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When one day, after a fifteen year-long absence, Adam had bid Sachiel to come see his newest brother, Sachiel initially ruffled one of his wings in irritation at the idea of, “Another one?”
“You haven’t even met him,” said Adam. “You’ll love him, I promise.”
So Sachiel obediently held out one of his hands, into which Adam dropped something that, to their titanic proportions, seemed no larger than a mustard seed, and who, like the proverbial mustard seed, was destined to grow into something quite substantial indeed. Sachiel held his hand up to one of his gargantuan eyes for a better look, and found nestled between his claws something suspiciously human-shaped.
“Tabris,” Adam said to the latest addition to their family, “this is Sachiel.”
Tabris climbed across Sachiel’s hand to bask in his admiration. “Hello, Sachiel,” he said. “I like you.”
He pressed himself against the skin of Sachiel’s visage in the nearest achievable approximation of a hug, and Sachiel suddenly found himself overwhelmed with a wave of uncharacteristically un-godlike sentimentality.
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
Adam explained to Sachiel and the other angels how Tabris had been made in man’s image so that he might live among the humans and, in doing so, make their minds a little less unknowable to celestial beings such as themselves. “He’s perfect,” he declared after each of the angels had handled Tabris in turn. “They’ll love him like we love him. They’ll tell him everything.”
Love him they did. Not long after Tabris arrived on Earth did he endear himself to nearly everyone he met with his innate goodness, and they treated him likewise simply because he was a very easy person to be kind to. (“I bet you just think you’re god’s gift to the world, don’t you?” somebody had asked him once after he’d breezed right into their town’s inner circle of musicians. “I am,” Tabris had responded with genuine pleasantry. “How did you know?”)
And Tabris loved them too. He began to ask for favors from Adam, beginning with a human name for assimilation purposes. “Anything you want, Tabris,” Adam said, and that was the beginning of that unfortunate little precedent.
The favors advanced from there: a surname, then more time with the humans, then more unsupervised time with the humans, all of which produced little actual effect on the angels’ overall understanding of the human condition. It seemed the problem stemmed from a fundamental difference of opinion on humanity to begin with. “They’re wonderful,” Tabris, now more commonly referred to as Nagisa Kaworu, told his family in protest when they asked if he’d yet discovered the root of the humans’ more sinful proclivities. “What’s not to understand?”
His siblings tried to tell him that he saw the best of them only because he’d brought out their best to begin with, and he replied, “Well it’s a good thing I’m around, then.”
It appeared that he had grown to love the humans a little too much. Fortunately for him, however, the angels had grown to love Kaworu a little too much themselves, and were in no position to separate him from the objects of his affection.
One year into his mission, Adam called him back to heaven for a visit. “You’ve done so well for yourself, Tabris,” he said. “What would you like for your birthday?”
Kaworu fell back into Adam’s palm, a mere speck on its vast surface. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. “Humans are so interesting. Their hearts are like glass.” He rested both of his hands on his upturned chest, where his angelic core warmed the skin there. “I think I might finally be able to explain them to you if you gave me one.”
“You say they’re like glass,” said Adam. “So what happens, then, if you should break yours?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” said Kaworu. “You can’t break your own heart, so all I have to do is keep mine inside me.”
“And you’re sure that’s what you want?”
“I’ve thought a lot about it.”
“I see,” said Adam.
He turned Kaworu temporarily back into the bone carving that had been his original form so that Kaworu wouldn’t feel any pain when his chest was cracked open and the angelic core pulled out of him. Adam held Kaworu’s body in one hand and let the marble of Kaworu’s core roll into the center of his other palm before he crushed it. When he uncurled his fingers, Kaworu’s core had been compressed down into a crystalline heart, ringed by a stain of blue blood on Adam’s palm. He carefully placed it within the cavity of Kaworu’s chest like a jeweler placing a gemstone in its setting, then he took a shaving of bone from his own rib to reseal it.
Kaworu cried when Adam reanimated him, and Adam feared the operation hadn’t been successful.
“It worked,” Kaworu told him. “Because I thought I loved them before, but that wasn’t anything compared to this.”
“I don’t know about human hearts, but I have an idea,” Adam said to soothe Kaworu, who lay paralyzed in his palm from the intensity of it. “Because your siblings felt something similar when they beheld you.” He continued to cradle Kaworu in his hands while they waited for the waves of new emotions to stop overwhelming him.
“It’s not as warm now,” Kaworu said, rubbing at his aching chest when he had enough strength to sit up. “But it hurts a lot more.”
“I think it must hurt you so much more because you’re that much smaller than your siblings,” said Adam. “But you have such great capacity within you.” He sent Kaworu a gentle breeze to help dry his tears. “You’re the best thing I ever created.”
The transplant did for the angels as Kaworu had hoped. They had, as Adam said, experienced a similar feeling of newfound fascination when they’d encountered Kaworu for the first time, and it was this fellow feeling that they accessed when Kaworu spoke of his adoration for humankind. But now there was a sadness that overcast his reports to them. During one of his visits with them, Sachiel cupped Kaworu in his hands and turned him from side to side, examining him for any signs of injury.
“Are you sure you put him back together correctly?” he asked Adam. “He’s not missing a piece?”
“Maybe you didn’t make the heart right,” suggested Israfel, who split themselves in two so they could view Kaworu from multiple angles at once. “Maybe you broke it.”
“I’m sure I made it properly,” Adam said.
Sachiel held Kaworu up to Sahaquiel, who had the biggest eyes, for inspection. “How would you know, though?” she asked, after her gaze had roved over Kaworu for some time and she hadn’t found any defects.
“Tabris,” said Adam. “Have you been keeping your heart inside you like you promised?”
Kaworu nodded.
“You haven’t given it to anyone?”
Kaworu shook his head.
“Maybe his temperature’s too cold now that his core’s gone,” one half of Israfel said. “Angels probably aren’t supposed to be this cold. Look, he’s shivering.”
“Give him to Sandalphon,” said the other half. “That’ll keep him warm until we figure out how to fix him.”
Kaworu shook his head harder.
“No?” said Israfel together.
“He doesn’t know what he wants,” said Sachiel. “He’s confused.”
Adam scooped Kaworu out of Sachiel’s hands while he and the rest of Kaworu’s present siblings argued amongst themselves.
“It’s not becoming to sulk,” Adam said to Kaworu. “It would be much more helpful to your siblings and me if you could at least give us an idea of what’s wrong.”
“You won’t like it,” Kaworu said quietly.
“I’ll decide that for myself.”
Kaworu stood his ground. “No,” he said, turning away. “It’s ungrateful.”
“Tabris.”
“I can learn to adjust to it on my own; I just need more time.”
“If you’re hurt,” said Adam, “then why force yourself to suffer when we could just solve it now?”
“Because you won’t want to.”
“I won’t let you return to the Earth until you tell us.”
Kaworu turned back toward Adam, although he refused to look at him. He curled himself up tightly and stared sideways at the nearest stellar dust cloud. “You asked me if I’d given my heart to anyone,” he said.
“And you lied?”
“No.” Kaworu wrapped his arms around himself for extra protection. “The problem isn’t that I gave my heart to someone. The problem is that I would like to.”
If Kaworu’s family had been paying a bit closer attention, they would have noticed the way he’d taken to staring longingly at passing couples for some time now. At first, when he’d come back to Earth with his new heart, every emotion was still too intense for him to be able to distinguish them from one another. He waited for his heart to cool and set inside him, but even after it did, he felt like something must not have aligned correctly.
“It’s hard to explain,” Kaworu said to his family once. “When I’m spending time with the humans now, I feel even happier than I used to, but I don’t think I really could be happier because being with them never used to make me feel sad like this before, either.”
His family members had each handled him in turn to look for signs of damage, and after he’d passed inspection from everyone, they all decided to chalk it up to growing pains for the time being. It was only after the third check-in like this in a row that they began to take it seriously, but now they weren’t sure if there was anything to be done at such a late stage.
“What do we do with you, Tabris?” Adam said. “You change so quickly, like them. I don’t think I even know you anymore.” He brought Kaworu close to his chest, letting the warmth from his core ease Kaworu into a state of comfort for what would be the last time in a long while. “But I can’t stand to see you in pain.”
After he’d held Kaworu like that long enough to feel like a sufficient goodbye, rather than teleport Kaworu back to the town he’d made his home like always, Adam sent Kaworu away with his second youngest, Armisael, to deliver Kaworu personally to an idyllic meadow on the outskirts of town. “You’re so different from the Tabris I created,” he’d said before Kaworu left. “You’re so mysterious to me now that from now on I won’t understand how to help you. So this is perhaps the last thing I’ll be able to do for you.”
Armisael touched down with Kaworu in her arms. The grass was cool beneath them when she set him on the ground, and he moved his feet at the last moment so that he wouldn’t crush the patch of wildflowers that, though barely visible, he knew was there from all the time he’d spent in the area. Before Armisael returned to heaven, she wordlessly touched her forehead to Kaworu’s the same way Adam had when he’d said, “Your heart was a gift, so it’s yours to do with as you wish. You’re the angel of free will now; if you want to give it away, if you want to break it, that’s your choice. But I want you to know: even though this experiment didn’t go to plan, I could never make another one of you.”
Several years passed, and Kaworu still managed to keep his heart inside him. In the absence of his family to talk to, he’d begun work on maintaining it. Though it still ached when he thought of the still-absent keeper of his heart, he’d taught himself to endure it by thinking of his loneliness as time spent readying his heart for that special someone. He imagined a small terrarium within its glass chambers, filled with seedling flowers that he needed to look after until, when he finally met his sweetheart, the conditions would be right for them to bloom. I’ll take such good care of it, he thought to himself. I’ll make sure it’s so beautiful when I give it to him that he’ll never want to break it. Every morning when he woke up, he’d touch his fingertips to his chest to make sure that everything was still in order, if not quite complete.
If he would come to me tomorrow, though, he thought, then all of this loneliness will have been worth it. He told himself that every morning, and every evening before he went to sleep, until he accumulated years’ worth of tomorrows that he wished he had been too distracted to keep count of.
“Maybe I ought to have an animal around to keep me company,” he said out loud to his empty house one day. Animals seemed to sense his benevolence too, and tended to gather round him whenever he went out, so he ventured into the nearby forest to perhaps find a companion. However, every time a bird or small mammal approached, and even trusted him so far as to settle into his hands, he still couldn’t find it in him to ask it to come home, and ultimately set it free.
He tried this again on and off for a few days, until on his way back home from another unsuccessful excursion, he came across an injured black bird on the ground.
“Hello,” he said to it, kneeling down. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bird the likes of you before. Are you very far from home?” He reached out with a finger to stroke its inky feathers, then thought better of it. “Maybe that’s how you got hurt; you’re not used to the area,” he mused. “Wait here, I’ll be back for you.”
He hurried the rest of the way home and came back carrying a small box lined with some soft cloth, into which he deposited the bird as gently as possible. “Since I don’t have anybody to love right now,” he said as he carried it home, “I suppose I’ll just have to take care of you and love you in the meantime.”
He liked to think that the bird didn’t protest.
Luckily, the bird didn’t seem to be hurt beyond Kaworu’s ability to help. It seemed to have just been in shock for a bit, maybe from accidentally flying into something, Kaworu thought. In what felt like no time at all, it was back on its feet, flitting about Kaworu’s home and sometimes hopping into Kaworu’s lap or onto his shoulder, which delighted Kaworu to no end. “You’re cheeky,” he said when the bird flew over to stand on his violin bow during practice, staring at him with its round, yellow eyes. Then he smiled at it very sadly. “I’m going to miss you.”
The following morning, Kaworu coaxed the bird onto his finger and walked outside with it, shielding the bird’s eyes from the harsh morning sun with his free hand. “You’re all better now,” he said once he’d brought them into a shady spot. “I’d love nothing more than to keep you, but I know that it’s time for you to go and be free. Come visit me anytime, though, alright?”
He closed his eyes, gave the bird a kiss on the top of its head, and then felt the bird leave his finger. He kept them closed for a few seconds longer so that he wouldn’t have to see that it was gone, but when he opened them at last, he found something else had replaced it.
“Hello,” said the boy standing before him. “My name’s Shinji.” And Kaworu felt the flowers in his heart blossom.
“Look at this bird that I rescued,” Kaworu said to those who would ask, and, on the occasions that those people were in low supply, those who didn’t. “Isn’t he beautiful?” Then he would coo at the bird perched on his wrist for a bit while he waited for his audience to agree.
“His name is Shinji,” he would say when they did.
Sometimes, the person with whom he was speaking would have enough polite interest to ask where he’d gotten the name from, to which Kaworu would wink and say, “He told me himself.”
Shinji had been very good-natured about letting Kaworu fawn over him after his transformation. He marveled at Shinji’s dark hair, the tone of Shinji’s skin compared to his own, and Shinji’s eyes, which in human form were a dark shade of blue that Kaworu suddenly decided was going to be his favorite color.
“Who could possibly bewitch you like that, though?” he asked. “You seem so wonderful.”
“Magic runs in my family,” Shinji said, and he told Kaworu the story of how, after the recent death of his mother, he’d been so overcome with grief that he’d transformed into a bird to numb himself. “And being a bird let me run away,” he added.
“Poor thing,” said Kaworu. “What was your mother like?”
Shinji shrank back from him, and Kaworu thought he could see small feathers begin to manifest around Shinji’s wrists, but they disappeared too quickly for him to be sure. “I’m sorry,” Shinji said. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep her memories to myself.”
“But of course,” Kaworu said. He didn’t quite understand this reaction; after all, he’d lost his own family not too long ago, and even when the separation was fresh he never so much as winced whenever any curious soul would ask him about his origins. But all this only added to his growing fascination, so he took the conversational pressure off Shinji and began to instead tell him all about his father and many siblings.
“That’s sounds amazing,” Shinji said. “Your life is so much more interesting than mine.”
Kaworu smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. I can’t do any magic like you can. People used to ask me to perform some for them, but my father didn’t really build me with performing miracles or anything impressive like that in mind. You can tell by how I look.”
“Really?” said Shinji. “Well… I think you’re nice to look at.”
Kaworu liked that response very much indeed, and he thought that Shinji could probably tell.
“Hey,” he said by way of distraction, “Would you be able to show me some real magic?” He stared at Shinji’s hands expectantly.
Shinji stared down at them too and shook his head. “I don’t think I can bring myself to perform any significant magic anymore. Or at least, I can’t see myself being able to anytime soon. I just don’t have the concentration for it right now.”
Unfazed, Kaworu said, “That’s completely understandable.”
“To be honest,” said Shinji, “I was surprised when I heard you say you couldn’t perform any spells, because I thought that only somebody else could break the one I placed over myself. But when you told me, it made me think more about how I felt right before I returned to being human, and I hadn’t realized how long a time it’s been since somebody really wanted me around. And then when you kissed me,” he paused to look at Kaworu, “I felt so happy.”
“Shinji,” Kaworu said, feeling his heart grow so warm that it almost approximated the warmth of his original core, “I know that this will sound very arrogant, but I think that I was probably made for you.”
Shinji told Kaworu that he’d also had some musical training, once upon a time, so Kaworu immediately took him to his practice building, where there would be multiple pianos available for Shinji’s use. “They have some pretty nice ones,” he said, “I don’t know what you were used to playing before, so maybe they won’t be up to your standards, but they’re better than average.”
“I was never good enough to get the chance to play on a really nice one,” Shinji said. “I only had a few years, because the cello was my first instrument.”
Kaworu stopped with his hand on the doorknob to the practice room, lost in thought. “Hmm. A stray cello would be a little bit harder to get my hands on,” he said.
“Well don’t feel like you have to,” Shinji laughed.
Kaworu looked back at him. “I would do anything if it made you happy,” he said, and then unlocked the door.
The practice session didn’t go tremendously, as it had been a while since Shinji had even had fingers with which to touch a keyboard, let alone had access to one, and the sounds of other people practicing in neighboring rooms made him feel more than a little self-conscious. “Don’t mind them,” Kaworu said. “They’re too worried about their own music. Besides, they’d only wish to have the luxury you do of not needing to practice seven hours a day.”
“You practice seven hours a day,” said Shinji.
“But that’s still seven hours I get to spend being around you,” said Kaworu. “So I still win.”
During their entire walk back home, under a darkening sky, Kaworu mulled over ways he might be able to find Shinji a cello so that he wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable as he did today. Then, back indoors, he put that on the back burner so he could switch to mulling over how to create some suitable sleeping arrangements for Shinji. “Unless… you’re used to sleeping in the forest by now?” he said, although he felt embarrassed for having said it immediately afterwards.
He looked to Shinji. “Sorry, I haven’t even asked your opinion on it,” he said, but when his eyes fell upon Shinji, they fell once more upon a bird.
He held out his hands, and Shinji flew into them so that Kaworu could kiss him again, but to no avail. Even though Kaworu was distressed, he pushed the feeling back down when Shinji nuzzled his finger in apology.
“It’s nothing I can’t figure out,” he said. “Just get some sleep, alright? I’ll work this out in the morning; don’t even worry yourself about it.” He took Shinji back to his box on the windowsill, settled him inside it, stroked his back a few times, and then quickly left so that Shinji wouldn’t have to see how upset he was. He was readying himself for at least a good few hours of agitated wakefulness, but then Shinji left the windowsill box to hop onto his headboard. He fell asleep there, and the rhythm of his breathing lulled Kaworu into joining him.
Kaworu tried to bring Shinji back to his human form the first thing in the morning after he woke up, and, to his relief, came out successful this time.
“I guess I’m just not accustomed to being human for an extended period of time yet,” Shinji said.
“You’re probably right,” said Kaworu. “It will get better with more practice.”
Instead of going to the practice building today, Kaworu suggested they take a walk in the forest together, figuring that perhaps he had pushed Shinji too far out of his comfort zone yesterday and that might have contributed to his regression. Shinji, for his part, carried his apologetic gestures from the previous night through to his human self, and he linked his arm through Kaworu’s as they walked.
“I never did thank you properly for finding and rescuing me,” he said. “So a belated ‘thank you’ to you.”
“No need,” Kaworu said. “You’re the one who found me.”
“You’re too much,” said Shinji, shoving Kaworu a little, though he kept their arms linked.
Kaworu used the opportunity to pull Shinji a little closer. “I’m being serious. I told you that my father made me from a piece of his rib, right? Well, on the day that I separated from my family, prior to my visit I had been hoping that the next time we saw each other, I would ask my father if he could use the same method to make me somebody I could love. But that next visit never came, so I was afraid that I might have lost the opportunity for good. So I mean everything I say to you, Shinji.”
When Shinji turned back into a bird come nightfall, Kaworu told him that he wasn’t hurt.
Twelve hours wasn’t anything to be ungrateful about, Kaworu tried to tell himself. Yet he still began to lose focus during his practice time over the next few days, because he wanted to be present when Shinji was. He watched the clock carefully, attempting to shave down his practice time in ten minute increments. Then, because he was so attentive to the passage of time, he began to notice a few things. For one, Shinji’s time as a human began to dwindle, first gradually, then by entire hours before the week was up, and Kaworu had to carve bigger and bigger blocks of time from his practice in order to keep up. And then on the other end, it took longer and longer intervals of time after Shinji’s nighttime transformations for Kaworu’s kisses to become effective the next day. Instead of Shinji building up a tolerance for being human, he was building up an immunity to Kaworu’s attentions.
“I’m beginning to think there’s something you’re not telling me,” Kaworu said to him right after his morning transformation one day. For the first time since he’d asked Shinji about his mother, he thought he could see feathers begin to appear on Shinji’s wrists when he lifted them in front of his face like Kaworu was about to strike him.
“Don’t hate me,” he said.
“What?” Kaworu asked, stepping forward to comfort him, then stopping cold when Shinji didn’t lower his arms. “Shinji, what are you saying? I could never hate you.”
Shinji covered his eyes with his hands completely. “Maybe, but you could still stop loving me.”
“You know I could never do that either.”
Shinji’s hands didn’t move. “I’m so sorry, Kaworu,” he said. “I’ve never stopped being happy to be around you. It’s just that my happiness being with you has stopped being greater than the sadness I still feel from my mother’s death. I’m so sorry.”
Kaworu gave a small “Oh,” that was nearly lost in the sound of his sharp exhale. He brought one hand over his mouth, and walked slowly backward to sit back down on his bed, staring at the floor for a long time.
At last, Shinji lowered his hands from his eyes, and Kaworu lowered his from his mouth, and he said, “In truth, I had a feeling that something like this was coming.”
“I feel awful,” Shinji said. “This entire time I couldn’t stop thinking about how it was going to break your heart.”
Kaworu touched his fingertips to his chest. “I think that my heart is still intact,” he said. He pointed weakly to Shinji. “But yours is broken, and it nearly breaks mine to think that I couldn’t heal it.”
They didn’t go anywhere that day, and Kaworu didn’t even touch his violin.
“May I try something?” he asked after he and Shinji hadn’t spoken for a several hours.
“Yes,” said Shinji.
“I haven’t even told you what it is,” said Kaworu. “You don’t have to say yes out of guilt.”
Shinji twisted his fingers. “Okay.”
“May I kiss you?”
He was surprised when Shinji didn’t hesitate to say yes. He kissed Shinji, and Shinji kissed him back, and then not long after turned into a bird.
“I can tell that I don’t have very much time left with you,” said Kaworu to Shinji on the second to last day that he saw Shinji as a human. “So I’ve been saving what remains for something special. Shinji?” he asked, holding out his hand.
Shinji took it. “Yes?”
“It will be in the near future, so soon enough that you can see the end, but it also won’t be for a little while, so you have time to recover. But when that day comes, would you allow me to turn you into a human one last time? Would you tolerate your broken heart for a few more hours? And after that, I’ll never ask again.”
Shinji nodded.
Every year, the people in Kaworu’s town held a subdued little festival based around the summer meteor showers. Before dusk, each household made a ritual of extinguishing every light in the house so that there was nothing to distract from the nighttime sky. With each light extinguished, the person putting the light out thought of something from the past year for which they were thankful. This was important because, supposedly, the blessings counted would balance out the things they coveted when they wished on the passing meteors. Kaworu’s blessings were all related to Shinji.
Most people liked to watch the showers from the roofs of their homes, but Kaworu walked out to the meadow, Shinji perched on his shoulder. He left a bit early so that the two of them could venture out to the farther reaches, a good distance away from the others who would choose the same area.
“I like to think,” Kaworu said as he pushed his way through some tall grass, “that I have a small advantage in the wish-making department.” He emerged into a small clearing that Shinji had spotted from the air and to which Shinji had been guiding him the entire time. “You see, the tradition of wishing on the meteors started because a long time ago, people thought that the meteors were passing angels. So the people would save up their prayers for the nights of the showers, since that was when the angels were closest to earth and they had a better chance of receiving those prayers, so to speak.”
He held out his wrist for Shinji to hop onto, which Shinji did. Kaworu appreciated the way Shinji adjusted his footing to face him, and he stroked Shinji’s back while straining to make out the small yellow moons of his eyes.
“It’s since become a rather more agnostic practice, but those early villagers weren’t entirely off. My siblings do fly overhead with the meteors sometimes. And I have the benefit of being able to distinguish them from the meteors. I haven’t seen my siblings for some time now, but I think it’s possible that they might have heard me eventually, because my wish did come true in the end.”
He held Shinji close to him. “I wished every year that I could meet you,” he said before he kissed Shinji on the head and the first meteor of the night streaked across the sky above.
They spent the majority of the meteor shower in silence, holding hands with Shinji resting his head on Kaworu’s shoulder. The only time Kaworu spoke was to say, “Oh, that one was Arael. Now would be a good time to make your wish, before she’s too far away to hear it.”
“Thank you,” Shinji said.
It was, of course, bad form to ask somebody else what they’d wished for, but even if it weren’t, Kaworu wouldn’t have asked Shinji anyway. He had the feeling that the answer would have just made him sad.
That year, Kaworu wished for Shinji’s happiness.
He felt Shinji turn back into a bird during their walk back home. He’d been leading Shinji by the hand, and all of a sudden, Shinji’s hand wasn’t there anymore, and he felt the familiar talons on his shoulder. Back at the house, Kaworu sat awake in the darkness, Shinji’s sleeping form resting in his lap.
At last he thought it was safe enough to whisper, “I really was made for you,” to Shinji without waking him, though he didn’t dare touch, because that would be too much. “However, I know now that you were not made for me. I want you to be able to move on and be happy, and I can make it so. Just not the way I wanted.” He sighed. “I really thought that love would be enough.”
Then he took one last look at Shinji in the dark blue that filled his room.
“I know that your heart is broken, so I’ll give you mine to have instead. It’s been yours for a long time, anyway.”
He rested his head against the wall behind him and closed his eyes. In his dreams, he labored over Shinji’s unconscious body, trying to extract all the sharp fragments of his heart that were hurting him. He placed them into a bowl as he pulled them out, and when he took out the last one, it put a sliver in his finger that drew out his blue blood. He managed to wash the blood off, but the sliver wouldn’t come out, so he had to be extremely careful when he pulled out his own heart for the exchange.
The terrarium inside looked just as he’d always pictured, a beautiful array of miniature white and blue flowers to contrast the red chambers, and bright, lush greenery carpeting the spaces between. He knew he had to work fast, because the flowers would die if they were outside the body for too long, so he held the hand with the slivered finger against his stomach to keep Shinji safe while he gave his heart away. The flowers took to their new home, and quickly grew to fill the spaces in Shinji’s chest where his former, broken heart had left wounds.
Shinji had the same dream, and he awoke at that point, in human form and with a white crane asleep on the floor where Kaworu had been.
Kaworu hadn’t set foot inside a temple since the night that he and Armisael had parted in the meadow, so when Shinji carried him inside one in the dead of night, he could feel the atmosphere there begin to hum when his siblings sensed his arrival. Just as quickly, the humming became harsh static when they saw his body.
“Adam?” Shinji called, his voice echoing off the marble. “Adam, I brought Tabris back; please fix him.”
“Don’t call him that,” said a voice, and Armisael appeared before them in a flash. “You’re not allowed.”
“I’ll do anything you ask if you turn him back,” Shinji said, holding Kaworu out to her.
Though the top two of Armisael’s six wings shielded her eyes from onlookers, she pointed a damning finger through Kaworu to the place where Shinji’s heart was. “I can tell that’s his heart inside you,” she said. “That means Tabris gave it to you of his own free will, and Adam promised Tabris a long time ago that he wouldn’t intervene with that choice.”
“Can’t he give him a new one?” Shinji pleaded. “I’d make sure nothing would ever happen to it. I’ll love him as much as you do.”
Armisael lifted Kaworu from Shinji’s arms, and as soon as he was out of Shinji’s grasp, she barred Shinji from taking him back by closing the middle pair of her wings around him. “We don’t think that you should see him for a while,” she said. “You have his heart, but you don’t love like he does. Come back only when you know that you can.” She snapped the third pair of her wings together and, with another photographic flash, vanished with Kaworu back to heaven.
Back in heaven, she handed Kaworu over to Adam’s waiting hands, and Adam held him to his core again like nothing had changed.
Kaworu sympathized with Shinji; it was greatly preferable to be a bird. After Armisael brought him back home, he only ever willed himself to human form once to ask Adam, “Tell me, did it at least work? Was he able to move on with his life and heal?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “He’s doing very well.”
“I’m glad,” said Kaworu. Then he released his mind’s straining grasp on his human body and returned to the relative comfort of his avian form.
Adam placed him in a stellar nursery to rest. “We may still not understand them,” he said, “And maybe we never will. But if sending you to live among the humans has taught us anything, it is that they are evolving and changing all the time. To creatures like your siblings and myself, it seems almost mercurial. So don’t cry over him, Tabris. You’ll see each other again.”
Kaworu dreamed about carrying the pieces of Shinji’s heart around, trying to reassemble it over and over. He would build it very carefully, arranging the fragments like a house of cards, and a few times he nearly completed it before it would shiver back into pieces. He tried to grow flowers in the nooks of the larger pieces, using dust from the stellar nursery as soil, but in spite of his best attempts, the flowers never passed the seedling stage. Each failed attempt reaffirmed in his mind that he had made the right choice, and he continued to make the right choice by keeping himself away from Shinji now, for how could he ever ask him to come back to collect his heart when it was in this state?
He dreamed once of Adam offering to carve a new companion for him with a rib taken from the other side of his ribcage, so that it would be more balanced and a better match for Kaworu. Kaworu turned the offer down, because he remembered Adam saying that he could never make another one of Kaworu, and Kaworu wasn't about to force him. And besides, any new angel that he could summon up would inevitably have a core, and even if Adam crushed that angel's core into a heart too, the fact remained that Kaworu couldn't get his back.
In between dreams, he sometimes caught glimpses of Arael and Ireul racing each other across the sky alongside the track of the meteors, and he wondered if Shinji was making any wishes upon them. Taking pity on him, Armisael carried him in her arms along that path every now and then, and he listened for anything coming from the Earth that sounded like Shinji's voice. Do you hear him at all? he asked Armisael through their mental bond.
No, she said, But then again, he might not have seen me. Would you like us to try again?
No, that's alright, said Kaworu, and without another word, Armisael returned him to his resting place.
He fell back asleep and dreamed of a journey across the sky where he did catch Shinji's voice calling to him. The sound brought him back to the inside of the temple, remembering the urgency in Shinji's step as he ran to seek help. I brought Tabris back, he said, carrying Kaworu up the steps to the altar.
Don't call him that, said Armisael.
Tabris, Shinji said, framed against the outline of the temple door this time. Tabris?
Tabris, said Adam's voice in his mind, There's somebody here to see you.
Kaworu opened his eyes to find that he'd been sleeping on the altar.
"Kaworu," said Shinji from the other side of the aisle, and then he broke into a run, sweeping Kaworu up into his arms when he reached him. "I've missed you."
Kaworu nuzzled the underside of his chin, although he would have preferred to be able to see Shinji properly. It had been hard to tell from across the room, but Shinji had seemed more lively and whole since the last time they'd been together. As if he could tell, Shinji set him back down on the altar top so they could take in the sight of one another. "How have you been?" Shinji asked. "You still look beautiful."
Kaworu wanted to tell Shinji the same. Up close, he could see that he hadn't been wrong about Shinji looking like he was doing better. He had more color to his cheeks, and though the color of his eyes remained the same, they had an expressive emotional depth to them that hadn't been there before.
Shinji ran a finger down Kaworu's left wing all the way down to the black feathers of his wingtip. Their inky shade was the same as Shinji's feathers had been. "People have been wondering where you went. I told them that you’d gone to visit family for a while, and I was looking after your place until you were back. They've all missed you, too." He ran his hand down Kaworu's back. “But I missed you most of all."
It looks like you've found me again, Kaworu wanted to say.
Shinji lowered himself a little so that he could be eye-level with Kaworu. He tilted his head forward slightly, and Kaworu took the invitation to rub their foreheads together. "Your heart has been a wonderful gift," Shinji said. "But the entire time I've had it, I couldn't stop thinking of it not as a gift, but merely as a loan. At the same time, to call you back after so long just so I could hand it back, that seemed like such an ungrateful thing to do. So I spent a lot of time thinking, about healing myself, and about you and I. I actually came back to this temple asking for you several times, but your family must not have thought that I was ready until now. Looking back on it, I think they were probably right. They would know your heart, after all.”
Kaworu wasn't sure where this was going; Shinji had just said he couldn't give Kaworu's heart back, and by the same token, Kaworu couldn't saddle Shinji with only the pieces of his and undo all his progress.
"Kaworu," said Shinji with a wide smile, and his eyes looked a bit damp as he said it. "I'm giving half of your heart back today." He bent down and gave Kaworu a long kiss on the top of his head.
Then, from his seat atop the altar, Kaworu wrapped his arms around Shinji's shoulders and held him close.
"It's my turn to be sorry now," he said into Shinji's ear, voice ragged from underuse. "For not having faith in you, for doubting that you loved me in return."
"Of course I love you," Shinji said, turning to kiss Kaworu's temple. "You were made for me."
"May I kiss you?" Kaworu asked.
"Yes," said Shinji.
They kissed, and afterward, Shinji pulled Kaworu down off the altar so that they could walk home together. As they exited the temple, Kaworu shook a few lingering black feathers off his sleeve.