Chapter Text
Sometimes on those days where he could no longer handle the weight of his life, Shinji simply left the house. With all the release of the falsely accused leaving a successful trial, he walked out of his apartment and down the stairs, out of the lobby with nothing more than himself, a jacket, and the old SDAT he'd dug out of the attic when he left his dad and left the old childhood home he'd practically haunted by the time he'd turned seventeen. He never really left with a location in mind, as he much preferred to engrave himself into the curves of the music staff than have the liberty to think much about anything at times like these.
This time, he found himself near the shore of a beach.
It was February, and the stark white clouds that covered the sky matched the washed concrete of the boardwalk and the granulated-sugar sand on the beach. It matched the snow falling so slowly that it might as well not have been falling at all, and, the strangest out of all of these, it matched the impossibly pale skin of the boy he found standing next to him, smiling lightly at the sea and leaning his weight against the cold metal railing of the boardwalk's edge.
In his many days of walking, Shinji had found it becoming increasingly uncommon to see a face he hadn't before, meandering the streets on the edge of the city where he lived. Sometimes he mixed up the faces of people here with those back home.
This one, he was sure belonged to neither.
As if he was wearing the headphones himself and hearing the same melodies as Shinji always did, the boy turned to meet his gaze, his warm smile filling in the silence between the fading out of one piano and the fading in of another.
"Hello."
"Oh, ah...hello." He said, surprised that the other boy seemed unaffected by his unprecedented staring, and surprised that the snow seemed to have stopped moving altogether, and seemed to have entered a stasis to allow for their meeting.
"If I may ask, what are you doing out here by the water, on a cold day like this?"
"Ah, well," I much prefer walking to anything I might find myself thinking while alone in my apartment on a day like this. "I could ask you the same thing..."
"I suppose that's fair," he laughed, easy and unconcerned, "I'm Kaworu, Nagisa Kaworu, but you can just call me Kaworu."
Kaworu looked at him patiently, lifting himself off of the railing and sliding his hands into the pockets of a heather-grey jacket.
"Ikari Shinji, but, ah, Shinji is fine for me." Kaworu smiles at him, and Shinji turns his eyes to the ground.
"Well, I do hope we can meet again, Shinji." He turned on his heel, waving a hand over his shoulder and beginning to hum, and a smug voice in Shinji's mind that sounds all too like his mother asks him if maybe he thinks he's found something more worth listening to than the same three tracks playing through his headphones.
It's not until he's all the way back on his apartment building's doorstep that he realizes the snow had begun to fall again.