[text] your blue walls get in the way of these facts

[interstices]

Who: Asuka Shikinami Langley
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Handholding planet, if you want it.
When: 7/27

[It's not like her to post much, and it's not like her to post with text at all, unless it's as a response to someone else. But if there's one thing Asuka's confident in, it's that people tend to own up to a hell of a lot more on the network than they ever do in person, especially when they're typing it up. Something about the distance. Even Katsuragi always sounded far more imposing over email than in person, except for the last couple years.]

[Plus, she's curious. All those pilgrimages that it seemed as if the whole Fleet had made had to have earned some useful tidbits. Asuka's poor at cloaking her motivations in the best of times, so she barely bothers.]

If we stay here much longer, I'm learning to swim.

What did you get from the tree? Even if it's something crappy like the promo stuff we get sometimes, I still want to know.

Comments

[interstices]

[He's wrong. The feedback loop is pretty much endless, even if it's mostly intimations she's getting, they can respond back to each other. Arguing with him like this might even be easier. She doesn't shudder or back away from his flashes, surgeries, experiments, whatever, but there's definite revulsion there still because it's the soul beyond that's really hurt when those things happen. She knows damn well that's so.]

[Envy bubbles up, slow and low and almost silent. Family. Real family. Asuka's hungry as a starving child for every image that passes. The tall, dark ones and Zhas both make her want and want and want. Father's a shadow, a birthday call that stopped coming fourteen years ago, and Mother's a corpse and Asuka a crying brat neither wants. Zhas saved him. Zhas protected him. Keeps protecting him. Asking about signing the first time he was on the ship. Stabs of longing shoot through her like sparks, and they only stop when she finds herself there. There from the party.]

[But she hates thinking about herself and she's scared of what she'll see of how he thinks of her like the nervous coward she really is deep down. Because she's awful, just awful, and everyone must really know that. Asuka blinks back one watery, overwhelmed eye, looking directly at him, thinking that for his silence, for his stubbornness, his morbid curiosity, he's all right, far more than all right. There's a thump of something soft landing, right by the tree's massive roots, a sound that she barely hears.]

[mortalcoil]

[it's funny how he hardly notices when thoughts of family come in from the outside, because the echo is so close that he has a hard time distinguishing hers from his. that father-shadow is one he'll never live up to (how dare he not even look like him; he looks too much like--) and his mother is dead.

he knows what it's like to be hungry. he knows what it's like to want and want and want and want, but she'd stopped smiling at him sometime when he was very small. it's hard to remember what it had even been like. he'd tried so hard, but it'd never been enough. he'd promised that he'd make her smile at him again, but he ran out of time. after all of her portends and prophecies, the guilt, the horror, and the love that she kept up high on a shelf, she died. impossibly, just like that. they're all gone now, and he carries their ghosts in his blood.

Mother, dear Mother. now, she (the new one) has red hair and long, cold fingers and she loves him, and she gave him Zhas, but he's never, ever, ever going to see her again, he just knows it--

and that thought, as it spirals in the way that his mind likes to do when he lets even one thing slip in his head, gains quiet momentum until the gravity picks up Asuka too. at the party, her in her silly pink dress, pretending to be a person.

he likes that she has to pretend. she wears it well enough, but he likes the little ways in which he can see it slip. he likes that she has red hair--

the sound over by the tree's roots goes unnoticed by him, but he loosens his grip on her hand anyway in an effort to get away.]

[interstices]

[There's one small, sad word that escapes her mouth the second before he severs the connection. Just one, quivered out in a high little tone that sounds too childish to belong to her.]

Mommy.

[Even once the tie between them is broken, she still can't seem to fit herself back in her own head. Maybe because it's too similar, too much of the same pain. Mother wouldn't even look at her in the end, no matter what Asuka did, no matter how she excelled. Pretty Mama, sitting in her chair, oblivious, then angry, when Asuka dared call her Mama at all.]

[His Ma-- his mother's not like that, is she, the new one. She must be good for him to long for her so much. Asuka's all jumbled. All jumbled. Thinking of her like that (pretending) he likes her, Asuka-- does he like her? Why should he like her? Why should anything...]

[She bolts forward, towards the tree. It's as if she's trying to run away from herself as she stumbles her way around the tree roots. Her eye's hot with tears by the time she finds what the tree's left her, small and red and easy to spot. It's her doll, intact as ever, with its familiar scuff marks on the plastic hair, the ragged stitching on her dress, the hood. It's all there. She's all there.]

[She picks it up, and there's the tune in her head, not a pop song after all but a German lullaby, soft and sweet, that almost makes her shake. She has to turn and yell just to try to drown out the sound.]

Coil! I-I got it. [A breath.] I got it.

[mortalcoil]

[Coil stands there as she runs away, breathing wrong and looking at nothing, as if he isn't actually free. it's not until she calls back to him--something louder and much more tangible than what's in his head--that his eye focuses and hunts after her.

though, he still stares like he doesn't quite know who she is. he's maybe a little detached. that feedback loop of thought left tangles around him, and it's taking him some time to shake himself out of the coils.

the first nod he gives her is only shellshocked. but after a few shaken blinks, the wires actually connect in his head and he gets what she's saying. he nods again--more definite.

it's over now. she's got her prize. he doesn't hear any music, but he isn't supposed to hear any now, is he? she's clutching something in her hands and he recognizes the look on her face. that's how he'd looked, he's sure. that's what they had tried to warn her about.

without getting any closer, he waves his hand, motioning for her to come back. he doesn't want to get any closer to the tree.]

[interstices]

Coil.

[Asuka repeats his name though it's already obvious from the nods and the gesture that he's heard her. It's a bid to cement in her mind that this is reality. Not a mesh of scattered flashes of her past and his. Right here, right now is what counts the most.]

[The lullaby isn't one her mother sang. She can't remember any that she sung at all, doesn't remember a time when Mother was well enough to love her. But it's still one she knows, and it's still enough to make that eye keep watering up. Savagely, she rubs her good eye as she fumbles to join him. Asuka doesn't blame him for not following her to the tree itself. She wouldn't have, either, if she'd known.]

[Once she's close enough, standing next to him, she holds up the doll. Still too overcome and mentally exhausted to be more than a little embarrassed, not offering it to him, just showing. It's only fair. Without him, she never would have gotten it back. Coil deserves to see every handmade stitch, every scuff mark, the fading on the entirety of the doll that signals its age.]

[She's not sure how to feel about the gift. Not sure at all. Her doll's petted and spoken for her and spoken to her and been thrown up against the wall. An object of disgust as much as love. An object of immaturity and nostalgia and sick, sweet longing. She cups it tighter, almost like a real baby.]

You didn't have to come. [It takes a bit to say any more, and she swallows thickly.] Thank you.

[mortalcoil]

[his expression is mercifully devoid of anything like judgement when she stands there, displaying the doll like a fresh wound that she doesn't know what to do with. he might have had opinions on some other occasion, but after everything he'd just had visited upon him? it just kind of makes sense. having steeped so long in debris from her mind almost makes that doll seem familiar to him too.

he hears what she says, but his eye is still on the toy. as rattled as he is, that object does have a way of anchoring, doesn't it?

a little awkwardly, he holds out his hand a little, and asks 'can I see?']

[interstices]

Here.

[She looks reluctant to give it to him even as she hands it over. But she's sure he'll take care of it. He won't make fun of her. Not after how overwhelming all those thoughts got. How vulnerable they both ended up.]

[He can see her name stitched on the dress in capital letters. She hasn't gotten any better at sewing since then, as he's discovered.]

I made her. A long time ago.

[mortalcoil]

[yeah, he recognizes that stitch-work. when he and Zhas had gotten their gifts, he'd received a harp that he was only mostly certain was actually his old one, and his partner had received something entirely new. so, seeing those stitches and old, scuffed paint adds an unsettling level of authenticity. before, he'd been able to at least pretend that the tree was creating objects that were only similar to their memories. seeing this, though... it makes it much harder to fool himself.

accepting the doll, touching the clumsy lettering on her dress, makes him feel like a voyeur. he's trespassing. again. with the way that Asuka calls the doll "her," he can't help wondering if it has a name, but he doesn't ask. he scans over all the little details, looks into its painted eyes for a few long seconds, and then passes it back to its hovering owner.

and once his hands are free, 'Sometimes you don't want normal people to see whats inside.'

it's his way of responding to her thanks. he already knows she's a monster, so what's the harm in him looking in her head? it just spares her from having to show it to someone else in order to get something she wants.]

[interstices]

Yeah.

[The truth is, she doesn't want anyone to see what's inside. She doesn't even like to peer in herself. All she ever sees there is more evidence of her own rottenness. Better to push it away than face it. That's why the doll was so good, an intermediary and a cheerleader, even when she was far too old to need encouragement from a piece of plastic and cloth. The doll was there for her. Even the day of the attack, the doll was there, situated among all the makeup she never got to put on, all the cosmetics that signaled an adulthood she'd never have.]

[Asuka puts the doll under one arm, gesturing with her hand.]

Let's go back.

[mortalcoil]

[he nods, stuffs his hands safely into the pockets of his sweatshirt, and turns to head back down the path. he tries not to seem eager to get away from the tree and out of the woods, but he certainly doesn't dally.

and this time--without him really even noticing--he's walking with Asuka on his blind side. it's not to ignore her, though. the other reason he ever turns his seeing side away from someone is the from the unconscious instinct to keep an eye out. their nerves are rattled, he's feeling wary, and he apparently trusts her enough to let her walk along where he can't watch.]