2022-11-29: "Enough Reason for You to Exist"
- Log: Enough Reason for You to Exist
- Cast: Leina Ashta, Ennil El
- Where: The Mass Estate; Lilac
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-11-29
- Summary: Leina and Ennil catch up. You don't carry the weight of the world alone.
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
All of Leina's travel necessitated a certain amount of history homework. She had an arrangement for remote classes, but at times the Minovsky interference was too much.
It was in the middle of a selection of potential topics for History Essays that she scanned one in particular. 'Discuss the effects of the 0088 Gundam Fight on Federation Policy in Depth, and its aftereffects in subsequent years.'
It was a topic she could write about in her sleep. That wasn't why she stopped, however...
"... Shuuji..." Her fingertips brush the datapad over the question, as she thinks about how the destruction from his victory caused his despair.
How the Federation's focus on contest created so much strife, and death.
It was a common theme wasn't it. With a sigh, Leina rubs her temples. The topic of Shuuji Kurosu accidentally brought to mind something else...
... or perhaps, more accurately, someone else. It's not like Ennil is cackling on TV about how she'd become Super Axis or something...
She's just one of those people whose actions she views more generously than the rest of the world would, due to knowing them before.
Without too much fanfare, she switches to her communicator, and tracks the contact info in VERTEX and...
Ennil gets the call. When she answers, its Leina in just a faded old T-Shirt, 'Magical Girl Wonderful Persimmon.' there's a shooting star barrette in her hair. From the glimpses of the setting around her - it's probably her room.
There are pictures all around, of various events and people in her life after Axis. While probably blurred, there's a picture of the surviving Argama crew right before Judau left for Jupiter.
However there are others, of her at swim meets, cast pictures of her in her drama club, pictures of her with friends - and someone who must have been her first serious boyfriend.
"Alright. Assuming you're someplace where we can talk right now Ennil. Tell me about what happened. Tell me why."
Despite it taking her a while to work up to this, there's no lack of confidence about her, not in those far too stern seagreen eyes, or anxiety now that she's done it and pulled the trigger...
"Not from a letter. Look me in the eye and talk to me."
<Pose Tracker> Ennil El has posed.
"Leina."
The call was picked up immediately. It wasn't too hard -- life doesn't ask much of her, at the minimums.
And Ennil's got a room of her own. She's traded the sparse bunk on the J-Ark for a little space of her own at the back of Lilac. It's not a terribly warm place, but she lives here. There's a Sheryl plate on the wall; a big, kind of ugly stuffed bear with a pendant hanging off its arm; a little table with a bottle of wine on it.
But staring down into the video call, it takes some time for her to respond. She stands; she swings the phone around as she paces -- there's a handful of bandages stretched over the back of the chair she was sitting on. Clean, but with edges torn away, ragged.
"I'm still... sick about it. I thought it'd get better, seeing Banagher at the concert, moving around just fine."
She sighs, and the pacing only stops because now her eyes are doing the work. Swinging back and forth across the screen without ever really sinking in on Leina's face.
"It was an accident. I swear. Hurting anyone... anyone you care about. I'd never." Slump. Back in the chair. A couple deep breaths.
"Being in the Unicorn... being so close to Loni's machine... turned me inside out. Something between them made it so hard to even breathe. And I could feel it, Leina. How angry everyone was. Even worse than Torrington. And --"
Another little choke. Trying to figure out what the right thing to say is. How to name it.
"That BASTARD in the mask! The one who thinks he's Char! He hurt her again, Leina! He brought her back! I... Loni would've killed them. Or they would've killed Loni." She finally finds her focus, though now Leina's face is muddy behind tears. "I couldn't... bear any more..."
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
Leina's hands are folded, her elbows apparently on her thighs, she's sitting cross legged on her chair in all likelihood, but one can't see much.
Leina spends a few moments picking up the details of the room but her eyes don't wander much.
She just waits for her to talk.
However, to her credit, while she looks like she's trying to bore a hole into Ennil with those eyes of hers, she doesn't go off on her, she listens to the whole thing.
There's a flicker of emotion in her eyes as Ennil slumps. She could feel it? Something in Leina's eyes gives her a longer look, brow furrowing.
Her anger is infectious, and for a time Leina's eyelids close, as if she were enduring it - or absorbing it. It's difficult to say.
Leina opens her eyes, looking at Ennil's tear streaked face.
"Give me some credit, Audrey was out. If you really wanted to kill Banagher - he wouldn't have made it. So I knew it was either an accident or an impulsive decision to injure him - but not finish him off for whatever you thought it would accomplish."
Leina unlaces her legs off camera, letting them drop to the floor, and leaning forward, "And under ordinary circumstances - I'd believe you. I know that normally you wouldn't. However, that's not exactly true right now is it?"
There's a sort of firmness in her voice, "There's something inside of you right now telling you all intelligent life has to die for the good of the universe. That includes me, Banagher - Audrey - Callisto - Sayla - Judau... and then Loni and you too."
She continues evenly, voice never wavering, "Even if you still wouldn't do it yourself - some part of you is forced to agree that its for the best. And that's something else you'll have to live with, once we get it out of you. And we will get it out. And you will live with it. ... But we'll help you move past it too."
Leina rubs the side of her face, "As for Callisto, I found her, she's not okay - but she is better. I want you to know that the guy you're railing about? He's a puppet too, a Cyber Newtype dancing on someone else's strings just like it's ALWAYS been."
Leina gives her a long look, "I'm not telling you to sympathize with him, I'm just putting things into perspective - a perspective you'll know all too well."
There's a prolonged pause, and Leina up to this point has seemed fairly reasonable? She hasn't yelled at once. "I don't know if something within you awakened at Torrington - or if there's something else out there. It overwhelmed you - I get it. I know exactly what that's like."
At this point Leina picks up the screen, holding it closer to her face and her volume just increases abruptly all at once, "No - what I want to know is what possessed you to think this is what is BEST for you or HER Ennil!? You wanted to save Loni! And now you took up a shovel and handed her an even bigger one so you both could dig a deeper hole TOGETHER! Do you really feel so guilty about still being around that you have to PUNISH yourself like this?!"
Something cracks in her tone on the word punish, obviously upset herself about this whole affair, "What were you thinking!? What were you really thinking? If I knew this was going to become some self-flagellating act of slow suicide - you think I would have just sent you off on your merry way that day in Dublin? I don't care that I was in a wheelchair! I would have dragged your butt to someplace where you could get some real help myself!"
<Pose Tracker> Ennil El has posed.
Leina speaks up again, and Ennil is deeply still. Locked in place. Her breathing is so shallow that;
"Callisto... that's her name now..."
barely makes it to the microphone.
And Leina tells her the truth. No matter how she keeps trying to change it. No matter how she steers, she keeps coming to the same point. "I know. That's why it's. Like this." She waves a hand at the camera, drawing it in and out to demonstrate the distance. "So that I can't..."
Full Frontal being another Cyber Newtype... Yeah, that makes sense. Whose hands are on him? Who thought anyone in the world needed that? The news just makes her gut sink further.
"I know..." The stillness becomes rigidity. Ennil's elbows come up, her arms winding around her, clinging to her sides. Holding herself together.
"I know, I know, I know! I keep trying, Leina! I keep hurting people!" Her fingers twist, trying to find purchase, to sink in. "I fight and all it does is remind me that no matter what I'm fighting for it's all fucking rubble in the end. That's all I ever leave behind. The whole damn world will be a goddamn vacant lot by the time I ever get what I want. One fucking moment of peace."
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
Leina lets the Callisto talk slide, because she knows right now the girl is having such a horrible time figuring out who she is. She was validating calling her Puru-2, but in the back of her mind, she can't help but think of what a backslide it is.
All she can do is help her navigate this to a healthier place eventually, and she can't do that by rejecting who she thinks she is.
Ennil's posture shifts, and she bares out more of it, and Leina takes a deep breath. Then another. Closing her eyes, it's like she's taking some time to think, to process whatever emotions she's picking up off of her, even from this great distance.
"Is that why Oath over Omega appealed?" Leina finally says, more quietly, in a sotto voce, "Because it'll hasten the process?"
Leina finally opens those sea green eyes, and there's definitely a melancholy about her, "To that one moment of peace?"
There's just this lengthy sigh, and she puts her phone back down, tipping her chin up, thinking this through, "... Ennil. I know you're trying - I know, but you're trying under the pall of this... belief, of who you are, and what you do to the people around you - and how things are going to turn out. It's like you're running into walls, not making any real decisions... living on the inertia of despair."
Leina gives her just this incredibly miserable look, "It upsets me that you're continually hurting others - but what upsets me most of all is that you're continually hurting yourself, over, and over again. It's like you're punishing yourself while waiting on your execution. And I think that was true before your executioner became the universe."
Looking down from the screen, she rubs her forehead, "Do you think I really don't know what it feels like? It's been eight years, and it feels like more is falling apart, not less. Change? It feels like an impossible task doesn't it?"
Her eyes drift up again, as she looks out of the periphery of the tops of her eyes at her, her arms encircling her abdomen, as if to cover... something that was already out of sight, "But I'm gonna do it. God help me. I'm going to find a way to make things better. For you too. I wouldn't be able to live with myself otherwise."
She knows that for as proud as Sayla is of her, that she hates it. That Judau will hate it. The idea of her putting so much of herself into an impossible task.
They both want her to live her own life, but they'd probably prefer that she just find some fulfilling career far away from any battlefield or politics and settle down with someone who treats her well and find happiness that way.
Not throwing her life away at something that so many people have tried before without anything lasting, anything tangible.
"...God help me." She whispers again, more softly.
<Pose Tracker> Ennil El has posed.
At first the questions make her shake. There's so much anxiety in the air, Ennil feels like the space around her is burning, full of ozone.
And then...
"...s'not fair." Ennil sniffles, chokes a little, grins weakly into the camera. "You always know. Makes me feel dumb." She's still hugging herself, but without the force, without the claws aimed at her own ribs.
"I keep going because... If I don't, if the only other option is to stop," And she has to take a deep breath here, not least because she's been barely ahead of suffocating this whole time, "then Dublin is who I am. If I can't do different, do better, I died there. I left you and-- Callisto, and everyone behind. And I'd hate that. More than I hate,"
She waves a hand over herself, slowly. "This."
For the first time, she really matches eyes with Leina, staring into the green she'd admired even back then. The strength in them...
"It shouldn't have to be you. Banagher's so sweet. You've done enough. You almost died. Look at you right now... Why can't it just... Ever stop?"
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
All of that anxiety is a lot, and then she gets choked up and Leina responds to that by...
"God Ennil, you're anything but stupid." Leina sighs, then there's a thin weak smile, "You are a huge dummy sometimes, but you're not stupid. You're just, hurt is what you are. Haven't let your wounds heal - so they can't even become scars."
... trying to defuse the tension somewhat, actually. At least she tries, "Not stupid. Just hurt. Wounds need oxygen to heal. You need to let yourself breathe."
Leina can't even really know what Dublin was like, not really. She knows all about it from Elle. She knows what she felt in that hospital bed. However, she knows the hurt it left on those that experienced it.
She wasn't even there, and it hurt her so much when she died...
"Dublin isn't who you are, dummy." Leina reiterates the same word, "It's not. It's who you've convinced yourself you have to be - to punish yourself."
There's this small sigh, "God Ennil - you can do so much more, so much better - but you can't do it while you're letting yourself bleed out."
However, matching eyes with her, Ennil tells her it shouldn't have to be her. And she peers at her for a time, "You're right. Shouldn't. A lot of things shouldn't have to be. You shouldn't have to feel like you do either. Shouldn't have so much stacked against you. It doesn't stop, because enough people haven't stood up yet to put in the hard work of making it stop. So I've gotta be one of them. So many kids out there say they're going to change the world - and then end up getting crushed by reality before they can put a foot out the door."
Leina keeps eyeing her, "But that's already happened to me - and I'm still moving forward. I know what I'm up against, better than almost anyone out there. I've seen into the hearts of the top officials of the Federation. I'm aware of just how far the rot goes."
Pause.
"Got to. If I'm not creating a world that girls like Elpeo or all of her dead siblings would have wanted to live in?"
The melancholy in those green eyes reappears again, and in that moment, some of the guilt behind it, "Then why am I still here, Ennil?"
That isn't to say that she isn't motivated too by doing the right thing, but - she is after all a girl who believed she wasn't going to heaven...
... even as she lay dying.
<Pose Tracker> Ennil El has posed.
'Dummy.'
It makes her smile. It's so... Leina. She hadn't been able to bear holding onto anything from those days. She'd thought she lost it all, every part of it that wasn't a hook buried in her chest.
Leina'd gone on living, and she hadn't, had she?
"I thought it would stop hurting. If I had a reason," Ennil sighs. "If the world was supposed to feel like this. If this was what... something, or someone, wanted from me."
She stares at Leina. How many other people would know what she meant, how she felt, right now? "It doesn't, Leina. It doesn't feel better at all. It feels like him."
And that's what's killing her. The thing that's been keeping her alive.
And Ennil, as much as it scares her to see or be seen, catches that guilt in Leina's eye. She reaches out a hand on reflex, without even thinking about it. Before, when she'd hold Leina, make a shield of herself against the world...
"Leina... You're really strong. The people who love you... are enough reason for you to exist. You give so much back to them. And you still do more. So don't you ever sell yourself short. Dummy."
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
"It's not. Supposed to feel like this." Leina tells her a half second after expelling a breath she didn't realize she was holding during her explanation. "It's not. You should have never been made to feel this way. Not by him, not by the world."
She points at herself, "You know I can't even wear a skirt or a dress anymore? And I love dressing up."
Her eyes drift downward again, and she shakes her head helplessly, "Loved, dressing up. Now if I look in the mirror while wearing something nice like that, I feel like I'm still his."
Pause.
"Not supposed to feel like this."
Her eyes still tilted slightly down when Ennil tries to reach out, however she catches the gesture, listens, then quietly...
"Yeah?" And then Ennil might get the distinct feeling like...
... she was led into a trap, by the way Leina suddenly grins.
It's not that there was anything dishonest about anything she said, everything was earnest, sincere - the guilt was real...
...but it still was leading her in this direction, "That's good advice. Real good advice. Maybe I'll take it to heart..."
An eyelid descends, as she winks at her, "... the moment you do."
<Pose Tracker> Ennil El has posed.
Ennil winces, though there's something about Leina's honesty that unravels the tightness in her further. A shared burden. "That's a shame. You're really cute. At least someone decent sees it. Couple someones -- Which you didn't tell me about, by the way!" Not that she'd asked. She's smiling a lot wider at this point. "They at least bought you some jewelry, right?"
Then she sees that grin descend. This girl;
"Don't you da--"
Ennil can't help but actually laugh, this time. Yeah. That's Leina alright.
"You absolute brat. Fine then. Prove it: If anyone can, it's you. Friggin' Ashtas. Your brother's still at it too, I know for a fact -- Throwing himself out of cockpits like a damn madman."
The grin's still on her face, but her eyes are that deep, dark blue. Because it's true.
Someone's going to have to save her.
"I don't want it to have to be like this any longer."
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
"Ha. Yeah. Usually I'm seen as this giant tomboy by everyone at my school - and that's so not what I am."
Not that tomboys aren't cute at all, it's just that her trauma creates a different set of expectations and tends to attract people who see her as someone she's not...
... honestly not too different from Sayla, save hers is the mythology of Sayla Mass, versus the reality.
"He did. The goof, he barely has any money, and he buys out the whole stand without asking any of us our sizes. I don't think he realized jewelry has sizes."
Leina sits back with a self-satisfied grin as she's called an absolute brat. And then sticks her tongue out at her.
It's a thing she used to do at Glemy typically when he had his back turned, make faces again, until the day she stopped.
"Of course he is, you probably didn't see it dogfighting Kamille but he did it at Torrington while the Unicorn had the NT-D active."
However, despite the levity, she sees that look in those dark blue eyes. "Don't worry. Help's coming." Leina tells her after a short time, "Help's coming." She reiterates, "It won't let you accept the first part of what that entails. It'll make you kick and scream and bite."
A beat, as her face grows more serious.
"But it's coming. And we'll go from there to making things better for you. For everyone."
<Pose Tracker> Ennil El has posed.
"Oh my god, really? I don't get guys. But yeah, that sounds like him."
Which does make her happy. As does seeing Leina tease back. She's still finding ways to make Leina smile.
She still wants to.
Leina promises her help is coming, and she tightens up too, feeling something inside her rail against the idea. But she wouldn't have cared enough to screw up, if she didn't want to make things better, too.
"Yeah. There's... a few people I can think of, who are going to need me," and her gaze shifts back to that battered bear, and the gold chain dangling off its arm. And out, towards the bar that's the front of her home now.
"It's gonna get ugly. I'm sorry about that. I wish I could be as sure as you are about how all this ends. But I trust you. You're too damn stubborn to let me get away with it."
She sighs, deep and shaky, then favors the camera with another warm smile.
"Thanks."
<Pose Tracker> Leina Ashta has posed.
Leina regards her with this keen sense like she's trying to separate what's the Aura of the Dawn, and what's Ennil in there. Luckily the Aura of the Dawn can't really change a person - all it does is shift their priorities.
"S'okay. You made the choice to get into this, sure - but you can't help that part of it now."
Leina gives her a sad look, "Can't help it, but we'll bring you home."
Pause.
"... Damned right I am." As her eyes light up and she smiles at her, "You're welcome. Be seeing you soon."
And this time... there'll be GGG, or Domon and George.