Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ The Children's Crusade ❯ Shadow and Flame ( Chapter 3 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

The Children's Crusade Alrighty then, here you go. Hope you enjoy it...more than me I mean. Damn thing kept me up sometimes until 3 in the morning to finish out a chapter or so. But I guess it was all worth it. New chapter spacing indicators will be marked by the presence of four of these ~~~~ instead of the usual three. I'm taking the summer off to prepare myself to go to college, but I'm still writing. Just not posting. So all of my avid fan-haters, just rest awhile. M'kay? ^_-
Seldon.















Asuka rounded the last corner of the building, her mouth screaming curses and insults for the poor boy she was sent to rescue; while her mind tuned out the incessant stream of commands that flowed from the purple-haired Misato. She rounded the last corner.
And stopped.
Eva Unit-01 was crawling up the side of a building, hands forced through the thick steel skin and tempered glass windows so as to serve as a handhold, half out of the black ink that covered the road and the roads beyond it.
Then, the ink boiled.
Thousands of strands shot out of that darkness and latched themselves onto the Eva. Asuka never saw when they pulled.
But then Shinji was falling into the darkness. Screaming once more before he fell totally in.
"MISATO-"
Static.
"ASUKA! THE SHADOW!"
Asuka jumped, screaming out as she climbed slowly to safety.
She felt her soul catch fire and burn. Slowly.
"Shinji."
The city was sinking around her.
"Asuka, Rei...pull out now." Misato's voice wasn't reassuring in the least as to Shinji's fate. Asuka could hear the tears roll down her face even as she spoke those words to the remaining two pilots.
"But--"
"--Ikari and Unit 01 are still in there," Rei's soft tone actually raising a bit as she cut through Asuka's protest. The small holograph of Misato shuddered as she repeated herself, with two thin lines of silver lining her high cheeks.
Asuka wanted to cry.
'Shinji...'
The power cord was still pulling in.



Shinji wanted to sleep.
He wanted so very badly to sleep. Yet, he could not. Because it was tiring to sleep, every time he closed his eyes his body ached and hurt so badly that the very pains that should have sent him blissfully into the dark kept him awake.
"I never knew..." his voice failed him in the end. Everything was failing him.
A slight movement, a metallic click that bounced crazily throughout the entire metal entry plug. Light, glaring, dazzling, pulsating, strobing light flooded that small tube. The elaborate sequence that connected the walls of that plain, smooth surface to the eyes of the beast itself.
A sea of white.
"It hasn't changed..."
Shinji shifted his eyes downwards, to the small LCD timer on the backside of his hand. Little orange-red numbers flashed and darted on that flat, glossy panel. Signifying the time passed since he had entered this endless hell of light and noise. Signifying what little time was left until the Evangelion he was in totally died. Counting down towards his death.
'How....strange,' his mind felt as though he were slogging through a road made of thick, clingy mud. 'How....strange, that the inside of this....whatever this is; is white.' This wasn't a new thought to him. Indeed, it was the first thought he had even the sense to ask himself after he went to minimal life support.
He didn't know the answer then.
He still didn't now. Shinji felt his eyes drift shut again. He felt a sinking, deep inside his chest as his numb fingers found the small depression in the butterfly handles.
Another metallic click, a shifting of the hands.
'....soon....I won't even be able to look outside....'
Then the darkness fell across his eyes, and his wearied mind drifted deep inside of itself. Never noticing the small flickering of light that crested across the top of the smooth wall before him. A light blue, reminiscent of water perhaps....floating in a momentary flicker right across from the boy who sat alone, surrounded by several thousand metric tons of metal, organics, and weapons.
All alone, in the night.

Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
A flash. Light. The light of a dying sun.
Shinji felt his body chill in that sunlight. He felt cold, despite all of the heat coming from that bloody crimsoned sun. He was in a tram. Circling around Tokyo-3. He could see everything, the streets, the cars, the houses, the markets, the skyscrapers....and two Evangelions. One red, the other blue; facing a white-striped black sphere in the sky.
"H-how did I get here?"
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
He wasn't supposed to be there, on a tram circling the outskirts of the city! He was supposed to be in his Evangelion! He was supposed to be defending the city! He was--....he was supposed to be dying. Shinji's eyes went wide as he sat there. Motionless as from the same moment he realized where he was.
"This....is impossible?"
He felt panic, that oily sickness like a surging tide, rise up from the small core of ice that had now hardened and lumped around the center of his breast. He nearly let it sweep him, nearly let it overwhelm his mind and let it snap the already strained bonds that held him to sanity.
But he did not. He forced it at bay.
'No! You are not here! This is a dream, you are in the Evangelion, sitting in the middle of a shadow that is now a sea of light and noise! Keep calm damn you!'
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
If he had been expecting an answer, from whom he was not sure, perhaps himself? He never received one. Only the rhythmic pounding of the tram's brightly polished wheels on the joints in the track kept him company in that moment of panic.
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Wait....something else. Something about that last. It sounded all like the rest true, but there was something--wrong--about it! A feeling that made it ring false in Shinji's mind. But what? What? There, there it was again! A faint hissing, like steam. But not a loud hissing, rather the opposite. As though somebody was exhaling their lungs through the thin slits of their teeth, each passing moment sounding less than the before.
'What is it?'
Shinji pushed down upon the worn padding of the tram's bench, and heaved himself to his feet. They never made it. The world spun. A jumbling kaleidoscope of color and motion, mixing and changing until up was left and right was to the South.
Shinji opened his eyes. Around him, the air was permeated by the thick, viscous liquid that Doctor Akagi had named LCL. A foul taste in the best of times, with it's ever-present smell of--....blood!
Quickly his eyes darted around, peering into the murk of the entry plug. Here and there sat small particles; clumps of white waste that floated easily in the dense LCL.
"The purification system is breaking down!" Shinji felt panic return, forced it aside, taking a deep breath to stabilize him. The smell hit him.
He gagged on the intensity of it, folding himself double as he clenched his hands to the nose on his face. Panic surged throughout his body, permeated every pore, filled every crevice; until he could hold onto himself no more.
"Blood! It smells like blood!" he gurgled, his words making large surges of bubbles to break through the liquid filling his lungs. Shinji never felt his sanity snap, "Get me out of here!" His fingers pried the emergency release levers up and his wrists gave a sharp twist.
Jammed.
A fist, his fist! Pounded the small metal hatch. "LET ME OUT! GET ME OUT OF THIS PLACE! MISATO, WHAT'S GOING ON! MISATO! Misato--....Asuka! Ayanami! Ritsuko!....Father...." the last nearly drowned out by the sob that erupted from deep inside of his midsection. He was trembling, hanging on to those two jammed levers. Sobs wracking his body from crown to heel.
"Please....somebody help me?"

Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Shinji stared out across the empty tram car and through the grimy windows that lined it. Staring out at the city that he had failed to protect. 'Is that why I'm dreaming of this? To punish myself by watching the city I was supposed to protect flash by in my last moments?'
"Do you really think that you can decide that?"
Shinji started, his head violently snapping twice in quick succession; so fast that a person might not have noticed it but for the abrupt shifting of his short brown locks.
Shinji stared across from him, stared at the source of the voice that had spoken to him in this bleak, crimson-colored place. He wasn't alone anymore.
A shape, a figure. Small....a boy?
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Something passed by, making noise. A warning signal?
"Who--?" Shinji started, not knowing what he should say or ask.
"Who?" the voice calmly replied, in a deep tone edged with ice. "Shinji Ikari."
"But that's me!" Shinji protested.
"I am you," the voice continued. "This self incorporates another self. This self has always been composed of two selfs."
It made no sense. None at all! "Two?" Shinji cautiously asked.
The figure became a little clearer. No longer just a figure, now clothes and hair could be seen on that shaded boy. "Yes, the self that is observed and the self that observes the other. To expound: the Shinji Ikari that exists in your mind is only one Shinji Ikari--"
Lunacy!
"--There is also the Shinji Ikari in Misato Katsuragi's mind, the Shinji Ikari in Asuka Sohryu's mind, the Shinji Ikari in Rei Ayanami's mind, and the Shinji Ikari in Gendo Ikari's mind. All are different Shinji Ikari's, but each of them is a true Shinji Ikari."
More light: a striped shirt of blue and white, pulled low on one shoulder; brown hair. A kid, no more than four or five. 'I'm going insane!' Shinji could only stare horrifically at the boy as he continued on.
"Your fear is of the Shinji Ikari's who exist in the minds of others."
Shinji found himself replying, "I'm just afraid of being hated." Even his voice sounded weak and feeble when compared to the steady, low flow of words that came from the small boy. But now that changed, the words became....accusing.
"You're afraid of being hurt."
The sun hung directly above the boy's head, his face a swarth of shadows. Suddenly: a question. "Who is bad?"
"Father is," came the even reply.
Shinji's head dropped sharply, "No! I'm the one who's bad!"
Something flickered through his head. 'Asuka?' She was saying something, a scene from earlier that week and another from earlier that same day. Both times she had been angry with him, for a reason he could not fathom. Then another voice, his own.
Then Misato's, a gentle and reassuring tone directed to him.
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
Tchumpp.
"....Father...."
Ayanam i slapping him on that elevator. Asking him whether he trusted his own father. A father that had abandoned him! Then....his father, praising him after he halted the Tenth.
As if he knew what Shinji was thinking, the boy gently asked, "Will you spend the rest of your life regurgitating and re-digesting those few pleasant memories?"
Shinji frowned and stared hard at his clenched hands, folded tightly into the dark cloth of his slacks. "If I trust in their words, it will be enough! Enough to keep me alive!"
Alive to protect them.
"Even though you are deceiving yourself?" the voice pressed, the small boy never shifting an inch.
"Everybody does it! That's how everybody survives!" Shinji feebly defended.
"If you do not believe that you can change yourself, you will never be able to continue." The boy was dogged, he would not relent!
"This world is filled with too much pain and suffering to go on!"
But you do....to protect them, don't you?
"For example," the boy ignored Shinji's last statement. "You can't swim?"
"Humans aren't made to float!"
"Self-deception."
He is correct.
"I don't care what you think!" Shinji nearly shouted at the shadow covered boy.
When did you start talking? Shinji stopped....staring wide at the surroundings. The boy never shifted, never moved, did not even breath. 'What in hell...?'
A flood of images erupted. Toji grinding his fist into Shinji's stomach; pain as well, from that blow? How? Voices. Kensuke. Misato. Father. Overwhelming him, more....more. More!
"No! I don't want to hear this!" Shinji cried to the boy, pressing his palms hard against his ears. As if to shut out the boy's calm and firm voice.
It pierced his defenses anyway, "See? You are running away from reality again. No one can justify their existence by linking their happy moments into a rosary. In particular, I cannot--" the voice faded, blurred, shifted, echoed. The alarm, that high whining was coming around again.
Shinji trembled with rage, fury, something he had experience only a handful of times in his life. Suddenly he shot up, opened his mouth and screamed: "WHY WON'T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!" The silence of the tram was shattered, even the rhythmic tchumpp, tchummp, tchumpp faded into the distance.
Everything faded into the distance.
Except the images....oh, those images.
"....Father...?"
Newspapers, headlines, pictures, accusations, denials, rumors. Then....his father walking away from him. Leaving him a boy of no more than four behind him as he walked forward to bigger and greater things.
'Father....don't you want me?'
Silence. The man walked in silence. Not even his shoes, scraping against the rough concrete, made a noise.
"FATHER!"
"It was yourself that you ran from, wasn't it?" that voice, the boy. HIMSELF! HIMSELF!
More papers. More....more....more....MORE! Then: his mother.
'No! Mother was....smiling....'
Misato, speaking to him after his first fight. His first experience in the hell that was Evangelion. His father, still walking away from him. Misato again, encouraging him. "I hate this place...." for once, the boy was silent. "I hate this loneliness...."

Shinji opened his eyes and bleakly surveyed the increasingly clouded LCL swirling around him. It felt as though he was swimming in the North Pole, and he very nearly coughed as he rapidly sucked in cloudy-white LCL.
"....T-the heat sy-stem and th-the oxygen are giving out...." Shinji pulled himself tightly into a fetal position, trying desperately to conserve his warmth. His eyes burned from the sleep he had, fitful and filled with nightmares. Or were they dreams at all?
On his hand, the LCD panel beeped steadily, a solitary orang-red blip marking the slow countdown to the suits existence. Marking the slow death of one Shinji Ikari.
'....These are as the footsteps of Doom....' was all he could think, hearing the slow, plodding beep of his dying suit echo around him. "E-even the suit is giving out...."
Then, the echo died away. Everything became quiet.
"....s-so tired....of everything....this is my end."
Shinji closed his eyes once more, and drifted back to his dreams. Finally, the cold, wearied, worn, frayed, bunched muscles of his face relaxed. And he looked at peace.

It was still quiet when Shinji woke.
He was sitting on that padded bench again. In that damnable railway tram.
But....it wasn't moving. It was still.
And the world was dark outside.
'....Am I dead?' Shinji asked himself. The doors directly ahead of him slid aside. 'Doors? There were no doors there!' Panic began it's oily surge up into the throat. But he stood, and walked through those doors. Never truly realizing that he had done so until they slid shut behind him. A great, booming sound. As though someone had thrown the shutter back on a great spotlight. And a spotlight it was.
From high above, so high that Shinji could not see the beginning of it....and at the end. There was a small, metal folding chair there. Set precisely on the floor so that it faced him across the old floor of hardened oak boards.
It looked inviting.
Then, a ripple in the shadows behind the chair. A sudden movement. A boy stepped out, causing Shinji to catch his breath in his throat, thinking: 'Not again! Not again!'
But this wasn't the same boy. This boy....was different.
Deep chocolate hair, hanging thick and rich across his deep black clothing framed a face that could not have been over the age of ten. With no creases, no lines, no wrinkles of worry or care set into the smooth, creamy skin.
The eyes though....swirls of thunderclouds, deep gray the color of impending tumult. Shinji felt a knee buckle underneath that stare of the boy's. Felt the other give way as he watched that young man place his hands on the back of the chair.
"Not for you," came the voice, mixed with a miasma of tones and pitches from high to low. "Yet a span to weave, before your Age comes to the end. This....is not for you."
The light suddenly switched off, with the same loud and reverberating boom as it had come.
"Wait!" was all Shinji had time to cry before he was left in the dark. "....I don't want to be alone...." He curled up once more. Huddling as he knew he had done in the entry plug. The plug....so far....so distant now.
A whisper.
Shinji's head perked up from the tangled mass of his arms and limbs, "W- who's there?"
Light. A touch. A person! A luminescent being of transparent colors with a long, flowing mane of hair in the same hue and tone. A whisper, a touch.
Something....
"....Mother?"

The boy watched the darkness intently.
Two pulses of blue light, distorted and wavy as though underneath a thick layer of water, shone briefly and brightly through the eternal darkness of this world.
His world.
"It has begun again," was all he said.
And then....he was gone.

Kaji walked briskly through the long, slightly lit passage.
It wasn't as long as some of the other passages and corridors of NERV's immense headquarters. But it was still longer than what many people considered a brisk walk around the park. But there was a reason for that, a very good reason.
A guard stepped out before Kaji could get any further down the hall. Raising his hands, the guard motioned for Kaji to stop; one hand steady on the small pistol holstered by his hip.
"I'm sorry sir, I've been instructed to allow no one but ranking members dow--"
Kaji had the man unconscious before he could finish. He didn't touch the weapon though, nor did he touch much of anything else on the man. Preferring to let him fall heavily to the floor as he strode on by.
"Sorry, but I have no time to waste talking to you."
The remark was somewhat apologetic, and Kaji made a mental notation of the man's name and face. It wouldn't be very wise to run into him in the halls of NERV. It might get....complicated, then. His step quickened, and Kaji peered intently at the bunched numbers at each passing door. Then, with a quick backstep, Kaji reached for one of the keypads that was set to the right of every door and tapped in a quick, six digit combination. A hiss, a whoosh as the air inside was depressurized, and the door slid aside with a loud scraping of metal on ungreased metal.
The inside of the room was hardly any better looking than the corridor outside. Dark, barren, lined with only a cot, a chair, and a combined washbasin and toilet. But the most important thing the room held was the man who was just now raising his head off of one supporting arm to look at Kaji.
"Hello?"
Kaji smiled, "Time to check out."
The Old Man smiled, "Are we going somewhere? Mr. Ryouji Kaji?"
Kaji felt his smile fade and quickly motioned for the Old Man to stand on his feet. "Yes, we're leaving here. The sooner, the better."
"Ah," the Old Man stood from his cot and quickly patted his pockets down. Then frowned as if realizing he was missing something that was very important to him. Kaji pulled out a small, heavy plastic bag and tossed it to him just as he was turning back towards the door. The Old Man caught his possessions with a grin, "Well, it was a lovely stay. Free food, free quarters, free absence of light...."
Kaji gave a small laugh in spite of himself. 'Yes....it is quite dark here.'
The spy took the lead, one hand clasped tentatively around the pistol he kept in his pocket as he cautiously peered around corners and through open doors.
The Old Man followed behind, moving quietly as a mouse.



Night was falling across Tokyo-3.
And the Evangelion known as Unit 01, was still trapped deep inside the inky blackness of the Twelfth Angel. Asuka stared bleakly across the city, silently watching the few remaining towers near the outskirts of that shadow hang awkwardly in the windy night air.
'Shinji....you idiot!'
Asuka refocused herself on the meeting. Doctor Akagi was giving a small lecture as to what that black shadow was, detailing something from one of her higher-level physics/mathematics classes. Dirac Sea. A hole in the Universe. A place where the fabric of matter is taken away and where new matter fell inside. Something that was technically, impossible to make outside of a vacuum.
'But here it is....and Shinji is now in it,' Asuka's lips curled down slightly, frowning as she heard Doctor Akagi continue to ramble on about her theories and conjectures about the Angel. Asuka's eyes drifted over to the Angel, or rather....the shadow of the Angel. If what Akagi was saying was true.
A strange, pale-green light bathed the underside of the Angel as it hung there in the night sky. An unearthly light that came from nowhere, and yet lit up everything around the dark circle that had taken so much of the city.
"....So the image is a shadow, and the shadow is the Angel...." Misato was saying, turning her head back to look at the hovering monstrosity. Most of the bridge crew turned to watch with her. A few eyes betrayed fear, a few: concern. Misato's were covered with a sheen of unshed tears. She had taken it badly.
"There's no way we can fight it," Asuka whispered to herself. Her hair shifted as a gust of wind suddenly picked up and shout out over the city, heading away from the gathered NERV crews and their two remaining Evangelions.
Both were kneeled down, heads bowed. As if they were already mourning their lost comrade. 'No! Shinji's still alive! He's still alive damn it!'
Rei noticed the sudden twitch in Asuka's face, a small moment of frustration and anger....and perhaps sorrow. 'For Ikari?' She looked back out across the city, and remembered a time not to long ago. They did not know Asuka then, and her Evangelion was painted a different color. A very uncertain time for NERV back then. Much as it was now.
Rei closed her eyes and leaned back against the armored vehicle.
Mount Futago.
The Fifth Angel.
The first shot, and the counter-fire that warped and swerved around each other as the charged electrons and ions interacted and shifted and jumped and changed until the two beams curved completely around one another.
Only to continue on, in a different path.
An explosion, both nearby and in the /p>

city. Captain, now Major Katsuragi screaming through the commlinks for Shinji to move and buy the NERV crews some time. Shinji wrenching handfuls of power connections and jumper trucks with him as he hastily slid his Eva down the mountain. "I'm getting another high energy reading from the target!"
Voices, as though far off....underwater.
A flash, directed at Shinji. Who was still swinging the barrel around and into position for his next shot. The startled cry of alarm and surprise as the bright beam of death sped for his motionless Eva.
Then....everything went white.
A grinding sound, of metal slicing through an adamantium surface that wasn't quite strong enough to resist. She could feel the shield melting in her hands as it bore the brunt of the Fifth Angel's attack. Burning. The armor on the Evangelion was sloughing off as well. Liquefying under the intense heat that washed over her with the super-charged electron particles.
Then the shield was no more.
Darkness. Darkness and pain.
A burning sear that overwhelmed her small mind.
Then, someone shouting. A light touch on her shoulders. Shinji.
"...I-Ikari."
The boy looked surprised, and relieved. There were tears in his eyes.
A jet roared overhead, Rei snapped her eyes open.
Misato was still discussing the matter of the Dirac Sea with Doctor Akagi, with the rest of the NERV staff contributing their ideas and thoughts as they felt appropriate.
'Mount Futago," her left arm came up to clutch at her right elbow. A habit that she had picked up from somewhere, perhaps nowhere. Yet it felt....natural. If felt right to be holding onto herself like that.
It felt familiar.
She remembered something then, something that Shinji had said to her as they both limped away from the wrecks of their respective Evangelions. It was poetic....something she never expected to hear from him.
"We might not have anything right now but Eva, but as long as we are still alive....then someday we can be glad that we survived. It might be far down ahead of us....but let's live on."
Rei let a small frown creep to her lips as she recalled that, the moon had been full that night. Just as it was this night. Here they were again, on Mount Futago. Planning the death of another enemy.
But now Shinji wasn't here.

The office was colder than ever.
"Ikari," Kouzo began.
The commander of NERV looked away from the expansive window once, then turned back to watching the dark horizon. "Agent Kaji has released the captive." Kouzo sighed slightly, "I should have guessed. Did you engineer it?"
"No," Gendo said, a slight quirk in his lips that might have been a smile. "Though I did let him know indirectly about his new "acquaintance" that was being held in the detention centers."
Kouzo gave a halfhearted smile at Gendo's explanation and felt his left eyebrow rise as his right furrowed down. "I don't suppose you will tell me why you did that?"
"Only because he would draw too much attention to himself if I released him personally."
"And having him broken out won't?" Kouzo said in shock.
Gendo turned his head to the right and watched the lights of some car flash along one of the many roads that crossed across and around the Geofront. "He will draw attention yes....but it will not be linked to me."
Kouzo kept his half-smile on and began to think darkly of his former student. 'Yes....not be linked to you. But what makes him so important that you wouldn't just wait?'
Suddenly, Gendo pivoted around and crisply sat down in his empty seat. His gloved palms spreading out over the cool metal top of his desk. There was a file in Kouzo's hands, he noticed. Gendo gave the file a questioning glance and prompted Kouzo to hand it over.
"One of our agents just reported in," Kouzo picked up where he had originally left off. Kaji releasing a prisoner was secondary to the information he had now. "He was trapped inside a shelter until about an hour ago. Apparently, the power was cut when the Angel started taking most of Tokyo-3 into itself."
Gendo flipped through the first few pages of text, and then picked the whole document up. "A man, dressed as a western priest....calling for the citizens of Tokyo-3 to repent of the Satanic Whore, NERV, and beg God for forgiveness." Gendo finished that line and sat the papers down.
"I think we have an insurrectionist on our hands." Gendo nodded to Kouzo's assessment and then pushed the file back over to the older man. He reached for his seldom-used desk drawers and pulled out a file of his own. Kouzo felt his breath catch as he saw the seven-eyed shield of Seele emblazoned in gilt on the black front.
"We have something a little more dangerous, I believe...."

It was a rare occasion that Kaji used his car in Tokyo-3.
Usually, he only needed it when he was going out of town, or over to pick up a date to go out for dinner and drinks afterwards. That was happening less and less these days. But he never really used the car for anything else but that, preferring to walk in the crowds of people and feel the heartbeat of the city. Except, these were unusual times to say the least.
An Angel above, with Gendo Ikari's vaunted Eva Unit 01 trapped somewhere inside that deep void of space midnight. That....creation....that held the soul of--
'Dangerous thoughts their Kaji-boy, keep them reigned in.'
Kaji glanced away from the road for a few seconds, trying to see if his passenger was still as calm as he had been when they left. Kaji grimaced at that placid, calm face. It wasn't exactly an easy departure, what with a few dozen armed NERV guards descending on Kaji's car. Trying to re- apprehend the Old Man.
'I hate getting shot at.'
His face fell even further when he studied the long line of bullet holes that punctured along the top of the hood and then popped back out along the right side of his car.
'The engine sounds worse than two miles back....might have to get a new one unless this can be fixed.' The windshield was partially destroyed as well, with a gaping hole over on the driver's side, punched out by Kaji so he could see. It had been one hell of a ride.
"Tell me Mr. Kaji, are you a gardener?"
Kaji blinked, and half-turned his head over to the still calm passenger. "We just got shot at by several armed guards, nearly killed by them I might add, and came this close," Kaji narrowed his thumb and forefinger to a millimeter apart. "From getting arrested. You know what they would do to us?"
"Kill us I assume."
Kaji shuddered, then took a deep breath to calm himself. He didn't much enjoy being shot at. He enjoyed it less than when he had people trying to kill him. Spying was one thing, that came with the job. Seeking the dirty secrets of NERV was another thing, he wanted to do that. But getting killed while rescuing somebody was NOT on his agenda at the moment.
Kaji hated being shot at.
Almost as much as he hated being flustered.
"Where now?" the Old Man asked.
Kaji grimly pressed his lips together and gunned the flagging engine, "Anywhere away from here."



The car was parked.
Well, more like pulled over to a convenient side of the road so that it wouldn't block any traffic coming either way. Kaji hadn't voluntarily decided to stop here....but it beats having a dead and destroyed vehicle going down the side of the mountain.
"What do they intend to do?"
Kaji looked over at the Old Man and then back down at the unlit cigarette. With a small flick of his fingers, he set the small tube of dried leaf spinning off into the darkness beyond his car. "I don't know, but whatever it is....it won't be good for Shinji."
The Old Man sighed, "Ah, Shinji. How long has it been..?"
"Almost sixteen hours," came Kaji's heavy reply.
The Old Man looked confused, as if he had asked different question and received the wrong answer. "Is that bad?"
Kaji turned and walked across the deserted highway, taking up a position next to the Old Man. They stared out across the vast valley beneath them, down into what used to be Tokyo-3. Now....just a sea of darkness, that illuminated a striped Angel above.
"Sixteen hours is how long Shinji can survive," Kaji said, rolling his tongue around in the pause. As if he was tasting a soured drink. "Before he....before--"
"Before he dies?" the Old Man put in.
Kaji nodded, then reached for another cigarette. He pulled it out, then hesitated just before the filter touched his lips. He brought it back down again, and studied it in the dim light. A light that was coming from far- off Mount Futago.
'Kill an Angel once from there,' he bitterly though as his fingers rolled the paper and leaves around in his hands. 'Maybe they think some luck remains for them to kill this one?' Kaji found the cigarette lit and half gone before he even realized it.
The Old Man pulled free his pipe and tobacco pouch and slowly tapped in the cured leaves. From the same pouch he pulled an old lighter, and carefully shielded its flame from the wind as he pulled the leaves alight. A curl of smoke whipped free of the corner of his mouth, and the Old Man smacked his lips as if tasting a sweet delight that he had never had since his childhood.
"Today is Thursday."
Kaji blinked, then ground his spent cigarette underneath his heel.
"Shinji will be back. He has not visited me in a long time....but today is Thursday. And I believe he will come back to see me."
"We should get going," Kaji said as he turned to head down the mountain.



Rei watched the argument calmly.
She said nothing as Doctor Akagi suggested the use of all the World's remaining N2 mines against the Angel as both Asuka and herself activated their AT-Fields in an attempt to destroy the Angel. She said nothing as Major Katsuragi heatedly asked about the safety of Pilot Ikari during the event of such an explosion. She never blinked as Doctor Akagi threw back a vehement comment that sparked the Major into striking her.
She never questioned when Doctor Akagi took over the operation.
But....there was something about this, scenario. This sequence of events. It was....an undefinable familiarity. As though they were all actors in a play, living the lives of their roles again. Only: this was something else as well....some things were, wrong, about it.
Rei closed her eyes and concentrated, shutting out the world around her. The hum of high-powered halogen lights, the bustle and turmoil of running technicians and NERV employees, the nigh-silent sobbing of Major Katsuragi as she held herself on the railing. Keeping her breakdown barely away from the brink of desperation.
Rei shut this all out, and concentrated.
Silence.
Silence.
Are my comments about Shinji pissing you off, Wonder-Girl?!
Do you pilot the Evangelion solely for the praise of others?
Silence.
Rei opened her eyes, and the world flooded back to her. 'Wonder-girl? When have I been called that? That name is....something Pilot Sohryu called me. When did she call me that? Why?' No answers. No mystical portend from Heaven to greet her with the answers to everything and anything about the vast mysteries of the Cosmos. Not even a small book that she could read thoroughly and entirely, from cover to cover, only to find out the answer to everything is the number: 42.
Only the world.
'Perhaps I should ask Pilot Sohryu,' Rei thought, forcing her body to calm the sudden inner twisting she felt burrowing deep inside her chest. She fell away from the vehicle she was leaning on, and quickly made her way to the rear of the mountain.
Pilot Sohryu had not remained behind long after the briefing by Doctor Akagi was adjourned. The red haired Evangelion pilot had quietly stole away from the rest of the NERV personnel, heading down the back of the mountain to a small building that was stowed safely away from the activities.
Rei looked up at the cross that was the simple buildings only outward decoration as she walked toward the crooked door. A slight groaning came from those doors as she closed the distance between her and them. The building had not been used in several years.
Rei softly pushed her way into the dark interior, dark enough to make her pause and wait for her eyes to adjust themselves. The halogen lights were a bother.
"Rei?"
She turned to look slightly to her left, and soon saw a dim outline of the person she sought sitting on a long bench.
"Pilot Sohryu."
Asuka reached up and rubbed a palm across her face, "Is it time already?"
'She sounds distressed?' Rei gently probed the ground before her with a foot, picking her way through the interior ruins of the building as she made her way to the other Evangelion pilot. "I have a question to ask you."
Asuka frowned in the darkness, 'What does she want to ask me? Why?'
"Does the word, "Wondergirl" mean anything to you?" Rei asked in her soft voice as she carefully moved beside the pew Asuka occupied.
"Wondergirl..." Asuka thought for a moment, probed deeply into the depths of her mind and memories. Searched for an answer.
Mama!
Horrible, isn't it?
Y-YOU PERVERT!
...Y-You were willing to throw her life away! Weren't you?
Asuka quickly blinked to keep the tears back. She didn't like crying, and she wasn't about to let anyone see her cry. Not for the World. Not because of anything! Not for her mother. Not for her Father. Not for Kaji. Not for Shinji.
"No," Asuka replied to Rei with an almost identical voice. "I don't recall anything."
Rei nodded and sat easily on the pew. Yet somehow, she seemed alert....tense. Ready to spring to the balls of her feet and lunge feet first at an Angel should one appear.
'Has she always looked like that?' Asuka wondered as a trickle of light struck one ice-blue lock of her short hair. It was like seeing her for the first time; and wondering if she was really all that Asuka's mind had made her out to be.
'Not that it matters. If this Angel isn't defeated....nothing will matter.'
"Pilot Sohryu, what is this place?"
Asuka jerked, she had been staring at Rei so hard that she had missed the question twice before. "Pardon?" Red crept into her light olive skin.
Rei gestured to the front of the ruined building. To where an alter and a preacher's pedestal once stood. Both now in collected piles of wood that lay underneath a collapsed section of ceiling. The damage was recent, but several months past apparently.
"You don't know?" astonishment rippled through Asuka's return.
Rei folded her hands and pulled her legs up. Tucking her knees just beneath her chin. "I would not ask if I did know the answer."
For a moment, Asuka felt utter stupification set in. Her mouth fell open, and her tongue went limp. The moment passed quickly.
"This place is....was, a church."
Rei looked openly confused.
"Don't you know what a church is?" Asuka tiredly asked.
Rei roamed her gaze around the front of the room, settling finally on the cross that was set on the wall behind the shattered alter. "I have been given a small amount of material to study about the religions of Asia. But none of those religions have a, church, as their listed places of worship."
Asuka smiled, 'So Commander Ikari doesn't want his toy to know about God....for all the good it would do her.'
"I have seen a few references to Western Religions....but I did not pursue them."
"Well Rei....lets see, how to start?" Asuka tapped a slender, red-sheathed finger on her lips. "In the West, there are several groups of people who believe that there is only one God. But one group believes that God sent a son down from Heaven to Earth--"
"Why?"
Asuka blinked, she didn't remember much of her mother's faith. Only a few things, "Well....I don't know why. But that is what they believe. That this God sent down his son to Earth to live as a human. To be born, to grow up, to learn, to live, to work, and to suffer as a human."
"Suffer? Why would this God want his son to suffer?" Rei asked with her soft voice, a questioning tilt of her head slowly forming as the word left.
Asuka sighed, "I don't know all the specifics, just that this Son of God was sent to Earth and that the Romans crucified him."
"Crucified?"
Asuka groaned and felt her head drop into her hands, 'Why me?'

"How did you know I was a gardener?"
"I felt your trowel digging into my backside all the way out of the Geofront."
"Oh."
"How much farther?"
"About five miles until we get there."
"NERV is going to kill you when they find out you released me."
"Yeah....but I'm already dead. It's just a matter of time until Gendo Ikari decides to pull the trigger."
"....You're a very carefree man Mr. Kaji."
"I don't have much to live for....anymore."

"Are you certain?" Kouzo felt as though he was freshly washed laundry coming straight from spin-cycle, only to be strung out on a line. His knees felt weak enough to collapse on him the second he decided to shift his weight.
Gendo stolidly glared at the black folder's cover. Caressing the guilt symbol of seven eyes on a shield as another would might touch a cross in times of crisis. "Very sure. Our agents in Germany and China reported his arrival at the secondary NERV bases there. Which were soon followed by massive protests and worker strikes."
Kouzo heavily fell onto the steel desk's top. "Why was I not informed of this?"
Gendo turned his chair slightly, letting the lights of the Geofront silhouette his frame, "The protests were quickly put down by the local governments. There was no need. The point is moot anyway, those protests happened during the construction of those secondary bases."
"Then this insurrectionist has been underground since then?" Kouzo felt a draining slowly eat away at his energy. 'My God....why do I feel so weak?'
"Somewhat. Section-2 tracked him down to a remote church somewhere in the United States. Near our Nevada Branch you'll be happy to know. I assume that Seele was using him to keep track of our programs there."
Kouzo stood hesitantly, one of his hands straying often to the desk as he steadied himself on the one solid object in the office. "We always wondered how they got so much information out of that base. But now they've sent him off on an assignment here....why?"
Gendo folded his hands underneath his nose and frowned, "Something will happen at Nevada Branch, someth--"
Silence.
Weakness. So weak.
'....Something is wrong. Ikari's lips are moving....but I can't hear--'
Pain. Pain erupting inside his skull! Like a headache that had suddenly taken life and decided that it had been long cooped up inside the dark hole that was Kouzo Fuyutski's head. Pounding, pounding, pounding. The pain!
"Fuyutski!" Gendo raised his voice as the older man suddenly grasped the steel desk and screamed a horse, barely audible shout. A rasping gasp for air, more than a scream. Kouzo fell heavily to his knees, then over to his side. Grasping feebly at his head or chest for no discernable reason.
Gendo quickly pulled out a desk drawer and pulled out a phone. Pushing two buttons he cut through all operating and open telephone lines and found himself on the end sentence of a conversation.
"--So I told him to go take that money and screw himself--"
"This is Commander Gendo Ikari, I have an emergency situation concerning Lieutenant Commander Fuyutski. Authorization code Alpha-Twenty-Nine Ultraviolet-Seventeen. Send an emergency response team to my office."
His voice was calm, but his words were furious. 'This cannot happen. He knows too much information for me to loose him now! I need him to see me through to the end!'
"Y-yes sir! Right away sir!" the duty nurse on the other end replied, her voice all but shaking from fright and embarrassment. "Sir--"
Gendo did not wait for the rest, he hurriedly placed the phone back on the receiver and then walked around his expansive desk to kneel at his one-time professor's side.
"Medical aid is on the way Fuyutski," was all he said.
Kouzo couldn't hear. The pain blocked everything out with a dark veil of silence. Only his eyes could see anything of the world around him. And they were locked on one thing, a thing that to him seemed far in the distance.
A small boy, of perhaps ten years of age, smiling at him.
Darkness fell across Kouzo's sight.
And he was suddenly alone.

"I still do not understand, if they all believe in the same God, why do they have different names for themselves?"
Asuka's cry of anguish was much louder than her first. And fortunately loud enough for Misato to hear. The doors groaned in protest as the NERV major forced their rusty hinges to work, and she blinked for a time at the darkness beyond.
"Asuka? Rei?"
"Yes?" Asuka nearly shouted back at the taller woman, her frustration building by the passing breath. "Present," Rei's voice nearly drowned by the echos of Asuka's shout.
Misato finally found their shadowed outlines and gestured back towards the bright mountain. "It's time."

In the darkness of the Angel, that Angel that had brought a darkness of light and a light of night to Tokyo-3, two pulses of blue power; shimmering like the sun on a pool of rippling water, echoed through.
Then, Hell broke through to Earth.
The sun was rising as Evangelion Unit 01 broke through the blackness of the Angel's one-time shadow, floating high above the city. And blood flew from that wound as though the Angel were a fountain in a city pavilion.
Then, the beast clawed itself back to the world. Landing in a rain of crimson death like a wearied man returning from a long battle. How very tired, how very fierce some the Evangelion looked; with eyes alight, filled with power unknown to the entirety of mankind.
The power of the Unknown.

"Shinji? Shinji!"
The voice. Far off. Distant.
'Am I dead yet?' Shinji curled tightly against himself and shivered. 'Cold....so cold.'
A screeching protest, metal roughly sliding on metal. The emergency hatch, that jammed door of escape and freedom that had only become another wall of his prison, sliding free. A flood of orange-red liquid congealed by floating white particles rushed out at the feet of Misato Katsuragi.
Slipping forward, she hauled herself into the cramped entry plug and lurched onto the small figure of Shinji. "Shinji! Shinji..." she finally broke down and sobbed heavily on the young boy.
"....s-so, cold...."
Misato hugged the boy and then pulled back, fear and desperation clawing at her eyes. "S-Shinji?" He could only shiver.
"MEDIC!"
Thunder rolled across the hills and valleys of Tokyo-3.



Asuka stonily looked on as medical personnel swarmed the entry plug.
A mad dash of scrambling white ants, swarming over their intended prey. Though, in this case the prey was not meant to be consumed and meted out to all there. Their prey was to suffer a different experience of agony, and so: in time, their prey may come to prefer what might have been the fate of the ant's prey.
'What the hell is the matter with him anyway?' Asuka frowned and stood tip- toe, though the swarm of ants blocked her view. 'He's alive....isn't he?'
A tall red blot appeared in the group of white, stumbling out of the frenzy and bustle of the group. Forced, really. Pushed aside so that qualified men and women could rush forward into the gap that once held her body and help the boy inside that long metal cocoon. She fell heavily onto the nearby armored vehicle, one hand grasping desperately onto the open door while her other clasped lightly over her mouth.
'What is going on?'
Misato trembled, then shook heavily; looking for all the world like she was having an seizure. Asuka hurriedly pushed through the outer fringe of the ants and moved up beside Misato.
"A-Asuka--" she didn't get off anything else before she collapsed onto the German girl, sobbing as though she had just lost the first love of her life. Asuka could only shift herself uncomfortably in that painful grasp, patting the back of the older woman in what she hoped would feel consoling.
'What's happened to Shinji?'
"Make way! MAKE WAY!" That was one of the doctors, an elderly man with streaks of white running alongside his temples and blazing a trail down to the base of his neck. Beside him stood a medical gurney that was pushed hastily into place beside the entry plug. The crowd of ants shifted and reformed as the doctor and two others went into the darkness of the plug.
"Misato?" Asuka felt a slight quaver in her voice.
She sobbed and breathed with tear-laden sighs, "S-Shinji....something is wrong w-with...." Her hand came up to clasp across her mouth again, letting her tight hug go slack. Asuka quickly turned to see what was happening.
"Bring the gurney up!"
"Hold it steady damn you!"
A flurry of insistent hands from inside the plug, "Get the vehicle over here!"
The doctor appeared first, then turned around and reached back inside to take hold of something....no, someone. Shinji.
"H-Hold him!" the doctor's voice was strained with effort. His face red with tension as he attempted to gently pull Shinji from the small square hatch. Several of the ants surged forward to take hold of Shinji's elbows and body as he was gingerly shifted through the cramped exit. Finally, he was out, and lowered to the gurney.
Asuka finally saw then.
"....Oh mien Gott...." the soft utterance sent Misato back to tears.
The gurney started moving, its bearers running at a full trot as they sped it along to a closing medical van. They passed Rei as they left the entry plug. And all she could do was stare at the gurney.
And remember.
Asuka stared blankly at the swarm as they crowded around the ambulance. Felt something twist inside of her as she watched Shinji being lifted and rolled into the brightly lit interior. She jumped as the doors slammed shut. Their sound echoed in her head. Sounding like a casket's lid. A deathly chill spread through the warmth of the night.

Gendo Ikari stood impassively by the window.
It was a rarity that he even visited the hospital ward of NERV's headquarters. Usually only coming here to learn of new developments in recovering injuries that Rei had often sustained over her fourteen years of piloting the Evangelion. He had come only once before that, to acquire an antibiotic salve for the palms of his hands. He could still feel the twin lines that branded each palm. Rough, raised patches of deep scarlet skin. A reminder of getting too involved.
"Sir?"
Gendo let his eye flicker over to the white-coated doctor that stood beside him. Then his eyes were back to glaring through the clear plate of dense liquid before him. Peering hard into the sterile room that held very little, yet so much.
"He will live?" A question, yes....but a very cold question. Coming from the pit of ice that might have been what remained of his soul, or perhaps it came from the sudden fear that had seized him not but an hour ago.
"Yes," the doctor replied in a stately, matter-of-fact tone. "He will live." She flipped through several charts and printed reports that were held fast by the large clip fastened to the top of her steel board. "From what our X-rays and blood testing have shown, the Sub-Commander has suffered a diabetic stroke. The stroke was mild, but there is no telling how severe the damage is until he has regained full consciousness."
Gendo clasped his hands tightly behind his back, "How long?"
The doctor did not glance up from her charts, "Until he can return? Depends on his body's recovery. At maximum, six months."
Gendo sharply tilted his head down at the woman. His skin drew and his face ticked slightly as he stared down at the woman. She calmly lifted her face and looked back. Shorter than Gendo, she was none the less a very stout woman, with a face that spoke of steadiness and eyes that said "Try Me". Gendo glanced down at the clipboard in her hands.
"Will he be able to move around before that projected time?" Gendo shifted his neck back until his spine stood ramrod-straight. The doctor lifted one eyebrow and her eyes twinkled with something that said he would not have an easy time of this. "With aid," he added leisurely. He was not about to let this woman frustrate him further.
"Perhaps...." her slow voice, mellow and smooth. "We shall see." Gendo was about to order it done so before the end of a month, when the wide double doors at the end of the hall slammed against the walls behind them.
"Coming through! Make way!" shouted the elder doctor at the side of the rapidly wheeling gurney. Gendo and the woman very nearly had to leap aside or be run over as the doctor and his attendants wheeled past.
Gendo narrowed his eyes as he saw the gurney's occupant.
"Was that...?" the doctor beside him started. Gendo did not wait to hear the rest. Instead he pivoted sharply on his heel and headed for the slowly closing doors.
"I expect to have a full report in the morning Doctor."
She quickly acknowledged his order and then scrambled down the hall after the other doctor and his patient. 'So he has returned," Gendo pushed the ascent panel on the waiting elevator and calmly waited. On his way up from the hospital, he had the opportunity to view the first rays of light stream into the Geofront.
The elevator pinged.
06:00 Hours.

The Old Man heavily started up the broad marble steps that lead to the entrance of his museum. He could barely stagger along properly he was so tired. Walking all the way down one mountain and then across two others was hardly the way to keep himself alive.
Especially since he was a fugitive from NERV.
'Well, that was my fault really.'
It was, in part. After the Angel consumed Shinji's Evangelion, the rest of the city started to go down with it as well. Including the building he was on. He couldn't get out, he couldn't get off, he could only wait until the building sank beneath the black surface....or until someone came to help him.
Unfortunately, NERV was the only one around who could do that.
They didn't take kindly to him ignoring the warning sirens.
"Could have at least left me my camera. Rat bastards," he muttered as he leaned on the tall statue that sat ponderously before the expansive glass entrance to the museum. The insides were dark now, almost as dark as the Angel's shadow had been.
But that darkness would not try to swallow him.
"And how are you my old friend?" the Old Man called up to the statue. "Still as talkative as usual?"
The statue continued to stare at the sword tilted almost precariously at its feet.
"Yeah....I was just about to tell you to shut up." The Old Man laughed slightly, clutching at his side as his wheezing hack that passed for his laughter rumbled out. A slight scrape of shoe on stone was all that announced another's presence.
"Excuse me, I happened to be passing by and noticed the museum. Is it open today?"
"What?" the Old Man hesitantly said, turning to see the questioner. A bright glare stung his reddened eyes as the polished surface of some trinket reflected the bright morning sun. "Ah, well....considering what everyone has just been through; I don't really think so. But, if you really want to take a look around...."
He had so few visitors these days. Shinji used to be his only regular patron, until he was injured that is. A frown pulled down the corner of his lip as he fumbled for the keys.
"Bless you my son," the man smoothly said, raising his hands and forming a blessing ward with them. "I so rarely do get to see such a fine collection as yours. I've read all about it you know."
The Old Man's eyes widened, "Really?"
A toothy smile shone back from underneath the wide brim of the man's large hat. "Oh, yes....I know all about this museum."
"Well then, let us not be strangers," the Old Man found his key and gestured to the front of the building. "Pleased to meet you Mr...."
The smile grew to a grin, and two virulent green eyes shone from underneath the shady darkness of the hat.
"Father, Father Sanders."

Asuka sat quietly in the room.
A very still and silent room. Only the faint beeping of medicinal machines that ran tubes and wires and plugs to and from the bed that held him. That poor boy who had suffered so much in those long sixteen hours just past. Asuka wanted so very badly just to stand up and hold him still on that bed. But she could not; it would not help him in any case. Nothing she could do would help him now. No matter how badly she wanted to do it.
Her head came down and she stared at the red and black of her plugsuit. A slight tremble coursed through her body. The chill of the air was something she had expected....but, perhaps she should go change her clothing soon.
Very soon.
Asuka looked back up at Shinji, on that bed of white and silver. Then she stood, and quietly stole over to the side. She looked down on him, at what had happened to him. At what was still happening to him....and she felt pity.
"I....I'll be right back Shinji. I've got to change out of this plugsuit or I'll freeze to death." A small smile, well....half of a smile. "And you would be in a world of hurt if I died because of you."
The sheets shuffled, twisted, moved, went back to their original position. Asuka sighed, and turned to go. She hesitated between leaving him and heading off to change several times, each time she felt the urge to stay beside Shinji tug just a little bit harder.
'Enough already! If I don't change, what good can I do him later?!'
The pull faded, and Asuka left.
Beneath the thin sheets of hospital white, Shinji trembled and jerked as he drifted in his dreams.
Nightmares of the light inside, and the darkness out.




Misato was very tired.
So tired that it was hard to tell when she was falling asleep or when she was awake anymore. That fine line that was so blurred by the lack of many day's sleep was becoming shrouded with darkness as the hours passed. So shaded with the black pitch of unreality that she could no longer realize when her feet had stumbled over the line of the dreaming world and that of reality.
Abruptly she jerked her head up from the report that it had been precariously perched over. She recrossed the line of the dream world into harsh reality with a frustrated gasp. Misato reached up, leaning her face none to gently into the palm of her hand, who's elbow was forced heavily onto the flat plane of the metal surface of her desk.
'A clean desk for once,' was her weary thought. Most of the paperwork envolved the restoring and allotting of resorative funds to the families of buildings that were sucked down into the Twelfth Angel. Money, money, money....and the world still spins.
"God forbid that the money ever run out." Misato reached up to her face with the remaining hand and rubbed vigiorusly, driving the sleep out of her reddened eyes for the time. It would not last for long though, and in a few short minutes the world would glaze over again.
But for the time, Misato contented herself with the study of the sole remaining report before her. It was not a very long report, but the news it bore made the whole paper feel heavy and thick.
As though the names of the dead it bore also carried their heavy souls with it.
The air seemed to whisper with the cries of the slain, moaning, groaning. The cries of the damned and the forgotten and the unrevenged. Crying for their revenge....Revenge! Revenge! Misato slumped heavily onto the small report, and never heard the cries fade in her mind. It had long left to seek another world.



Gendo Ikari was an impassive man.
Very little seemed to affect him or phase him in any way. But that was just how he was. To others, he was a man that seemed to care very little about anything around him unless it helped further any of his hidden goals or mystery-enshrouded schems. And in a way, this was very true. Yet in another way, this was totally false.
He did care about some things....granted, their was not too many of those things that he cared about simply because he felt like he needed to. But there were a few.
"The doctors will release you in twenty-seven days," his stone voice held no ice, nor any heat. "You will be able to continue on with some limited duties then."
Kouzo nodded. He didn't look quite the same as he once did. Perhaps it was the short, thick collection of unshaved stubble that rounded across his jaws and across his lips. No, no that wasn't it. There was something else about him....something that had dulled the spark in his eyes. He seemed to be in a haze now, even though he was hearing and seeing everything. He was in a haze of something....fear?
"They told me that I'll most likely have to use a wheelchair if I am to continue so soon...." Even his voice sounded dead.
Gendo did not nod, "Yes. It will not affect your duties in any way though."
Neither of them said what hung in the air. The diabetic stroke had nearly crippled him from the waist down. Even the doctors did not know if Kouzo would survive another one, which from all their poking and prodding and testing, seemed to be imminent.
"I've heard some rumors about the Third Child Ikari....what has happened to him?"
Gendo stared at his former professor for a long, silent moment. Kouzo dropped his head and stared at his wrinkled arms that seemed to jut out from beyond their blue-white hospital gown, then flow down to the bed in a disorderly fall of skin, flesh, and bone.
"He is being taken care of by our medical staff, they tell me that his condition will not prevent him from piloting the Evangelion, but he will never be able to live quite like normal again."
Kouzo slid his eyelids down slowly, held them closed a moment, then raised them in time with his head. Gendo's eyes were unreadable beyond their orange shield, and with a sharp turn he exited the room.
'Not like normal....ever again. Just like me...' Kouzo shut his eyes and leaned back against the thin pillows.
Meditating on that dour thought as he listened to the near-silent drip of his IV tube.

It was the third day since the Angel had been defeated.
It was the second day since the schools reopened and she had skipped classes.
Asuka knew these things, but it didn't really matter to her anymore. What did matter to her was the slight, fourteen year old boy who lay shivering and shaking underneath three piles of thin, white hospital blankets. He looked bad, even if you discounted the constant convulsions and little tremors that wracked his arms, legs, neck, even his whole body sometimes. His face was drawn in, his eyes appeared sunken deep within dark rings, Shinji looked....thinner, than he should.
Asuka lowered her head and glanced through the magazine she had brought in from the reception room. He hadn't woken since he was put into the hospital room, the nurses having to feed him nutrients from an IV that was fed up through his mattress and taped down in five places so that it wouldn't rip off. His sleep was a jumble of still quietness, intermittantly broken up with sudden spasms of violent movement and almost seizure-like shaking.
'But the doctors gave him something for that,' Asuka told herself grimly as she turned the page. 'He's better now.'
The doctors had explained Shinji's situation to Asuka, to Misato as well. From what little they could get from him, he had been severely hurt during those last few moments in the Evangelion... 'Those last few moments...' Asuka herself trembled as she remembered what came out of that sea of darkness. A creature that was horrifying and powerful beyond all belief, shredding through its captor like a cleaver tearing through butcher paper. Landing amidst a cooling shower of blood as the sun rose in the East.
Asuka shook her head and thought back to the present. Shinji....his Eva had run out of power. Just before he broke free. And for those eight precious minutes that existed between that termination of what should have been his life, and his rebirth into the world....his mind was deprived of one vital thing.
Oxygen.
The little thing that gives everything life. For eight minutes. Six minutes is when brain damage begins to occur. Yet he had been without for eight, and was still alive. When the entry plug was re-activated, the internals showed that the temputure of the LCL had dropped to nearly two degrees Celcius before the power ran out.
Nearly a mirical that his heart didn't freeze in his chest.
Eight minutes. The doctors said that he had massive damage to his motor functions, and that his brain continued to fire off sudden impulses at random times to his muscles. Perhaps in an effort to try and keep his body temputure going by stimulating muscle movement. He was cold, his mind was cold, so the mind told itself that it was cold.
"The cold damaged him too," they said. And now he would feel cold....for the rest of his existance. He would be cold.
"....If only you hadn't been so eager....idiot."
But what good would that do?
Asuka refused to answer.
"A-Asuka?"
The magazine fell from her hands as she leapt back hard against her chair, one hand gripping the armrest as tightly as she could. Her wide eyes hastily scanned the room and then descended on a trembling Shinji, who stared back at her with bloodshot eyes of poor sleep.
His teeth chattered together as he struggled to ask something, "--W-what- t....i-i-is wrong w-ith me?"
Asuka quickly bolted for the door and slammed her hand on the button, calling out for the doctors as soon as a crack appeared. Footsteps hurried down the hall in her direction as she looked back over to Shinji.
"You're going to be fine Shinji, just fine."
He didn't look convinced, he looked scared.
And cold.
Soon the doctors arrived and began their barrage of testing, poking, prodding, probing, measuring, injecting, retracting, groping; and Asuka found herself being firmly, if politely, ushured out into the hallway by an elderly nurse.
The door seemed to close slowly, leaving Asuka with a pained, pleading stare from Shinji as the doctors tried to pull him apart in twelve seperate directions. She could only wince before the metal entryway was sealed up once again.
Asuka sighed, "Poor kid." She said before turing towards the exit. Her foot stopped short on her first step though, and she felt her eyes bug out at the specter before her. That blue hair and light skin did indeed make Rei Ayanami appear as a ghostly incarnation.
"How is Pilot Ikari?"
Asuka snorted, "He's just dandy, just fine! Why don't you go and visit him if your so worried about him?"
Rei blinked quickly, a short blink. And only one. "Why are you hostile? Have I offended you by inquiring about Pilot Ikari's condition?"
"N-no!" Asuka spluttered, unsure as to why she herself was so acidic in her first comment. "I could care less about that stupid idiot, after the stunt he pulled: going through that Angel should be an easy punishment for hi-"
The slap echoed down the hallway, only one nurse looked up and then away again. Asuka stared at Rei for a brief moment before she reached up and touched her face.
"Pilot Ikari has been hurt by that experiance," Rei calmly continued in her placid voice. "From what I have learned by my inquiries; he has been hurt very badly in an incurable manner."
"So?" Asuka sulkily replied, pointedly squashing the recent memories of her waiting for three days in Shinji's room as he sat their quivering underneath his covers.
Rei lightly stepped past the auburn haired girl and headed for Shinji's door, "It would have been you in that room Pilot Sohryu, had he not gone first instead. If at all."
The door slid open after Rei tapped a code into the keypanel beside it. The noise inside subsided for a moment, then resumed as if she had never been their at all. Asuka listened to that bustling flow of words and mechanical clashes, until it was all cut short by the door locking home once again.
Her hand dropped listlessly to her side, and she took her first step again.
'If at all.'

Misato feebly swung her arm out to hit the source of that annoying tap.
It had been rumbling through her head for some time now, but she was just becoming aware of its unwarrented, unwanted, and detested intrusion into the first real sleep she had in several days. Apparently she missed, or she had hit it but the part of her mind that registered such sensory perception had not become fully aware of itself yet.
In either case, the tapping just intensified.
Misato swung out her arm again and this time felt something solid connect. The tapping continued though, and in a few moments she could feel that solidness shift up and down in time with the tapping.
"Uuughhh...." she groaned, clumsily pushing against the moving solidity. "Shut that thing up..." Her voice was muffled, being pressed flat up against the desktop as it was, and the words came out more like: "Shfuap thaapt fwhing ahp."
"Now, now," came the melodious voice of her friend Ritsuko. "We can't have you sleeping on important documents. After all....I seem to remember you drooling in your sleep back at college."
Misato groaned as her mind slowly registered those words, then her back flexed and forced herself back up into the chair. A sudden pain in the lower side made Misato think hard about wanting to move any more, yet move she had to do, and the pain flared brightly along her side before slowly fading into the background.
"Have a good sleep?" Ritsuko asked as Misato nearly wrapped her left arm completly around her head to shake the right, and then did vice versa with the right arm.
"No," Misato groggily answered. "But it was better than none at all. What's up?"
Ristuko smiled and jestured with a cup of her liquid caffiene, "I came to get my report back. But now I'm not sure that I want it."
Misato looked down and realized that most of the report had, indeed, been covered with a giant splotch of what could only be saliva. For it outlined her face almost perfectly.
'No wonder I'm feeling like I was in a sauna bath.'
"Anyway, that's not too important. I can get another copy somewhere along the chain of paper....what I'm really here for is to ask you if you wanted to go out with me and Kaji tonight." A small sip of her coffee and Ritsuko arched an eyebrow at the still groggy Misato.
"Kaji? You? Out?" She said the words as if unfamiliar with how they should be used in application to the world around her, but shortly the idea behind the words sunk into her mind and she shook her head negative. "I can't, though I'm sure going out for drinks would be excellent, but I'm almost to the point of falling over. I think sleep is what I'll be getting this night."
Ritsuko shrugged and hopped off of the desk corner that had served her admirably for a seat on her visit, "Suit yourself then, I've got to go do some work....see you later."
"Bye!" Misato said with a pained smile.
Ritsuko raised her cup in a salutation and then stalked off into the halls of NERV softly mumbling to herself, "Damnit....I though for sure that would work. Better tell her that when she's awake next time."
"Doctor Akagi."
The stern, cool voice brought her quickly to a halt. A sharp pivot on her heels brought her smartly about to face her commander.
"I take it you know about the Third Child's present situation?" Gendo asked, drawing even with her and then walking past, forcing Ritsuko to walk slightly behind him as he set the pace.
"Yes, I heard." She took another sip of her strong brew, wincing as the flavor burned deep into her tongue. "He will apparently be able to pilot the Evangelion, but he'll be shaking like a fish out of the water throughout the rest of his life."
"Yes....perhaps we should look into alternative means to pilot the Evangelion," the tone was more than an insinuation, something close to a suggestion, and by the way he phrased it: definitly an order. "Find two pilots that we will be able to use if the Thrid Child does not respond favorably with the Evangelion."
Ritsuko frowned into her cup, "Two?"
Gendo impassivly stared down the long hall, inside he seethed. "We will need a second pilot to operate Evangelion Unit 03 eventually. And if the Third Child does not respond favorably to the Evangelion, then he will not respond favorably to Unit 03 either. Find two replacements Doctor, and quickly."
Ritsuko halted at an intersection and murmered her acquiescence to her superior before sharply turning down and nearly power-walking for the elevator at the far end.
Gendo never slowed his stride.
'Things are spinning faster and faster, should I misstep for even an instant it will all fly out of control,' he frowned at the long, empty corridor.
"But that is the problem of life....everything is unpredictable."

Hikari Horikai was always the first student to arrive.
It was just common law. A thing that was set down when all of her peers were in the fifth grade, and one that has never changed in the years that followed it. Some of the students wondered why she was always the first there, some voiced aloud their opinions and questions about this subject. The answers ranging from: "She just wants to suck up to the teach," or, "She gets her early because she's a early riser." A few even said that she got there to do certain things that she would have never been able to do at her house. Of course, those who voiced such and opinion more often than not received a chorus of groans and a small pelting of school-issue food for their troubles.
The truth was, Hikari always arrived early because she loved to be there. She loved school, she loved the smell of the halls, the classes, the old decay of paper books, that pungent smell of cleaners that were stored securely in their closets. She loved to arrive at her classroom on the third floor and watch the sun rise over the mountains to the East.
She loved being there.
Thus, it was a surprise for her to find two others talking softly in the classroom that morning.
"Did she tell you anything?"
The voice was low, almost indistinguishable to her ears as she silently pressed herself against the wall beside the door. Later she would ask herself why she had not entered the room as normal, she would question herself as to why she had stopped to listen to those two talk back and forth.
She could not even tell herself why.



"No....only that she would come down to talk to me this afternoon about an offer." A second voice, higher pitched than the first, one that nearly cracked halfway through. Though from stress or from puberty Hikari could not tell.
"Yeah, that's what she told me too," the voice paused, then laughed. "I never believed it....looks like Ikari will have a few more names to add on his Crusade."
Even with the laughter, the voice was cold. No mirth penetrating through those last words--rather, a deep sadness and a grim reluctance. As though the speaker was resigning himself to be lead down a path, hand-in-hand with Death himself.
"We don't have to accept you know," said the lighter voice. Lighter, but still heavy with finality and death-gray grim. "We could always reject the offer."
"If they offer what you're thinking. We don't know exactly what she will talk to us about."
"Oh come on!" the second voice nearly shouted at the first. "What else would she come talk to us about? You know as well as I do that something happened to Shinji during that last Angel attack!"
Hikari breathed lightly, her face blanching as she heard those words. She knew that something did indeed happen to one of the Evangelion pilots, that something had happened to either Shinji or Asuka; but Rei would not comment on what had happened. Would not, or could not.
But Hikari did not think it serious, she thought it was maybe a few broken bones or some such--but to hear tell of it from the second speaker--you would think Shinji was near death.
"I know....I know!" the first voice rattled the wall as he punched it. "....But what are we going to do about it, hun?"
The second voice did not respond for a long time, and when it did: it was meek, almost submittal. "We can't do anything for Shinji now....but his Evangelion will need a pilot if he can't function it anymore."
The first voice snarled, "He will be able to pilot it! No Angel is going to keep him down!"
"Still," the second voice continued on levelly, "there is the possibility." A loud harrumph sounded from the throat of the first voice before the second could continue. "Not to mention the fact that Unit 03 is nearing completion at NERV's Nevada Branch."
Silence again.
"A third Evangelion?" Awe, reverence perhaps--and more than a small portion of fear.
"Yeah....and a fourth. My father doesn't protect his files well enough these days." That last bit sounding confident, cocky. "Why else would they ask the both of us? They'll need two pilots; one as a backup for Shinji, the other as a pilot for Unit 03. And when they get Unit 04, the backup switches over to pilot that one."
The first voice snorted, "Whatever man....but should we accept this? I mean....look what happened to Shinji. We could end up like that, maybe even worse."
Hikari frowned at that last, trailing sentence. 'What has happened to him?' she screamed aloud to her mind.
"Perhaps," another pause. "But if they don't get us as their pilots, then they will probably get someone else." A chair scraped across the hardwood floors as one of the voices sat down. "Do you really want somebody else taking our places?"
A shifting of clothes was all the answer that the second voice received.
Hikari could stand it no more, her strong hand firmly shoving the thin partition of a door aside as she thundered into the room; demands on what happened to Shinji forming on her lips as she strode across the threshold.
Her foot never landed, frozen in midair as she saw who the two voices were.
"N-no...."

"The project is still being delayed by Ikari."
"Yes, but our other projects are proceeding as planned."
"No they are not! The projects are all linked together! If one does not advance, the others do not advance!" Lorenz Keel felt the weight of the ages bear in on him then. He always felt it burdening his back and his soul during these pointless quibbles between his children.
'Yes....Children....'
They really weren't his children. Some were even older than he was, or so they thought. Seele was a very old organization, with roots extending as far back into recorded history as the birth of that Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ.
A soundless snarl puckered Keel's weathered lips as he recalled that name. None of the others in the Seele Council would see that snarl though, as each was hidden behind their own black obelisks--hiding from each other who they all were. They told each other that this method preserved the organization's livelihood, with each member unable to reveal the others if he was captured.
No one mentioned that Keel knew all of their names though.
They took comfort in forgetting that fact.
"My fault! I say that it is your fault that our projects have not come into fruitfulness Number Twelve!"
A headache bloomed behind Keel's empty eye sockets, having failed long ago to nature and now replaced by a visor that was directly linked into his neural cortex. He was getting these headaches more often lately.
"We must deal with Ikari before we can advance our other projects, that we agree on yes?"
"What about the agent, Priest, that was recently activated? Could we not use him?"
But then again, Keel had been feeling his age in other ways as well. His body, falling apart and kept alive only by the massive surgical implants that took up the duties of most of his internal organs, was feeling the pains of a very long life.
"Yes, we could use Priest to deal with Ikari....but he has been assigned to a different mission by Number One. A mission that he has stressed repeatedly, Repeatedly! That takes precedence to all other missions by our sleeper agents."
"And what is this mission then? Number One?!"
Keel started, his hand frozen along the temple that it had occupied itself by rubbing. Slowly he lowered his hand and folded them across the yellowed parchment of the book that covered the length of his desk.
"That mission, is not to concern yourselves. I will tell you if and when I wish to!" Silence descended as a fog in the echoing aftermath of his booming retort. "Now, do we have anything relevant to discuss?"
"Ikari." Said one, you could not really tell which one though--all the voices sounded alike in this room.
"Ikari...." Keel paused, delicately recalling his prepared response to that question. "Ikari can be dealt with at any time. We have two sleeper agents positioned within NERV that could reach him right now; but that would be short-sighted of us." He emphasized the last word, forcing them to remember that if one failed, all failed in this game.
"And what of the project?"
"The Human Instrumentality Project will be completed....but only after all the Angels have been defeated. By our count, we still have five more Angels--"
"Speaking of thus, what should we recommend as Ikari's reprimand for attempting to hide the Eleventh Angel's presence from us?" Interrupted one voice.
Keel frowned, "A reprimand is not necessary in my opinion. Let Ikari play his small facade and smile at our backs....we will still succeed in the end."
Silence once more.
"Anything further?" No member responded, "Good. Do remember that we have a debriefing of Major Katsuragi on the events regarding the Twelfth Angel coming up this following week. Now return to your duties and continue to press along each of your projects. I expect to see results soon."
Slowly, one-by-one, the massive black and crimson lettered obelisks thrummed out of existence; shortly leaving Keel alone with his desk and his book. His single optic lense lowered itself once more to the age-yellowed pages as one finger on his left hand followed along the faded writings.
-And the Barons of Hell leaped forrth from the Abyss of Shadow and Flame. Their powerful devices laying waste to the poor, humble, sinning relations to the great Adam and the Tempted Eve. One was as a beast from the unknowns of Afrika, with a single horn and great, gnashing teeth of a pure light. The second was of a blank, estranged look that was hardened by a single glaring eye of clear blood. The third that leapt free from the Abyss was as the color of blood, with four eyes and two mouths that seemed to descend deep into the Abyss themselves. The last was as pitch as the Midnight hour, and walked about as a monkey with unnaturally long arms and curved, wicked teeth; sharp enough to rend a man clean through the midsection should they bechance descend on him. Oh Lord! Save this poor sinner from what he dreams! Sa--
Keel stopped reading the passage and lifted his finger from the page. The words that followed were covered by a smear of ink, perhaps from some clumsy scribe who had tipped over his well in a hasty moment. Perhaps by some intentional deed that forever destroyed the words of this unknown author.
Keel frowned at that thought, 'But what is done cannot be changed....yet.'
His aged hands clumsily lifted the massive front portion of that book, and tried to gently set it down against the other side. His fingers slipped free though, letting the book slam together with a loud bang and a small cloud of dust and parchment.
Keel held his breath, waiting for the dust to fall back to steadiness before he moved on.
'I must be cautious about this matter of Ikari," was his thoughts as he gazed down on the cover of that old book. 'If he gets out of hand the council will demand that a vote of opposition be cordoned against him. I cannot allow that to happen at this stage of the game....and then there is that matter of the Sub-Commander...' His aged hands dropped to the leather- bound cover of the book, slowly tracing the horrible figures that cavorted and writhed along its surface. "And then there is the Third Child."
The dust settled slowly, and Keel waited several minutes further before he left.
His headache was in full force, and he needed some morphine to relieve the aches of his body. 'Study of the Necronomicom, is not a light undertaking.'

"We're home Shinji," Misato softly called to the blanket-bundled person in the back seat of her shambling Renault Alpine. It wasn't a bad car, more like it needed to be repaired yet again. It had seen much service these past few months; service that would have a military-grade humvee sitting in the repair shop every five days.
Shinji wasn't answering though. He had drifted back into his nightmarish sleep. Yes, the nightmares. He had been having one every day, every time he closed his eyes to sleep. Every time he let the darkness take him, those nightmares returned.
Ritsuko had spoken to him about it, the nightmares. He said that he tried hard to forget them as he bolts upright, screaming aloud that he didn't want to keep remembering again. She asked what it was that he did not wish to remember.
Shinji would never answer that question directly, he would only mumble something about a boy.
What boy? Ritsuko would ask.
Which one? He would reply.
There were more?
Yes.
Even now, Misato shivered as she remembered hearing Shinji answer that last question. He had responded so coldly to it, so evenly and levelly that she could not help but shiver at it. She shivered, and then chided herself for doing something as natural as displaying her fear and discomfort like that.
After all, she could stop whenever she wanted.
But Shinji couldn't stop.
"He fell asleep after we got out of the Geofront Misato," Asuka softly intoned from beside the shaking bundle of blankets. "We could carry him."
Misato marveled at that suggestion, however innocently it sounded. 'Six days ago you wouldn't have said something like that Asuka. Six days ago you would have been ready to clock the poor boy's lights out if he had said so much as a word to you about finally getting a better synch ration than yourself....what happened to you?'
Asuka waved a hand before Misato's eyes, belatedly making the older woman realize that she had been staring at her ward for several long moments.
"Hello-o? Earth to Misato?"
Misato jerkily shook her head, "I don't think we could do that without waking him up Asuka. Might as well do it now."
The German girl sighed in exasperation, feeling a hearty unwillingness to disturb what looked to be Shinji's most peaceful rest in several days settle in along her bones. She had to do it though, or leave him out her in the car to sleep until morning.
"Come on...let's get him inside."

Gendo stared frostily at the report that sat so insolently on his desk.
"They agreed....with few stipulations too. Only one of the candidates asked for anything, and it is an easy task for us to do as he asked." Ritsuko was chiming along in her somewhat harsh voice, a copy of Gendo's folder laying in her hands. 'In NERV, even orders for a twenty-thousand dollar hammer and a fifty-thousand dollar toilet seat has forms in triplicate.'
The third folder, the last of the triplicate forms, was intended for Sub- Commander Fuyutski. He would receive it later though, when he was out of the hospital.
"This one," Gendo pointed to one of the two profiles that were paper clipped to the folder. "He admitted knowledge to Unit 03's completion and Unit 04's existence?"
Ritsuko held her breath and then released it in a soft sigh, "Yes....when I asked him he admitted to hacking through his fathers files to get the information."
Gendo's eyes held a cool, analytical light as they swivled to stare at her. "What position does his father occupy?"
"He is one--"
"Never mind, terminate his father's employment with NERV. Then activate the pilot funding system for the Sixth Child."
Ristuko blinked, daring so much in her confusion as to step forward one pace, "B-but he's one of our top researchers in the Biogenetic field! We can't just tell him to muck off!"
"He is not even capable enough to keep his son from learning classified information," Gendo's voice would have made the Arctic Ocean seem like a sauna bath. "If he cannot handle that information responsibly, then he will never handle it again." His eyes locked on Ritsuko's, and a small war erupted between their mighty wills.
Ritsuko capitulated.
"Yes, sir."
Gendo closed the folder and brushed it off to one side as Ritsuko left. Letting it lie there until he had a need to either destroy it, or file it away into one of his many secret places. He waited a moment, listening to the sounds of mankind's creations at work. Shortly, though, one of his fingers depressed a small button that was hidden in with several others along his desk. The lights dimmed, leaving the office in near twilight as a small projection sputtered to life in front of the massive desk. The whole of the holographic image was nearly eight feet tall, with line after line of glowing green text covering the image in thick passages.
"It will come by clouds of contempt and will infiltrate the trenches of the enemy. Only to turn one against the other by means of its will...."
The next Angel would come. And it would be soon.
Gendo narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow, 'Yes...soon. Too soon.'
A chime sounded from the door, and Gendo pressed the admit button with only the slightest moments of delay. The familiar swoosh of the door admitted a very familiar figure, who sauntered in with a near-insolent grace and charm.
"So, I hear that the Third Child was allowed to return home today-" Ryouji Kaji began with his sly, unctuous tone.
Gendo quickly interrupted him, "I congratulate you on a successful rescue, Inspector."
Kaji froze.
"And now I have another mission for you to do for me."
Confusion, disbelieve, apprehension, all running clearly through both his eyes and his posture. But Ryouji Kaji was a very flexible man, and if he had double-crossed Satan himself he would remain calm should that vile being even give him the slightest of second chances.
"Of course, how may I be of service to you?" Kaji took up with almost a perfect ease, strolling by the large holographic text of the translated Dead Sea Scrolls to lounge comfortably beside the desk.
Gendo pulled out one of his few drawers and removed a plain black folder. Kaji flipped it around as Gendo slid it over and began to leaf through the information inside.
"This man has recently been seen inside by one of our local agents," Gendo nonchalantly started, "he was found in one of the emergency bunkers that was spared during the last Angel's attack. Debriefing of the NERV personnel inside revealed that he was shouting inflammatory statements about NERV during the first assault on the Angel."
Kaji had just breezed past that report when he came upon a small black-and- white profile of the man inside, 'I know this guy!' He mumbled inwardly, cocking his head as he studied the jutting nose and the fat-swathed cheeks.
"Your job is to find out why he is here, Inspector. And if you think it necessary, to deal with him before he becomes a nuisance." Gendo never moved his eyes from the scrolling line of text, following each movement of the words with an intensity rivaled only by what Rei Ayanami could do with a will.
Kaji cleared his throat and let the reports drop, "You realize that if NERV kills him it will look badly for you?" Gendo nodded.
Kaji watched him for a moment more, wondering if he should ask how he had connected himself to the freeing of the Old Man--but decided that he wasn't about to loose his head over something that Gendo was willing to forget.
'At the present Kaji old pal....at the present.'
Gendo barely noticed the sharp clack, clack, clack of Kaji's shoes as he exited.
'And the four will gather together, and then be reduced to one. And the remaining three will join ranks under the revealing light of God, and then the one of blood will fall to the light of God's mind. The others will catch the one of blood, but fall still will it. Then the Body of God will cometh to Earth, and enter the one of the staring eye. And the Body of God will consume the staring eye of insolence, and it will be no more....'
The room seemed darker than ever before.
Bleak, cold, and dark.

It was the sun that woke him.
A warm shaft of golden light streaming through his window and squarely landing upon his face. It was still early morning, but compared to the chill of the night: that one ray might have held all the warmth of the sun itself.
Not that Shinji could feel it anymore.
He bleakly watched the sun climb higher above the mountain range to the East. Quietly shivering beneath the thick comforters which were piled high atop him. He sighed and looked away from the rising ball of molten gold, and tried not to think of his new pain.
The doctors had explained what had happened to him, oh yes. They explained quite clearly. He would forever be cold, and shaking, unless he took the pills they sent him. Those pills did nothing for the cold though, only the shaking. A sedative of some sort, a muscle relaxer. Shinji held his breath.
Several moments went by, with only the dull rhythm of his pulse beating into his mind. Soon that pulse became a rushing, and then the rushing became a roaring, which turned into a dull, electronic whine. Shinji gasped out the deadly carbon dioxide and rapidly panted for air.
'....why couldn't I die?'


Misato watched Asuka carefully handle the hot skillet across to the sink.
"Should I go to school?" her ward asked as she quickly doused the steaming cast iron with cool water.
Misato frowned over the lip of her beer and hastily sloshed some of the brew down her throat. "I don't know Asuka. If you feel like going, then go. If not: stay here and take care of Shinji." Asuka blushed lightly, drawing one of Misato's eyebrows up. She hadn't deliberately provoked that, but she might as well have from Asuka's reaction. 'Well, well Asuka. What has happened to you these last few months?'
"I was thinking," she started slowly as her hands moved rapidly across the skillet with a washcloth. "That maybe I should take Shinji down to that art museum that he likes so much. You know, help him start recovering and all."
Misato sipped her beer lightly, her liquid brown eyes never wavering more than a few millimeters from the center of Asuka's spine.
"Get his spirit back up," her ward softly concluded, setting the cleaned cast-iron aside to dry. "Asuka, what do you think about Shinji?"
Asuka blinked as she dried her hands, half-turning to face Misato. "What do you mean? What do I think of him as a pilot, or-"
Misato quickly interrupted, "As a person, Asuka."
For a moment, the fourteen year old pilot stood still. Then, she side- stepped back over to where a small plate of sizzling, sliced ham sat atop of a solitary paper towel that was slowly soaking with grease. Asuka gingerly lifted the plate and then side-stepped again to gather the knife and fork that had been set aside a thick mug filled with black coffee.
"I-I can't tell you Misato," her delayed reply coming shallow and brisk. "I...he's a friend, a comrade Misato. What's more than that is the fact that Shinji is a fellow pilot who's saved my life. For that, I can never pay him back."
Misato sipped her beer again, lowering her eyes to the stained yet clean surface of her old, imported-oak table. A finger ran across the pitted and marred surface, tracing along an old scar here; a shallow depression there. Asuka turned away from the white counter and in a very non-chalant manner, walked past the pondering woman with the mug in one hand and the plate with it's necessary utensils in the other.
"Is that for Shinji?" Misato calmly asked before Asuka cleared the room. "Very thoughtful of you Asuka."
The girl deemed not to reply, instead turning down the hall and shuffling for Shinji's door. It was a slow trek, with her mind focusing intensely on not spilling a single drop of the brown brew whilst also precariously balancing a plate filled with food in her other hand.
Misato smiled as her ward knocked on the door and called to Shinji.
'Well...let them figure it out,' a quick glance to the clock and she uttered a mumbled curse in a few colorful phrasings, then hastily slammed her beer down and dashed for her clothes and purse.

"Final testing phase has initiated. Synchronization is nominal, stability: ninety percent."
"Thanks Maya."
The slight bridge tech looked warily over at her mentor, peering through the slight haze of blue-gray smoke that surrounded the pinched and haggard looking face as it wearily read over the newest stream of data that flowed from the two simulation bodies.
"Ma'am?" she tentativly asked.
Ritsuko pulled the latest cigarette away from her mouth and snubbed it in the already overflowing ashtray. She had been smoking more lately, thinking about how close Shinji had come to meeting Death. About how close he had been to finally reaching peace.
"Ma'am? Are you okay?"
Ritsuko turned slightly and sat herself down in one of the few comfortable chairs that littered NERV. She had personally ordered the chair installed here from one of her older, less-inhabited workstations. Preferring to let the sense of ease follow her instead of creating it again.
"I'm fine Maya."
"You don't look very fine," Maya tenativly said as she turned back to her panel. Her eyes shining with the light of myriad colors that emanated from before her hands.
Ritsuko smirked and reached into her lab coat for her second pack and lighter. 'Well Maya, when you've just condemned two souls to a life such as I have...you'll understand why I look like I do.'

Beep. Whsoosh.
Beep. Schwooss.
Beep. Whsoosh.
Beep. Schwooss.
"I...uh, I was offered something yesterday. Something that will help you, I hope."
Beep. Whsoosh.
"The doctors tell me that the transfer will take place in a few days. They'll take you out of here, out of this hell. You'll be flown to Tokyo-2 and put into the NERV district hospital there. Hopefully, you'll be safe from all of this."
Beep. Schwooss.
Beep. Whsoosh.
"You remember my friend? Probably not, since he never really came over to our house. But, uh, he's going to be with me. Working with me on what I'll have to do in order to have you transferred over. But, don't worry about that...okay?"
Beep. Whsoosh.
Beep. Schwooss.
Beep. Whsoosh.
"I won't be able to see you for a while. But I'll try to write you occasionally. So that you'll have something to hear from me when you wake up."
With a slight creek of worn metal, the door of the still hospital ward opened and a nurse stuck her head it.
"Excuse me, but your time is up."
There was a pause before he stood, in which he stared down at his sister. Her blank face looking serene and calm. Then he turned and walked away, the nurse escorting him back to the exit. As the door swung shut, the girl's eyes fluttered open. A young boy with a swirling tempest of gray clouds for his eyes smiled down upon her. Her eyes closed again.
Breeeeeeeeeeee.
"So it goes."

"Asuka, I don't want to go."
She stared down at the lipid boy, a faint quirk of her eyebrow arcing over her left brow as she watched Shinji stare out his window and across the bright landscape of Tokyo-3. The light was slowly fading into orange as she watched, heralding the end of the day while she stood there.
"Fine then, I've tried to get you to go out, but you refuse my help. And now you will make amends."
Shinji scoffed, letting fly an exasperated breath of frustration and listlessly lulling his head away from his perpetual staring to glare at the girl standing with a defiantly commanding poise over his bed.
"No."
"No? Oh, I don't think you understand this Shinji," Asuka leaned over and poked his chest with a solitary finger. "You 'will' do what I say...or you can refuse and I will 'make' you do as I say."
Nervousness crept into Shinji's eyes and his body quaked from a short spasm. He was somewhat grateful to Dr. Akagi for prescribing him those muscle relaxers. They managed to keep him from quivering in fear as much as they blocked his still-present nervous quakes.
Even with them though, his hands still shook.
"Well?" Asuka said, her head moving questioningly to the right as she looked at him innocently. Shinji felt a caving within him. A hole that suddenly sprouted from the depths of his will, and from which a pool of blackness erupted. Darkening everything.
"Fine."
Asuka beamed down on him, "Great! Now, up."
Shinji groaned as the girl backed away from his bedside, one hand grasping on his wrist, forcing him to lift up from the warm comfort of his bed as she slowly plodded aside. "Alright!Alright...so what am I doing to placate your offended self?" He said with a disgruntled air of disturbed dignity.
"You," Asuka smiled widely, "are going to watch a movie with me."
Shinji collapsed on himself.

To say that Kouzo Fuyutski was more than a little angry at this moment...
Now that would be the understatement of the aeons.
The office door opened quickly enough for most people. But Kouzo would have preferred it to be one of the older kind, so that he could glean satisfaction from hearing it slam and shudder against the hard wall beside it. He stalked into Gendo's cave, breathing a thin trail of condensation as the waves of cold hit him.
'Damn ice daemon, you should have died all those years ago,' his eyes took on a feverish light. 'It would have been a favor to humanity.'
Gendo never looked away from the slowly scrolling text that was projected before him; and his eyes never wavered as Kouzo furiously rushed through that floating, green text and threw the yellowed manila folder at his desk, the papers inside scattering everywhere.
Gendo slowly blinked, but only because his former professor had actually slammed his hands down hard enough on his massive desk to make it quiver slightly.
"Something I can--"
"You lying bastard!" Kouzo shouted across Gendo's cool opening. "You told the medical staff to doctor those reports for the boy, didn't you!"
Impassive clarity slowly glared the anger that welled deep inside Kouzo down back to its primal source. "Of course I did. You should know Fuyutski, that the mental stability of the pilots, even potential pilots, has to be maintained within our set parameters. To let that pilot know that his sister was on the edge of death and would die within a few months would have been counter to my goals."
Kouzo lifted himself from the desk and sneered down at his commander, "And now you still plan to keep up this charade? To let the boy be ignorant of his sister's slowly deteriorating situation is one thing Ikari...but to keep her death from him and his family?"
Gendo lightly tapped an illuminated diode and the floating text stopped behind Kouzo; a short swivel and Gendo was now facing out the Geofront. Staring cruelly across his small dominion.
"I do what I must. From the reports that Dr. Akagi has sent through, that boy has the lesser of potential between the pair. Since Unit 01 is of greater import to my goals, the other will be the Third Child's backup."
Kouzo narrowed his eyes, "Which means the other will be piloting Unit 03..."
"The Fifth Child has been located," Gendo swivelled back to face Kouzo. A short, precise keystroke and the text behind Kouzo warped and congealed into the image of a sparkling oasis, surrounded by a vast plain of brown, broken desert scape that was only interrupted by thick spikes of jagged rock that shot up in the far distance.
"This is the Nevada Branch?"
Gendo slightly bent his head, "Yes. Units 03 and 04 are being constructed here. Unit 04 is scheduled for a test at the beginning of next week. Unit 03 is being shipped to our primary American Branch as a...precautionary matter."
"So the next two units are complete." Kouzo felt himself being over-awed by that thought, 'Enough power to level the Earth.'
"Correct, and incorrect. Evangelion Units 05 through 13 are either completed as well, or coming close to completion. All they lack are pilots."
Kouzo silently took in that revelation, and frowned at the implication. "The Council is worried."
Gendo laughed. A cold, cruel, soul chilling laugh that never sounded with the faintest inclination of mirth. "If they are, then they should be," his smile, a fanged mockery of the sterling item, faded into a thin-lipped line. "But I have a more pressing problem at my feet. The Thirteenth Angel is due soon. Either through Unit 03 or Unit 04. Either one alone is enough to overpower our pilots at their current synching."
Kouzo stood silent. One of the scattered reports along the floor wafted slowly to the side, rolling over itself as the air conditioning cut on and chilled the room even further.
"The Third Child being in the state he is, I think that it is due time that we started using the Dummy System."
Kouzo kept his peace.

Asuka laughed as she ruthlessly assaulted the curling, defenseless, and utterly stupefied Shinji Ikari. She continued to laugh, a deep and rich laugh, as she increased her torture of the unmoving Shinji by twofold. Soon, the boy let loose a cry and lurched from his fetal position and promptly landed square on the floor.
"Enough! Enough! I give up already!" he cried, struggling to push himself away from the vicious girl who had for the past hour, tormented him beyond all sensibility and reason.
"Oh, no." Asuka grinned slyly as she stood quickly from her position of rest, "You're not getting away that easily!" She fell once more upon her prey, as he was too slow in making good on his one break from her grasp. And with cunning, deft fingers of slenderness; Asuka began to work.
Shinji cried out again, his breath part gasp--part laughter.
Asuka re-commenced her tickling with thorough enthusiasm.
"N-no! Stop! I give up alre-eady!"
This had been going on since nearly the first of the movie, when upon a somewhat gentle jab into the middle of Shinji's side produced a squirm and a violent wriggling out of the boy, Asuka had perchance to ask: "Shinji...are you ticklish?"
Unfortunately for the boy, he answered that question.
For nearly an hour and a half the two had been going at it. With Asuka assaulting the poor boy at nearly every turn, giving him only short amounts of time to rest and recover before she went at it again. Shinji, in desperation, started to tickle back. He found a few spots on her that produced that effect which his whole body seemed attuned to; but these spots were quickly rendered useless to him as they only worked when Asuka was never expecting it.
Which wasn't very often after the first few times.
Shortly after their latest bout, the two teens collapsed against one of Misato's beanbag supports and sat there together, breathing heavily as their sweating bodies attempted to attain equilibrium with itself. The movie was reaching its end according to Asuka, so the two called a truce and watched the rest of the movie devoid of attacks.
"--and I never knew, her name."
The screen abruptly cut from the barren and mountainous, snowy landscape to black. On which was a line of text that Shinji could tentatively identify as Latin.
STAT ROSA PRISTINA NOMINE
NOMINA NUDA TENEMUS
"Forget not the name of the rose, without which: we would not exist," Asuka gently said, leaning heavily against the beanbag; a slight rustling of dried, hollowed shells rasped across the room as Asuka's body shifted and fell against Shinji's side.
The two looked at their arms, then at one another. They stared, deeply, into the eyes of their opposites; each thinking, wondering, imagining.
Asuka's head dropped, spilling her unrestrained hair across her brow, her eyes became shining liquid ice hid only by the occasional slow drop of her eyelids over them.
'She's...beautiful,' Shinji thought.
Asuka's head perked up a bit, as if though she had heard his though. Then she lowered herself back down, then back up and against the beanbag, so that she might gaze out upon the world. Shinji felt his palm twitch, and his pulse raced as he watched the world through the windows of his body. Slowly, ever so cautiously, he leaned down to Asuka's face; his mind drinking in every detail of her face as her eyelids slid back down again and stayed closed. Shinji's nose flared quietly, absorbing the delicate scent of Asuka; something akin to cinnamon his mind imagined, and he leaned in closer.
His nose brushed against hers, slowly tracing a small oval across her perfect protrusion; then it slid aside and past, allowing free unobstruction. Shinji continued further, leaning across himself to reach his goal. And with a passing moment, his head arched down--
And his lips met with hers.
Pen Pen watched from the kitchen door.

The wind was bitterly cold.
And hard.
The stuttering flap of a coal-pitch trenchcoat of heavy wool snapped incessantly under the high yowl of the wind; which sounded like the cries of the damned as their flesh was burned through by sulphurous ash. A suitable place for this monastery then, as it was devoted to the enlightenment of those who sought to escape the eternal cycles of death and pain.
Or so one could imagine.



The man in his heavy coat and offstandishly large rounded hat of the same colour steadily walked the winding, railess stairway that ascended through a harsh, rocky landscape. A shine of silver flashed indiscreetly from the man's breast, causing all who paused to watch his solitary ascent to cringe and shield their eyes from its sheen.
Finally, the man reached the plateau upon which the temple monastery was built. He hesitated but once to look around and appraise his bearings. Taking in the smattering of gathered monks with a slight glance as he rested for a short moment. Then the man in black took a step forward, heading for the largest of the three buildings that occupied the plateau; the one that was seemingly carved straight from the precipice of that lonely mountain itself.
The darkness inside, as it was only offset by the low flicker of dim candles and sparse windows, illuminated very little of the temple's innards. The man in black hardly slowed though, his head swinging from side to side as he passed long rows of pillared hallways that were similarly illuminated by candles and narrow windows from which burning gusts of wind pierced through.
Soon he entered a wider area, with the walls sharply angling away from his sides as he passed through a low arch engraved with mantras and surrounded by long rows of prayer wheels. The sounds of chanting and the smell of unwashed cleanliness wafted over his delicate nose, wrinkling it.
'Even heathens should bathe before praying to their false ones,' the man thought as he surveyed the long square body of shaven monks. They had been there for many a day from the smell of this room, chanting their mantras and seeking with the inward eye as they sought that sole thing that consumed their entity, but which so few seemed to attain.
A faint smell drifted through the rancor then. Light, cinnamon, incense. A short peering through the veiled darkness that permeated the room reveled several misty braziers from which the cloudy smell drifted from. A solitary monk stripped to the waist of his robes walked in a slow ponderous circuit around the mass; swinging a censer before him as he chanted along with the others.
The man gave all this a short investigation, then turned to his primary interest of this whole room: the sole occupant of a short dais that was only raised a foot above the frigid stone flagstones upon which the rest of the seekers squatted upon. His hands were held close to the chest, with the elbows resting on his knees and his lips moving only partially with the low, thrumming chant that boomed from his shrunken and withered chest. Snowy-white lines that were his eyebrows framed his open, staring eyes.
Eyes that locked upon the man in black as he gingerly stepped through the crowd towards the dais.
The old monk never broke his mantra, even as the man in black reached into the darkness that was hidden beneath his coat and pulled free a pistol with a long cylinder attached to its muzzle. The sharp shot jerked all but the deepest meditator from his trance.
The rapid shots that succeeded took all those who could not flee fast enough.

"Ia. Ia. Cthulhu fhtagn. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn..."
Lorenz Keel hesitated over the next few lines, pausing to see how he should phrase them so that their effect would have the desired reaction that he was seeking. His withered lips pursed and a thin tongue snaked out to coat them in a thin saliva.
"Master Keel?" a thin and wavering voice cut through his intense concentration just as the moment of second continuation was at the precipice of commencement. With a frustrated sigh, the old man with his cyclopic eyepiece of scarlet jade lowered his upraised hands and replied. "We've received a communique' from a person who only identifies himself as 'Priest'--"
"The message?" Keel sharply interrupted, his hands curling on the old wood of his stand. Yet far enough from the intricate book of immense size that occupied a good deal of its surface, no sense in damaging that which may provide what other means may not.
"Two words, in code I believe. Finis morte."
Keel smiled, a cruel smile that would frost the most cold-hearted bastard of any age. Yellowed teeth shown sickly in the soft light of the six hundred and sixty-six candles of ebon black that surrounded the book's resting stand.
"Good. Now...do not disturb me again."
The servant acquiesced quickly and left Keel alone in the dark once more. Spreading his hands and raising his arms above the stand, the withered old soul of a thousand cycles began his plea again. Chanting out to mercifully unilluminated horrors with dark and foul names, begging them for vitality and energies so foetid and corrupt that the mere sight of such dark sorcery would burn a man's brain clean and leave him a foaming dog.
"Ia. Ia. Cthulhu fhtagn..."
From the farthest corner of Keel's room of candles, a pair of red eyes watched.

Kaji shivered as he walked into the cool air of the museum.
It was always cold here, sometimes as cold as Ikari's office.
'A frightful thought there, Kaji-boy.'
"Ah! Mr. Kaji, welcome, welcome. Come in, please."
Kaji smiled and stepped blithely across the wooden floor that was the gallery's entrance foyer. He quickly passed the thickly-build receptionist desk and wove his way through the myriad of free-standing statues, hanging paintings, pale marble busts, and immense hanging scrolls to ascend the expansive stairwell to the second floor.
There, he greeted the Old Man back with a warm handshake and a bright smile, taking in all that had changed about him since they had last parted.
"You're not feeling well?" Kaji asked, glancing down at the darkly varnished cane capped with a golden point.
The Old Man shrugged and gestured for Kaji to follow him to his apartment. "Well, as of late I've been feeling a bit worn. My side has been aching something fierce these few past days..."
"Maybe," Kaji gently suggested, "you should go back to see the doctors?"
His host scoffed and pushed open his door, letting the rich smell of pasta drift through. A faint underlay of spices aeromated that somewhat thin smell; upheld in its richness by a heavy, meaty smell of the ground that was intermixed with the red sauce. "Nonsense, all I need to do is be careful how I go up and down these stairs. Otherwise I'm just as healthy as I was before." A clattering of plates came from the kitchen, Kaji stared questioningly at the area as he gently shut the door behind them.
"A guest I'm entertaining," the Old Man casually set his cane aside, revealing the intricate gold handle that was its grip. A carving of fantastical creatures that resembled crustaceans with long wings extending to their tails; yet with no discernable head, only a mass of jumbled tentacles it seemed. "I met him after you released me that morning; quite the patron of arts that this city seems to lack..."
As the Old Man continued, pulling a seat back from the head of the table that was his customary abode, the aforementioned guest swirled in from the kitchen: his hands mitten and filled with a large, red pot that wafted steam from its covered opening. A wooden spoon protruded from one end.
"Here we are!" the man, an aged person of perhaps twenty years younger than the curator, cried mildly as he set the pot down. A set of green eyes peered furtively at Kaji from underneath a thick brow, set within a face that was of definite western origin. "One more for lunch then? Good thing I've prepared extra." The man disappeared once again into the kitchen, this time a rattle of silverware and the clap of plates echoed from within its white depths.
"I know him..?"
The Old Man looked up from the table, "You do? Where from?"
"I attended a wedding service he was hosting," Kaji quietly intoned, moving over to a seat opposite the Old Man. "He's some denomination of Christianity, don't remember which one though."
"Methodist," came the answer as the somewhat plump man wound back into the dining room, his hands filled with plates and silverware. Glasses were already set out, and a small set of tea was steaming off to one side. "Yes, I remember you from one of those wedding services. Best man wasn't it?"
Kaji nodded as he helped the clergyman set out the dishes.
"Well, fancy meeting again!" the man, a Father Sanders Kaji believed, beamed as he lifted the lid free from the pot. A rolling wave of steam clouding the air above the table for a moment.
"Yeah, fancy..."

Gendo watched his former mentor from behind the thin glass that separated hospital ward room from the sterile hallway. A thin crease of impatience lined his face as he watched the nurse inside inject a thick, dark liquid into the upraised vein of his right arm.
"He over-exerted himself," the doctor was of Indian descent; his skin a dark olive and his hair a thick, curling black that held closely to his scalp in small locks. "The strain induced on his heart from the incident you reported was only the first of it. By the end of the day, the stress caused his heart to stop lest it overwork itself and cause permanent damage. The sole benefit of that was that he was here when it occurred, enabling us to properly treat him in time."
Gendo felt like frowning, held it in all the same. "And if it happens again?"
The doctor pulled his small lenses off of his face and folded them neatly before safely depositing them into a pocket by his breast, "If it happens again, he will most likely die."
"Who let him go?" Gendo cooly demanded.
The doctor inclined his head and quickly thought, showing no distress or anxiety. "The matter is being dealt with Commander, Hospital Staff is under "My" jurisdiction. And I receive my funding from the UN, not from NERV's budgets."
Gendo let his eyes narrow with angry frustration.
"Sub-Commander Fuyutski will have to remain under close supervision for a minimum of five months. He will be released in a few days, but...will have to facilitate the use of a wheelchair for an indefinite amount of time as of that release date. Rehabilitation should begin in a few months after that."
"Why wasn't he given a chair before leaving the wards?" Gendo asked, his cool tone now an icy point of steel.
The doctor glanced at his watch and then back to Gendo's shaded eyes. "We are unsure. But perhaps it was his own stubbornness and anger with the records he confiscated from our fileroom that had to do with it." The doctor studied his general overlord for a barest moment of time and then turned away. "Good day, Commander."

Shinji walked steadily through the shimmering heat of Tokyo-3.
He quickly glanced to the side, then stared forward again. After a few minutes passed, he glanced over again. Asuka sighed, "What?!"
Shinji shrunk a bit, his face clouding with an emotion akin to apprehension and confusion. "Well, Asuka...What...I mean..."
"What do we have between us now?" Asuka softly asked, turning so that she could watch Shinji as they walked together towards their school. Shinji nodded. "Well...I don't know Shinji. Some could consider that the two of us are dating now."
Shinji felt a line of sweat roll across his back.
"But, I don't really know myself."
Shinji made an uncertain sound, and let his hands droop unconsciously to his sides. Absently, they swung in rhythm to the beats of his feet. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Until, his right hand was suddenly arrested in mid-flight by another hand. A warm, soft, silky hand that gently held on until he barely squeezed upon it.
Shinji looked through the corners of his eyes at the radiant beauty that had so captured his mind that every waking moment of the night past had been spent upon her and that single, solitary moment of peace that she had given to him with that delicate kiss they shared. Asuka smiled back and squeezed his hand.
Shinji faced forward, his lips contorted into a silly grin. Asuka laughed at his weird expression and shifted her direction of movement so that she would push gently into him as they walked. Shinji laughed in return and did the same.
The pair walked to school that way, one brushing into the other only to be pushed back at the next step. Happy were their faces as they passed underneath drooping leaves of old oaks and sprawling cherries. Happy they were.
Shinji's left hand twitched all the way to school.

"That's it! A little more! More! More! No! WAIT!"
"Damn it Mack! Is it there or not!" shouted down the crane operator to his field director through their radio connection.
"Just a little to the left and forward and it's in!" Mack shouted back, his throat straining and cording as he forced his voice to be heard over the surrounding din of buzzing metal saws and hissing, sizzling, sputtering of arcwelders going about their delicate trade.
The operator cursed loudly, though in his environs it would have been a flies buzz within a car engine, and slightly tapped the requisite controls in their correct directions. A quick shout from Mack below and a shudder that bounced the entire crane around announced that it was, indeed, finally in position.
'The faster, the better too,' the operator thought as he pulled free a thick, short cigar and lighter. A flash of sparks and a puff of flame and the end glowed brightly. 'Better to be working New Manhattan docks than this place man...'
An exasperated puff of blue-gray smoke wafted through the air before the operators nose, concealing mercifully the horrid creaturesque monstrosity that towered even above his own tall crane.
It was black, midnight black; with a horrible face from which leered two unnaturally bright eyes that the operator always felt watching him. Watching everyone. A short, snubby face that held no nose but a massive maw of silver-sharp teeth; broad shoulders above which towered two protrusions that held only NERV knows what, underneath which tapered down a thin, armor- plated torso which eventually split and formed into legs of a biped.
But those eyes...
The smoke dissipated, and the operator slowly heard the calls of Mack from below.
"The people Up-Top said that it has to be more to the right now, sorry man: but we've got to take it back out and try it again."
The cigar was shoved deep into the mouth of the operator, and his teeth gripped it fiercely. "Damn." Slowly, he shifted the crane into reverse and pulled down the lever that would lift its burden high again. Ponderously, the massive crane backed away from the monstrosity.
And then it tried to insert the S-2 unit again.
In a far corner, a pair of gray eyes watched.
Their swirling tempest filled with mirth.












The lidless eye watched patiently.
It had watched since the birth of its mind, and would watch for as long as its masters told it to.
Such a simple and happy existence. To fly across the heavens and see all of mankind evolve and change and grow as the years pass. But it is not always so happy.
For sometimes; a few, bare, harsh sometimes--humanity has nothing happy to witness amongst itself. So, when the great, lidless eye witnessed the great flood of light and energy--it wept. And with a great explosion of fire and gas, the eye was consumed.
Destroyed by what it was privy too.


Gendo watched mirthlessly as Kouzo was wheeled into his office.
The elderly man looked terrible, his face appearing withered and pained at every slight jar or awkward motion of the leather and fabric padded chair that squeaked along on rubber-rimmed wheels. His hair was mussed, with spikes of gray down poking out from odd areas and heading off in equally odd directions. The whole of it was that Kouzo appeared to be a withered, old man who should be off in a country cottage sitting in a rocking chair and drinking hot tea.
The blanket draped across him did not help dispel that image.
"Thank you," Kouzo gently said to the middle-aged nurse that had wheeled him so far. His own arms being as of yet unequal to the rigorous task of wheeling him about the caverns of NERV, "Please wait outside for me."
The nurse nodded and gave a brief glare over to Gendo, an expression that said it would be his head served to the masters should anything complicate her patient's easy rest. And then she was gone, the heels of her shoes giving a sharp, militaristic staccato atop the metal.
"You are better I presume?" Gendo asked.
Kouzo grunted and shifted underneath his blanket, "Barely...I'm not feeling to well along my chest, but the doctors said that should go away in a few days."
Gendo hummed approval and then opened his top desk drawer and removed a file. "Here, you should look at these," he said as the file was passed over, "official word will reach us under an hour I would suppose."
"This-this is--"
Gendo nodded and hummed again, "Yes. Unit 04 has disappeared. The S-2 testing has taken Unit-04 and all of the Second Branch from Nevada."
Kouzo rapidly scanned through the various black and white photos, "Taken it where?"
"I don't know...and that worries me."
Kouzo glanced up and saw a frown grace his pupil's face, and that scared him more than anything he had seen before. For if the Puppetmaster frowned at his Puppets--then you knew not next what would happen. "The United Sates?" he gently probed.
"They are demanding that NERV ship Unit 03 to us," Gendo pulled out another file and opened its weathered cover. "And rightfully so, several thousand people have died after all." Kouzo peered closely at one of the first pictures asking, "What have the Committee to say about it?"
"They were alarmed, but they should have guessed at something like this. They were also non-plussed about our activating the Sixth Child for use as a backup pilot for Unit 01, however: I convinced them that he was necessary for the moment, as a precaution against the Third being unable to synchronize with Unit 01."
Kouzo laughed softly, 'They'll have your head for that Gendo, sooner or later they will.'
Gendo flipped through several documents in his folder, stopping at a single photograph that lay in-between several English documents. From the brief glance Kouzo saw, it was a group of men in American fatigues in a jungle of some sort in a far gone date. The corners of this picture were bent and the white backing stained with the wearing of many years and many fingers.
Gendo traced one gloved finger across the picture, stopping over one point and lingering there for a long span of time.
Then he put the picture back and closed the folder.
"We should prepare the PR units, and send a field team to investigate."
A ringing buzz sounded and the Nurse came back in.

"I wonder where they are?"
Shinji looked away from the window, with its stunning vista of rolling hills and rising mountains, to turn to yet another stunningly wonderful image. Asuka smiled at him, but that beautiful look soon dissolved into an expression of distasteful worry. "Where who are?"
The girl snorted and gestured to the two empty seats beside and behind Shinji, "Your idiotic lackeys, that's who. They've been gone for longer than you and I have according to Hikari."
Shinji frowned, then blinked rapidly as he lowered his head to stare at the book that lay open on his desk. "I don't know either..."
"Well, come on, it's lunchtime and you should be outside where you can get some sun." Asuka lightly said, tugging on Shinji's sleeve before she left to retrieve her bento. Shinji sighed as he mused on how nice it was to have her looking after him rather than nagging on his every fault.
'Much better,' he thought as a smile crept across his face. Asuka met up with him at the door and together they walked out of the room. They weren't holding hands, true, but they were going to take their time with this. Go nice and slow.
Shinji smiled as he quickly gazed through the corners of his eyes at the radiant Asuka. And she smiled back.
"Asuka!" A loud rapping of hasty footsteps from behind, which proved to be Hikari herself hurrying to catch up with the pair of them before they disappeared for lunch. "Asuka," Hikari said breathlessly as she halted beside the girl, "I need to talk to you...alone."
Hikari gave Shinji a significant glance, one he found was filled with sorrow and anguish, and then turned that same gaze over to Asuka. She quickly realized that something was wrong, terribly wrong, and immediately agreed to follow.
"I'll meet you after school, okay?" Asuka whispered to Shinji before she left. He grasped her arm tightly and nodded once--and she was gone.
"So much for a nice, quiet lunch." Shinji sighed as he turned for the stairwell. A flight or three more and he emerged onto the sun-lit roof of his school. A cool breeze wafted across the parched top and ruffled his dark hair.
"Yo, Shinji!"
He turned to the disheartened call and felt a grin erupt across his face as he saw the speaker. "Touji, Kensuke! Where have you guys been?" Gravel crunched underfoot as he rushed over to the edge, where his two unlikely friends were waiting. They shared many a lunchtime up here together, and today it looked to be another day. Both had bentos out and were already feasting upon the delights within.
Touji stood first as Shinji neared, and Kensuke followed suit; rubbing a hasty hand across his mouth to clear it of the rice crumbs from his lunch. Shinji halted before them and met their gaze evenly.
"What? Where have you two been?"
His eyes whipped from one to the other and back again. Meeting a hollow and haunted gaze from each equally.
"What?"
Touji reached a hand into his pocket and pulled out something tightly gripped in his fist. Kensuke pulled something from his shirt pocket and gripped it tightly as well. They seemed to mirror Shinji and Asuka after the Seventh Angel, as both raised their hands palm up in an eery unison and opened them.
Shinji's bento landed open with a sick crakk.
His hands started to shake.
"N-no..."
The gusty wind made the plastic wrapping of his lunch wave in the air.

In the realm of Seele, all sanity is fantasy.
"What should we do in concerns to the Sixth Child?"
"We should wait and see if the Third is able to utilize the Evangelion before coming to that decision." "Ikari should be punished for that act! Activating the Fourth is one thing, but activating the Sixth when he knows that we already have a trained pilot is criminal!"
Keel felt his frustrations mounting again, as they always did whenever he listened to the gathered powers bicker and argue like spoiled rich children. Another headache crept across his sight, a black stain that slowly spread across the red of his vision.
"And what of this latest incident? Unit 04 and the Second Branch disappearing right underneath our noses like that! It is criminal! Ikari should be reprimanded for that failure that has cost thousands of lives!"
"And what would you have me do?" Keel interrupted, his voice cutting through like a razor. "Place the blame for those lives on him? Even though it was this Council that ordered the testing?" He shook his head and silently cursed their stupidity, "No...that would waste both his and my time. Besides, the test was not a total disaster..."
"How do you mean?" Asked one of the gathered few.
Keel smiled, his yellowed teeth dully glinting. "Because we have managed to gather, this," Keel pushed a button and the council circle lit up with the unearthly light of a holographic projection. "Without Ikari knowing of it."
"This, this is..."
"My, God Keel! If Ikari knew--"
"What? He would kill us? He would do that for far less offense than this already. We need this for insurance, as well as to complete our own Evangelion Units in production."
Another cleared his throat, "And the Fifth Child will p--"
"No," Keel interrupted again, "the Fifth Child will be a basis for the other units. But you and I know what he truly is...and knowing that, we must let him do his duty before we can implement our scenario."
"What do you propose?"
The silence of waiting was thick and heavy across the expansive room of darkness as Keel quickly recalled his plan. It was a short time to pass, but as all short times of momentous occasion, it felt as though aeons were flying by.
"The Sixth Child will have no use to NERV if the Third can operate Unit 01...in that situation, NERV will have a useless pilot for immediate concerns."
"You mean to bring him here?"
Keel grinned a sickly smile, his throat clenching as a pure undulation of victory erupted in his chest. "He will be most...malleable for our purpose."
Seele agreed.

Kaji watched the tip of his cigarette glow orange in the flame.
A slight puff and the tobacco caught and now steadily burned. The top came back down on the flame and let itself deplete the small modicum of oxygen that was left inside with the flame. A curl of smoke erupted from his mouth as he placed the lighter away, but his eyes held steadfast to the figure in black that slowly moved down the street.
A man dressed as a western priest, with a black coat and black vestments; who's face was always shaded by the large brim of his black, felt hat.
Kaji pulled the burning tube away from his lips and exhaled, 'He moves like an assassin, not like a man of God.'
The cigarette went back and Kaji felt for his pistol. It was still there, underneath his worn and slightly weathered coat. But feeling it there made him feel no safer than before.
Down the street, the man dressed as a priest walked steadily along. Oblivious to any fact of being followed, he was totally enraptured with the thick, leather-bound book he held reverently in his hands. His lips slowly moved as he chanted out the words that formed sentences that formed paragraphs that formed pages. Softly wringing his tongue to catch every nuance of his current speech.
Several times he crossed himself, calling upon the blessings of his God to descend on this unworthy servant of His; a few passers-by glanced repulsively at him as he shuffled past, but never held his face long enough to be blatantly rude about it.
Not that he cared.
'They will all pay in full, the infidels, God shalt render them their judgement at the turn of the days. And the blessed will receive his full glories while the wicked shalt burn in the fires of Hell.'
A wicked grin pierced across the shaded black under the blackened brim. And a broken, hysterical laugh that was nearly too low to be heard drifted from behind his ivory teeth.

The room was dark.
It was always dark. That is what Seele found suitable to keep him in. Much of what Seele found suitable for him was like the darkness of his quarters. It always had that depressing feel to it, that subtle closing in that gave anyone exposed for long to it a distinct claustrophobia. Much of what Seele did felt that way.
"Your time is nearer at hand."
The boy started in the darkness, flinging himself up on his thin cot and peering into the corner from which that voice, a voice that was not any one voice but many and more all thrown together and mixed from high to low, sounded.
"Yes...I can sense the closing of the Age drawing near. This Age...so different than any of the others. Much started as the same, but now it has become a new and living entity..."
"Is the end written as before then?" The boy asked, his honeyed voice asking in a tone more serious than it was meant for.
A ruffling of fabric, as though the speaker in the darkness was shaking his head. "It is unknown; all Ages must come to an end, as this one will. However, all of their endings are not chiseled in stone."
The boy leaned back against the hard, cool wall of his room and sighed. He closed his eyes against the darkness and thought back, trying hard to recall that which he had been subject to countless times before. It was always hard to remember, but with effort he could remember all.
The closing hand.
The words.
A wet, nauseating snap.
A splash of liquid.
A solitary tear slipped underneath his eyelid and rolled down his pale skin.

Asuka didn't complain when she was told.
She just nodded and said that she would be waiting when Shinji returned home. She knew that he, Kensuke, and Touji had something to discuss. Something dreadful and important.
Something that might affect hundreds of thousands of lives in the near future...
Or just two.



Shinji slowly stirred the bubbling curry with a wooden spoon.
Around him, Touji and Kensuke also carried out their tasks, as set forth by Touji surprisingly, in a calm and collective silence. In a small room across the way there came the irregular and quite scrape of paper on paper as Touji's father, a man with a paunch belly and a smooth head with thick lenses sitting precariously on the bridge of his nose, sat reading through one of Tokyo-3's daily newspapers.
"How long?"
Touji looked up at the sauce and then back down to the vegetables he was slicing up, "A few more minutes. Then they should be done. How about you Kensuke?"
"Should be done shortly after," he replied from where his pot bubbled and blurped. He wasn't a good cook, much less even a decent one. So he sat there and watched the rice cooking to make sure it didn't boil over. Their dinner together was a silent one, with Touji insistently doing all of the serving and fetching of minor items while the other two sat placidly by. Shinji commented on the delightful taste of Touji's curry, and Touji thanked him for the compliment. Kensuke stolidly ate his rice. A mechanical motion of the arm and the jaw that was their only indication that the boy was still alive. They all washed up in silence, their only interruptions being the irregular scratching of paper on paper and the sharp clink of their plates.
The air conditioning turned on.
The trio made their way outside, where the slowly cooling night air brushed easily across their smooth cheeks. Shinji felt his eyes water as he crouched over the railing in-between his friends.
"Why?"
Touji stared out across the vast, open space which led down to the blanket of lights and movement that was Tokyo-3. Kensuke was rythmicly rapping his fingertips across the railing, sending mild thrums into the arms of both Shinji and Touji as they all sat there.
"Wh-"
"My sister is in America you know...she was sent to a hospital there, to recover." Touji quickly interrupted before Shinji could finish. Kensuke said nothing, only rapped his fingers along the hollow metal. "But...I don't think she's going to make it."
Shinji breathed in harshly, the air rasping across the back of his throat. "Touji, she's going to make it."
The boy looked melancholy at those hard words, and he turned to face Shinji with eyes that shimmered with unspilt tears. "They tell us that Shinji...but, I can't feel her anymore. I can't feel my sister anymore." Silence. Touji's mouth opened and closed, his tongue foundering for words to describe the pain he was feeling.
The hollow pain.
"I don't know why I joined."
Touji closed both eyes and mouth as Kensuke turned Shinji away from his plight, silently thanking the boy for what he did. Shinji, who had turned to face the sullen-looking youth with sandy hair, looked questioningly at him.
"Well, it's true," Kensuke said, gesturing with one hand whilst the other drummed incessantly on. "NERV has nothing to offer me; nothing to ply at me with. Yet I joined anyway." He shook his head and drummed on. "I dunno, maybe I felt like Touji would need some company...or at the very least, some help. Maybe I felt like you shouldn't take all the pain for us anymore, but...I dunno if that's why either."
Shinji watched Kensuke and felt a nervous tension ooze out of the slight frame.
Slowly, he turned away from Kensuke and faced out towards the city.
And sitting there, all three of them, they suddenly felt a bond coalesce between them and that shimmering blanket of lights. A bond that inexorably tied them and their souls to that massed lump of humanity that struggled in the face of monstrous adversity to protect themselves and the ones they loved. They felt that bond form.
"I wonder if we'll make it out of this alive."
"If we don't, will it matter?"
"Probably not."
The silence lasted a good bit after that, until Shinji broke it with a single phrase. "Welcome to the Crusade."
They left shortly after.

"Have you told him?"
Asuka peered intently at her friend as she curled herself up into a tight, defensive ball around the large and overstuffed teddybear she held tightly in her lap.
"No," Hikari admitted shamefully, "but...I just don't know how to tell him myself. I just can't find a way to get around to the big lug so that he will understand!"
Asuka smiled at her friend's exasperated smile that bore a subtle pain buried underneath a thousand layers of patience and kind willingness.
"Well, why don't you try to do something nice for him?" Well, sure Asuka and Touji hadn't gotten along very well in the past--but that was no reason to destroy her friend's hope for finding love in him. No, she would never do that to anyone she liked.
Never.
"Asuka? Are you okay?"
Asuka blinked hard and quickly ran a hand over her eyes to catch the two tears that had barely started to work their way down the lonely trek across her smooth cheeks. "Yeah, I'm fine...now, what should we do for this ape of yours?"
Hikari smiled at Asuka.
Asuka smiled back, feeling a happy contentment wash over her.
It felt good.

Kaji groped for his beerstein.
His head was foggy and feeling somewhat softer than finely mashed potatoes at the moment, and the beer certainly didn't help harden his delicate gray matter. But that didn't matter to him right now. What did matter was drowning his sorrows and aches and pains and regrets and wants and needs and desires--ach, the list would go on forever if he wrote it all out.
But that wasn't important either.
"Hey Shino!" he called out with a mild slurr.
Shino, a stocky man with two pencil thin mustachios worked his way over to Kaji and patiently rubbed the beerstein in his hands with a wet rag. "Yeah, Kaji?"
"This glass...ish defective."
Shino, being accustomed to slurrspeak, easily deciphered the question and took upon his tanned face a look of wonder and astonishment. "Really? How is it defective Kaji?"
Kaji morbidly looked into the stein and then back up to Shino's patient face, "Well...ish empty."
Shino took the stein out of Kaji's hand and peered into the foamy depths himself, then he replaced it on the stained and smelly wood of his Bartop and nodded assent. "You're right Kaji, it is empty."
"Defective," he said unsteadily. "There's only one way to remedy that defectivnessh..."
"You're right Kaji...but, I don't think the problem will remedy itself tonight."
Kaji groaned and tried to stand up, but somehow managed to tangle his legs up with the stool he sat on and only got as far as the Bartok, where a struggling Shino was trying to heft him up higher before he lost grip and Kaji wound up as a carpet.
"Here, I've got him." Shino found the strain being lifted from his arms and gratefully thanked the man who held Kaji up from beneath his armpits. "May I get a glass of wine?" The man holding Kaji asked.
"Yes sir, be right out. Perhaps you should seat him before he loses his stomach, sir?"
The man nodded and jerked his head to the empty table behind him. "Over there is my seat, make it a white zinfandel please."
"Of course."
Kaji felt himself being dragged backwards into the lounge and found himself more concerned over the suddenly raging contents of his stomach than who his savior was. Fortunately for him, his rescuer, and the cleaning crew of the up-scale bar he was attending; his stomach choose to reign itself back in.
He had been drinking a lot tonight.
"So, Mr. Kaji...what could happen that would make you binge out on so many drinks this fine evening?" The voice, familiar, but with his head swimming so badly as it did now: he could hardly remember what his own voice sounded like, let alone what others sounded.
"Well, ish really something bad...really bad." His face felt hot, flushed. His eyes felt watery, with tears of either pain or fatigue on the verge of spilling out from underneath their concealing lids. "Really...bad."
"Your wine, sir." Shino said as he placed a tall glass of a blonde wine before the man who saved Kaji from becoming a floor decoration.
"Thank you," said the man back as he reached into his overcoat and pulled free a lighter and a pipe. "Now then, Mr. Kaji," the man said as he flicked the lighter to life and pulled deeply on the worn stem of the pipe, stoking the dottle inside to life. "Why don't you tell me about why you are so sad?"
Kaji blearily looked up and tried to peer through the haze of alcohol to see who his bar buddy was. A bright light flashed into his eyes as the man lowered the lighter. But with a quick snick, the light vanished.
Swallowed in a sea of black.
"Well--"

"They are in the final stages of preparing the jet now, Ikari."
Gendo nodded absently at Kouzo's statement and re-read the passage that he had gone over what seemed like ten thousand times in the last hour. 'It still makes no more sense than it did a few moments ago, but still I read it again.'
It will come by clouds of contempt and will infiltrate the trenches of the enemy. Only to turn one against the other by means of its will.
"The Fourth Child shows the least aptitude for synchronization with Unit 01, but that aptitude is only slightly above the synchronization mark for start-up in the Sixth Child. Better, admittedly, but still not enough to control the Evangelion and utilize it to maximum standards." Kouzo droned on, sifting through the scattered reports that lay haphazardously across his blanketed lap. "The Council is demanding to know why you activated the Sixth Child in the first place, and it seems that they are no longer hiding the fact of the Fifth Child's existence anymore."
Gendo briefly flickered an eye over to where Kouzo read from his reports. "What are they demanding this time?" The Council was an annoyance, true, but it was a powerful annoyance that should not be discluded from any plans he made.
They were just too annoying to forget about.
"They want us to send the Sixth Child over to their base in Russia for advanced training on the Evangelion unit being assembled there. The Council reports that it is nearly complete and that their own pilot is being tied up in China with tests on new, experimental, equipment."
Gendo frowned, "Well, we shall see if the Third Child can still pilot the Evangelion before we make any decision about that," he flicked his eyes back to the slowly scrolling green text that floated ethereally above his desk and read the passage again.
It will come by clouds of contempt and will infiltrate the trenches of the enemy. Only to turn one against the other by means of its will.
"What will we do with your son if he cannot?" Kouzo gently probed.
Gendo's lips pressed together and frustration flared in a corner of his mind. "If he cannot, then we will more than likely not have to worry about it anytime after. For, as your reports have so clearly stated, the Sixth Child cannot adequately synchronize with Unit 01."
Kouzo laughed, a dry and mirthless wheeze of tired lungs. "What did you expect Ikari? That the kid would somehow have a synchronization ratio of forty-three percent like your son?" Another wheezing laugh, "Please, let us be realistic about that chance!"
Gendo frowned and bit in the remark he had, sparing Kouzo the scathing bile only to answer the suddenly insistent telephone that bleeped its way into conscious thought.
"Ikari...Understood."
Gendo replaced the phone and slammed the drawer shut. Then re-assumed his hunched poise, and re-read the text again as it looped back to the beginning.
'It has begun...'

Far away, over the vast expanse of the blue Pacific, a lonely jet was lazily sauntering over the sky. Lazily because of the heavy load that was its sole cargo. Though a precious cargo that it was.
Some people think clouds, especially dark clouds, had a certain foreboding sense about them. As though evil itself lurked deep within its enshrouding folds of cottony-white blooms.
The crew of the jet never felt this foreboding, after all: they were trained to fly in a place and environment that would mean certain death if any of a billion things happened around them. They were trained for it. They could handle it.
A solitary crewman gazed down through the open cargo bay at their precious cargo right before they entered one such cloud of vast proportions. She sneered at the pug-ugly face of the thing below her and snubbed her cigarette on the sole of her shoe.
"Damn monster," she said before turning away.
Lightning crackled around the jet.

Misato pushed her sunglasses higher up along the bridge of her nose, and snarled at the bright sun that glared down upon her visage. 'Damn daystar,' she darkly thought as a wave of heat rose and suffocated her like a thick woolen blanket. "When's this damn thing getting here Ritsu? I'm hot, bored...and sober."
Ritsuko smiled grimly as she wandered through the technical specs of Evangelion Unit 03, graciously sent beforehand by the United States government of course. "It should get here soon enough Misato, and then you can run along back to your boyfriend and a beer...after the tests, shakedown, and relocating has been done of course."
Misato scoffed at the idea. But she knew, with a certainty and a loathing dread that crept deep into her chest, that what Ritsuko said was true.
Except for the boyfriend part.
"Here it comes." Ritsuko softly intoned, her eyes shaded behind prescription glasses of her own peering far into the distant horizon. As Misato turned that way, she saw the dark outline of the F-Type Jet burst through the clouds. And underneath it: the dark outline of a cross. Two white, beady pinpricks of light shone from that cross.
Misato shivered. "Let's get this over with."



Kaji felt worse than hammered shit.
Which is a lot of hurt if you don't know what I mean. It's the kind of hurt that you can only get at a certain hour of the morning after having spent most of the night before doing a certain activity that is both strength- draining and mind-destroying.
No, not that.
"Ahh...shit."
"Morning Mr. Kaji," came the gentle voice of one who knew that any loud noise would result in pain for the recipient, and then: death for the utterer. "Feeling...well, somewhat better I hope. Though in a great deal of pain from all that wincing you're doing."
Kaji looked through fogged eyes into a bright room, and regretted not being blind. "Ah! Kill the lights!"
"They are out," replied the Old Man from where he was seated nearby. He forked a thick pile of eggs into his mouth and easily consumed them before the slimy taste ever hit his tongue. "You know, you really shouldn't drink like that."
"Like how?" Kaji asked, slowly easing his body over onto a shoulder. After a few moments of struggle he managed to roll over and lie edge-on to the bed's precipice. "Was it bad?"
The Old Man nodded and gestured to a seat opposite him. At its place was a large plate full of western delicacies. Eggs, bacon, ham, sausage, some good-old miso soup was there too; as well as a steaming cup of coffee. Black from the bittersweet smell it exuded.
"You were pretty far gone by the time Father Sanders dragged you in."
Kaji blinked. A flashing of silver erupted over the darkness of his eyelids, and a thick voice slurred into his ears. Then his eyes were open and he saw and heard only the Old Man. "Wha-"
The Old Man nodded again and speared a sausage, "He said that you were wandering around downtown when he came across you. From what he told me, you couldn't even manage two steps away from the wall before you fell."
Kaji wriggled the toes of his feet. 'Hm, I can feel those.'
The sausage was examined for a moment, the Old Man turning it from side to side as he looked over the thin, black crust that had been seared into the outer skin of the meat. Grinning delightedly, he popped it in and chewed vigorously.
"I take it that Sanders dragged me here?" Kaji asked, his hands fumbling with the heavy quilt that lay over him. He wanted some of that breakfast.
"Correct," he forked another helping of eggs and looked away through the window to watch the rising sun warm the steel mountains. Kaji hesitantly levered himself out of the bed and lifted his head from the pillow. The room swam for a moment, then slowed to a dull spin before subsiding into a dull ache. "Now, a question in compensation of me going out and getting all of this stuff for you."
Kaji wearily tread across the short carpeting of a deep navy blue towards the table and waved his hand tiredly as he pulled out his seat. "Fire away, just make sure I die quick."
The Old Man laughed softly and sipped some coffee, "Well...why did you get so drunk should be the obvious question for this situation."
Kaji hastily stuffed three sausages on a fork and thrust a piece of crispy bacon into his mouth. The flavor and texture was just right, and the sausages soon proved to be at just the right moment in their cooked lives to be tastily crunchy. A mouthful of eggs showed that they needed salt, but that wasn't on-hand at the moment so he swallowed quickly and then made do. He was halfway through the plate and into his second cup of coffee before he answered. "I'm beginning to hate my job."

Touji walked along in silent thought.
It was a rare moment in his life to be silent when he was walking. Usually he did something as he journeyed to and fro. Sing a song, hum a random tune that his mind just unconsciously thought up, tell himself old jokes that had long past ceased to be funny or humorous. But today he wasn't singing, humming, or talking.
Today he was thinking.
"Touji?"
He stopped with a short jerk and a mumbled grunt, looking around to find out who had spoken to him. It didn't take long to spot Hikari, standing in the shade of a small elm tree by the side of the road.
"Oh! Hey, how ya been?" He asked, uneasily waving a hand and feeling if at all possible, dumber than ever before. 'She just pops up outta nowheres and all you've gotta say is "Hey"...sad man, sad.'
Hikari smiled at him and nervously shifted from one foot to another. Never quite managing to look him in the eye as she stood in the cool shade of the roadside tree. "Asuka, Asuka told me...about the, uh..."
Touji felt his stomach twist and wrench into knots, his head felt burdened with a ton of lead as it slowly sank down to stare flatly at the ground. Hikari walked up beside him and hesitantly put her hand on his arm. "Touji, they know what they're doing right? The test should be routine, if Asuka thinks anything about your talent she does think you wouldn't be able to, well..."
"Screw up something as simple as gettin' in and thinkin' hard?" Touji asked, coming up to smile at Hikari's face. Hikari had the good graces to blush at that comment, with a reason.
"That's exactly how she put it."
Touji blinked, then grinned, "Strange minds think alike."
Hikari smiled at that and then gave Touji's arm a tug, telling him to walk along with her. For once, the boy managed to interpret correctly what a female wanted him to do with their cryptic gestures. The pair walked a few blocks together, talking about one subject or another; some about NERV and the upcoming test Touji would be facing in a scant few hours.
But, like all good things, it came to an end.
"Well, this is where I split...uh," Touji paused, fumbling for words that would make this a painless parting. And he was having such a good time with her too!
Hikari never stopped smiling. "Here," she said, placing a wrapped package in Touji's callused hands.
"What's this?" he blatantly put.
"A lunch silly," Hikari sighed, never once losing her smile. "You'll probably get hungry before you can get home to eat. So I made something up for you last night."
Touji looked up and looked astonished, "Really?"
Hikari blushed and gave him a quick hug, making her redden further and leaving Touji just plain dumbfounded. "Take care okay?"
"Uh-hu."
And then she was off, racing down the street in the school's direction. Leaving Touji to walk down to the NERV personnel train by himself. His face was still slack-jawed from that unexpected hug and he barely noticed his arrival at the Matsushiro train until Misato called out to him.
Soon he was aboard and in a plush seat by the window. His hands were cupped around the wrapped bento and his eyes were locked onto the delicate knot that held it all bound together. Suddenly, the knot was undone and the kerchief was folded back.
"Whatcha got there Touji?" Misato asked, appearing out of nowhere to drape herself over the seat directly in front and to the right of where Touji rested his own butt. He didn't answer though, instead he picked up the baked cookie by the thin loop of string.
He smiled slowly as it twisted in the air.

"What are you smiling about?" Asuka griped over the top of Shinji's head at the late-arriving Hikari. "Don't look so damn chipper or certain people who HAVEN'T slept all night are going to pound the happiness out of you."
She said this with a vehement punch to the dozing Shinji, who yelped as he was slammed out of the beginnings of a good dream. Soon the two were arguing back and forth about some strange thing or another and Kensuke was filming it all. "For Touji," he said when Hikari asked him. "Wouldn't want him to miss a thing in this place."
Hikari agreed; and as the class started, beginning its slow, dull monotony of a well-hashed and re-hashed history: Hikari found herself envying Rei.
She could stare out the window.

Touji watched the cookie twirl in the air as it hung from his fingers.
He had been sitting there for a good half hour, sitting in his thick and form-fitting plugsuit. The suit was a slick and shiny design of black that had a few highlights of blue slashing here and there. He had changed a few hours ago and had just come out of a last-minute synchronization check with a simulation body.
To make sure everything's set before the real thing, that doctor had told him when he'd asked. Now, here he was. Sitting in his new plugsuit, hair drenched with that copper smell of the LCL, face sticky with that orange goop. And butterflies rumbling in his stomach.
The air conditioning cut on.
Touji smiled and let a brief chuckle rumble in his throat as the string twined together and then snapped apart, only to twine together again and repeat. 'Hikari...'
A loud BAM from the door was Touji's only indication that Misato had barged in. He quickly lowered his hand and turned to look at his new commander as she confidently strode into the cramped locker room.
"Big day, you all set?" she asked, in a gentle tone that he had never heard her use with anyone but Shinji before. Touji nodded no, and then said yes. Misato let half of her lips quirk into a smile and she inclined her head to the door. "I know what you mean."
Touji watched her walk halfway and then turn back to look at him. He sighed, and hung the cookie inside his assigned locker before standing up to follow her.
The cookie swung back and forth in the darkness.

Gendo stared impassively through the glass window at the purple and lime behemoth.
"I understand." A beep signaled the end of Kouzo's conversation and Gendo turned back to face his second. He was still in his wheelchair, with a blanket draped across his lap and legs, once again fostering that frail impression that seemed to drape thickly over the man these days. His skin was pale, and his hair jutted out in sharp spikes from all directions except the front.
"Doctor Akagi is beginning the test in twenty minutes. Should I send out the recalls yet?"
Gendo paced up beyond Kouzo and examined a long bank of monitors. They were receiving a direct-live feed from Matsushiro. Where a camera had been set up in one corner of the massive, below-ground testing facility.
The dark eyes seemed to suck in light.
"No," Gendo said crisply, "wait until they begin the activation sequence. Then issue the orders to Communications. Tell them to contact all of the remaining Children...send out a communique to our Motor Pool. I want them outside the Pilot's school as soon as they arrive."
Kouzo smirked at that thought, 'One of them will understand that little gesture Gendo, surely Sohryu at the very least will wonder how NERV transportation managed to reach them so quickly.' Kouzo cleared his throat. "Then I take it that Doctor Akagi's test proved positive?" It was true, that Gendo had some gnawing suspicions that the Thirteenth Angel hadn't even arrived yet; the Scrolls never did say exactly 'How' that Angel would arrive and take over one of the Evangelions-if it did indeed do that. Just that it would. Somehow.
"...The tests were...inconclusive."
Kouzo blinked, "But, if the Angel is not present in Unit 03...then, why?"
"We don't know that it isn't, Fuyutski...just that there is a possibility that it isn't." Gendo tapped a button and the monitors zoomed in, focusing on a slightly tall and somewhat built boy striding across the umbilical bridge towards a newly painted entry plug.
Kouzo shifted in his seat, "And if it isn't?"
Gendo frowned, truly an impressive--and frightening--sight to behold. "The we shall have to wait until it does come. And make sure that Unit 01 never becomes the host."
Kouzo nodded, but Gendo's sharp voice snapped his head back up and around.
"Fuyutski...all of the others are expendable. But we must, "Must" protect Unit 01. Understand?"
Kouzo wheeled himself closer to Gendo and looked at the monitors. The entry plug was quickly sealed and in a reasonably paced time lowered into position. "I understand...Ikari."
A line of glowing text appeared at the bottom.
INSERTING THE ENTRY PLUG...

Shinji watched impassively as his watch slowly ticked the seconds by.
57--58--59--00
"They should be starting now," he flatly intoned. Kensuke nodded absently as he watched a group of tenth grade girls start their laps in the swimming pool. Shouts and jeers from their gathered friends, enemies, and lookers-on wafted up to them on the roof in fits and spurts. "I hope he's okay."
Kensuke looked up and pushed himself off of the bar, "Shinji?"
Shinji looked up at the sudden awe and fear that edged into Kensuke's voice like a knife. "What?" he calmly replied from his lazy position on the railing.
"What's tha-"
A sudden boom rumbled in the distance.
A pillar of fire rose far off. Fire that soon gave way to darker substance.
A pillar of smoke rose from Matsushiro.
"...Touji?" Shinji said the moment before his cellphone rang.
Kensuke answered his for the both of them, Shinji couldn't open his own-- his hands were shaking too badly all of a sudden.

"Status."
The order was simply that. An order for information. Not a question, not a 'please-if-you-do', it was a simple and direct command for obedience. Gendo preferred obedience.
"The object has left Matsushiro and is proceeding down the 285 road towards Tokyo-3," one of the bridge techs called out. His long hair swung rapidly from side to side as he flicked from one glowing console to another. His fingers rapped out precise commands and queries and the consoles blurped back their responses.
Another tech, the head of tactical operations now that Major Katsuragi was down, sang out his own response. "The Magi report an Orange Pattern emanating from the target. They cannot confirm or deny the presence of an Angel. Repeat, no confirmation of an Angel."
"The Pilots have all been recovered to NERV central. An express elevator is taking them to the emergency stand-by locker rooms." Maya Ibuki paused for a moment as a secondary monitor spat out a long line of green text. "All entry plugs are prepped and waiting. We have a clear status on all of the plugs."



Gendo quickly wheeled Kouzo into the lift and pressed the requisite button. The lift quickly ascended and let them out at the very top of the massive Command Bridge. Leaving Kouzo to his own devices, Gendo darkly stalked to his solid desk and swivled his hard chair around. "Status on the Dummy Plug?"
Maya gave an unsure grunt as she rapidly typed in several questions to her processor, "The programming is still incomplete, it is unknown if the plug will work at all," Maya paused and turned back to face her commander, "but why would we need the system when we have two pilots?" Gendo stared down from his nose and then turned his glare back to the holographic image being sent through. "The programming is incomplete?"
"Yes, sir," Maya hesitantly said. "Doctor Akagi took the program down to rework some of the systemic algorithms last week. She only managed to get through half of them before the situation with Unit-03 came up..."
Gendo frowned as Kouzo wheeled up beside his desk, a smile on his face. "It seems, that the good Doctor has other ideas for the application of your toys," he said in a soft voice.
"If the plug is not operation, then we will have to make do with another option," he said to Kouzo before raising his voice in another command. "Lieutenant Ibuki, stand down Unit 01's entry plug and bring Plug E-329-A online to stand in its place."
Maya, Hyuuga, and Aoba all turned back to look at Gendo in befuddlement. "E- excuse me sir?" Maya ventured forth. "Plug E-329-A?"
Gendo frowned. He hated being questioned. "Do as you are told Lieutenant. Place both the Third and Sixth Children inside the Plug and ready it for Unit 01. Dump transfer all the relevant information on both Pilots into the Plug and send it up to the insertion level."
"Yes sir," she replied before turning back to hastily complete her seemingly impossible task in the time before launch.
"Lieutenant Makoto, I will be assuming command of the tactical situation until the Emergency has passed. I want situation information of the target placed on my screen within five minutes. Give me a quick assessment of a tactically viable area for assaulting the target, and then give me a stock of what arms we have present at said location. If we have none there, then give me an inventory of equipment that you believe the Evangelions can take out with them on the rails."
"Sir!"
Gendo ignored the response and turned to the remaining bridge tech. "Lieutenant Shigeru, send out a medical response team and a Priority-One team to Matsushiro. Alert the JSSDF and notify them of our current proceedings. Ask them to assist our response teams at Matsushiro."
Aoba nodded and mumbled a quick "Sir" before swinging away to perform his duties. Gendo liked that about the man. He did not waste too much time observing formalities or questioning his simple orders. He just did it.
'A good quality.'
"Attention all JSSDF District Commands--"
"--Target information being directed, now--"
"--Plug type E-329-A file transfers completed, beginning final preparation stage."
The bridge rumbled with the sweet sound of the bustling activity of war. And beside him, Kouzo frowned. But that was of no matter now, his dice had been cast; and either they would reap the profits he desired--or humanity would die around him.
Such as the follies of madmen.

"What's this?" Shinji asked Kensuke.
"I dunno," Kensuke answered, his fingers running lightly over the tight fitting outer skin of his black and silvery-gray plugsuit. His glasses glinted sharply in the flourescent light of the huge cavern that was the Evangelion's lair.
When the plug in question slid up beside Unit 01, the two boys could only look at each other and shrug. Shinji was the first to step away, one of his hands tightly gripping the other to prevent it from shaking too badly, but soon Kensuke was trailing in his wake. Prodded on by the summons of one of the many hanger technicians that rushed, walked, and stumbled across the walk.
"What's going on?" Shinji asked, levying a questionable glance to Kensuke.
"A change in routine," the tech quickly answered, taking Kensuke by the arm and mounting the short flight of stairs that lead to the plug's opening. "You'll be in the second seat there, and Pilot Ikari will occupy the forward seat. Pilot Ikari will be in control unless a situation arises, then Pilot Aida will be synchronized with the Evangelion and control transferred directly. Understood?"
The tech wide-eyed them both until they nodded in understanding, or what they thought was understanding. Satisfied, the tech bounded away to a reel of cables and set himself to coiling them away from the dock's edge.
Shinji turned to face Kensuke. "Let's go then," Kensuke said as he bounced from one foot to the other.
"Yeah," Shinji mumbled as Kensuke hopped over the steel edge and slid down to his seat, "let's." The entry plug was unlike anything he'd seen before. 'With some reason,' he imagined to himself before vaulting over and down into the hollow tube. The seats, which were normally raised and lowered into a normal entry plug, were instead in a fixed position; a quick search revealed that there were no hooks for the raising mechanism to latch on to either.
As though this plug had been built before the other ones.
There were other differences, namely being the upward curving dome that separated one seat from the other. A barrier that had no seam, no hole, no protrusion or any other device that would belie the simple nature of what it was intended to do.
Separate the two pilots within.
"I don't like this." Was all Shinji said before he signaled to the techs that he was set. Kensuke signaled the same and the plug's hatch was in quick fashion slid across and dogged down tight. Within the darkness, Kensuke breathed rapidly; steeling his nerves for what may be the first battle he would join against the foes of his home.
Shinji just tried to keep from shaking so damn much as the LCL rose and surrounded him. The plug flashed through its cycle of color and images, and the familiar feeling of a second skin descended around his body. It was a familiar feeling.
He hated it.
"Evangelion, Unit 01. Ready for launch."

Gendo smiled at the small holographic viewscreen that floated above his desk.
"Interesting design," Kouzo commented as his beaded eyes tracked the Evangelions as they were hoisted over to their rail launchers. "I can recall seeing that plug design only once before...back in 2008."
Gendo frowned and narrowly glared at his subservient over the top ridge of his tinted glasses. "Yes, it is that same plug. Though I had it modified over the years."
Kouzo peered down at the few commands that Gendo had typed into his desk console and then leveled an icy stare at him. "So I can see. And what do you plan to do with your...modifications?"
"The Third Child has a sentimental spot in him. He's had it since that incident with the Second Child after the Eighth Angel was dealt with. I will not have that sentimentality destroy my long years of work this close to its end."
Hyuuga swivled to face the Commander and shouted out his report, "ETA to target area, five minutes Commander."
Gendo nodded as Kouzo raised an eyebrow. "Really? So you have the Sixth Child under a communications blackout for his own safety then."
Gendo smiled a frosty grin as he watched the sun slowly sink in the far-off horizon of the distant battleground. It was there that Lieutenant Hyuuga Makoto decided the battle take place. It was there that the present fate of humanity rested.
A thin, black form appeared within the sinking sun.
As though it were a man, no, a beast walking unscathed from a furnace of fire. Like a shadow in flames.
"I-is that...the Evangelion?" Aoba asked, breathless.
Maya turned away, typing in commands with rapid efficiency. Hyuuga typed in a few commands of his own and received a string of beeps, blurps, and other various sounds that indicated one report or another being received. "The target still shows only an Orange Field active. We're...also receiving biometric readings from within the entry plug. The pilot...may be still alive and unharmed."
Hyuuga exchanged a glance with Maya and then sent the files over to her console. Her expert eyes quickly ran across the stream of data and she confirmed his suspicions. "The pilot is still alive and apparently unharmed at the moment. Remote commands to the Evangelion have been blocked though, and nearly all of the nerve connections to plug functions have been cut as well."
"Eject the entry plug," Gendo ordered, tipping his glasses back up along his bridge. Maya pressed two orange and red diodes, flashing her screen black and red as the command was sent. On the screen, a faint flicker of shadow was seen as the top protective covering was detonated off. They failed to see the important part however.
The failed to see the entry plug fly out.
"Ejection has failed sir." Maya flatly reported.
Gendo nodded, 'As I knew.' Kouzo watched impassively. "Send the command again Lieutenant." Gendo turned his head away from her and over to where Aoba was heatedly conversing over a private phone. "What is it Lieutenant Shigeru?"
"The Committee sir! They want to know what the situation is and what we're doing about it!" Frustration oozed through his words. Kouzo chuckled at that.
"Inform the Committee that they will receive a full briefing and report about what the situation was and what was done about it...in good time. And if they fail to receive this report, then they shouldn't worry about it at all, due to...circumstances."
Kouzo laughed at that.
"Yes, sir." Aoba turned away and quickly repeated Ikari's words. Minus one or two sentences or so. Hyuuga called out from his position shortly after, "Sir! The Evangelions have arrived at the target area and are being off- loaded and directed into their positions."
'Excellent,' Gendo adjusted his glasses once again and briefly glanced at the two pilots inside their dual entry plug. "Have them armed with ranged explosives and Pallet rifles. Try to take down the target at distance. The target is now reclassified as the Thirteenth Angel."
Hesitant glances were shared all around as they complied. Then Gendo gave his order. "Alert the Evangelions...destroy the target."

"WHAT!" Shinji shouted at the pained face of Maya Ibuki. "You've got to be kidding me! That's the Thirteenth Angel?!"
"Please, Shinji--"
Asuka appeared in a holographic visual beside Maya's; her face was a chiseled stone. Blank, calm, emotionless, prepared. "I can see an entry plug still in the Evangelion, I think I may be able to get it out."
Maya sighed and then turned away from her vidscreen. After a brief conversation she turned back and grimaced, "Commander Ikari has denied that rescue attempt Asuka--"
"Father." Shinji's voice could give an imp lessons on contempt.
"--And his orders still stand. Destroy the target...I'm...I'm sorry."
Shinji snarled and cut all of his communications equipment. He sat there in the relative quiet of his entry plug, watching the slow advance of the onetime Unit 03 plod across thickly watered fields of rice and sharply raised dikes that fenced all of the paddies in. A thin line that underscored a small line of numbers counted the distance between the advancing Angel...no, it was an Eva! Between the Eva and his own. The red sun wove and shimmered in the steamy heated air.
5000
4000
3000
2000
The meters slowly counted down, each lurching step of the ebony Eva eating up massive amounts of land and air as it raised itself from the brown mud of the rice paddy. Shinji heard a rapid knocking of metal on metal and looked down to see his hands shaking up and down as they rested on the butterfly grips. He let go and clenched them tightly to his gut.
'I will not do this. I will not kill Touji!'
He raised his eyes, only to see Asuka's red Eva flying into the middle of a highway that ran rolly-polly through the sprawling expanse of rice fields. Chunks of street and soil flew hundreds of meters through the air until they rained down on fields and plains nearby.
"Asuka..."
For a moment, he felt the great and irresistible urge to rush forward and lift her free of the ground. To carry her back to the relative safety of the few buildings he was crouching behind. He raised one foot of his mighty war machine--and just as quickly put it back down.
The ebon Evangelion was marching forward again. Its silver-white eyes burning brightly in the deep shadows of night that surrounded its body. Long, ungainly arms swung limply from a wide, triangular torso as its slow and lurching gait walked it forward even more.
1000
500
Then, it stopped. A blue marker on the square holovid that served as a quick area reference map showed that Ayanami was there, crouched over behind a dark mountain. Then, Shinji saw the dark Evangelion do something horrific.
Bending itself down, the torso twisted and writhed, with armor plating snapping and twisting and falling off as it morphed around so that the back of its head was facing the back of its body. An ungodly roar, screeching and terrible, sounded from deep within the dark recesses of its throat.
Then it was gone. The screeching, the twisting, and--the Eva.
Shinji quickly flicked on his comm system and popped up his connection to Ayanami's Unit 00. "Ayanami?!"
Static was his answer.
The Eva was back. Marching from around a small hillock to slowly close the gap that remained between it, and the last defense of humanity. Shinji heard the butterfly grips clicking loudly as he gripped them.
"Shinji."
The boy turned stiffly to the viewscreen that held only the uncaring visage of his father, bastard that he is, and coldly stared at it.
"Pilots Ayanami and Sohryu are down. Pilot Suzahara is lost to the Angel. If you do not destroy the Angel...then you, and all of humanity, will die."
Shinji's neck seized and went rigid as multiple spasms wracked his body. "I- I can't DO THAT!" A twitch erupted along his jaw, pulling his lips back across his gums in a sort of rictus.
"If you do not, then we all die. Not just Pilot Suzahara; but Pilots Sohryu, Ayanami, and your friend Aida. They will all die if you, YOU, do not pull that trigger."
Sound died away. Shinji could see his father still speaking--but no words could he hear. Then images faded, turning white and blurred with memory. A memory of his first meeting with two certain people, friends of his now, on a bright and hot summer's day.
How hot it was that day.
"SHINJI!" Was the last thing he heard before that monstrous Eva closed on him. A leaping bound, and the machine of death leapt hundreds of meters into the air. Then its hundred thousand metric ton weight was caught hold of by gravity, and it plummeted down towards Shinji's still motionless Evangelion.
"N-no..."
Shinji found himself standing up in a daze, his head ringing from the blow. His hands were empty of the Pallet rifle they once held, and now he was on his lone. Armed with only his Prog knife.
If that.
The Angel, no EVA! Had landed in a crouch, like some uncaged wild beast from the remoteness of an African jungle. And as Shinji rose, he could see the small circle of the entry plug, caught in a massive streaming of pinkish webbing. Occasional gusts of gray steam vented from that open wound, but the plug budged not an inch.
"Touji...Touji! Answer me!" Shinji cried over an open channel.
The Eva made no response for a moment. Then--it raised a flat palm into the air and held it there for a moment, then slammed it back into the Earth; letting a gusher of water, mud, and black soil fount into the hot summer's air. Shortly, a similar fount erupted underfoot. Then there was pain.
After a brief repose to free the unnaturally extended arm from its cage of dirt, the second arm whipped forth and wrapped itself tightly across the throat of its enemy. Then they squeezed. The Evangelion didn't breath, that is to be sure. But--an enemy cannot fight you if their head is disattached to their shoulders.
And if you squeeze hard enough, a thing can pop off.
To a pilot of the Eva though, having your head pop off was not the immediate concern. Being suffocated was.
Shinji felt his skin wrench and twist as unseen fingers closed off his windpipe. Darkness filled his vision, and red slowly crept into the corners of his eyes. Eyes that felt soon enough to pop free of their casings themselves.
Bubbles.

"THE PILOT'S LIFE IS IN DANGER!" Maya screamed from her console, readouts of Shinji's suit flaring wildly all up and down the scales. Her fingers flicked rapidly across her two consoles and she continued to shout out reports to Ikari; vying for volume with the other two techs that were shout out similarly important reports as they came in.
"Ikari..." Kouzo's soft urgency cut below all of the shouts. "If you do not do something, he will die."
Gendo smirked, then looked down to his monitor. "Pilot Ikari is unable to handle the Angel. Pilot Aida, you must destroy this creature...or we will die."
The boy on the screen looked scared. All the better. "But, what about Touji?"
"Pilot Suzahara is dead, Pilot Aida. The life signs were terminated shortly after the Angel attacked Unit 02." Gendo lied through smiling teeth, and rubbed a finger along his knuckles. 'If he refuses, we are finished.'
Finished was far from what Kensuke was. Infuriated might be closer to the mark, but only as the surface of the moon was as to the surface of the sun. "Touji...he's DEAD?!"
"Yes Pilot! And if you do not destroy the Angel then you will be responsible for the deaths of all of humanity! Now destroy the target!" Gendo ordered, but Kensuke was beyond hearing. He could only see his friends body; lying broken and destroyed at the feet of that black creature. And he could only remember one thing in that moment. A sound that raised goosepimples along his flesh, and made his hair stand on end as his lips curled backwards into a snarl.
Touji's laughter.
Rage, pure and white-hot flared in his mind. Sweet, unadulterated rage. Just what Gendo needed. 'They killed Touji, they killed my best friend, theykilledhimtheyshallpaytheyshallsuffertheyshalldieTHEYSHALLPAYFORTAKINGHI S LIFETHEYSHALLPAYTHEYSHALLPAYINBLOODANDAGONYANDPAIN!'
Gendo grinned, a terrible and cruel grin that spoke of blood and pain. "Lieutenant Ibuki. Transfer control of Evangelion Unit 01 from Pilot Ikari to Pilot Aida."
Maya blinked, then pressed the button after she caught the unkind glare of her leader. Two seconds later, it was done. Shinji's life signs stabilized, and Kensuke's bounced across the charts.
And on the massive screen that showed the fine disaster that the whole affair had been shaping up into, where two of the most sophisticated weapons of mankind lay broken and humbled on the ground, where a third was being taught the lesson of humility--there came a roar.
Blood red was the color of the sun and sky. Blood red was the color of the waters as they lay in their pools. Blood red was the color of Unit 01's eye, as Kensuke unleashed his rage.
"YOU KILLED MY FRIEND!"
The favor of asphyxiation was returned in fourfold to the Angel, and as a stunned Maya watched Kensuke's synch ration spike to nearly forty two percent, the boy vented his rage upon the poor and hapless creature that he held in his grasp.
A sickly snap sounded for miles around. A thick, blackened tongue lolled out of the Angel's mouth as its arms fell limp to the side. But that was not the end of Kensuke's rage. No, not by far.
Earth flew in heavy sods as the Angel, that creature formerly seen as the Evangelion Unit 03, slammed back first into the side of one mountain. Artificial bones crunched as the full weight came to bear, but that was not the end. Oh, no, oh no.
The Eva reared back its hand, fingers curling into a fist. Aimed directly at the two staring eyes of silvery-white. The fist came down, and the head liquified. Blood, the same red as the sun and the sky and the waters, flew across the roadway that cut through the mountain and lathered itself across both fields, tree, and man's creation alike.
So it goes.
The fist reared up again, blood trailing in thick streams as it pulled up. Then it came down upon the breast of the beast. Another fountain of blood and ichor erupted across the landscape. Then the other hand raised up and ripped free one remaining section of armor plating. The plate went sailing into a nearby housing complex. Shattering both glass, concrete, and steel like it were a cherry bomb let off inside a sand castle. Then up went the fist again, and down it traversed.
Another fountain of red.
Up. Down.
Up. Down.
Up. Down.
Blood coated the streets. Blood flew through the trees. Blood mirrored the sky. Blood ran in the rivers. Again, and again, and again.
And then the crimson coated fist snaked out, quickly grasping the abandoned Pallet rifle from where it lay by the side. A round was chambered and the weapon was quickly leveled at the heart of the lumped shape that bled.
"DIE~E!" Kensuke shouted, bubbles rippling the LCL around him as the weapon opened fire with it's deadly harbringers of pain. Blood flew higher than ever before as explosions ripped through the chest, gut, legs, and arms of what was Unit 03. Then, a clang. And the last shell fell free.
Smoke rose from the weapon.
There was nothing left; not even the entry plug remained whole. With its center shattered by a vengeful blow that struck deeply through the heart of what remained of the Angel.
Kensuke passed out.

Misato couldn't feel her arm.
Maybe that was a good thing. Because she could feel the thick cast and the heavy sling that held her arm tightly to her bruised and battered body. Her head felt weighted and thickened above the temple as she tried to look about. Her cheek stung as she did, and a rush of something hot trickled down to her jaw when she opened her mouth to speak.
"Alive again Katsuragi," the voice was soft and gentle. Soothing.
"Kaji?" Misato croaked out.
The man nodded, crouching down over her litter and running a gentle hand through her soot-coated hair. "Doctors said you're going to be all right. Just needed a few patches here and there..."
Misato opened her mouth, but felt her eyes drawn to where an elderly man stood. There was a flash of light from his hands as he took a picture of something in the distance. Misato couldn't see what it was because the view was blocked, but she knew--she felt something coil in her gut.
A blue-gray cloud of smoke drifted off from the man's face.
"Kaji...Unit 03--"
Kaji lowered his head and sat down heavily beside her. His hands fumbled around near his pockets for a while, eventually coming up with a silver flask, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. He didn't answer until he had smoked half of a cigarette and taken two swallows from the flask. "Yeah...Unit 03..."
"Kaji?"
"Unit 03 was destroyed, as an Angel...by Unit 01."
Misato felt tears spilling, "S-Shinji?"
Kaji shook his head. "No, Aida finished it. Shinji refused to do it."
"A-and Touji?"
A roar erupted from across the valley, and the man backed away from whatever he saw; a cloud of smoke erupting from his mouth as he stumbled backwards.
Misato gaped at the sight.
"Unit 01..."
The horned demon raised its head to the night, and let its teeth gleam in the last rays of the sun as it vented rage and anger to the cooling sky. Shinji was its pilot, and he was distraught.
And vengeful.