2010-04-29 - Someone Somewhere Soon Will Take Care of You

THE SHIROGANE

WAY PAST A SENSIBLE BEDTIME

NOW

Rei Ayanami had to duck into a supply closet to cry for a while. She made it all of two turns through the corridors leading away from Leo Stenbuck's quarters before the facade she'd carefully maintained throughout their encounter collapsed. Not wanting to be seen wandering through the corridors openly weeping -- for one, the noise would attract too much attention -- she dipped into the nearest enclosed space and had herself a long sob.

And now Rei looks even worse. Her face is all bruised up and battered, on the mend but still marked with the ugliness of violence. And now her eyes are red -- and not in the good way, like you'd want. She breathes heavily, trying to center herself. She thinks about Mister Bushido, and wonders if it was like this for him. He seemed so complete and resolute in his... Bushido-ness that Rei got the impression he had one day just flipped a switch and turned himself off.

Rei wishes she could do the same.

So now she's moving back toward the room marked as where she's staying as a guest. It's easy to find her -- or, well, easy enough, if one looks. Excellen managed to track her down handily. And Rei is thoroughly unprepared for an ambush, even if it looks like she just survived both an emotional and physical one.

Noriko Takaya is on the Shirogane. Rei has missed a couple sessions - not /that/ unexpected, given her duties and the overal state of the world as 'at war', but when Noriko discovered it was solely because she seemed to be hiding out on the Shirogane, she got a little worried. She remembered Excellen's words to her, wondering if she was being picked on or bullied. She remembered Leo - blowing up on the radio and consistently refusing to acknowledge that she even exists, and only recentlly beginning to slow down on the malice. And isn't the Shirogane where Leo is? But...no, wait, if she's hiding /from/ Leo then...but...

Noriko doesn't really know what to expect when she hops in her RX-7 (these days little more than Noriko's private transportation, seeing as it's not actually much good for anything else), and makes her way to the Shirogane on the flimsy excuse of checking out the GN-XIIIs for possible Buster Machine Corporation use.

It's flimsy because the Exelion has more GN-XIIIs than any two other ships in the fleet, what with its several square miles of hangar space.

That said, she isn't intentionally looking for Rei at the moment, so much as simply quietly jogging through the tunnels, trying to work off excess, nervous energy so she can /sleep/. No massive iron sandals - just her Top Squadron (well, Fraternity, now) leotard, not even wearing the shirt over it. In her usual fashion she continues to quietly put a fraction of an inch of distance between herself and A-LAWS by blithely ignoring their uniform. Noriko Takaya is a Buster Machine Pilot - a true Top. She doesn't want any labels but those.

Either way, Noriko, on a lark, jogs past the area of the ship she was told Rei was staying in, wondering if she'll find the girl about. Probably not, she thinks; with the way she is, Rei seems like the sort to stick exactly to a sleeping schedule. From what she's heard, Rei's been fulfilling her exercise regimen with nearly robotic precision. It bugs her, the way Rei doesn't seem to /want/ to think for herself...but then, that seems to be a problem with certain A-LAWS personnel in general.

The point: Noriko suddenly rounds a corner, turns right, takes two steps, and emits a surprised, "Wha-!?" as she nearly rams right into Rei, stopping short with one hand slapping against the wall to slow herself down. Her breathing's elevated; she smells like sweat. Well, not much surprise there. And perhaps also unsurprising is Noriko's stunned reaction of: "What...Rei!?"

Really, the main surprise is that she's even here.

Rei spins like she was hit, even though Noriko just barely stopped -- blame the wonky spaceship gravity. Grabbing the wall herself to keep from toppling over, Rei is also wearing the Top / Fraternity outfit -- the complete version, showcasing how much progress she's already made in her brief experience as The Littlest Top. She's also carrying a gym bag, which emits a muffled squeak when bonked into the wall. Spun around like that, it's easy to miss Rei's face -- especially because Rei then tries to hide it, staying turned away from Noriko.

"Um," Rei says, eloquently and quietly, as she collects herself and scoots the bag back up onto her shoulder. "H-Hello, Coach," Rei says. She reaches up and messes with her bangs, purposefully pulling them down, mussing her long, shaggy hair to try and cover as much of her face as she can without looking like Cousin It. It's not entirely successful.

After a long moment, Rei finally turns back around, keeping her head bowed, trying to use that and her hair to keep attention from her face. The problem is, she's probably just drawing even more attention to it. "I'm sorry I've missed sessions. I hope you aren't angry with me." The tone is genuinely contrite; Rei actually seems sad at the idea of possibly letting down her Coach.

But then, Rei seems pretty sad in general a lot of the time. And right now, even moreso.

Rei shifts uncomfortably on her heels, keeping her head pointed downward and her shoulders scrunched inward. One arm drapes across her stomach, the other bending upward to grip at the strap of her bag. Her posture is defensive and insular -- which is strange, considering that Rei is usually more keen to simply stand there like a robot and fail to convey /anything/.

Noriko doesn't even notice Rei's progress - not with that behavior. She saw her face, but only for a moment - just enough to see something was amiss, but not long enough to really get a grip on what it was. And now Rei slumps, scrabbling to hide her bangs. Noriko can't actually see her, with feet on the floor and Rei's back to her, but she can only imagine a few things that kind of arm motion would be for, and now does not seem like the time for shadow boxing.

Rei turns back around - still trying to hide her face. Now Noriko's worried. What's...what doesn't Rei want her to see?

She's too worried to warm too much at Rei's genuine show of some emotion, and so the train of thought diverts onto an entirely different, slightly more paranoid track: She's warming up...did something happen?

Noriko can be kind of slow; she's not the most studious person and her skills with more complex subjects like astronavigation come almost entirely from Coach drilling them into her head on pain of a caning. But she's also a highly empathic sort of person, as long as the other person isn't Jung "psychotic mood swings" Freud, and this change of behavior stands out to her greatly. She's a little out of her depth, she thinks. She used to be in that position. She used to be...

She wonders if that's why she worried about Rei like she does. There is an awful lot of her beginnings in the pale girl. She raises an arm, putting it gently on Rei's shoulder - just a comforting presence, not trying to force the issue too far. "Rei...I'm not angry. But...did something happen?"

The conflict within Rei briefly reaches an intense peak when Noriko touches her. The crash course she's spent her brief life receiving in the ways that human beings connect is enough to tell her that Noriko doesn't mean any malice -- in fact, it's more than just an absence of malice, it's genuine kindness. Noriko is Rei's Coach, and in this exact moment Rei understands that that means more than being a drill instructor or a physiological consultant. Rei isn't sure if the word "friend" is appropriate. In any event, Rei feels touched, and because she feels touched, she feels troubled.

The blue-haired girl tries to recall Mister Bushido's words to her. His advice on becoming like him. But Noriko's voice drowns his out and Bushido's words distort and doppler out of range. She feels her grip on herself slipping.

Rei doesn't even have time to consider what she's doing before she does it. Instead of standing there, staring downward, and deliberating her emotional state further -- or making some excuse, pushing Noriko's hand away, hurrying to her room -- Rei just faces the music. She brings her hand up, carefully pulling her hair away from her face. It doesn't quite fix it -- she's grown too shaggy for it to really be fixed without some hard work and product -- but it does uncover her pale features, marred with shallow purple hillocks, ringed with the jaundiced yellow of the healing process. Her red eyes are wet and sore. She looks horrible. She looks directly at Noriko, making eye contact. Noriko isn't /that/ much taller, but she feels so small compared to her right now.

Rei remains as silent as a stone, except for the agitated state of her breathing. Her mouth trembles on a microscopic level. Her mask is only barely maintained as she confronts her Coach with the physical evidence of what even Noriko could probably clearly recognize as a beating. But she doesn't say a word.

Coach...for Noriko, that word is the most important honor you can give someone, or maybe more like, has become that. Coach Ohta has been the father she never had, even if he is usually distant, and gruff and quiet. Noriko can't be that man. Noriko can be only what she is - try as hard as she can to be a guiding hand.

Noriko would be more-or-less alright just standing there and murmuring to each other in the halls, but it appears Rei wants to come fully clean. More or less. Noriko steps back when she begins to turn, ending that physical contact and giving Rei back control of her personal space.

And her features darken. Noriko's never seen domestic abuse, but she's been trained by martial arts demigods and a boxing legend - she knows what a beating looks like when she sees it. "Rei..." she murmurs. The mask is back on, she thinks, with some surprise - no, rather, she's trying as hard as she can to keep control of herself. Just like Noriko would be? ...no, Noriko can't even attempt to guess how she'd act in a situation like this.

The True Top Pilot balls one fist, not really sure what else to do with her hands to keep them where they are. But she doesn't storm off or start yelling - after the initial surge of anger passes, she realizes she just...doesn't know what to do, who to do it to. Leo? But she thought that relationship was over. Someone else? But who could make her cry like that? That's the eeriest part, perhaps; mere moments after watching Rei emote so expressively, to see the girl return to that neutral center, if only barely...

Her hand rises, as if to land on her shoulder again, but she hesitates, and it hangs there for a second, Noriko's fingers curling uneasily. "Rei," she says, again, and takes a single step closer, setting her hand on Rei again - still trying her best to be gentle with a distraught person, even if this is the first time Rei has let herself act like a person in front of Noriko at all. "I...is someone hurting you?"

Rei, herself, has no experience with domestic abuse, beyond 'her co-worker tackling her and punching her about a billion times, not to mention the fact that she's a weapon created from the genetic material of an ancient alien being and a madman's dead wife who said madman has psychologically tormented in his own subtle way in order to create a thoroughly deficient and subservient half-a-person.' Still, in the more practical, quick-and-easy way of looking at it, no, she doesn't have any experience on either side of it. Leo was only ever great to her.

But facts really have no place in a moment so tense. Rei's self-control continues to face its most harrowing test, and makes it through by the skin of its teeth. Rei doesn't think about Mister Bushido. She thinks about how this would derail what she's trying to do. How getting too many people too involved would just... make everything harder. And it's already so hard. It's already a weight she can barely carry.

"Coach," Rei intones, that mask of flat neutrality paper-thin, like trying to obscure her sadness with cellophane. "Please... just... forget about this."

Rei suddenly seizes. Her throat catches -- it's a sudden swallow, like her body is forcing itself without giving her brain ample warning. She's not about to throw up or anything, but she's trying not to cry. "Th-They didn't mean it," Rei says, not realizing she's quoting a cliche, unaware that she's probably only fanning the flames.

Perhaps something like this should be hard? Ah, but these are questions for another moment.

Noriko is empathic enough to see right through Rei's attempt to keep herself neutral. It's shocking and alarming; Rei has always been completely unreadable. Noriko's never been able to tell if Rei were a robot or a cyber-newtype or maybe just lobotomized or /what/; it's obvious enough she has something Going On, even Noriko can tell that much. Perhaps she is better equipped than most to see - mecha anime love people who are ever so slightly Off, after all.

At the moment, though, Rei's Offness is far away, replaced by something more human than Noriko ever expected to see from the alien clone cyborg magically-animated-doll. "Rei...it's Coach's job to--no." She smiles, a sort of somber but very sincere look. "Even if I wasn't your coach...I wouldn't forget. There's things you shouldn't have to deal with alone. I...I don't know what's going on. I can see...I don't know, it's like something going on in the corner of my eye. Maybe it's none of my business, but..."

Her hand squeezes, and only her recollection of Rei's isolation stops her from putting her other hand on shoulder as well. "But you're hurting, and nobody should have to hurt alone."

They didn't mean it, she thinks, grimly. Noriko eats pop culture for breakfast; it's a familiar phrase. But that...she's not even sure how to have to approach that.

Rei doesn't have a response to Noriko. Or, rather, she has many, but she voices none of them. She wants to tell Noriko that she's wrong. Some people /should/ have to hurt alone. Some people have to atone for their sins. And some people... their sin is that they exist at all. But to go into that -- it's too much. Both for Noriko, and for Rei.

Rei tries so hard to keep herself together, but it just doesn't work. She has to look away from her Coach's eyes, lest she start to cry. Rei hates the feeling of crying. She does it so much now. She can't think of a single time the last one did. Not a single memory of it. But every day those memories get harder and harder to focus on. She forgets things like exact dates -- the colors of people's eyes -- the exact locations of moles and dimples on the terrain of Leo Stenbuck's body. Things that she can't even sort through to prioritize -- so she doesn't even know what to try and hold onto. It's all going away. Is she becoming her own person? What /is/ she becoming?

That question, posed to herself, is one Rei genuinely doesn't have an answer to, and thus she lets her body react as it will, operating on instinct. She slumps forward. Her head rests against Noriko's shoulder as she lands against the older girl gently. Her arms dangle at her sides limply; her gym bag slides down and lands on the floor, letting out another inappropriate squeak. Rei doesn't embrace Noriko as such. She stays slumped, a gently quivering mass. Rei can feel the floodgates opening.

"Coach, I..." Rei starts, quietly, voice partially muffled by Noriko's shoulder, bare but for the strap of the leotard. "I went to... see Leo, and..."

Rei doesn't even think about how that could be misconstrued. What she realizes in an instant is that she can't say anymore. Not even to explain, not even to get Leo off the hook. She can't bring her Coach into this. She's already going to hurt the poor girl enough when she--

Suddenly, Rei pulls back, grabbing her bag and running down the hall, the wonky gravity of a spaceshot making each pace a miniature long-jump.

If it weren't the exact wrong moment to appreciate such a thing, the signs of how dutifully Rei has been running her laps might even make her Coach proud.

Noriko doesn't know. Noriko doesn't understand. She wants to - she really does. She's seen so much, felt so much, but Rei is from another world altogether. She feels like she can help Rei, but doesn't have the background she needs to /start/. And it seems more and more like she's going to have to go somewhere other than Rei for that information. But who? She finds herself thinking it as Rei finally crumbles, just a little bit - pressing up against Noriko, the brunette moves her arm on instinct, wrapping around Rei's back to let her hang comfortably. She's so hurt, but she doesn't know how to work with it, what to do, how to do it. So Noriko does what she can just to /be there/, to be someone who knows this pain, some fraction of this pain at least - who understands what it's like when your whole world stands on its head, even if she doesn't really know why Rei's is doing so. "I'm here, I'm here," she mutters, trying to think of some comforting words to use.

She went to see Leo. And then...she implodes, and Noriko is instantly jumping to conclusions, even when Rei pulls herself free and bounds out and away, charging down the hall to her room at the weird loping sprint that can only be done on a space ship's gravity. Noriko is left watching her go - hand outstretched as the girl flees.

She doesn't chase - not per se. But a few minutes later she knocks, twice, on the door to Rei's room, and stands outside until ship's morning.