Chapter Text
“You’re lonely, I can tell,” the spirit said when he wrapped his arms around Shinji’s shoulders. “I’m lonely, too.”
~
Lilith and Adam halving themselves was only an eventuality. In the beginning, they halved the responsibilities of creating the earth. After the planetary explosion that had been their genesis, with each of their hands they compressed the scattered stardust until in Adam’s hand formed the fruit of life, and in Lilith’s the fruit of knowledge. They shaped the foundations of the planets from handfuls of the enveloping murkiness, and when the rest gravitated toward these planetary seeds, the heavens were left clear to hang the stars. With the fruit of life, Adam created the angels to populate the sky, and with the fruit of knowledge, Lilith created man to populate the earth. And at the end of this process, they halved the task of creating the final angel, Tabris, who took human form. They then each doted upon their respective creations and mutually pronounced them good, until Adam halved the fruit of knowledge, thereby making man subservient to angels.
When, out of anger, Lilith split their body in two, the two of them then split the sky between them, then their children, and finally they split Tabris from his divinity. Adam agreed to give Lilith half of the angels to direct, and they divided the first fourteen, from Sachiel to Armisael, but then they reached an impasse at Tabris.
An eye for an eye was a simple equation; an eye for a child was much more difficult to negotiate. Adam had taken the last of their seven eyes, Lilith said, so she had a right to the last of the angels. Adam resisted, saying that they were not of equal worth, to which Lilith replied that Adam had taken the sun and left Lilith with the moon, which could only borrow the sun’s light. This compounded with the injustice he had committed against man, she reasoned, must more than compensate for the deficit. During the time that they had yet to reach a consensus, one day while Adam was washing their blood from the eyes he had taken, Lilith planted the remaining half of the fruit of knowledge, and it flowered into a tree. As she had anticipated, when Tabris saw the new tree with its round, green fruit, his curiosity led him to pluck one for himself.
When he bit into it, the fruit turned to ash in his mouth, and a full moon halo blossomed behind his head.
When Adam discovered what had happened, Lilith managed to protect Tabris by spiriting him away to the earth, but not before Adam managed to cut off his wings. Heartbroken over the separation from his wings and thus his ability to return to heaven, and over the separation from his siblings altogether, Tabris secluded himself in the sanctuary of a nearby forest. There, he changed his name to Kaworu, for the flowers that adorned his new home, and he refused to drink the elixir of immortality that Lilith continued to provide him from her half of heaven. Over time, his body began to fade, and his halo receded to a dim lunar eclipse.
~
“Hello, Ikari Shinji. I’ve been waiting for you,” said the spirit. Shinji felt the lightest weight upon his shoulders and around his neck, not nearly strong enough to choke; it felt more like a breeze had come to rest upon him. With Shinji in his embrace like this, the spirit leaned his head against Shinji’s like a lover would.
“I haven’t had any company in so long,” his voice explained. “Nor have I eaten, nor have I been able to move from this place. Would you allow me to accompany you like this?”
Shinji agreed out of fear, and because the spirit told him it could guide him back to town and out of the forest where he had lost his way. So he carried the spirit home with him. When he arrived there, the other villagers could tell that something was compelling him, but they could not see the creature on his back, and so began a lifetime of whispers that Shinji had been placed under an enchantment in the forest that night.
After Shinji had shut the door to his house, he somehow managed to also kindle a fire for his houseguest, in case he was the sort who noted the hospitality with which he was greeted and rewarded his hosts accordingly. He assumed his gesture had been received well, because once the fire had acquired a healthy burn, he felt the airy arms around him release. Although there hadn’t been any real pressure there, he felt as one had just been lifted from around his throat so that he could speak at last. He rubbed his hand at his throat and demanded to know the spirit’s name.
The spirit had corporeal form but was translucent, and the light of the fire by which he now primly stood appeared to engulf him as if he stood instead at the stake. But his expression was placid like a saint when he looked at Shinji and asked, “Why? So that you know what name to call when you exorcise me?”
In truth, Shinji hadn’t considered it; he had simply asked out of pure indignation, and he didn’t even have time to entertain the notion anyway because the spirit said, “You can’t, in any case. But I’ll still tell you, if you’d like.”
Shinji said he did, and the spirit answered, “Kaworu.” Then he slowly blinked his big, sad eyes. “Do you think you could give me a surname, though?”
Shinji asked why.
“I think it was the full moon that must have brought you to me,” Kaworu said evasively. He looked down at his hands and traced the lines on his right palm with his left thumb. “I’ve heard… that some people believe that on full moon nights, they can see the future. But I’ve never been able to. If I had, I would have known that I was destined to meet you, and then I would have been more patient.” His thumb stopped moving, perhaps so that there was nothing to distract him when he asked, “Do you think so, Ikari Shinji?”
Shinji clenched his fists and teeth and said no.
“Then how do I know your name? How is it that I know you?” Kaworu’s voice broke when he asked this, and he began to wipe away nonexistent tears with the back of his hand whose lines he’d been tracing.
Shinji said that Kaworu knew because he had possessed him.
“I could never,” Kaworu responded as he continued to dry his tears of frustration. He progressed from using the back of his hand to his white, vulnerable-looking wrist. “I had my own free will taken from me; I could never take it from someone else.”
But, Shinji reminded him, he had just claimed that the two of them had been destined to meet.
“You could have still told me no when I asked you to carry me.”
They were silent, and Kaworu did a very good job masking his quiet crying with the vellum-like crackling of the fire. After some time he asked, “Would you trust me if I gave you the last of my free will?”
Shinji asked how so.
“If you named me,” Kaworu explained, “I would be yours. Every night on the full moon, I would come home to you, without the need for you to carry me. You would have the power to restore my strength once I gave you the means, and then in addition to that power, you would have mine. And I wouldn’t ask anything else of you in return but to let me stay with you for a while.”
Shinji said no.
Kaworu said, “I see,” and nodded slowly to himself, as if in a daze. Then he said no more and curled himself by the fire, although he continued to rub his arms as if he were cold. He stayed that way until the vellum crackling noises dimmed down to page turns.
“You don’t need to do anything to make me leave,” Kaworu said to Shinji, who had stayed awake the entire time to ensure Kaworu didn’t possess him, in the early hours of the morning. Kaworu gazed out the window into the horizon. “There’s still a few hours before the sun washes away your footprints. I can walk in them to get back home.”
Shinji said that was good.
Kaworu slowly turned to face him. “Would you at least consider seeing me again during the next full moon?”
To avoid angering him, Shinji lied and said he would think about it, but how was he to find that place in the forest again?
Kaworu drifted over to the table where Shinji had left a cup of tea before he’d ventured out and gotten lost. He raked his nails over the back of his arm, and then used his finger to gather up a few drops of blue blood that welled in the wound, which healed before Shinji’s eyes. Then he stirred the tea with his finger, as if mixing a potion, and the already thin blood was quickly diluted. “I’m not allowed to tell anyone the way back, because my mother doesn’t want my father to be able to find me,” he said as he lifted his finger from the solution, keeping it suspended until the last drops fell back into the cup. He then moved to push it toward Shinji, but seemed to think better of it and instead pulled his hand back to hold against his stomach like a wounded animal. “But if you drink that, you’ll be able to find me, and no one will be able to follow you.”
Shinji said that he didn’t think that seemed like a very good offer.
Kaworu, to his credit, agreed. “No, I wouldn’t think so, either.” That having been said, he faced the door and then paused uncertainly, perhaps waiting for Shinji to offer some comforting parting words. But he received no such luxury, and at last began to amble back the way they had come.
Shinji was still unable to sleep. He felt obligated to brave the rest of the night in case Kaworu tried to slip back inside before the sun rose. Then, even though he was exhausted throughout the entire day, the insomnia persisted, and he spent nearly the entirety of the that following night staring at the drink Kaworu had prepared for him, trying to will himself to dispose of it. He couldn’t simply empty it outside, where it could either seep into the ground and infect the flora with whatever curse it bore, or evaporate and make the curse airborne. He eventually took the cup outside and began to walk in the opposite direction of the one in which Kaworu had gone, but he was too tired to travel what he could possibly conceive of as a sufficient distance, and his hands had begun to shake from the sleep deficiency, so he cut his walk short. Upon his return, he placed the cup back in the center of his table where, he told himself, it would stay until the next night, when, after finally obtaining a good night’s sleep, he would surely know what to do with it.
The next night arrived, and Shinji spent the better part of an hour sitting at the table, bracing the cup with one hand and running the index finger of his other around the smooth, glossy lip in hypnotic circles. He recalled the slow, circular motions Kaworu had used when he’d prepared it, and wondered hazily if it had been some sort of mesmerization at work. Then, although he Shinji did not know this, clock struck the fateful hour of midnight, and then finally he took the cup with both hands and drank the contents because, as Kaworu had stated with painful accuracy, Shinji was lonely too.