2022-12-02: Fracture
- Log: 2022-12-02- Fracture
- Cast: Akane Shinjo, Anti
- Where: Tsutsujidai
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-12-02
- Summary: Someone with the eyes of a kaiju talks to someone with the heart of a human.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Ah. It happened again.
The rain continues. It feels like it could continue forever -- a continuous cycle from the seas to the sky of the PLANT. The false sky remains intact, barely; for the moment, the residents are permitted the courtesy of the illusion that this is the same as any other PLANT. Still, the environment is... claustrophobic.
Akane Shinjo stands outside a now-ruined Starbows. A sign advertising a new run of protein boxes -- now with fresh fish options! -- pierces through the storefront window. The actual Starbows sign is driven through a wall, in turn, and a car pierces the brick above the whole entryway. This type of small carnage has cut through the landscape even from this short battle.
Unlike usual, Akane has no interest in fixing it this time. Even the capability is barely there. She stares up across the street, to another car launched from the same attack.
"Lost again," Akane says, looking up at the immense reflection of a nameless corpse. (Her hand is so visible in the work, and yet, it looks nothing like her work. Indeed, it looks, in plenty of senses, like nothing.) Breathing out, she stands amid the broken glass of her heart.
She'd told Alouette, Yuka, Liam -- kaiju live to want, and that want kills them.
Wishful, and indeed somewhere distant past that, thinking.
Maybe it's even simpler than that. If a kaiju's wants were incompatible with that progression, and they exist to desire in endless futility...
"Do kaiju live and die... just to be defeated?"
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Even the sky is crying, now.
Shoulders bowed, Anti keeps walking.
There's an umbrella, in the park's trash bin.
It's the same trash bin he used, to get so many dinners.
With harrowed recognition, he looks down.
He grasps it.
He pulls it from the refuse.
Anti has never held an umbrella before. He's seen them held, certainly -- in Rikka's hands, in Leina's -- but the solace they offered him was always an invitational thing. Care expressed, to him. It was never his to give; never his to comprehend. His fingers fold around the bent and blustery thing, so, so like the one Akane used only for herself. He feels the spindly metal of its webbed spines, like a kaiju's frill. But this is not something for display, to communicate threat and focus beams of energy; neither is, entirely, a defensive bulwark. The bent spines and torn edges are proof enough of that. It is a fragile shield.
His fingers are stranger to it. He grasps it wrongways-up, handle tilted to the sky, raindrops collecting about its bunched skirts. He relies on a reverse grip, as if it were another weapon.
For what purpose does he approach the Starbows, and its God in residence? A God who looks in on death and destruction with all her wistful philosophy...
He steps quietly, and stops, some lengths from her.
After long moments he holds fast to his silence -- and that discarded umbrella, as he lifts it with a stiff arm, lever motion, to thrust it out towards her. It is the only movement granted him, as he stands, straight, his other hand loose at his side. One eye is dressed properly in bandages; the other, sunset-red, lies obscured by his damp bangs.
He does not speak and he does not move forward.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane barely moves to look. She can feel, just a little bit, that presence in her space, in her heart. But 'feeling' is hard to do at all, now; she's so numb, even as she hurts so much.
"It's been a while," she says, giving just the smallest tilt of her head before returning to staring off. Allowing Anti to know her better, to see more of her -- it's a burden he was never made for. He was an extension of the violence of her heart, after all. How could he bear another's burden? And for that matter -- how could she do anything but resent him, seeing him that way?
Nevertheless... she doesn't hate seeing him, in this moment. Indeed, there's just the slightest upturn in her voice as she half-asks, "Still hanging in there, huh?"
Her eyes remain forward -- on the little ways in which she's torn up her city. "Did you ever come here on your own?" she muses aloud, though she knows how hard it would have been for Anti to make such a choice. "This is where I got the protein boxes. From that one time. I thought if you beat Gridman, I'd treat you to as much as you wanted."
A chance at his happiness, deferred -- and now broken -- by her own selfishness. Her gaze fixes there.
She ignores the umbrella. Anti's purpose was to be her sword, not her shield.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
He was made to be Akane's blade. Even so, he's brought an umbrella for her, now.
The patter of the rain fills the silence.
"Why?"
It might sound like a logical conclusion to her statement. It isn't.
"Why give life to a kaiju like me?"
He stands in the rain, umbrella held out. His lips move. The rest of him does not.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane likewise fixes fully in place. Tsutsujidai was always meant to be a still place. So still it -- and she -- remains. No hand comes to take the umbrella. Those remain limp at Akane's sides.
Perhaps it's that feeling, teasing at the edge of her perception -- as it keeps doing, here, in this space, ever since Gridman's arrival -- that colors what she says next.
It could just be guilt.
"You're not a kaiju anymore."
This much, at least, she means.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
'A kaiju like me' is a phrase with particular meaning, and that meaning changes, when Anti's the one saying it. To be a kaiju like Akane is to operate on the tiny level of humanity; to be a kaiju like Anti...
But he's not a kaiju any more, Akane says.
If there's any reaction on his face, his bangs, slicked from the rain, hide it thoroughly.
"Why not?"
A question with sharp inflection, but it is quiet as he usually is, lashed down to this size.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
The attempt to reach out isn't lost on Akane. It's not a missed kindness; it's a rejected one.
"Kaiju can't read feelings," Akane says, tone almost totally blank, now. Knowing he can read hers forces her to build walls up -- and then collapse them on her heart. "You came looking for me, right? But kaiju don't do that. They don't go out of their way for other people."
Her eyes remain fixed. This is a place that she's been with so many people -- Renais. Guy. Sayla, Alouette. Liam.
Even those she didn't bring, she brought it to. Anti.
A list of tangled metal and blood and so, so many broken hearts.
"They ruin people's lives just by existing. That's a kaiju."
It's at this point that Akane finally turns to face Anti in full. An eyepatch -- the mark of a heart that won't give up, even in agonizing pain. And the way he looks at her...
... it's undeserved.
"I don't like kaiju that resemble people."
So of course, Anti cannot be a kaiju.
"You have eyes like a person."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
But those walls are Akane's feelings, too.
He can only see out of one; he looks at her with both eyes, anyway. He's not just looking at her eyes, when he reflects what she has to say, and she reflects something of his just the same.
"And your eyes are --"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Don't look."
It's the second to last thing Akane will ever tell Anti to do, in that precise, practiced way she does.
"Go somewhere."
And the last.
"Wherever you like."
To be sure.
Her body remains inclined toward him by that slightest bit, along her left side.
She remains fixed. Perhaps she always was.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
'You want me to abandon my reason for existing?! Like hell I will! I still mean something!'
It's different, when it's Akane, denying him.
(Releasing him.)
She is sure, and finally, his hand lowers to his side. Lever motion. He hangs there, in silence.
And then the umbrella drops to the ground, with a light sound, against the patter of the rain.
He drops it there -- he leaves it -- and he turns, and he leaves, as simply as that.
He wants to reach her.
He can't make her reach out, either.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
He departs. She remains.
Good.
"I always knew you were a failed creation."
And so much the better.