2010-05-10 - The Fifth Seal

It is late, and Leo Stenbuck is...

... not in his room.

SOME TIME AGO

Leo Stenbuck and Kristin Tsery are hanging out while off-duty, a fact slightly complicated by the fact that Kristin is wearing an outfit of civilian clothing that includes a very low-cut shirt, and significantly more complicated by the fact that Leo is pretty sure /someone/ has turned the climate control to /way/ colder than it should be.

The instant the two go their seperate ways once Kristin has to go back on duty, Leo beelines for Louise Halevy's room.

NOW

It doesn't take very much detective work to track him to where he is, though, especially not with the rumors going around... many of which are (sometimes unfortunately) true. 'Where he is' is, in fact, Louise Halevy's room, and, indeed, Louise Halevy's bed. It isn't that shocking, at least at face level; a certain someone has stumbled upon the two in the same bed before.

Just... last time, they weren't so... naked.

Not that you can tell at a glance, of course; Leo is currently currently hella unconscious, covers drawn up to his abdomen, one arm around Louise... who is similarly hella unconscious and concealed by blankets, her head resting on his chest.

But the rumpled clothes littering the floor of the otherwise clean room, consisting of two A-LAWS uniforms, one pair of teal boxer shorts, and one pair of extremely baffling space lingerie, sort of gives it away.

Leo Stenbuck's room was cleaned again before whoever or whatever did it realized he was not going to be there.

NOW

If this was a movie, the camera would drift down until it rested floor level, dim for-visibility-purposes-only faux-moonlight illuminating the topography of the clothing scattered on the ground. The opening credits would roll a bit as the soundtrack rumbled on ominously. Roll title, and then fade the music out, so that the ambience of the room, that perfect stillness, can take hold.

And that's when a pair of black boots covering small feet would walk into the frame, amidst the discarded clothing. They'd stop, and linger for a second. And then a pale, vaguely fit, still rather skinny arm would lean down, take up one of the greatcoats, and rifle through its pockets. Then the other, until it found what it wanted: Leo Stenbuck's futuro-cellphone.

Pan up and out to reveal Rei Ayanami.

Rei wanders over to the desk in Louise's room, silently pulling out the chair and sitting down. Her posture is less than perfect, which is strange, for her. Possibly Noriko's bad influence. At least she's wearing normal people clothes, though -- mostly. She's ditched her own greatcoat, for whatever reason, sitting there in the teal tanktop undershirt of her uniform along with its pants and boots. Golden A-LAWS logo hair clips keep her dangerously-close-to-long hair out of her eyes. Not that it matters much, because she's wearing something she found while picking up Leo's room.

A small blue glow rises from the corner of the room as Rei activates Leo's phone. It doesn't take her long to figure out his password and get through the encryption. The illumination casts her face into deep shadows, aided by the sharp, robotic contours of Leo's blue Mister Bushido mask. Rei's eyes can't even be seen from the vantage point Leo has. For once, though, Rei doesn't seem concerned with waking him up. Her gaze doesn't even fall on Louise. Just on the phone.

Perhaps it is her hyperfocus on Leo's phone that is the reason why the first sign of stirring that Rei gets is when something hard and cylindrical presses into the back of her neck, and the click of a cocking firearm cuts through the still air of Louise's room.

The sensation is only there for a moment before it vanishes, and Leo steps carefully around to stand beside the chair. In his right hand is clutched his golden revolver, the hammer still drawn back; his left is holding a sheet from Louise's bed around his waist, to keep him decent. In the background, Louise herself is wrapped entirely in the heavier blanket, and has curled into a ball, apparently undisturbed by Leo slipping out of bed.

Funny. He was never that good at it, when his Rei was alive.

"It's just you," Leo says, leaning backwards lightly against Louise's desk. Rather than look down at Rei's face, he sets his gaze on Louise, and lets the arm holding the gun drop to hang limply at his side.

After a few beats, he asks, quietly, "What are you even doing?"

Even as Leo deduces who it is, Rei still turns her head, as if unfazed by the gun against her neck -- unafraid, in any event. Lit by the phone, her features become more visible behind the mask, and there are very recognizable things. The flat line of her lips. The tiny intake of air through her nostrils, the closest thing she does to emoting. And her eyes. Rei stares at Leo pointedly but without expressing any kind of actual point, as if she were looking at a cardboard cutout of him.

Maybe it's a challenge.

Then Rei turns back toward the phone. She taps a few more things, scrolls through a few more menus, then tilts the phone so Leo can see. It's a picture of Leo and Rei in the NERV Geofront cafeteria. It's an old one, too. Rei's wearing her plugsuit, Leo's wearing his Titans uniform. She's not smiling. She's not even looking. She's staring at Leo, who, from the angle of the shot, has apparently taken it upon himself to rope an arm around her shoulders, smile, and take the picture with his other hand, perhaps unaware that she was staring a hole into his cheek.

Rei tilts the phone back toward herself and resumes flipping through the pictures. When she speaks, her voice is quiet. Her accent is still... building, like it has been lately. Rei never really had much of a marked accent when she spoke English -- as if it stood in the way of being perfectly bland. But now, it's overpowering, keeping her English words in a chokehold. "You came to the Geofront," she says. "I asked why, you said 'just because.'"

Rei doesn't look back at Leo. "Tell me about her," she says, a command rendered flat and inert by her monotone. "Memories. Tell me memories."

Rei says this while Leo stares at Louise. Of course.

Ouch.

The topic of the last Rei is, as always, sort of a knife in the heart for Leo, and a few seconds after Rei makes her demand for memories, Leo squeezes his eyes shut and half-bows his head. He'd cross his arms, but both of them are... a little busy.

"Why?" he croaks, after another few seconds. "They don't mean anything to you. Why could you possibly want..." He trails off, takes a slow, shuddery breath, and then opens his eyes and turns to look at Rei.

The more time passes, the less she looks like Rei... acts like Rei, even. He'd think that would make it easier - her gradual weight gain, her increasingly unruly hair, her totally alien style of dress, her strengthening accent - but it doesn't. No matter how she ages, or grows, or changes, she's still fundamentally Rei... because she's not a lookalike of her, she /is/ her.

Except not.

"... and why are you wearing that?" he adds, after a beat.

"Easier," comes Rei's response to Leo after a pause. She turns her head very slightly, as if to acknowledge that he spoke, but not far enough to make eye contact. Her attention is almost immediately returned to the phone. She tilts it toward Leo again, just for a moment.

Rei, alone, in her high school uniform, her default 'going out' civilian clothes because Misato couldn't always smuggle her Asuka's dresses. Standing on a subway platform, gazing off into the distance, facing away from the camera's eye. Unaware of the picture being taken. "I asked if you took a picture of me," Rei narrates, before turning the phone back toward herself. "You turned red and said no."

Rei continues scanning the pictures in silence for a few long moments. There are enough to keep her busy, and she tends to linger on them, spending a few seconds absorbing each one, as if replaying the moments in her mind.

"I want to know what you felt," Rei says. "I want to know what she felt. If she felt. I feel things. It's important." Rei pauses and looks over her shoulder at Leo more fully. Her stare lingers for a few long moments, as if Leo's inappropriately-clad body was one of the photographs. Then she looks away. "I want to know what kind of world I'm going to die for."

Leo at least remains looking aT Rei while she speaks, but his face is twisted into a pained grimace the whole time. He lets silence reign for several moments after she goes quiet, as he is wont to do, before he quietly points out, "There's more to the world than me, you know."

Despite that, however, he turns his eyes away again; they drift out of focus as he sets his gaze on the middle distance. After another few moments of silence, he says, "I lied about taking the picture. ... obviously."

"... I don't... know if she ever realized how beautiful she was." Leo sounds just as pained as he still looks; the memories are taxing, in a sense, to recall. "At least to me. She had this sort of... grace, I guess is the word. Like she was... I don't know. More than human, I guess. Go figure," he mutters, with a weak snort of humorless laughter.

He pauses again, takes a deep breath, and finally gets around to fulfilling the demand. "After our first date, when I was taking her home, she mentioned that she'd never been off of Earth," he explains. "So I took her up to orbit - we were in the Vic Viper - and showed her what the planet looks like from space."

"That good enough for you?" he grumbles, turning back to face Rei again.

It's Leo's quiet comment that prompts Rei to respond before anything else, but even then, her response is a very... Rei one. When he notes that there's more to the world than him, Rei turns again, and her gaze fixes on him like a hawk eyeing a field mouse. There's no malice -- there's not even any judgment -- but there is a profound, unshakeable intensity.

Rei waits until Leo's done talking, but once he is, she's rather quick to speak; if nothing else, this forgoance of the usual 'figuring out what to say' pause is generally a signifier that Rei is responding to some earlier statement. It's one of the little things that gets picked up as her habits show themselves.

"She had you and Gendo and Shinji," Rei says, voice dangerously close to breaking the armistice of its monotone.

"Nothing else."

Rei's mouth nearly frowns. The tremble of her lips, the conscious avoidance of expression -- even in the dim light, it can be seen clearly. Perhaps that's why she wore the mask. Insulation. She turns away again. "I remember," Rei says. "How do you think she felt, seeing the world?"

It was evidently not good enough for her.  Leo Stenbuck [A] has posed.

It doesn't take Leo as long to answer that question; his thoughts had already ended up there, thanks to the subject matter of the conversation at hand. "I don't know," he says, bluntly. "We hadn't known each other for very long. She was... difficult to read, at first. And I wasn't... great with people. But... I think she liked it, at least."

He pauses, tilts his head as if in thought, and then continues, "I used to want to protect... everyone. People who couldn't protect themselves. But... the older I get, the harder it is to care about that. The more I worry just about protecting the people close to me... the people I love."

Another thoughtful pause, and Leo asks, a little hesitantly, "Do you think that makes me a bad person?"

The pause that follows Leo's question is a long one, even for these meetings. Rei just keeps clicking through pictures. She's gotten all the way from the past to... well, closer to the present. Around Christmas. They didn't spend Christmas together, but it was around then.

Leo's smiling. Rei's not, but it's clear that she's come around somewhat. She's in a wheelchair, from when her spine was healing after that one Angel, when she was too weak to walk more than a few steps at a time. She's wearing a headband with reindeer antlers on it. Leo's holding a Santa hat, but not wearing it.

Rei stops and considers this picture for a long time. Her thumb stops clicking through the pictures, having apparently found one worth extended rumination. Eventually, she turns on her chair, so that she can face Leo with her body.

Rei looks up at Leo with that opaque stare of hers, meeting his eyes whether he's willing to accept it or not. She reaches over to grab his gun by the barrel. Her thumb deftly engages the safety before she pulls it away. With her other hand, she offers him the phone.

"What would she have said to that?"

Leo meets Rei's gaze easily enough; he seems to be holding together pretty well tonight, all things considered. He starts a little when Rei snatches at his gun, but he's not that concerned, and what little surprise there was vanishes almost instantly. After a few beats, his eyes shift down to the phone; another beat, and he gingerly sets the revolver down on Louise's desk and then takes his phone back.

Rei's question is ignored - at least for the moment - as Leo lifts the phone to look at the picture it's displaying. He stares at it in silence for a good thirty seconds...

... and then he collapses.

He doesn't /faint/, mind you, his body simply decides he isn't going to be standing anymore; his legs fail underneath him and he drops heavily into something resembling a sitting position, his legs curled up underneath him, the sheet still clutched tightly around his waist pooling around him. He bangs against the desk on the way down; the sound is awfully sharp, being preceded by total silence, but Louise thankfully only groans and rolls over.

Leo, meanwhile, drops the hand holding his phone into his lap, and slumps forwards, his shoulders shaking gently. Eventually, he manages to choke out, "I don't know."

Rei is now in the position of staring down at Leo, rather than up. Her legs are spread on the chair, letting her lean forward, gazing at him somewhat overbearingly -- although some of that may just be a side effect of the bizarre mask she wears. The silence again takes brief control.

"How can you not know?" Rei asks. She withholds any accusation from the question, but her even, detached way of saying it... may just make it sound even worse, really.

"Tell me more," Rei says, quickly, not letting a pause linger too long. "Tell me your favorite times with her. Tell me the most important times. Tell me what you both felt." Rei doesn't sound compassionate, nor does she sound pushy. Her demands are listless, like she were proctoring an exam.

"Maybe you will find your answer."

"I'm not a, a fucking vending machine," Leo protests instantly, anger leaping into his voice. He doesn't look up when he does; his shoulders are still shaking, and he still sounds like he's about to cry, despite his newfound vehemence. "You can't just--"

"Why do you keep doing this to me?" he interrupts himself to demand. "I told you I'd help you. Do you hate me so much that you have to keep, keep torturing me?" He forces himself to stop again, and take another shaky breath...

... and then, as he is wont to do, fulfills the request with the same breath that he decries it.

"When she told me she loved me," he blurts, without preamble. "That was... the most important. I... had thought, but-" Another shaky breath. "I'm... not stupid. I know- knew, I knew- I knew that she had... trouble, expressing herself..."

"So... when she told me she loved me, I... I was so happy... but she didn't want me to- and then I choked, and-" Another shaky breath. "- and now she's gone, and I just- all I have left is-"

Yet another shaky breath turns into another, shallower one, and within a few beats Leo is doubled over, hyperventilating.

Rei doesn't have anything to say to that. Not immediately. She looks up and away from Leo, and leaves him to his grief. She doesn't seem to be exceptionally troubled by it, but -- this is Rei. That she's looking away, off into the distance, that she's not keenly staring...

Everything does mean something with the girl, even if she strives to convey nothing.

Rei waits for Leo to start to calm, or at least to stop hyperventilating, however long it takes. She has time. Even if Louise is right there. "You have more than you're willing to tell me," Rei says. He gaze settles on Louise for just a moment.

Rei reaches behind herself and unfastens the Bushido mask. She removes it carefully, so as not to disrupt her hair -- the clips are actually carefully arranged, keeping it out of her face. It's a concession to the standards of appearance that seems so unlike Rei, but it exposes a face that's so perfectly like...

"Leo... talking... /thinking/ about her... turns you... turns you into this." Rei throws the mask down onto the floor. It lands in the pool of sheets quietly.

"Like this..." Rei says, quietly, barely audible, "how can you kill the Second Angel when you must?"

"How can you kill me?"

Rei's voice lowers even further. Her stare is the kind that can be felt. "How can you kill her?"

All told, it takes Leo about fifteen minutes to calm down and resume breathing normally; by the time he has enough for Rei to start speaking again, he has dropped his phone into his lap and releases his hold on the sheet wrapped around him, and is holding his face in his hands, shoulders still shaking. He doesn't even look up when she casts his mask onto the floor next to him, or questions his resolve.

It takes him another full minute before he answers her, and there's never so much as an indication that he's actually going to do so. "I won't be killing her," he croaks, his head still in his hands. "She's dead. She's gone. Nothing can change that."

He pauses, and then continues, "... I know... I'm not alone. I have people who care about me..." A tiny voice in the back of his mind adds, 'For now.' "But... every time you come here, it's like..."

Leo can't begin to even imagine how to summarize the feeling in his chest. He's pretty sure that this is what a heart attack must feel like, or possibly just 'dying'. He is equally sure that it is impossible to communicate this to Rei in a way that she would actually understand.

"Please, just... just leave me alone," he begs.

If Rei could hear Leo's inner monologue, she would give him the mother of all 'are you stupid' looks when he figures that she doesn't know what it's like to die. But then, if Leo could hear Rei's inner monologue, he would probably be having even more of a walking breakdown. So maybe it's a good thing that neither of them are telepathic.

Rei sits there in contemplation. Leo's request is apparently the topic of consideration. She looks down at the floor for a moment. Her facial expression doesn't change. But she can't look at Leo. Or won't look at Leo. Either way, that uncharacteristic avoidance continues when she says:

"No."

It's such a soft blow, spoken with no sharpness, no impact. But there's a stark finality to it. "It's too late. I told you. It's much too late." Rei reaches out to touch Leo. The contact is minimal. A palm presses against his bare shoulder. Her hands are warm. Her palms are dry. She never sweats. She never did.

"But it won't be long. Before I go, I'll explain what I can. But for now..." Rei's hand tenses on Leo's shoulder, a grip beginning to form, and then aborting itself. Rei's hand pulls away.

"It won't be long." Rei can't help but want to -- do something. Say something. She knows what she's doing to Leo. She knows what she's doing to herself. "You'll be able to forget me then. Forget her, if you want. And start over."

Rei reaches down and picks up the phone. She goes into the photos again. Leo can see the screen as she does so. She selects a wide swath of the pictures -- all of the ones with Rei, really. The ones she was just going through.

And then with a fingerstroke, Rei deletes them.

She tosses the phone back down. "Like none of it ever happened."

When Rei plucks the phone out of Leo's lap, he lowers his hands and lifts his eyes, the anguish on his face mixing with confusion. What is she...?

When Rei deletes all of his photos - the vast majority of what Leo had left of /his/ Rei - the young man's eyes widen, and his mouth drops open. He maintains the expression as she casts the phone back to the floor, and spends several dumbfounded seconds looking from Rei to the phone and back.

And then his arms snap out and he snatches up the phone, fumbling frantically at it, jabbing his thumbs at the controls. He doesn't really know what he's trying to do; something, anything, he has to get them back, he has to... to...

After a few seconds of obvious panic, Leo slumps forwards again, his eyes still widened to the point of bulging, his phone clutched in one fist. He forces himself to take deep, slow breaths, struggling to remain calm...

... and then he fails. His grip on the phone suddenly tightens, the muscles in his arm and shoulder bulging. An instant later, the phone simply shatters into chunks of circuitboard, plastic, and glass. The latter is especially disastrous; immediately, blood begins to pour from his palm, staining the white sheet pooled around Leo.

Slowly, he opens his fist, and the ruined phone clatters into the sheet. Shaking with a mixture of rage and more general psychosis, Leo rises to his feet; he doesn't bother bringing the sheet, because right now, not exposing himself to Rei is possibly the thing least on his mind.

"Say what you have to say," Leo tells the girl in front of him. There's a crazy - literally - gleam in his eyes, and his right hand keeps twitching, fingers curling spasmodically inwards. This may be because of the shards of glass still buried in his palm.

"And then get the fuck out of my sight."

Rei doesn't flinch when Leo breaks his phone. She watches him with the detachment of a jaded television viewer. Leo might as well be performing theater for her amusement. But -- she's not very amused, is she?

When Leo stands, Rei stands too. This is only partly to avoid being seated directly in front of Leo's 00 Raiser. But really, it's just because she's done talking. She listens patiently to what he has to say. She doesn't have anything to reply with. She stands there, though, glaring.

Rei is actually glaring. She meets Leo's enraged stare with one of her own. She is clearly struggling to remain neutral -- to remain Rei. Her red eyes are wet. Her lips are tilted downward at the corners. She's frowning. She's upset.

This silence sustains for a long few minutes. Then Rei says what she has to say: "Clean your wound and go back to bed."

And she turns and begins to walk away, toward the door, leaving various messes behind without a second glance.

As Rei passes through the doorway, her shoulders visibly shutter, like she's convulsing. But then the door is shut. And then it's dark.

Any of Leo's usual sympathy for Rei's obvious pain is absent; he stares coldly at her for the entire length of silence, unwilling to break it, and certainly not to offer consolation. Even as she leaves, he says nothing, does nothing.

And then she's gone.

Leo's legs shudder, and he collapses again, not so much into the sheet as onto it. He slumps backwards against Louise's desk and just stares into the darkness, and he stays that way for... he doesn't really know how long.

Slowly, the anger drains away, and is replaced by agony. He thought it was bad before, but this... this... how is he supposed to stand it? The knife in his heart has only grown, but he, himself, isn't any stronger, and he has no way to let it out. He can't cry. Screaming doesn't help. So...

Slowly, Leo drops his gaze to his bloody, mangled palm, and the shards of glass protruding from it. It's noticably paler, now, thanks to blood loss; Leo dimly notes that, but cannot remember why it's so important. He has other things on his mind.

Which is why, slowly, he reaches out with his left hand and pulls a shard of glass out of his palm. The pain makes him literally writhe in agony... but the physical pain makes the pain in his heart dull. Leo stares down at the bloody shard of glass for several long seconds, the gears in his mind turning...

... and then, very carefully, he places the edge of the shard on his bare thigh and drags it across, slicing a long, thin, shallow line into his flesh. He convulses as he does, gritting his teeth together so hard his jaw hurts, squeezing his eyes shut. It hurts like hell.

But it helps.