2010-05-29 - The Seventh Seal

Tonight is a confluence of unusual events; it's the wee hours of the morning, and not only is Leo Stenbuck in his own room, lit only by the Shirogane's dim artificial moonlight, but he's awake... and in a manner that isn't 'lie in bed and stare at ceiling', even.

Indeed, he's sitting at his desk in only his uniform pants (and bandana... although that goes without saying, seeing as how he almost never takes it off.) His Haro sits on top of the desk, in front of his turned-off computer monitor, occasionally flapping its ears.

In Leo's hands, he's holding the pair of dog tags he's taken to wearing lately, with another, smaller chain lashed to the primary one. From the second chain - the subchain, if you will - hangs a tiny piece of metal with an X scratched into it, the lucky charm Latooni gave him before she left to gallavant across the universe.

Every once in awhile, Leo looks up at his Haro, sighs heavily, and then looks back down at the tags in his hand.

It shouldn't even be surprising now -- the familiar sound of a door opening and closing and gentle footsteps moving inward, at the familiar time of 'way too late.' Still, it must be said in Rei Ayanami's favor that she still knows how to keep things interesting. Maybe it's the fact that her wardrobe is so different -- she's dressed casually, in a dark skirt that pleats its way down to mid-thigh, tall socks, and a pink hoodie-and-t-shirt combination that looks like it was selected for her by Excellen Browning or something -- who certainly must not have been aware of the irony when she picked a tee with 'ANGEL' written inside a little rhinestone heart. Rei's also wearing a headband, not unlike Leo's -- it has a much longer trail, it's sky blue, and it's very obviously the one that Noriko Takaya wears, or possibly wore. If Rei isn't real, is this a message from Leo's subconscious -- the longer hair, the hardening body, and now the fashion choices as well?

Whether she's real or not, though, one thing is obvious -- Rei's drunk.

The bottle of sake in her hand is a dead giveaway. She also holds a tiny cup -- knowing Rei, she's probably had about one and a half of them to get this tipsy. She wobbles on her feet, nearly needing to put a hand up against a wall to steady herself. She doesn't stop for any dramatic staredown or ominous greeting -- instead, she walks past Leo, to lean on the wall next to his desk. It's then that she makes eye contact, and her face goes flush.

Rei lifts the hand holding her cup to cover her mouth, and giggles in embarrassment. It is probably not what malicious ghosts usually get up to when trying to torment the living, but then, Leo's pretty messed up.

As per the norm, by now, Leo doesn't look up when the door opens, or closes, or when footsteps pad across his room... although Haro does swivel to watch Rei's advance towards, and then past, Leo. As she passes by the young man, in fact, the spherical robot chirps a greeting of, "HELLO, SAYLA! HELLO, SAYLA!"

That doesn't get Leo to look, either. Only when Rei giggles does Leo slooowly rotate his head to look at her. When his gaze settles on her, he takes a moment to sweep it up and down her body appraisingly, stopping briefly on the rhinestone heart and word, the bandana, and the...

... sake...?

Leo blinks once, and then just as slowly turns to face forward again. He calmly lifts the chain in his hand to slip it back over his head, and, having done so... places his elbows onto his desk and leans forward to put his face into his hands.

"You've got to be fucking me," he groans.

There's a pause -- the usual kind, but with a slightly different flavor to it. The difference is lost in Leo's abandonment of looking at Rei. She stares at the back of his head, pale face still pink, smile disappearing. Her red eyes are blank, but not blank like Rei is normally blank -- it's the look of someone who is hearing a language they don't speak.

Which, sadly, is true.

Rei turns to Haro and leans toward it. "Haro-kun," she begins, and from there, it's all Japanese. Haro's eyes flash and it responds to her in kind -- its Japanese just as sing-song as its English.

Rei pauses again, and then slowly sets the cup down on the table, next to Leo's elbow. She leans forward and pours carefully, putting a hand on Leo's shoulder to keep herself from tipping over (or from tipping over the bottle too roughly). She says something, in Japanese.

Haro then immediately echoes her, speaking in a preset 'feminine' computer voice, translating on the fly: "Drink with me, Leo."

Wha--

what

Only after the entire series of events has passed does Leo lift his head and turn to look at Rei again, obviously puzzled; after a beat, he swings his gaze over to Haro, and he proceeds to spend several seconds looking back and forth between the two like he suspects they're playing a joke on him.

Which would be pretty silly, considering she's definitely a hallcuination, and Haro proboably is right now, too. Or... possibly not even 'right now', Leo notes, with a frown. He wracks his memory, trying to think of a time when someone actually interacted with Haro, but it's so /late/, and--

"Yeah," he says gruffly, rubbing vigorously at his face again and then reaching out to take the offered cup once it's full. "Alright, I guess we're speaking Japanese now. Uh... ahh, fuck me..."

After a few beats of thought, Leo lifts the sake in a salute towards Rei, and says, in slow, halting Japanese, "Sake will not make me go to sleep with you again." Then he downs the entire cup in one swift motion.

Rei pulls back from Leo as Haro helpfully and automatically explains what Leo just said -- his English is translated into Japanese for Rei, and then, because Haro is stupid, Leo's Japanese is translated back into English, presumably for his own benefit. Maybe Amuro Ray programmed these things with Pimsleur modules.

Rei frowns sourly with the exaggerated pout of a drunken teen. She looks away for a moment, the red in her cheeks getting redder still. She's not usually so expressive, which is an understatement if there ever was one -- but then, this is literally the second time in history she's had a drink.

"I don't want to sleep with you again," Rei says, with Haro translating -- the voice that issues forth from the thing is not terribly different from Rei's own, soft and neutral, but without the microscopic hints of humanity that can be found if one listens to the First Child hard enough. It's like hearing Rei's sound, but any trace of blood is replaced by veins full of plastic. "That was a mistake. I couldn't make love to the one I wanted." Rei looks away again, and briefly folds her arms. She's caught herself in the trap of having spoken before she could figure out that she didn't want to say what she already has. She lifts the bottle of sake to her mouth and has a sip, struggling not to make a face. "So I settled for screwing you."

Rei is quiet for a long moment, and then leans down to pour Leo another cup. "You wanted someone else, too. But we got each other." Having Haro speak for Rei is like hearing her tell jokes -- and the punchline invariably not so much being 'a funny twist' as 'the terrible truth.'

But then, Rei -- the other one -- never really went in for telling jokes, after her first attempt: somehow, 'orange you glad I didn't say banana' loses its effect when the person saying it sounds bored.

Rei looks over at Haro, and then down at Leo again. "Why did you choose her to start with?"

When Haro translates 'settled for screwing you', Leo's face twists into a scowl, and he looks angrily away from Rei to glare at the robot on his desk until she finishes.

It should be noted that Leo still laughed at the 'orange you glad I didn't say banana' joke... but that was because it was cute, not because it was funny, so maybe it doesn't count.

When Rei asks her question, and Haro translates, Leo takes a long sip of sake, savoring the fact that it feels like he's being kicked in the throat by the Devil rather than simply downing the entire thing as fast as possible, and then lowers the cup and says something that needs no translation, in part thanks to how harshly it's said. "Fuck you, too."

He takes another sip, and only then explains, "She had a hot voice. I dug up a picture and she had a hot body, too. Then we got into an argument, sort of, on the radio once, so I--" He pauses, frowns, and then reminds himself, "But you remember all that, so."

Another pause, and then Leo forges onwards. "Well, whoever you 'couldn't have' missed out, 'cuz you were pretty good." Pause. "And not that I care, but... who was I the consolation prize for?"

When Leo delivers his harsh first volley, Rei's blue eyebrows twitch upward gently, but other than that, no real change in her expression registers. She doesn't seem angry. Maybe a little hurt, but she's working to hide it, and even with her lessened faculties -- sobriety and otherwise -- she still does a pretty good job. Mostly, what Rei can't hide is that she seems depressed.

Resigned.

When Leo explains his reasoning -- hot body, hot voice -- Rei lowers her head slightly. Her hand comes up to self-consciously adjust her headband -- she's still unused to the feeling of it on her forehead, and it shows. She doesn't say anything for a long time. She breathes, deeply, and then has another sip from the bottle. She has a more difficult time hiding how bad it tastes. She's probably not drinking it for the taste.

"I'm drinking," Rei says, slowly, carefully, and through her Haro surrogate, "because I don't know what else to do. And you seem to enjoy it." Haro offers no clues as to whether or not that statement is sarcastic. Rei herself is the same. "But I don't think it's helping. I just feel worse."

Rei tops Leo off after that, and has another drink, herself, as if inviting those bad feelings. "It was Johnny Domino," Rei finally admits, after considerable mental deliberation -- the question of whether or not to admit it is written across her face. "It /is/ Johnny Domino. You say you don't care. And you probably don't. But he did. He does." Rei sets the bottle down, and folds her arms, still leaning against the wall. Her head tilts to one side, blue hair touching the vertical surface. "He treated me like a human being while you were treating me like nothing at all."

Leo Stenbuck has no idea why the revelation that Rei's object of desire was Johnny Domino is so irritating - nay, /insulting/ - to him, and he probably never will. A look of what can only be disgust crosses his face when she reveals the act, but before he can vocalize his thoughts on the subject ("Ugh, /him?/") Rei's words move on to territory that pushes Leo out of 'agitated' and into 'angry.'

"So this is my fault, now," he says angrily, leaning forward just enough to make the growing flush in his cheeks visible. "I'm not welcoming you with open arms, so now I'm the bad guy, and he's your fucking, fucking knight in shining armor, huh?"

Leo's speaking so fast that Haro is having trouble keeping up; the only thing that allows him to is the Japanese people's lack of belief in things like 'pausing' or 'breathing'. "Man, whatever," Leo sneers, tossing back most of his cup in a motion of his hand and head that seems like it should probably give him whiplash.

"An' he must not care /that/ much," Leo adds vehemently after a brief pause, leaning back in his chair and holding his cup out for a refill. "If you had to 'settle' for me.

"Not that you were complaining at the time," he points out, smugness joining his belligerence. "I had to crack open Haro here and reset his fuckin'... people memory. He'd modified my entry. Thought I was named 'Sugoi.'"

Rei weathers Leo's sudden turn toward indignance. She stays leaned against the wall. Her expression is sad, but she's not moping in an exaggerated (even 'exaggerated' by Rei standards) pity-me sort of way. She just seems sullen, like she wants to withdraw emotionally but can't figure out how to turn the key.

When Haro finally catches up to Leo, a few seconds after he himself finishes speaking, Rei's tongue moves inside her mouth, and for a long moment, that's her only response. She doesn't blink, of course, and her breathing stays even through nothing short of Herculean labor.

"I took a Galbaldy over here," Rei begins, quietly. Haro has ample time to translate just because of how slowly she's speaking -- where Leo was spitting hot fire in rapid succession, Rei is comparatively mumbling grey ash. "I spent the entire time thinking about what I wanted to say to you. I can't speak English anymore. This made it hard."

Rei reaches out and rests some fingers on the bottle of sake. She touches it, but doesn't claim it; after a moment of thought, she decides not to have another drink. Her gaze looks down at the desk, then up at Leo's angry face. "But I don't know if it matters what my last words to you are. Do you even remember hers?"

Rei breathes, visibly. "Do you think you fulfilled her last wishes?"

Leo's reaction to that question, once it makes it through the Haro Filter, is instant. "Ohhh no you don't," he snaps, suddenly slamming his still-empty cup down on his desk with a sharp bang that, somehow, startles Haro, making him flap his ears in a brief spasm of despair. "No, no, no," he snarls, "I'm not going to be, to be /guilt tripped/ by a figment of my fucking imagination!"

"You think I don't remember her last words?" Leo sneers and rises out of his chair rapidly enough to topple it. "Not a fucking day goes by that I don't think about them, about /her./ But what the fuck am I supposed to do, huh? Tell me /that./ She can't forget, she can't forget anything, because she's, she's fucking /dead!/"

"So what am I supposed to do?" he repeats venomously. "Should I pretend you're her, huh? Is that what you want? You want to be my girlfriend, you want to dress up nice and go out to fancy restaurants and pretend everything's okay?"

"Well, tough shit, because everything's /not/ okay, everything's /fucked./" As if to emphasize his point, Leo kicks his desk, which mostly translates sort of smashing his knee into it and then instantly regretting it and snarling in pain. He turns to storm away, but only gets one step before he whirls on Rei again.

"And you know what, you're right, I /was/ thinking about her while I was fucking you, because, /apparently/, I'm a piece of shit, and I can't even keep the one fucking promise I made to myself that I wouldn't ever replace her, so, congratu-/FUCKING/-lations on ruining my life in YET ANOTHER WAY!"

"/FUCK!/" Leo punctuates, in a way that would undoubtedly attract attention were his quarters not in the ass end of the ship rather than in the center of all the others. God bless his eccentric tastes in comfort.

Again, Rei endures Leo's fury. When he shoots to his feet, she pulls back from the wall with a start, but drinking has dulled her reaction times and made her sluggish and slow. As Leo fumes and screams and kicks and bangs, Haro relates his words in calm, even cheery Japanese, giving it none of Leo's emphases and certainly none of the emotion.

Rei is still not incredibly steady on her feet -- the three or four modest sips of sake (she doesn't remember and wasn't counting) since her entrance are about three or four more sips of sake than she can really handle. Roy Fokker got her loaded off of half of a wine cooler, after all. All the same, Rei steps forward, getting right up toward Leo, right in his face. She doesn't seem scared; she probably wouldn't be, even if she were sober. If he's pissed off enough to deck her -- so be it. The possibility doesn't elude her. It's a risk she's willing to take.

There's no mistaking that Leo has managed to make Rei angry. But this isn't the sort of anger like last time, where she shouted and hit him and eventually had angry, angry sex with him. This isn't anything so shallow or short-lived -- this is, in the unmistakable language of Rei Ayanami, pure atomic fury.

"Sit," Rei says, her voice like a frozen dagger...

"...down."

It is not a command that invites dissent. That much can be heard in her tone, even if Haro's translation gives it the force of a feather. Whether Leo does it or not, Rei doesn't seem to be ready to let him continue his tantrum. "Once again... you missed the point." All emotion has bled out of Rei's voice, even if it's a little wet around the edges from her intoxication. It's a very deliberate, focused lack of emotion, though.

It wasn't often that Rei was angry with Leo while they were together, but there's no forgetting when she was.

"This... is not about you. It's not about me, either. You made what our relationship would be very clear from that first day on the radio. It hurt. It still hurts. But I've had my /entire life/ to try and move on. And that life is nearly over, so it doesn't even matter anymore." Despite the dull chirp of the Haro Filter, Rei's tone can still be read easily -- she doesn't say what she does with self-pity. There's a matter-of-factness like Rei was explaining how magnets work.

"This is about saving humanity from Gendo Ikari, which you promised you'd do. I need to know that you'll uphold that promise. I know you don't think I'm real. Get over yourself." Even Rei's little ad hominem is delivered with a coldness that Haro's clinical delivery couldn't hope to match. "Put yourself aside for a moment and let me know that I can die knowing you're able to keep your word. Not for my sake. I don't care about my sake. For the sake of an entire planet. One that happens to be the home of the woman you're meant to be with. For /her/ sake. If no one else's."

When Rei gets all up in Leo's grill, he meets her gaze evenly, rage flashing in his eyes and alcohol flushing his cheeks. She wants to have a staredown? Fine. He can staredown. She's more than half a foot shorter, and still probably a good thirty pounds lighter, than him.

She also wins. It's not that surprising; the last Rei won each of the (very rare) fights she and Leo ever had, too.

Still muttering fervently, when Rei commands him to sit down, Leo leans down, rights his chair, and drops angrily into it, crossing his arms sullenly over his chest. The words 'bullied' and 'imaginary' stick out amongst his mutterings.

As Rei continues speaking, however, the muttering dies down, and Leo fixes her with a stare again. He maintains it until she finishes speaking, and then until Haro finishes translating, and then long, long after, for almost a full minute.

Finally, he says, "Assuming you aren't real, the difference between seeing you and doing the things you tell me to is the difference between a doctor and a padded cell. Or a firing squad," he notes, after a brief pause.

Leo pushes his legs off the floor to swivel - his chair, like all desk chairs ever, is, of course, a swivelly chair - to face the door... or, more accurately, a peg on the wall near the door where his gunbelt hangs, his golden revolver actually in it for once.

"What happens," Leo asks, after a long stretch of silence, "if I say 'no?'"

Rei is still impossibly angry -- she'd be on complete emotional lockdown if it wasn't for the sake warming her cheeks and loosening her feelings. Rei stops taring only long enough to follow Leo's own gaze, turning and looking over her shoulder at the gunbelt -- and the gun.

When Haro gives her Leo's question, Rei turns and walks over to where the revolver hangs, not answering immediately. She's concentrating so hard on not stumbling that the effort underscores her drunkenness. Not bothering to listen to any protests if they come, Rei removes the revolver from its holster and flips open the chamber to inspect. "You shouldn't keep it loaded," Rei murmurs, still angry, but with the chiding tone that another Rei often used a million years ago. "It's not safe." She doesn't even seem to really notice she's saying it.

Slapping the chamber back into place, Rei lifts the gun, looking down its barrel. She doesn't point it at anything in particular -- just the far wall. One eye closes. Maybe someone from Celestial Being taught her how to snipe -- but then, it's not like she needs the lessons. It's strange to her, though -- holding a gun without Unit-00 acting as surrogate for her hands.

Walking back over toward Leo after lowering the gun, Rei kneels. "Give me your hand," she says, again in a tone that refuses to be questioned. Rei cocks the gun and puts it in Leo's hand. As she does so, though, she lifts both the weapon and Leo's hand to her face.

"If I'm not real," Haro translates blandly, "then this isn't a risk at all, is it?"

Haro sounds bland, but Rei herself -- she's drunk, and she can't hide the wobble in her voice. She can't hide that she's scared. But then she puts her mouth on the gun barrel and uses her rather surprising strength to push Leo's finger into the trigger guard, leaving the final decision to him.

Leo mutters some excuse as to why the gun is loaded, especialy when he does, in fact, know that it's unsafe, and normally he does, in fact, unload it. He tries to pretend the excuse is a legitimate one, but... really, it just boils down to that he was depressed and tired and didn't want to unload it, the last time he hung it up.

But that all becomes less important when Rei comes back over with the gun, and - as far as Leo can tell - attempts to bully him into shooting her in the head.

As difficult as it sometimes is to believe these days, Leo Stenbuck is not a cruel person. He doesn't want people to suffer, or be sad, not even people he doesn't really know or care about. Ther are, of course, a few exceptions, but they truly are the exception.

But right now, he's drunk. He's angry; angry that, as far as he's concerned, he's the bad guy no matter what he does. And that sort of changes things.

Leo stares up at Rei, his finger - forced into the trigger guard by Rei - hovering there far longer than can possibly be comfortable for her. Then he says simply, voice as cold as ice, "Stop it. You'll tarnish the gold."

To emphasize how important this is, he wrenches the barrel out of Rei's mouth, which, unfortunately and painfully, involves the little raised part that makes up the front part of the gun's iron sights catching briefly on her lip.

Rei is scared and uncomfortable -- this intensifies as the staredown continues, her eyes softening, and beginning to grow wet. Rei knows what death is like. She knew she'd have to face it down again. But this is a drunken plan, poorly conceived and yet more poorly executed, and she doesn't know how it's going to end. Maybe Leo really will explode the back of her head. At least it would be hard for him to deny the fragments of skull and brain that would hit the wall with a splash.

It doesn't happen, though. The gun barrel catches; flesh tears. Rei is left with a nasty little gouge in her upper lip that starts bleeding and adamantly refuses to stop. She's always been stoic about pain. Compared to the things that happen to her Eva, this is nothing. Still, maybe uncharacteristically -- the liquor, again -- she makes a squeak of pain, and her hand comes up to cup her mouth, looking down at the blood that pools in her palm and finds its way to the floor in droplets. Much of it lands on her shirt. It runs through the rhinestone heart, slashing through the word 'ANGEL.'

Rei can't even read anymore. She picked the shirt by mistake.

"If you say no," Rei says, "then you get to watch what happens and realize until the end of your life that you could have stopped it, but didn't." Rei's speaking is impeded slightly by the tender, painful wound in her mouth; forming sounds with her lips seems to aggravate the bleeding, and her teeth quickly become stained. Haro takes a second longer to translate. "You'll talk with Zerogouki soon." 'Zerogouki' -- in casual, private conversation, it was never 'Unit-00.' Like the difference between a codename and a real name. "Maybe you'll understand then."

Rei stands there, bleeding. Her hands drop to her sides. Red runs down her chin and her neck. She looks like a vampire. "You're never going to see me again after tonight," Rei says, with the steely tone of a promise. "If there's anything you want... now's the time."

Some part of Leo feels terrible, having seen the fear on her face, the wetness of her eyes. Some part of him feels guilty because of what happened to her lip, insists he should have been more gentle.

Some part of him has questions, however strange they are. Some part of him wants to know if, if he hadn't known or hadn't cared that she wasn't 'his' Rei, she could have loved him back. Some part of him wants to know if there's anything, anything at all, he can do to save her.

But that part of him isn't making the decisions right now.

Rei says that this is the last time Leo will ever see her, and the young man drops his eyes to the revolver now resting in his lap, where he's wiping the small amount of blood that got on the barrel away on his pant leg. He is silent for a moment.

And then he says, voice as hard as steel, "Good."

Rei stands and waits to see if Leo does indeed have any last requests. Finding none, it's hard to detect any trouble on her face at this, beyond the pain of her mouth. She doesn't seem shocked -- again, her stare goes back into a resigned mode. She seems to almost pity Leo.

"I went to you because she trusted you," Rei says, quietly. She doesn't indulge in hyperbole, especially because she can't make those claims with any real certainty -- just educated guesses. "I'm not sure if I should, or if I can. But I want to trust you. You're a good person, Leo. You're just your own worst enemy." Rei looks over at the Haro for a moment as it continues to issue her words in a digital pitter-patter of English.

Rei says something to it, and it doesn't translate; the word for 'stop' can be picked out, in addition to her directly addressing "Haro-kun."

Rei then stands there for nearly two minutes, without speaking or moving or blinking. All she does is continue to get blood on herself and the floor, the flow slowing, but not by much.

Then she says "Leo-kun. Sayonara."

And then Rei turns and walks out, trailing grey storm clouds in the air around her and drops of half-human blood on the floor below.

Leo stares right back at Rei, still and silent the entire time, watching her get blood all over his God damn floor. When she says goodbye - for the last time, Leo notes in the back of his mind - and departs his room, he doesn't turn to watch her go. He stays where he is, staring into the middle distance. his hands and revolver resting in his lap. Haro - who did turn to follow Rei, and even waved with one of his stubby little tard arms - eventually returns to staring, too... but at Leo.

After ten minutes of silence, Leo says quietly, "Even if I look, and they're there... that doesn't prove anything. I could be imagining it. I could be imagining you," he adds, turning to look at Haro. "I could be imagining Latooni. All of this..." Leo gestures grandly, to indicate not only his room, but the Shirogane, and, presumabl,y all of creation. "... it could be fake."

"But..."

"... if I can see it... if I can hear it, and touch it, and smell it, and taste it... that's like it's real, isn't it? It's real to me, at least..." Leo frowns expectantly at Haro, as if expecting him to have answers, even though he know he doesn't.

Leo reaches up to run his hands over his neck, to brush his fingers on the now fading hickeys on there; they move up, to brush over the strip of bandage tied around his head, and then back down, to clutch at the pair of dogtags, and the charm lashed to them, around his neck.

After a moment of just clutching the charm, he lifts it to his face, presses it again his pursed lips, and squeezes his eyes shut. He stays that way for several long moments.

Then he gingerly sets the chain back down, and opens his eyes again. There is something there, ethereal and undefinable, that wasn't before. Leo's mouth tightens into a grim line, and he reaches out to gingerly lift one of Haro's ear flaps and reach inside to pull out the connector of a retractable Neo-USB cable.

"Haro," he says gently, "You're going to go to sleep for a little bit, okay?"

"OKAY, AMURO," Haro agrees forlornly. "OKAY, AMURO."

Leo smiles sadly, and plugs the cable into his computer.

LATER

Presumably, Leo Stenbuck leaves his room at some point. And when he does, he finds something left for him. Next to the dried spatter of a few drops of blood, dark and hard on the metal floor, a small crane rests, folded from delicate paper, a gentle pastel blue stained from the touch of fingertips soaked in crimson.