Chapter Text
Terminal Station smells like a gas station bathroom and buzzes with too many people for an hour before midnight. Kotone hefts her modest luggage closer to her side to avoid the man stumbling by yelling at his wife on the phone and looks between her mp3 player and the train charts. They’re all off by at least half an hour. Her train is due to arrive any minute, but even if it pulled up in the next few seconds it would have been twenty-nine minutes late. Strange, for Terminal Station, which usually runs pretty consistently.
Someone near her yawns, and she rubs at one of her eyes and cranks her music a little louder. Just for the help to stay awake.
She boards her train, luggage squeaking behind her, and gets a seat. Her music is American, something with longing and love but a strong baseline and guitar, and she turns it down so that she doesn’t bother the elderly woman sitting across the aisle. Her heart is thumping faster than the drums in her song and she doesn’t really know why.
You’ll see them all soon, she thinks, and her tapping foot pauses.
See who? She thinks, trying to roll her mind back to that thought from before, trying to understand it. It feels like nostalgia, like warmth.
She doesn’t know why.
“This is the final train bound for Tatsumi Port Island,” says the announcer as the doors slide shut, and for some reason she feels like she’s heading home, rather than somewhere new.
It’s two minutes to midnight when the train pulls into its stop, and she’s one of two to disembark. Her shoes squeak on the yellow line. It’s so dark, but it’s only a few blocks. She’s walked farther.
Her song is in the middle of the crescendo, the American artist’s voice hitting a hell of a high note when it suddenly stops. She almost doesn’t notice, because at the same time her cute brown shoes splash into a puddle that’s sticky and russet colored and most certainly blood –
The Dark Hour.
She stops, one foot still raised. Her music is dead in her ears, and she stares at the way the scarlet runs down her white sock and drip-drip-drips into the puddle below.
The what?
The…
Her stomach lurches. She stumbles. Her vision blurs and her head aches and for a moment she hears a lyre, but then it's giant metal wings that she hears, and then it’s nothing at all and –
And —
—
…
You feel a little sleepy…
No, Kotone thinks. She isn’t sleepy. She’s exhausted. Kotone is so tired. Her limbs are heavy. Her head is heavy. The pleat on Aigis’ skirt is pressing lines into her cheek but she can’t feel them, not really. The effort it is taking to breathe in, for her lungs to expand and raise her chest enough for the air to reach her, is quickly becoming too much.
She feels like she’s been awake for a hundred years, even though she slept in so late this morning she almost missed the graduation ceremony. But if she closes her eyes, she knows they won’t open again, and she’s …
She’s not afraid. She isn’t even sure she’s sad, really. She thinks, now that she’s here at the end, that maybe this was always how it was going to be. She thinks of standing in front of Yukari on that roof months ago, with a scrape on her knee stinging from falling and an unfamiliar piece of cold metal in her hand. She thinks of pulling a trigger with a barrel to her face. She thinks of the power, the fire of her emotions blowing her auburn hair around her face and twisting her pajamas around her legs as a lyre rages hell in her head until Orpheus appears for her.
She thinks of recognizing Orpheus, and she thinks she knows that she has always known that this is where she would be, when things finally ended.
“You can close your eyes,” Aigis says softly. Aigis’ voice is always so soft. “I’ll always remain here by your side.”
She wants to listen to Aigis. She wants to close her eyes. Her lashes are carrying the sky and she wants to finally drop the weight. She wants to rest.
But – But Aigis shouldn’t have to stay. She should be free to move on, and –
Distantly, there’s the sound of a door swinging open. She thinks Junpei might be yelling something but she can’t make out the words.
Aigis says something else. Kotone can see her lips move. Aigis has perfect skin, because it’s not real skin at all. She’s beautiful in the way porcelain dolls are beautiful, but just then the wet tears on her lashes and the furrow of her delicate eyebrows and the wobble of her mouth make her look so human.
You’re getting sleepier…
Your eyelids feel heavy.
Kotone’s eyes fall to half mast, and all she can see is the brilliant, blinding blue of Aigis’ eyes. Brighter than the sky, truer blue than the sea or any stone.
“Sh…” she starts, with a strength she didn’t know she had, and then, with the last of her air, “Shinji.”
She loses sight of Aigis, because her eyes do close.
Kotone Shiomi dies at age sixteen, sometime during the day of March 5th 2010.
And then she wakes up again a year earlier.