2010-05-08 - ...Faster...

It's been a little while since Rei Ayanami and Noriko Takaya have had a workout date. Part of this is pure logistics - the Minerva and the Exelion simply not in the same place long enough for Rei to hitch a ride over.

The other part is that it has taken Noriko about a week to get her head back on straight, and also for her to be able to move her wrist again, this latter somewhat complicated by a bareknuckle fist fight in the halls of the Shirogane a few days ago. It helped, though - Noriko has a better sense for her feelings of the situation, including her desire to know just what the hell is going on with Rei.

The time for a workout has come again. Today, Noriko is in her full Top Squadron leotard and shirt combo, strong legs completely bare except for her ridiculous 80's socks. There is a reason for this: the theme for the day is running, now that Rei has gotten some muscle in her body and seems less likely to fall over and die the second Noriko makes her run a basic five laps. In iron sandals.

When she presented them, Noriko proudly declared that this was the true nature of hard work work and guts. Noriko is using a pair too, and seems to be enjoying the chance to stretch her legs and move around some more than she has been the last week.

There's something different about Rei Ayanami this session. Part of it is, no doubt, the crippling psychological trauma she's undergone recently thanks to stuff like Leliel (after all, she was shrieking about Char Aznable on the radio the other day, wasn't she?). But part of it is just the fact that, in lieu of cutting her blue hair, she has elected to clip it back and out of her face. The clips are little golden A-LAWS logos -- the effect is rather striking, if only because in the case of Rei, even the barest, most minimal concern with her appearance or comfort (or both) tends to come across as light years beyond what she's even /capable/ of. That Rei's in her own little Top outfit, showing what progress her body has made, adds to this effect.

Of course, then Rei failed to react entirely to the iron sandals being brought out, complying with the task wordlessly and emotionlessly. So. One step forward, five steps back. In fact, Rei's barely spoken this entire workout -- "Yes, Coach," "No, Coach," that sort of thing. Except not 'Yes' -- it's 'Hai.' It's not 'no,' it's 'iie,' and what little Rei says beyond that is littered with 'masu' and 'desu' and other Horsemen of Politeness. Why Rei has decided that she is going to speak Japanese today, she hasn't said. But then, of course she hasn't.

What Rei /has/ done, is run. She's not very fast on her feet, especially since her feet are burdened by heavy iron sandals. But Rei was never very fast even when she wasn't manacled. Her strength is her perseverance -- it took her most of the first lap to figure out her pace, but now Rei is clonking along at a fairly brisk pace. She never seems to sweat. It's weird.

Noriko is more fluent in Japanese than she is in English (not that you'd know it from the player's complete inability to use words below a college level), but...

But they've been talking in English habitually. It's just a habit; Federation business is conducted in the Federation common language. But Rei...

She's speaking in half-Japanese that she hasn't before. Noriko has at least spoken with her enough to think she's got /that/ much of her speech down. Did Leliel mess Rei up, too? Or...was it something to do with the Evangelion? Her prescriptions? But what could cause /that/? Noriko can't even tell.

She stews on this for a while - knowing that Rei seemed unhappy with getting too close. But...

But she can't really think of Rei as just someone she's helping, anymore. Not really, not after...that.

So when they wind up the fifth lap, Noriko slows down (clonk, clonk, clonk), and says, "Rei...is something wrong?" English. For now.

When Noriko finishes up her lap, Rei is some distance behind. She's tired -- that much is obvious -- and the only way she could probably keep up with Noriko would be if Noriko intentionally took it really, really easy. So there's a bit more clonking before Rei catches up to her Coach and hears the question.

Rei, too, slows down, and comes to a stop. She sways a little, feet rooted to the ground, both by her habitual way of standing and the massive weights on her feet. Her shoulders rock, and she breathes heavily but rather silently, mostly through her nose. Her red eyes stare at Noriko throughout, making eye contact in that alarming way Rei always tends to do, the eyeball equivalent of something like grabbing someone's hand to shake it without permission. She isn't sweating. Her hair is a little rustled, though.

Rei stares for a long moment. Whether this is a sign of something being wrong or not, though -- well, it'd probably be more obvious that something was wrong if Rei /did/ answer immediately.

But it still seems like something's pretty wrong.

" Coach," Rei replies. In Japanese, but for that last word.

Noriko knows she is better than Rei at this - no matter how great Rei's progress, it's only been like a month since they started. Rei was starting from pretty much as low as she could possibly get, so her progress has been remarkable from a certain perspective, but...well, she's not Noriko, not yet.

She's not even sweating. /Noriko's/ sweating! Another weirdness about the girl, another thing Noriko just...can't understand. She wants to - ever since that day she's been finding that she worries about Rei's situation a lot more than she had been, which was already not a trivial thing.

Like they were hurting her best friend.

She waits patiently for Rei to respond. That unnerving pause is becoming predictable...but still, something sounds...

"Rei," she says, and switches to Japanese instantly - no honorific on Rei, either, unconsciously speaking to the girl with a level of social privelege she may not actually have, "why have you been speaking Japanese today? I don't mind, but...you spoke English just fine, before."

Incidentally, Coach is the same word in both language. (well, the Japanese one comes out as KOUCHI, but)

Rei puts her hands on her hips, possibly to keep herself from tipping too far in one direction or another -- despite the lack of sweat, she still seems physically exhausted, and far more so than Noriko. But she keeps it hidden as best she can. Naturally.

Throughout the elaborate ritual of pretending that she's not about to tip over, Rei doggedly maintains eye contact. Her facial expression is so starkly neutral that it'd be easy to imagine she was mad about something. Or sad about something. Or any number of feelings, really, but none of them good. It's not like it was in Leliel's little world, where Rei's feelings were spelled out on her face. Everything is tight and cold now.

"" Rei says. "" Her accent is markedly the stuff of upper-class Tokyo.

Another pause. Then, Rei speaks again. Her accent seems to be stronger than it ever was -- when Noriko met Rei, it was sort of there, hovering in the background, but now it's practically crowding out the words. "But English is also OK."

Noriko frowns, just a little. That sounds a little...

...she's supicious now. It's so hard to tell what's right and what's just her head seeing phantoms. Ugh. It is /so much easier/ to just shoot a laser at her problems, seriously.

"" Noriko says, popping one of her best grins. "" She hums, hands landing on her hips more out of a need for them to land somewhere than any problem standing. She's breathing hard, but she can tell - even without sweating, Rei's increidbly exhausted. "Gosh," she says, continuing in Japanese, because angle brackets are for squares, "you look like you're gonna tip over."

She doesn't even think about it when she moves to throw Rei's arm over her shoulder and use her own to brace the girl. "C'mon, let's go sit down. Did I push you too hard?"

Rei, being Rei, offers no clues on her own as to what's real and what's a phantom and what's maybe both. Maybe she's bored. Maybe she's sick of the workout routines. Maybe she's just thinking about something else. There definitely does seem to be a certain... well, it's hard to call it a 'lack of presence,' since Rei has all of the 'presence' of a cardboard stand-up. But even that anti-presence is fairly distinctive in and of itself, and it's not out in quite as full force today. Rei is distant, yes, but -- there's Rei's normal level of distant, and then there's this. If she's normally so far removed from everyone along an x axis, this is where she's started drifting up the y one.

Rei's arm is taken and thrown, and there's only a token resistance from the girl, which fades almost immediately. Still, in that instant, the growing strength of the girl is briefly displayed -- she would have never managed the same kind of physicality when her arms were those pale little noodles.

It's not until they've walked over to a sitting spot and actually sat down that Rei speaks. During that walk, though, she keeps staring at Noriko, even though her Coach is all of a few inches away from her face. Rei's concept of personal space has always veered toward the 'too much or too little' understanding, with little middle ground, but usually she's more tactful than just to bore eyebeams into someone's head from so close a distance, especially whilst sucking in deep breaths that would probably produce horse-like snorts in a less fundamentally quiet being.

"No," Rei says when she sits down, answering the question close to a minute late. There's another silence. "Coach," she says, "What's Sailor Moon?"

Noriko assumes the eye beams mean she has gotten too close, but rather than drop Rei like a rock, she walks the girl over toward one of the benches on the side of the track, letting her sit down - and then, like a fussy mother, or perhaps like a concerned friend, kneels down and starts unfastening Rei's iron sandals. "Sorry," she says, with a little laugh. "Maybe these things were a little much for your first time. But, I guess it's the idea? Work hard, challenge yourself, so you can succeed. Something like that." A weak little laugh, and then she blinks, stupidly.

"Uh?" she says, with all of her God-given eloquence. "It's...an old anime, from like the pre-colonial era," she says, confused. "I...collect stuff like that, so I know all about it. Not many do." Pause. "What about it...?" And how did /Rei/ know about it?

"You drew it on my cast," Rei says, as if anticipating that last, unspoken question. That reply comes rather quickly, actually, with a sharpness that signifies, if nothing else, that Rei is probably paying more attention right now than she was previously. She stares blankly still, down at Noriko undoing her sandals. She doesn't protest, but she doesn't help out, either. When they're removed, she doesn't flex her feet or bend her ankles. She just presses her feet back down on the ground.

"You were the first person to sign it. And you drew that picture on it, of something called a Sailor Moon." Rei doesn't elaborate that this did not occur in the real world. There's no expository 'y'know, when we were in that hallucinatory Angel-world.' That much, Rei probably considers obvious, but her sins are almost always ones of omission anyway.

"I was just wondering why you drew it." Rei's tone is at odds with her words, but when doesn't she sound bored? (When she's weeping and blubbering incoherently.) "Is it important to you?"

Noriko stares at Rei for a long few moments, visibly uncomprehending.

And then recognition flashes into her head, and she lurches backwards like she were struck, back flopping against the wall.

She laughs, and it sounds a little sick. "I spent...the last week, trying to figure out what happened and what didn't because of that whole mess," she says, shaking her head. "Uhh." She plants hands on her knees, slumping over, putting weight on them. "I don't even remember why. It was probably something silly...it's my favorite show, so I just thought it'd be cute?"

A slow sigh. She liked Rei a little better the other night when she was an emotional wreck. This blank Rei is so much harder to relate to, and so unlike the person she feels like she knows. But that's the thing, isn't it? It's /not/ the person she knows. That person...did she ever exist?

Noriko isn't sure. Noriko isn't sure about a lot of this stuff - it's all so far over her head. But she knows what she will do, for better or worse: Stick by the girl her heart remembers, and do her best to help her, even in little ways.

"It's kind of embarrassing," she laughs, weakly. "But...yeah, it kinda is. It's about a bunch of girls who get the power to save the world, and even though there's a lot of pain and they keep getting hurt, they keep going - keep fighting to protect the things they love." She cranes her neck to look over at Rei, smiling weakly. "It's...I don't know, I guess. Inspiring?"

"We went into an Angel," Rei says, looking over at Noriko calmly, speaking softly, as if she were breaking sensitive news about unfortunate test results at a free clinic. "It showed us what it thought we wanted." Rei looks down at her arm -- the one that she 'broke' in that dream world. On her hand, she has faint scars, glossy, hard skin where she was recently crucified. Or, where Unit-00X was crucified, and she suffered for it.

"Some of its deductions were more accurate than others."

Rei looks up, then, away from Noriko, off toward the track they just ran on, letting out a gentle breath. It's not a sigh, really. There's one of those trademark silences. When Rei ends it, it's not through words -- the stillness is such that any motion at all from her carries as much as speech, and she turns, facing Noriko again, looking right at the older girl's eyes.

That contact is maintained for a moment. Rei doesn't say a word. Her face is empty, but her gaze is so pointed that it's like there /must/ be something under that surface. And there is. It's let out slowly, so much so that when it starts, who knows if it's even really happening.

But when it's done, it's clear, and more than being clear, it's real. The corners of Rei's lips have lifted. Rei is smiling. It's not much, it's certainly not very expressive, but Rei is smiling.

"...I figured it was something like that," Noriko says, with a nod, once Rei is done talking. "It just...the memories are all messy. Messed up, both ways...you know, after a day or so you started showing up in my memories of my real high school? And on..." ...She does sigh, for reals, eyes sliding shut for a second as she bores psychic holes in the floor. "...took me a while to sort it out. I'm not even sure I really have."

Rei has been silent for a bit. Noriko finally cranes her head to make eye contact, and she meets Rei's intent, intense gaze. Slowly she stops slumping over, pushing her weight back into an upright position without really breaking eye contact. Rei's face is always a little bit haunting - that blank, empty expression, even when she should be exhausted or frowning or, or /anything/, is difficult for Noriko. Coach doesn't emote much but she can /understand/ the way he does it - presenting a constant, stern demeanor over his emotions. Rei...it feels more like she just doesn't know how, or doesn't want to. Once, she would have guessed she perhaps doesn't even have them, but...no. She knows that's not the case now.

It takes her a second to notice the ghost of that expression emerging, and it's not until it's almost at what passes for full that she really figures out what is happening, but it makes her smile in turn - wider and warmer than Rei, because Noriko is a far more expressive person. As is perhaps amply presented when Noriko completely loses all sense of propriety and just locks Rei in a big hug, holding her tight and murmuring, "I was happy, too."

Rei gets hugged. She at least has the graciousness not to fall over as if she'd been tackled -- and if nothing else it's as good a way as any for Noriko to feel in passing that Rei has indeed been doing the prescribed number of daily situps.

Still, even if she has a fair bit of experience /being/ hugged, especially lately, Rei has yet to quite master 'returning hugs.' She lifts her arms tentatively, and slowly closes them around Noriko's waist as if she were a wallflower going for their last-chance slow-dance at the end of the prom. Rei's head tilts down, forehead resting on Noriko's shoulder. Unlike the last time she sought anything there, though... well, this time she's not so passive in doing so.

It's a whole Moment.

And that's why, when Rei feels her lips starting to move, when she feels words on the tip of her tongue, she stops herself. She doesn't need to ruin the Moment. She doesn't need to say anything. If any statement could be made on her friendship with her Coach -- the embrace she's giving is enough.