2010-04-26 - Any Fool Can Regret Yesterday

THE SHIROGANE

NOW

The shuttle ferrying the NERV 3066 participants down to Earth has stopped at the Shirogane. This is where Leo Stenbuck got off; others are due to continue their trip, but the a malfunction in one of the ship's doors has caused it to be delayed by some long hours. Rei Ayanami has been given full run of the ship while she waits for the shuttle to get fixed up and take her to the Minerva.

Full run of the place includes the gym. Coach Noriko has been adamant that she keep up her exercise routine -- build it into ritual -- even when she herself is not present or available. If there's one thing Rei's good at, it's memorizing routines. She's even started bringing her workout clothes with her on her trips to Earth, in case she gets stuck and needs to get in her daily stomach-crunch quotient.

This is why Rei Ayanami walks into the Shirogane Mess Hall wearing a Top Squadron uniform. It's fairly scandalous, compared to every A-LAWS uniform not worn by Excellen Browning -- but Rei seems to have no problem with the stares and comments, ignoring them as placidly as if they were a gentle breeze wafting past. She stands in line with her tray, her bag slung over one shoulder. She looks like she's finally starting to improve, physically -- even with only a few weeks of work, she's showing... vague hints of actual /tone/ in her body.

She also has -- and this is another reason people whisper when she walks by -- bruises all over her face and neck, like she got the crap beaten out of her.

And wouldn't you know it, she happens to get in line right next to Louise Halevy.

Louise Halevy has had a rough couple days; almost immediately after being tasked with what basically boils down to 'doing the nasty with Leo Stenbuck until such time as he comes around to her point of view' ('his point of view), Leo has betrayed her trust. She is kind of surly, or more accurately, rapidly becoming detached in a manner that might seem a little surly.

As Rei gets in line next to her, Louise glances over to the girl... and detaching or no, it's hard to ignore all of those bruises, or for that matter the blunette attached to them. Glancing to her again, still saying nothing, Louise finally -- the third time she looks toward Rei -- attempts to start up a conversation, as they slowly trudge through the line.

"... Are you Rei Ayanami?" she asks, unsure where to start. 'How did you get those bruises' might be a little too direct.

Rei Ayanami /invented/ detached. The blue-haired girl stares straight ahead as she waits in line, holding her tray out, perfectly even. If a bird landed on her, she probably would not react. That is how much she looks like a product moving through an assembly line, even moreso than the rest of the tired, hungry grunts. A robot in a barely-there swimsuit and totally 80s jacket, but a robot nonetheless.

Louise keeps looking at Rei. Normally, when people steal glances in close company, it's that sort of awkward thing -- you look at them, they're looking away but suddenly look at you, half a second of eye contact and suddenly you look away and then they look away -- but there's none of that tradition with Rei. She just stares ahead vacantly, as if Louise wasn't even there. And then Louise speaks.

Rei's head turns, as if separate from the rest of her body. Her unblinking red eyes -- surrounded by swollen purple puffs of flesh -- fix on Louise's, but there seems to be no intensity to her stare, like making eye contact with a blind person. "Yes," Rei replies, flatly, boredly.

Louise is so used to that act of stealing awkward glances that /not/ having it returned is almost agonizing. After she's half-refused the niceties of 'normal social interaction,' she almost decides to just drop the conversation right then and there; it seems pointless to her to talk to something so alien.

Turning her eyes back away from Rei after a few moments of that uncomfortable eye contact, she says, "I understand you used to, um." Date Leo? Got him involved in some kind of awkward deceit web that resulted in him cheating on me? Go on -- and still are going on -- missions with him?

Deciding that line of conversation is going to go absolutely nowhere, she decides to talk something that might be safer: work. "I understand you were on a mission recently," she attempts again.

Rei is silent for a long moment after Louise's second try. Even if Louise looks away, Rei continues to stare -- even without a sharpness to her gaze, there's still the overwhelming feeling of being watched, like spotlights being shined at her from a distance. Rei's silence is awkward -- perhaps she's decided that the conversation is going nowhere, herself.

Then, suddenly, Rei responds. There's no real impact to her sudden speech, though -- it just fades in out of nowhere, soft and gentle, couched in a strong Japanese accent that renders it brittle and fragile. "Yes. NERV contained an Angel attack in Alaska. One of the Team Captains on this ship was present."

What Louise doesn't know is that Rei recognizes her. The first time she came to see Leo in the middle of the night, to rope him into the horrible things she's going to force him to do -- there was Louise, laying next to Leo in bed, sleeping through their chat. Rei forces herself into a state of almost zen emotional stillness. Having just worked out, she's tired; it's actually easier to appear blase. "Captain Leo Stenbuck, of the GNX Team. You may know him."

"I see," Louise says, considering what else to say here; there's a certain awkwardness to discussing the man that they are so clearly both invested in. She doesn't know about Rei's additional foreknowledge, but knowing it or not wouldn't really change the tone of the conversation. It's still awkward, either way.

"... what is your relationship with Leo Stenbuck?" she decides to ask, getting a little more comfortable in the conversation, or more accurately trying to force the conversation to something concrete, simple, and comfortable.

She adds, "I understand you two dated for a little while?" after a second, trying to lead the conversation exactly where she wants it. She wants some affirmation that Leo is, if nothing else, not Rei's anymore, when right now she has no confirmation that she has... /any/ stake in her.

There's a long silence. Longer than the last one. The line moves -- Rei steps, but doesn't speak. It's as if the gears in her head were rusty, and slowly creaking to figure out 'something was said!'

The disconnect Rei feels enables her to keep her cool. She doesn't know what she feels for Leo -- she knows what a past Rei felt, but only through inference and expository dialogue, though the physical sensations and not the emotional ones. Still, encoded into her memory is every touch, every time she sat in his lap, every kind word, every time he kissed her on the belly trying to make her giggle just the /once/--

"Leo Stenbuck and I were involved in an intimate romantic relationship for over a year," Rei says. She doesn't particularly stress any of those words, suspicious though they may be -- she might as well be reading the description off of a tax form. "He terminated the relationship. We continue to work together on missions for NERV, without incident."

Louise examines Rei closely as she says this, almost stunned by the halting, awkward nature of her description. It's like a robot, she thinks to herself as she slides through the line, finally getting to the best part of the line: getting actual food.

"I see," she says at first, meeting flatness with flatness -- albeit differently-motivated flatness. The flatness is something that she uses to give herself a brief reprieve from actually asking any probing questions... but unfortunately, her jealousy and curiosity get the better of her.

"So why would someone sleep with him to 'get back at you?' And then announce it during a mission?" she asks, looking closely at Rei's bruises as she says this. "Could you explain that for me?" Her tone remains careful, though not as flat as it was.

Rei takes her turn getting food while Louise asks these questions. Cheese and rise is slopped onto her tray, along with mashed potatoes. Rei stares directly at the mess hall technician. She doesn't blink, still, nor does she have anything to say -- if she objects to the cuisine, she keeps it to herself. (Like it's any different on the Minerva, anyway.)

Rei starts moving again, with the rest of the line, and then, without warning, her attention returns to Louise. The turn of her head causes her shaggy, neglect-length hair to shake and fall in such a way that her dull gaze is partly obscured, only increasing the alienating aspect of her stare. "If I had to guess," Rei says, in an anti-tone that seems to imply that perhaps Louise is indeed making Rei guess, "it was under the assumption that some connection remained between myself and Captain Stenbuck." Not 'Leo.'

"But, as I said, he terminated that relationship." Rei sounds like she couldn't care less. She looks and sounds like she's humoring Louise, like Louise is /boring/ her. Or -- does she? Because Rei is, essentially, a blank slate. People can project whatever reading they like onto her. Because Rei offers no clues, no interpretation of her vacancy is any less right than any other interpretation -- no less wrong, either. "But that would be a guess. I have no explanation."

Louise finds the food in the mess abhorrent -- and yet, she asks for double rice. She gets one and a half times, since basically everyone on the ship knows her and wonders how the Hell she puts up with the rest of her squad. (The truth: she's no better than any of them.)

"I -- see," Louise says, frowning deeply at Rei's answer. It's inconclusive. Almost pointless, even. She wonders, for a moment, why she's even bothering to talk to her -- and more than that, why she's compelled to /keep/ doing so. "... I see," she repeats.

Eventually, she decides that this entire conversation isn't going to be helpful, and as such decides to ask questions she would have otherwise thought awkward. It's pretty clear that nothing's going to get her to react. "What happened to cause those bruises?" she asks; if she gets an answer, her curiosity is sated, and if she gets a rise out of Rei... well, the part of her that enjoyed verbally and financially abusing people (which still exists, at least, so far) gets something out of it, one supposes.

There's a catch to dealing with Rei Ayanami. She likes to leave out details. Well, not really 'likes' -- it's not an intentional thing. She just strips everything down to the core and presumes that this is good enough for everyone else. It's a hard language to get used to -- you have to ask Rei exactly what you want to know, and keep up on her until she either tells you every last little stupid detail, or she's grown into a comfortable enough routine with you to know what details you'd want.

Leo Stenbuck being a fine example of the latter.

"While on Earth," Rei says, "I had an -- altercation with someone I was once close with. They took out their anger physically, as they are prone to do." What Rei doesn't mention: That this was not the NERV mission to Earth that she was just on; that this person she was close with was Asuka Langley Sohryu; that by 'close with' she meant 'in a professional capacity'; and about a thousand other little details that would help Louise contextualize that description.

And then there's that stare. Rei just won't blink. She stares and stares and stares and maybe she's trying to tell Louise something with those battered eyes of hers. Maybe Rei knows more than she's letting on, in an entirely different sense. Who can tell, with a girl so frustratingly opaque?

Louise brings her own biases and sets of experience to the table. Right now, she's coming down from what feels like a betrayal by Leo (who has been close to Rei) let out during a NERV mission (on Earth) yet again (after the last time he hit her). When Rei explains things that way, Louise visibly pales; she momentarily loses her grip on her tray, letting it land after a three-inch fall to the 'rails' that allow lazier soldiers to just slide their tray along in the mess.

Falling back on those same two words again, Louise mumbles, "I -- see." That detachment lets her draw her own conclusions -- and of course, none of them are pretty. Then, after a second, she decides she /really/ doesn't want any more of this conversation. She got exactly what she wanted (honest, if not complete, answers, to every question) out of it.

There are two tragedies in life: not getting what we want -- and getting it.

"I'm sorry -- I need to go. If you want, you can have my food," she says, the tiniest bit of actual compassion -- or, perhaps more accurately, identification of parts of herself in Rei -- creeping into her voice as she steps out of line, heading back toward the door.

Rei watches Louise's response as disaffectedly as a sociopathic child might watch an ant burn under a magnifying glass. She has no pity or sympathy in her face; her tone is unreadable, because she fails to speak again. When Louise excuses herself, Rei doesn't respond.

Rei just... stares.

She continues staring, too. As Louise walks away, Rei turns, still clutching her tray, seemingly completely disinterested in the offered food. She stands there, watching Louise go, holding up the line and inconveniencing everyone.