Day 43: Chapel

[constellates.livejournal.com]

And just like that, the disorienting feeling of blacking out just to wake up in an unfamiliar bed came again. Alkaid had wondered if it would - everything about last night had been different, all the way from the zombies to the eerie emptiness of the Institute to the strange broadcast at the end of the night. Had the Head Doctor been shot? Damn, someone had gotten to it before her. And who was the voice at the end there? It was like she'd been allowed access to some kind of strange mystery that she could not understand, one that had been going on for a long time before she had arrived and would be going on for quite a while in the future, after she was gone. Had these strange sets of circumstances been bugs in this place's programming? Who could say?

The morning's intercom greeting was strange, as well. Federal training whatsit? It didn't seem like this happened very often, from the sound of it, but so much had happened since the last day she remembered that the former Demon Palace Emperor was ready to take pretty much anything at face value.

The room she woke up in was still empty. Wondering where to stick the half-cracked bat that she'd picked up last night, she shoved it under the mattress hastily when she heard footsteps in the hall.

The stupid nurse was the same as ever, though. Some things never changed. "Ahh, good morning, Eileen. It's so nice to see you awake."

Alkaid rolled her eyes at the nurse's chuckle, and shook her head. She didn't care that the NPC thought it was nice, she just wanted to see the rest of the institute already.. see what had changed! "Yeah, it's fantastic. Whatever! Just take me where I'm going and be done with it!"

It was just then that she realized that she was not wanting to devour the flesh of the nurse in front of her. And that the pain on her arm had kind of abated - she couldn't see through the thick bandages they had covered her arm with, but she wondered if her skin was still rotting off like a zombie. Had they somehow cured her infection overnight? Or was the nurse not human, like Alkaid had always thought?

There was only one thing for it: she had to go somewhere else.

"Chapel, sun room, or cafeteria, then?"

"Does it look like I care?"

The nurse sighed, then started walking Alkaid down the hall, up the stairs, and down another hall to the chapel. No one here yet, huh? That was weird. She couldn't imagine that no one else'd show up, but who could say? This place had been turned on its ass.

The chapel was empty so far, and kind of nondescript. She shooed the nurse away, and stood in the middle of the space between the pews, standing akimbo. What would happen today? What would she learn about herself... her situation? How long had she been sleeping? Was she really still going freaking undead, or had that been somehow taken care of?

All this would come to light really soon. She hoped. Geez, too many mysteries!!

[unwittingly awaiting Haseo]

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[141-12.livejournal.com]

"You really think so? Because episode twenty-four isn't the last time you see each other, but I guess it depends on how exactly you want to interpr— Er. Never mind." Otacon looked off in embarrassment. Once an otaku, always an otaku, he supposed, then found his thoughts turn inevitably to Snake. That was the choice he'd made too, wasn't it? His death, for the survival of the people he loved. Otacon had resolved to not cheapen his sacrifice by dwelling on it and all the things they'd lost — what, after all, did Snake have to regret now? He'd been cloned decades before the birth of Dolly the Sheep, and had lived longer than anyone expected. He'd fought his battles and ended the war, and passed on everything there was left for him to pass on.

And Otacon would survive, as he always did, and Sunny would grow tall and strong in the outside world, and carry the memory of Snake with her as well. That was how it should have been, anyway.

Otacon sighed. Maybe it was pointless to try to control whether or not he dwelled on it. "Free choice," he murmured. Otacon met Kaworu's eyes again. "It mattered, if that's what you're worried about. Shinji survives, and later learns that a world where you can be hurt by others is still a better one than a world without individuality and free will." A slight smile touched his lips. "That's something which took me way after the age of fifteen to learn, so you have to give him credit there."

[moral-liberty.livejournal.com]

Kaworu felt light. The only thing he had ever truly wanted, he had accomplished. He had abandoned his survival for this, and would have done so even to simply give Shinji an opportunity. He had been happy when he had died, just imagining that it might have happened. Kaworu had never felt truly happy before meeting Shinji, not that he had been sad either. He had simply never really experienced anything at all.

"Thank you." Kaworu smiled, readily and easily. For a moment, he sounded more like a teenager than anything else. An awkward note of happiness had slid into his voice. He touched the man's hand, because a smile seemed insufficient. Words seemed insufficient.

"When did you learn?" He asked, still feeling alight. "Was it the one you love?"

[141-12.livejournal.com]

"Oh... uh, well..." Otacon just laughed, pleasantly surprised by Kaworu's mood shift. He ignored the tickle of guilt at the back of his mind which chastised him for bending the truth. It hadn't really been a lie, he'd just... neglected to detail the exact path Shinji took to get to that point. Or what happened afterward, if you were following the first movie.

He looked down at the pale slender hand on top of his, and back up to Kaworu's face. Two nights ago, he remembered, the teenager had reminded him of Sunny. "Not exactly. That is... it wasn't one person in particular, but..." Otacon paused, but it didn't actually hurt that much to talk about it. Despite the dangers of running Philanthropy, those handful of years after Shadow Moses had been one of the happiest times of his life. "I learned it when I was about twice your age, almost ten years ago. I had to lose someone first before I realized that you can't live your life just waiting to be loved. You have to make it happen."

Otacon wondered, for the first time in years, what exactly Kaworu was supposed to represent to Shinji Ikari. Was it that same impossible wish to have a happy family simply walk into your life? Shinji had lost that, and then lost everything else. Why did it always end up this way? Was Otacon just overanalyzing everything? NGE had been the magnum opus of creator breakdown, after all. As a motivator for young otakus to get over their fear of people, it didn't exactly fill you with confidence.

But maybe that hadn't been the point. Maybe taking a chance on love was supposed to be hard, no matter what. Maybe you lost, even when you fought.

"That's what my partner and I spent our lives fighting for. Not for love, exactly, although love was a part of it. But in my world, there were forces who wanted to control ideas and feelings and how the world was run and take these things out of human hands, because we're fallible. And we hurt each other." He looked around at the other people in the chapel, quietly conversing like they were. "But aren't those potentially painful differences what makes it worth being in love? The ideas we don't come up with, but someone else does; the things we're won't say, but someone else will say; the things we're too afraid to do, but someone else will do. And if there's no differences between us, then there's no reason to remember anyone. Everything you were... it's just forgotten when you're gone."

[moral-liberty.livejournal.com]

Kaworu looked closely at Otacon. He was Lilim. They all were Lilim. All the same thing.

But if that were true, why should he remember Otacon, or Yousuke and Naoto, or even Shinji? If they were all the same, why did he feel his heart drop whenever he found no sign of the dark haired, blue eyed boy from his memory in anyone else? The pull he felt for Otacon was nothing like that for Shinji, or the man who had first asked him how he felt about the name Kaworu. Many years ago he had leaned over to show him on a piece of paper how he had written out the characters.

Suddenly and inexplicably, Kaworu regretted that he could not remember anything else about him. He could not even promise that it was a man and not a woman. The more he tried to summon up details, the less convinced of them he became. He had forgotten this person who had changed his identity indefinitely. It could have been anyone who had named him. Anyone. If Kaworu could let these memories slip away from him, there was nothing to say it would not happen again. If they were all Lilim, why did it matter? If it didn't matter, why did it bother him..?

"You will not be forgotten," Kaworu said, unsure if he meant by himself or others. He didn't want to forget Otacon, but what would stop the decay of emotions and memories? He was not Lilim. "You have loved and been loved, and you have felt pain as others have felt it because of you. By overcoming fear and opening yourself up to hurt, you will never be lost by those who have accepted you. You are easy to love," he looked up to the front of the chapel, "I can tell."