2022-11-17: Whatever You Want ~SHACKLE~
- Cast: Guy Shishioh, Rei Ayanami
- Where: Tsutsujidai
- Date: U.C. 0096 11 17
- Summary: In his continuing efforts to visit all of Bujack's victims, Guy Shishioh comes across Rei Ayanami. They discuss the snare called freedom.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Rei Ayanami: She lives here now.
If you can call it living.
Rei is relatively recognizable from a distance, although she is currently in her summer uniform (the classic blue and white with its little red tie - it seems as if it's a little rumpled now). She is seated on a bench in one of those long winding parks in the floodable banks near the waterway that crosses through Tsutsujidai, even if, no doubt, it will never flood, here, beneath a strange sun.
She has a book in her hands.
The book seems to be in German; rarely is this a positive sign.
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
"Well, didn't quite expect to see you out here," is the greeting.
Who Rei finds when her eyes track up is Guy Shishioh, dressed in his full GGG Chief uniform, the green and white GGG men's jumpsuit under a black knee-length sleeveless coat. His right hand is in the white glove it usually wears; his left is now sheathed in a gold bracer crowned with a lion's head. Maybe Rei, a younger pilot, won't have the context to know about the Mechanoid Lion Galeon, Guy's partner from the Primeval War, and the GaoBrace used to summon Galeon to his side. Or maybe she will. She clearly reads.
He gives her a little grin, and doesn't intrude further into her space, standing rock solid even under Tsutsujidai's gloom. "Been a little bit," he says.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
A shadow crosses over her.
Not for the first time.
Rei hears a familiar voice and she looks up, slowly, gradually. She blinks several times. She looks a little ragged, even as her outfit does. "Captain," she says with a tone of very faint surprise. She reaches up to dog-ear the page of her book--
-- she doesn't quite manage it.
"Why are you here?"
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
"Just makin' the rounds," Guy says, conversationally. "I mean, if nothing else, so many of our pilots all wandering off in the same couple months is the kind of thing that gets HR worried." He looks around, listening.
This place doesn't feel right, not to him. He can tell on one layer that it is physically serene, but the Limpid Channel's lapping waves from the sea of intention are frustratingly still, for what little he can hear them. And the electromagnetic waves he has more access to are also just...wrong. He's used to these things. But it makes it hard to truly call this place relaxing.
He turns his attention back to Rei. "So I'm just checking in on people. Making sure everyone's alright, you know?"
Making sure everyone knows they won't be dragged back screaming while he's around. Making sure they know he respects the pain that brought them here, even if the mechanism is one he must destroy. They won't listen to those things.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Making the rounds.
"Understood," Rei says, her head turning away from Guy.
It's more forthright, isn't it? There has been growth since the last time Guy saw Rei. But there are some things that haven't changed. Turmoil. Perhaps fear. These things are in abeyance, yes; this place seems to be a soothing place, in some ways. But they are still there.
Heavy, like a lead waistcoat.
"..."
Silence.
Her head lifts.
"... Soup," Rei says.
This may make no sense, *unless* Guy's memory casts back to a certain conversation with the 'Mad Scientist' of the Evangelion corps some time ago.
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
This place isn't as healing as it looks.
Some of his frustration with this place is strictly personal. He hates what it's made people he cares about say about themselves. He's beginning to find its stillness frustrating entirely on its own merits, to say nothing of the way his enhanced senses bother him here. But it's still true that as calm as Tsutsujidai may seem on the surface, it is a place of quiet, and stasis, and never, ever healing from the jagged wounds of the soul that brought people here.
He didn't really have a game plan for this one - Rei was a surprise to him, almost as much as Asuka, and he doesn't know her well, and what he does know is...surface-level. So maybe it's more obvious than usual when she says Soup and he looks confused for just a moment...and then laughs. "Ah, remember that, do you?" he says. He approaches - fingers out, a display of peace. "Then you pretty much know how I look at all this. I'm not a danger, I promise."
He shouldn't have to say it. But after what Asuka told him....he wonders if Rei feels the same. "Mind if I sit?" he asks, rather than rushing himself into her space.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
It's a place of stillness.
Perhaps that's familiar to Rei. Where did she grow up? Where did she come from? Did Commander Ikari adopt her in the chaos of Second Impact, or did she just sort of get found under a daikon leaf?
Rei shifts herself. "Yes," Rei says.
"I don't have anything to say to them," Rei continues, "but my phone told me when things happened. I would read the translation, and I would listen, when I didn't understand the translation." This probably means the auto-captioning - of course this sort of thing is trivial to even normal computers, much less the MAGI.
"You can do whatever you want," Rei quotes.
She doesn't *seem* on guard.
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
If this were Ouka, or Asuka, Guy might be on the lookout for the 'and so can I!' *knife* swerve, but it's Rei, who is...not the most forceful. Certainly not in person.
He remembers Ako, telling him about being saved by a giant. That connects him to the real memory of the event, an Evangelion gushing blood, and a screaming girl.
"Makes sense," Guy says, and accepts the...not completely passive, invitation. He sits, and leans back, arms folding so he doesn't elbow into her space.
He considers what to say first. Finally he tips his head. Well, first, remove assumptions. Dad taught him that. "Everyone's got a story up here," he says. "What's brought you all the way to Tsutsujidai?"
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Rei is quiet for long moments.
Obscurely, it feels like a betrayal. Yet...
Yet, this is Guy Shishioh.
This is a man who came to her before, when she was in distress.
He was not in that place... but he is one man; he cannot... he cannot be...
"Have you asked the others?" Rei asks back.
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
Guy nods. "Alouette and Renais both said they just felt like the world got too big. Too...doomed. Alouette said she didn't want to have to fight the Ruin Apostles, our friends. Renais, that it just hurt too much to continue."
...he shakes his head, huffs a deeply unhappy breath, but tries not to obviously judge those thoughts. The one he looks to Rei before saying is: "Asuka told me she thought she was in danger with NERV. Like they might just end her life one day."
Asuka had ATTEMPTED to pass it off as feeling like she had 'no future' with NERV, like a simple problem of low morale and low possibility of promotion. But the later portions of that conversation make him sure she meant a more dire kind. The keenness of his gaze suggests this is the one he's worried about Rei thinking.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Rei considers.
"I don't think the Second is correct," Rei begins. It feels like a vestigal comment, somehow. "She cannot be easily replaced."
Though -
- Shouldn't she know that?
Something about it troubles Rei. It crosses her face.
"I think that I am closest to Renais," Rei says. "Everyone has told me that I can do whatever it is that I want. But they have looked at me with warm smiles, and it is like finding wounds."
Her head turns a little as she looks towards Guy. "I suppose it was not 'courage'."
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
Guy nods. Kaworu had said similar to that. Normally maybe that'd make him pass it off as something the kaiju inserted, but...that's not really how its deceits have been working...
"I see," he says, and nods.
"Hm," Guy says, tipping his head. "...heh. Gets trickier when you know what I see. But that's not necessarily true."
He turns more to face her, too. "Taking a bold step to secure your happiness, despite adversity and fear...trusting in people to catch you when you need to move without knowing every variable...that is courage, Rei. Choosing to live, your own way, and seeing it through, is absolutely an act of courage."
The but hanging over his head is practically visible from space.
But he doesn't say it. Instead, he gives her a concerned look. "You don't feel like you deserved that freedom? Maybe I don't understand."
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Choosing to live your own way --
"Everyone tells me to do what I wish," Rei says. It sounds...
...
...
...
... petulant?
It's faint. You might wonder if she were tired or had a rock in her shoe, or if Asuka had been yanking at the pigtails she doesn't have.
After a moment, Rei is quiet, then she isn't.
"I am the weakest pilot. I know it."
"Eva is powerful, so it is alright. But I am the weakest one."
"I don't think I can become stronger. I think, you will encourage me," Rei continues, not looking at Guy, "and I do not mean that I doubt myself. I mean that there are parts of me that aren't there. I don't know how to put it. Something about me is not like other people."
Seconds pass.
"I don't have anything else. So I came here."
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
Guy listens. Just listens, really. He keeps his hands folded in his lap. "You're not sure what that is, huh?" he prompts her. Hm.
Those words. ...if Renais or Alouette said something like that he absolutely would not have been able to withstand it, his resolve to respect their pain or no. But Rei's world is not, quite, as personal to him, and so he finds it more possible to keep an open mind to the meaning behind her words.
His answer to all that is a quiet, "Alright," and a nod.
...
And that's it. He lets himself smile, a little, hands folded between his knees. What does she mean, there are parts of her that aren't there? It's a strange phrase. But....at least, Guy knows a thing or two about feeling like you're not like others.
"I can kinda relate...I guess it sounds presumptuous. But I do know a few things about feeling like what you are isn't...right. And it eats at you, little by little."
He huffs a breath. "I won't tell you you have to fight to be the best, Rei. You don't have to be. Leave competing for that to dopes like me who get itchy when they're number two."
"But you do deserve to feel comfortable in your own skin. In the life you have, and the people you're with. I believe that. And trying to find that place, and those people...I guess it's just how I see it. But that is courage."
...Hm. "So you came here, huh," he muses to the sky.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
"..."
"I don't know," Rei says, "if it's presumptious."
There is a strange feeling in her gut. Something that feels obscurely like - hope? A shy sort of wondering. A feeling that perhaps these feelings are not limited to her. Perhaps even Guy Shishioh, the hero, has known them.
But...
... he couldn't be...
He wasn't, after all, replaced. Not exactly.
"Yes."
"It doesn't hurt, here," Rei says, but she sounds uncertain.
"I can do whatever I want," she echoes, and it sounds forlorn.