd never spoken differently.

"Come on, idiot," Asuka said.

"Why don't you do it?" Why can't I do it?

"Because you're standing right there! This is ridiculous! Are you trying to be annoying, or is it a talent that you're nurturing and saving for your big debut?"

Shinji felt cold desperation creeping up his spine. He felt like he wanted to cry and scream all at once, but he did neither, because then what was in there

the

would wake up on the wrong side of the bed and then he would be eaten whole.

"Shinji," Rei said patiently, as though explaining addition to a five-year old. "You will want to awaken her very soon, because after that it's not likely that she will ever awaken again."

"But…" Shinji hesitated. The truth was, he was just afraid. He felt as though perhaps if he applied himself, he could awaken her, but…it was scary.

"Don't be scared," Rei said. "Just do it."

"Yeah," Asuka chipped in. "Don't be such a pussy."

"Youare scared as well, Soryu," Rei said, and Asuka nearly spit out her rice.

"Excuse me? I am not afraid of ­­. is afraid of me. I run this damn house."

"And yet, your hand is shaking," Rei said.

And when Shinji took a good look, he saw it: Asuka's hand was visibly trembling. Her chest was moving quickly, too, and her eyes were just a little wider than they ought to have been. A little redder around the edges.

"If she does not wake soon, she won't," Rei said. "We must—"

wake

(her)

up

wake up, shinji. You're going to be

"late." Rei was shaking him gently. "If you don't wake up, I'm going to have to assume that you're"
eaten whole
"dead."

Shinji's eyes opened, and it took him no more than a moment to realize that Rei's face was dangerously close to his, her look almost
eaten whole
sultry, though this may have been no more than standard Rei, but closer and in lighting that may have been romantic or sexy or both if it hadn't been coming through a dusty, stained window.

Another dream?

He strained to make sense of his peripheral vision, and saw dull, dank light to his left, ugly wood to his left. Underneath him, the floor felt damp, as though he had spilled water on it last night and it hadn't wholly dried yet.

No. This is where I live.

"Why am I on the floor?" Though it was coherent in his head, it came out slurred with sleep.

Rei stood up, and for just a second, Shinji felt

eaten whole

the slightest inkling of disappointment.

Why can't I get that out of my head? Eaten whole, what does that mean?

"You slept very restlessly. Asuka did as well."

You called her Soryu just a moment ago. Why?

You were dreaming, idiot.

Shinji sat up as best he could, found it to be as difficult as was to be expected after a night of rough sleep.

"Did we keep you up?"

"No. I sleep very soundly."

Then how did you know we slept restlessly?

"What time is it?"

"Time to wake up, as I said."

Is Rei being…cheeky?

Shinji thought that while it was really a far cry from cheeky, it almost seemed like she was making an effort at it.

Shinji stood. "Not too late for rice?"

"I would not have woken you up too late for rice," Rei said.

She's definitely making an effort at cheeky. When did this start?

"Alright," Shinji said, promising himself to give it some thought throughout the day—what the hell else did he have to do working at a convenience store, after all—but as he stood, stretched, and then began cooking the morning's rice, it faded from his mind, escaping him like a leaf escapes from a child's hand on a windy day.

Rei felt no fear, only anxiety.

This, at least, was what she told herself on a daily basis.

The truth was, and she knew it as she walked to work, her belly half-full and her mind half-empty, that she was afraid. She feared the many,but she knew just as well that she couldn't allow this. Themany swallowed those who feared them. Ate them whole.

So she did her best to pretend that her fear was only anxiety, and she blanked her mind as often as she could. She knew Asuka felt their presence as well—that was why her hand shook every so often—but Asuka didn't know what they were, and this was for the best.

Of them, only Shinji didn't seem to feel them at all. Rei knew that Shinji felt the same painful tedium that the rest of them did, but even so, sometimes, he seemed to be living in his own world. The way he became so often lost in thought. The way he was able to carry on his constant routine.

The way he plays.

Rei could not help it. When she thought about the music he made—and so doing, she took care to distinguish between the music and the cello he used, because there was a distinction—she felt heat rise to her face. She couldn't help it—she was still human, and at this point, the music, so unexpected and beautiful, had seemed almost sensual. Certainly she had felt it vibrate on her skin as had played. Certainly she had been disappointed when he stopped.

But she had been glad, too.

Because she knew that there was a distinction between the cello and the music. She didn't know the cause of the distinction, but she knew that it existed—she saw it.

She passed an alleyway. She was nearly to work.

She did her best not to look in the alleyway. Tried not to see, encased in shadow as though it were a coffin, the mangled remains of a man, barely a heap of bones now.

(You're next)
I am not next. You will not have me.
(We'll devour you. This place is ours.)
It is not. You do not scare me.
(There are others who will scare.)
None of mine. You will have none of mine.
(We will have each and every one.)
Then come. Take me. A taunt. A dangerous thing, but a necessary thing, too. Rei did not slow her step for a moment. If she had, she might well have become theirs.
(We will have each and every one.)

And then madness. Gibbering, thoughtless madness.

Rei hardly felt the weight of the many. She could bear it. Her sanity could bear it, as could her body. She had been through much, much worse, after all.

This, at least, was what she told herself on a daily basis.

She got to work, and ducked into the bathroom, remembering at the last minute. She placed one hand on her crotch. It was dry.

She didn't need her change of clothes today.

There was a new boy at work today, and he was cute. There were two reasons that Asuka was not giving him the good try.

The first was that she was exhausted. Apart from that heavy, lingering weight that she felt every day, the weight of working more than eight hours a day and receiving something that was not minimum wage but felt very much like it, (this was the feeling which had caused her to drop five pounds since they had arrived, giving her already-skinny form a subtle, skeletal hue, and which had helped to completely deprive her of her sex drive) her sleep had been restless and unnerving at once.

The second was the conditions under which they had met.

Asuka had walked to work, but this was like saying that air filled a vacuum when they met. On her way, she had passed the alleyway that she had found the cello in the day before. (And what a find it had been—she would not easily forget the way the music had felt, both in her ears and on her skin; nor would she easily forget the way she had shivered with delight. Between that and the brief glance of the drama, she had actually felt a dull sense of want below her waist that night for the first time since they had come to the city.) She had done her best, when she passed this alleyway, not to look too closely at what it was that had drawn her attention to it in the first place: A woman, rocking gently at about chest level, held in midair by a rope, wrapped around her neck, dangling down from a second-story window. The woman's skin was a dull shade of gray. Her tongue hung down the same way her arms did—loose like a seven year-old's tooth was loose, ready to drop off at any moment.

(And directly below her, a beautiful lacquered cello. As though she had been waving Asuka over, ha-ha.)

Try as she might, though, her attention had been drawn to it.

One of the woman's arms had fallen off from rot overnight. As she stared, it looked as though the neck was about to give up from the same.

"Hello," had come the voice, just as Asuka was certain she heard a tendonsnap. "Are you headed to Lawson?"

How did—
Uniform.

"Yes," Asuka had said as pleasantly as she could manage, wrenching her eyes off of the corpse and onto the boy, who, a dull, suddenly-distant point of her brain had noted, was very cute. "Can I help you with something?" Truthfully, even the dull edge to her voice had more life than she usually did talking with people.

"You could give me directions. Or better yet, you could let me follow you." He gave her a charming smile, showing just a hint of white teeth. She recognized it—it was a melt women like buttersmile—but couldn't have brought herself to melt into it even had she been the melting type. Even his voice—deep and confident—seemed a bit muffled to her, so his smile had no chance at all. It seemed to bounce off of her. "I promise I'll be good company."

"Fine," was all she said. "If today's your first day, you'll want to be a little early anyway." She always showed up early—technically her shift didn't start for a half hour after she arrived, but she clocked in and worked anyway. The extra few hundred yen was worth it.

Besides, she didn't want to be in the apartment after everybody else had left. She'd have to keep the lights off, and the thought of being in that room in the dark any more than she had to was unnerving.

Any room in the dark is unnerving.

Little baby afraid of the dark? She didn't want to admit it, but this voice which seemed to speak to her sounded almost absurdly like that of mutti.
(creak creak)
"Okay, thanks." The cute boy was obviously a bit put off by her standoffishness, but he did his best, and she supposed that was something.

Asuka Langley, standoffish? Hell is expecting snow any day now.

They walked in silence for a moment, their footsteps becoming such a force on the silent, dead street that the cracked pavement seemed almost hollow.

"Quiet day, huh."

"Every day is quiet. I see a car on this street maybe once a week."

"Oh."

The truth was, when Asuka looked at this boy—really looked at him, she recognized that he was attractive, and maybe that was part of the problem. She didn't know how Shinji did it, and she could guess at how Rei did it, but for her, she survived off of the monk's salvation—by erasing sex from her mind, she erased her body's sex drive. It hadn't been hard, but it had been completely necessary. One of the reasons it hadn't been hard was because in terms of men, the only one around until now had consistently been Shinji.

And who the hell would trouble themselves for that freaking idiot?

(You.) Again, mutti.

Like hell. It was not yet 9 in the morning, and Asuka felt already too tired to argue.

"Well, that's all right then," the boy said. "It's nice, just walking like this."

Asuka supposed that was romantic. She found herself nonplussed.

Mostly.

The boy caught up to her and walked next to her. She let him.

Work helped. Work seemed to Asuka like much of the rest of life—poorly lit and ill-kept. Familiar, as though she had been there forever. The manager was outside smoking, so she showed the boy the basics: The old timecard machine, which creaked profusely when you punched in and out; the storeroom, concrete and dusty with a single lightbulb on the ceiling lighting up twelve rows of shelves filled with canned food, drink, and cigarettes; the cooler back, and which two coolers you had to be careful restocking so that the door didn't come back and smack you, or worse, trap you in the space between the shelves and the door; the spot in the corner of the store with the smell of mold and the small green section of the floor that never seemed to stay clean for more than an hour before the fuzz began to grow back; and finally, the front area, and the shotgun underneath the desk, "just in case," though Asuka had never even heard of a robbery in this town.

All through this, not a single customer.

When the manager finally stepped back inside, she grinned at the boy, motioned him to the room with the timecards with one fat finger. He followed and smiled back, like they were old pals or something. Maybe he was just friendly. Hell, maybe he was about to eat her out for all Asuka knew. She didn't give a shit. It was their business.

All she knew was she didn't like the way the manager smiled at him.

She didn't like the way he smiled back.

It made her shiver.