2010-05-24 - The Sixth Seal

It is a rare night, tonight; a night that Leo Stenbuck is sleeping in his own room not because he has no other options, but by choice. Louise Halevy has been spending her nights with 'Soma Peries', lately, and while several days ago he was able to finagle his way into permission to join them, sleeping with two girls on a twin bed did not prove nearly as awesome as it seemed like it must be.

Not that Leo is anything resembling emotionally selfaware enough to understand why it's so... irritating, let's say, of course; all he knows is that he feels just as alone in bed with Louise and 'Soma' as he does in here by himself. Maybe even moreso.

Sure, it helps him sleep, and it still kept him from having any nightmares, but... Leo rolls over onto his side in bed and crams his arm angrily under his pillow. He doesn't think he'll be getting any sleep tonight, alone or otherwise. Not after what he learned today.

Grimacing into the darkness of his room, Leo wonders, dimly, if being so upset with Louise and 'Soma' is part of his apparent insanity. It stands to reason that it would be; he is, after all, pretty clearly just totally broken.

Leo Stenbuck's position of importance aboard the Shirogane means that he's let into the loop on important communications. Today, he was included as part of an e-mail circle initiated by, of all people, representatives of NERV. The bureaucracy and infrastructure of the Earth-based organization is almost deliriously deep -- the Shirogane was dealing with a branch of NERV that Leo had heretofore been unaware of, operating out of a location that was not previously labeled as NERV territory, largely because it was in space.

Still, those details weren't as important as the content of the conversations. NERV and secrecy go together like Louise Halevy and Soma Peries -- well enough to make Leo Stenbuck alienated and nervous, of course.

But for half an hour today, the Shirogane had tentatively agreed to transport an Evangelion. Big whoop -- occasionally they have to go out into space. The Minerva has a little tagalong barge specifically designed for no purpose other than to carry GN Eva Unit-00X around, since it doesn't fit in the ship's hangar. But this wasn't any of the Evas Leo Stenbuck had ever heard of. This was 'Unit-03.' They... aren't supposed to go that high.

Of the pilot, little information was given. Just the name 'Suzuhara, T.'

And the designation 'The Fourth Child.'

The negotiations fell through when NERV abruptly terminated the agreement, citing a sudden change in the needs of their training process that the Shirogane would be unable to fulfill. But the e-mails exist -- Brough Grabbs helpfully informed Leo that no, that was what was actually written on his screen, when asked.

Leo didn't hallucinate it.

NOW

Leo Stenbuck is alone and, presumably, lonely, as he tends to be. But the 'alone' part ends swiftly enough, when his door hisses open and a brief ray of light shines through. There are footsteps on the ground -- the sound of hard soles' heels clicking on the tile. The door shuts, and that flash of light ends quickly, but the sound of footsteps remains.

Rei Ayanami may or may not have just entered Leo's room.

The girl is dressed in almost a parody of Leo's desires. An orange halter top is unzipped to just above her chest. That there's even the slightest bit of decolletage to see means that she's wearing a push-up bra. A cream scarf is wrapped around her neck. A black skirt can only barely legally be called such, and avoids being mistaken for a belt by the fact that she wears a real belt -- faux-leather, black, covered in metal eyelets. Tan cowboy boots cover her feet. Pale skin is left exposed copiously. A-LAWS hairclips, gold glinting in the darkness, keep blue hair out of her face, ostensibly... styled.

Rei walks up to the foot of Leo's bed and just stands there, staring down at him for a long moment. Her red eyes don't need to be seen looking down at him -- somehow, they can be felt.

When his door opens, Leo's entire body tenses up, and he squeezes his eyes shut; it's her, he knows right away, he can /feel/ it. Maybe it's the way she walks; maybe it's just the nagging knowledge in the back of his mind that, some indeterminate time ago, he finally lost it. Either way, he doesn't want to deal with it... not tonight. At least he doesn't have to, anymore.

Or so he tells himself. But either way, after about fifteen seconds, he rolls onto his back and looks down the length of the bed at Rei. After only a moment, shock propels that into sitting suddenly upright, staring wide-eyed at the girl in front of him.

Another few seconds, and he groans loudly and slumps forwards, lifting his hands to bury his face in them. "You've got to be fucking kidding me," he grouses miserably into his hands, as if Rei wasn't even there. "Fuck. I should just kill myself, or something."

Rei stays there, at the foot of Leo's bed. She makes eye contact. Her face registers nothing -- her visage is blank, but then, if she's Leo's hallucinatory ideal, then why wouldn't it be? Maybe it's a subconscious message about his preference -- maybe he liked it better when Rei never smiled. Or maybe the memory of her stony neutral anti-expression is just that much more vivid for him. In any event, Rei being there poses all kinds of questions Leo can ask himself, but as usual, there are no answers. There aren't even clues.

Rei walks around the bed. She looks away from Leo only once, to glance at his Haro. She sits on Leo's bed, not far from him, but not too close, either. Her thighs press together. Her hands fold in her lap. Her head turns to regard Leo, his face buried in his hands.

Rei, on some level, feels a twinge of sympathy, but suppresses showing it. She decided that she needed to make Leo angry the last time she saw him. She did something that she regrets; she doesn't believe in Heaven, but she knows that it was an act that would probably have gotten her locked out of the pearly gates. Now, though, seeing Leo again, she questions whether she made the right decision all the more.

But her tone betrays none of this. Rei's voice is quiet, like a breath that carries, her accent thicker than ever.

"Why?"

Of all the expected responses to the question, laughter was probably not one of them... but it's what happens; Leo chokes out the bastard child of a sob and a chortle into his hands, and answers, bluntly, "Why not? I'm a, a fucking psycho. Everybody hates me. Louise is... is..." Unsure of what to even say on that subject, Leo settles on sighing miserably and dropping his hands away from his face and into his lap.

"Whatever," he mutters, flopping back onto his back, rolling onto his side again, and drawing his blankets tighter around himself. "I don't have to explain myself to you. You're not even real."

As he says it, he can't help but feel some relief that at least, now that he /knows/, these visits won't be nearly as agonizing... as they're certainly not likely to ever stop.

There's a silence that settles over the room after Leo's admission. Rei really doesn't know how to respond to that -- perhaps, she thinks, she judged Leo poorly. She thought him strong enough to withstand what was necessary, but... perhaps she let herself be too influenced by the memories stored within her body. Maybe her plan was doomed from the start. And now, every day, it gets harder to think, harder to keep focused on that final goal, and her ace in the hole has turned into an insane wreck thanks to her, and...

"Oh," Rei says, quietly, while looking around for obvious evidence of alcohol or drug abuse. She sees none, and mentally chastises herself for the thought.

Silence reigns a bit longer. Rei has to figure out what to do. This would be so easy before, she thinks. Before everything started becoming so hazy around the edges, before words stopped losing their meanings, before...

Rei reaches over and presses a slim, pale hand on Leo's shoulder. Flesh to flesh, he can feel the scar in the center of her palm, a spot of hard flesh amidst the softness of her gentle grasp. When Rei speaks, she tries her best to be what Leo needs right now, or at least what she thinks Leo needs right now. Leo can read the quiet signals hidden behind her voice. This is Rei being compassionate -- trying to reach out, in ways no one else would be able to understand.

"If she hadn't died," Rei says, keeping her hold on Leo's shoulder unless and until he gets himself free, "what would you have done?"

Leo simply refuses to answer for almost a full minute; he ignores the hand on his shoulder and simply lies there, trying to sleep. He fails, of course, and eventually the hand on his shoulder and the question hanging in the air drive him to indulge his psychoses... even if a little belligerently. "You're not going to go away unless I do this, are you," he says coldly, without lifting his head. "Fine, whatever. Fine."

He shifts uncomfortably, curls his legs up underneath him to assume something vaguely resembling the fetal position, and declares, "We'd... I don't know, I guess we'd have gotten married after the war ended. Bought a house somewhere, had kids. That's what you're supposed to do, right? That's what normal people do."

It's obvious by Leo's tone that he's... not insincere so much as in a hurry, as if impatient for the 'visit' to end. "That good enough for you?" he mutters angrily.

Rei's hand drifts. As Leo gives his rushed account, she listens, and her fingers reach the center of his shoulders, brushing his spine. She certainly feels real enough. After he's done, her hand stays there. She doesn't try to force Leo to turn around, or face her, or any of that -- but still, she feels the need to remind him that he can't just will her away.

Or, at least, not /quite/ this easily.

"Oh, Leo," Rei says, those subtle shades of her voice coming through loud and clear: the tone she always used when she thought he was missing the point. (She forced herself to stop using it after a while, when she realized he'd caught on.) "Leo... you know what I am. You know what I'm made from."

Rei isn't sure if this is the right thing to say, given the circumstances, but... maybe it'll jolt Leo into waking from his constant nightmare, from the dream that tells him that he's dreaming her. But part of it is maybe just... trying to euthanize a hope that never had a chance. "I can't have children," Rei notes. "Neither could she."

Rei is silent for a long moment after that, but then she asks: "Would you really have given your entire life to her like that?"

Leo fills the long stretch of silence in between being told about Rei's infertility and her next question instantly, with a sharp, "Oh, well, that's just fucking fantastic. I'm glad I wasted all that money on condoms. That's just... that's great." In truth, of course, the money doesn't matter; if anything, he would be more upset simply that she didn't tell him.

Except...

"Except," Leo says, after several seconds of silence in the wake of Rei's question, "You're not real, which means you're just, just making shit up! Fuck, she probably wasn't even-- fuck!"

Unsure of how else to express his anger, Leo forces Rei's hand off of his back by flopping over onto it and glaring up at the ceiling. After another few seconds of silence, he informs the girl sitting on his bed, "And for the record, yes, I would have. I loved her. Love her. Ggh... whatever..."

Rei's hand returns to her lap when Leo rolls over. As he lays on his back, she sits next to his head, more or less. He can feel the sag of the space mattress from where her body weight registers on it. In the corner of his eye, he can probably see that skirt, that pale thigh.

Rei is quiet, then. She thinks about what Leo says, and feels awful. She's not really sure why. She's already a self-hating clone, but it feels like more than that -- Rei becoming lost in her existential concern is why she doesn't think before she speaks.

All the same, though, she justifies it later by saying she was trying to shock Leo into no longer denying her.

Her hand returns to his shoulder, before moving downward again, fingers curling over his bicep.

"What about the others?"

Rei regrets saying that, too, but once the door is opened, it can't be left only a little ajar. "...she knew. She knew you... looked around. She knew you had... feelings. For others." Rei doesn't look at Leo. She sounds vaguely miserable in a way that it would take a Rei Expert to spot.

"What about them?" Leo demands, instantly defensive. He notes the sound of misery, but brushes it off; if anything, it just makes him angry, as if his own hallucination were trying to manipulate him into feeling bad for it. "I love Latooni, too. I did even when Rei was still alive... I think. What does it matter? It doesn't mean I loved - love - her any less."

He drops his eyes to where Rei's hand rests on his bicep and just grimaces at the limb for a moment, as if expecting it to turn into a snake or something. "Besides," he continues after a moment, "It doesn't matter anymore. She's dead. It's not like... like... gghuh. I don't know," he sighs.

"NERV had you under observation for a long while after she was injured," Rei says, not moving her hand, although her fingers do tense slightly as she pushes deeper into her memory, something that's gotten harder and harder to do lately. "Misato became concerned. She was angry. She showed things to m-- her. Demanded that she stand up for herself and confront you."

Rei pauses there. Her recollection is unsteady in its delivery -- as if she were trying to read illegible handwriting, or recite words from a distance so wide that it all becomes fuzzy. "She said that it didn't matter to her if you chose someone else, as long as you were happy if you did so. That was the important thing to her."

Rei sits in silence for a long moment before her hand lifts from Leo's arm. "I'm going away soon, Leo. Forever. I know it won't be long now. It took me a long time to realize it, but now it's too late."

Rei is silent again for a small stretch. With a rustle of the mattress, she shifts, laying on her back at the edge of the bed, next to Leo. Her hands are folded on her chest. It's a pose not unlike a corpse. She, too, stares up at the ceiling. "I hope you forget about me when I'm gone. After you destroy NERV... I hope you never think about me again."

When Rei lies down next to him, Leo turns his head to grimace at her for a moment... and then, without thinking, he lifts his right arm as if to put it around the girl's shoulder. It freezes before he actually reaches over, and with a tremendous effort of will, he transforms the motion into folding his arm behind his head.

"Sure you will," he responds coldly to Rei's claim. "Just like I'll be the Fourth Child, right? Just like you can't get pregnant. Just like, like... fuck me," he curses, flipping angrily onto his side again and once again cramming his arm underneath his pillow... but at least this time, he's facing Rei. He squints at her for a few moments, trying to sort out what he knows for a fact from what the obviously imaginary Rei has told him over her numerous visits.

The answer, when he realizes it, makes him sag like he'd just been hit in the kidneys. Most of what he'd been basing his life on, for the past few months, has been from these. He is suddenly and viciously overwhelmed by the terror that accompanies no longer knowing what's real and what's not.

"I wish I was dead," Leo whimpers wretchedly, drawing his blankets as tight around him as he can.

Rei Ayanami doesn't respond for a long, long time. Maybe three minutes pass in total silence. Rei doesn't move. She just stares at the ceiling. She loses herself in thought. When she emerges, what she has to say is:

"Fuck you, Leo."

There's a definite undercurrent of anger there, to say the least. There's only a half-moment between Rei saying that and sitting up, so sharply that the bed shakes. Her face is still terribly inexpressive, but there's a clear frown curving her lips, and a tension in her eyes that suggests untold fury.

"Is this why she fell in love with you?" Rei asks, "Because of your ability to pity yourself? I've been trying to help you, but... but all it does is... you just... ngh!" The grunt of frustration is like a bomb going off, in terms of 'Rei Ayanami, expressing anger.'

"Is this real?!" Rei suddenly /yells/, bringing up her hand and /whacking/ it down into Leo's shoulder. "What about this?!" Again. And again. Rei's face contorts into a grimace. It's harder and harder for her to keep things bottled up lately, and so much is going wrong. Everything, as the saying goes, is broken, and what's left is breaking too. Including Rei.

The blue-haired teenager lets out more noises of fury as she climbs on top of Leo, more or less straddling his blanketed form as she brings hands down on him again and again. She doesn't think to control how hard she hits -- and while she's not as strong as Leo, she /has/ been working out with Noriko Takaya for a while now. "WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?!" Rei screams, her voice too delicate to support the volume and cracking as a result.

Leo spends the entire stretch of silence bracing for whatever horseshit his hallucination is going to spring on him next. It really does make it easier; now that he knows she's not real, he can just harden his heart. Sure, there's the fact that the knowledge has also basically ruined his life, but, well, at least every cloud has a silver lining, and there's nothing she can say that will unsettle him.

Then Rei swears, and Leo's head swivels almost mechanically so he can stare at her, his eyebrows raised, his mouth open in shock.

Okay, maybe there's one thing she can say that can unsettle him.

Leo's mouth opens and closes dumbly as Rei fumes at him. This can't be happening, even in his hallucination. Rei never swore, and she certainly never got angry. This... he just... whuh?

And then she hits him.

"Ow!" Leo yelps, recoiling from Rei and clutching at his shoulder. "That hu-" Before he can finish his complaint, she hits him atgain. "Ow!" And again. "OW!"

And then, in the words of a wise man, Rei climbs on top of him and goes nuts on his nuts. Leo spends the first few moments of her barrage batting helplessly at her hands before he gives up and lifts his arms to shield him from the blows. Once or twice, he can't help but notice an opening where he could strike back, but, well...

Some lessons, even Leo Stenbuck is capable of learning.

Eventually, however, the combination of Rei's increasing physical strength and fury, and Leo's fragile skeletal structure, combine to make the blows actually start hurting, to use layman's terms, 'a fucking lot.' Compelled by the desire to not be in pain anymore, Leo roars, "CUT IT OUT, YOU BITCH!!" and surges upwards, his arms closing around Rei's body to try to pin hers in place.

Rei's tantrum ends when Leo seizes her arms. He can feel the changes in her body just from that grip -- where /his/ Rei was soft and skinny, this one is... still skinny, but the tension of firm muscle can be felt underneath her white skin. Rei's scarf has come loose and half-off. Her top is twisted somewhat. Her hair, despite the clips holding it in place, has become a mess.

And Rei stares. The tension in her eyes remains. The barely-contained anger is on full display, tightly pulled into an expression that only slightly deviates from her default look, but to someone who knows her face, or who knows /her/... it's like nothing Leo has probably ever seen on Rei's face before.

She doesn't say anything for a few moments. Her breath comes in heavy snorts, raggedly trying to even themselves out and regain calm. Rei doesn't move her eyes away from Leo's, though.

Then Rei speaks, and again, it's maybe not what would be expected.

"The Haro you took is an early-generation model with a number of recording features designed for personal convenience, but what most people don't know is that there's an additional set of subroutines similar to a mobile suit's black box recorder." Rei is reciting this like she's reading it from a textbook. She speaks so quickly that her thickening accent makes it a bit hard to keep up with, perhaps. "It requires considerable effort to unlock the recorded audio. Each Haro typically stores about two months' worth of ambient recordings. This is so that if a Haro is found at an accident site or a crime scene, it can be used in piecing together the circumstances that it presumably bore witness to."

Rei doesn't try to wrench free from Leo's grasp, but that whole spiel... seems to drain her, as if she'd just spent too long out in the sun. She seems dazed for a moment, a little groggy, a little confused.

Leo's emotions may be tinged with bewilderment and surprise, but he's just as angry as Rei is, seeing as how he was just sissyslaped like a thousand times. He meets her gaze evenly, a slight sneer on his features, anger blazing in his eyes; unlike Rei, he wears his emotions on his sleeve, as he always has.

Of course, to someone as experienced as Leo is at reading Rei Ayanami, her current level of displayed anger translates roughly into 'storming around and throwing things' for a... less reserved person.

And then Rei speaks again, and... well... that.

Miraculously, Leo doesn't seem to become any less angry as REi's droning recital geos on. In fact, he seems to get a little /more/ angry. She's... what, is she making fun of him, or something? It's not his fault that he's not some kind of mechanical whiz. We can't all be Alex Dino, after all. Fuck. Fuck!

When Rei ends her Haro spiel, Leo grits his teeth for a moment. The fact that she's a hallucination is, briefly, forgotten; mostly, he is now fixated on how angry she is, and how dissheveled she looks, and how she's been working out, and how hot that outfit makes her look, and, and, and-

Rei isn't the only one capable of doing the unexpected. Without warning or preamble, Leo leans in and - still angrily - presses his lips against the disoriented Rei's in a fierce kiss.

Whoops!

And bad goes to worse for a number of reasons.

Foremost among these: the fact that Rei responds in kind.

There's just as much anger in Rei's kiss as Leo's, and as if the way she pretty much attempts to tickle his uvula with her tongue wasn't enough proof, the rest of her body attempts to back her up. One hand closes in on Leo's hip -- the other arm wrenches free of his grasp and throws itself around his neck, her bicep flexing against his shoulder. Rei knows that she's making a mistake, but...

But, well, she doesn't try to stop herself. Not immediately, anyway.

The thought is there, though. Rei knows she /should/ stop. She should shove Leo away, she should deny him, she should deny herself. But she has so many memories of this, so many indistinct, blurry images of feelings and sensations, running without emotional context like a film without a soundtrack. This is how it feels, she reasons. This is how the last one felt. But she still knows, as she justifies it, that it's not right. She's so angry with Leo, but she can't keep her hands /off/ of him, and her hips are just moving completely of their own volition at this point so thank christ there's a blanket between them, and...

It moves so fast that by the time Rei is done sorting out one train of thought her body has left her mind in the dust. Fingers grip desperately, nearly clawing in their need. Teeth graze Leo's neck as Rei moves her kisses downward, sucking harshly, not even thinking about the consequences of a hickey. Not thinking about consequences, period. It's all moving so fast.

Rei tries to tell herself that she needs this, even if she knows she shouldn't. That she wants to experience all of this just once, before her time is up. That she may never have the chance again, especially after Johnny rejected her...

Wrong thought at the wrong time.

"No, Leo, stop," Rei whispers breathily into Leo's neck. She's not thinking, though, so she says it in Japanese. It just sort of comes out that way. "We shouldn't," she continues, still speaking a language Leo only knows fragments of.

"We can't..."

Rei's feelings mirror Leo's exactly. The entire time, his mind is screaming that this is wrong, that if he does this he'll be hurting Latooni even more than he already has, that if he does this he'll be betraying Rei by replacing her.

But his body doesn't listen to his mind; it's far too busy listening to Rei's body, and the lust radiating off of it. A year ago ago, this sort of behavior from Rei would have been - to put it bluntly - a turnoff. He /liked/ her the way she was, even if it was... unusual. But now...

When Rei says 'no' - even in Japanese - Leo's hand freezes on Rei's butt, halfway up her skirt, and for a few seconds Leo is still and silent save for his increasingly heavy breathing. It takes him a few seconds to piece together a more complete version of her message; she doesn't want to. They shouldn't do this.

She's right, Leo tells himself. She's right, she's right, she's right. They can't, he can't. "No," he agrees breathily into Rei's hair, after a few seconds. "No, you're right, we can't, we have to stop."

The fact that he's clumsily undoing Rei's belt as he says this sort of undermines his words, though.

Rei's breath is hot on Leo's neck as he agrees with her, but no further words are offered. Her grip on him only hesitantly loosens once her belt is undone, the buckle making loud clacky metal noises from the movement of her body. Her grip loosens, but she doesn't quite pull away, so much as...

...pull the sheet off of Leo as her head lowers.

SOME TIME LATER

It's morning.

Rei Ayanami is long gone.

Leo is alone.

Leo lies on his back amidst the tangled sheets of his bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling; his alarm clock, part of the future space console that makes up his bed, is blaring, as it has been for a good two minutes now. He hasn't reached over to turn it off.

It was just a dream, he tells himself. It wasn't real, so it doesn't count. Just because it was... a /weird/ dream doesn't make it any less of a dream. You can't betray someone in a dream. You can't. It's impossible.

But...

Some lessons, even Leo Stenbuck is capable of learning.

But some he isn't.

Leo lifts his hands to cover his face, and groans into them,

"I'm so fucked up."