Official Story Disclaimer: I have never owned nor will I ever own Evangelion. This story is for entertainment purposes only and the author claims no ownership over original source material nor any royalty rights thereof. Evangelion is copyrighted and owned by GAINAX. All intellectual property used in accordance with "fair use" laws.
0: Prologue
A cold wind drifted across the red sands of the Japanese shoreline. The sea of LCL lapped gently upon the beach, advancing and receding in an almost perfect rhythm. Upon the shore line two figures lay, as if washed ashore by the tide. One, an adolescent boy with dark brown hair wearing dark pants and a white button down shirt, and the second a girl with long red hair wearing a skin tight red bodysuit. The boy was thin but not anorexic by any means, and the girl was shapely but obviously young.
As the boy opened his eyes, he was greeted with a blood red sky, punctuated by what appeared to be a ring, not unlike the rings of Saturn, only this one was also crimson in color. Slowly he sat up taking note of the orange ocean, cool breeze and something unusual in the distance.
Miles off shore and split in half was a giant head. He recognized the head of course as the apparition of a girl he knew. It was part of the result of Instrumentality... the very thing that was supposed to "save" mankind. In reality, the boy felt it doomed it. The world was dead, and he was likely one of the few who chose to return to this world.
As his senses became clearer, he turned to his left and he saw the girl laying there. He recognized her too of course. She was the source of much of his rage, and at the same time, much of his admiration. He believed he hated her as much as he tried to love her. In his disgust he did the only thing that would come to his mind.
As he straddled her and wrapped his thin fingers around her throat, he felt only grim satisfaction. Soon she would struggle no more… images of what she had done to him in the past flooded his mind. He re-experienced all the humiliation, the jeering, the contempt… but then something happened he did not expect.
His strength was not with him, and suddenly he was roused from his flashbacks by a gentle touch to his face. It was her hand… never once had she been gentle with him. He stared into her one visible eye as her left was covered with a bandage. The brilliant sapphire right he was used to seeing seemed dulled, and her expression was almost sad, as if she knew she deserved what was being handed to her and simply accepted that this could be her end. The look of sadness and loss was what sapped the strength of the former third child of NERV.
The feelings of being that same pathetic child that was forced to pilot a massive war machine against heaven itself flooded back to him, and he began to sob. Salty tears fell from his face onto the face of the girl beneath him. Unable to control it anymore, he let go and slumped forward on top of her.
The hand that was at his face gently laid upon his back, and she finally spoke to him… though the phrase could have been directed at anything, the boy knew what it was she was speaking off… and it only upset him more.
"I feel… sick."
Archdruid Sephiroth Presents
A Post Third Impact Story
Adrift
Act I: Rebirth
I: Tears of Blood
The world had changed… this I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. No traffic could be heard, no planes flew in the sky, the trains were not running, no machine sounds filled the air. The only sounds to be heard now were the occasional drips from recent rains, the low roll of the sea, and the howls of the wind when it blew.
It was about three hours after I awoke on the shore of what used to be Tokyo-3 that I finally had the strength to get up and do something about our situation. The fortress city was destroyed, in part by the JSSDF, in part by the rise of the Black Moon, and the rest of the damage was undoubtedly caused by Third Impact itself. There would be no return to what was… and that left me in an arena I was unfamiliar with at that time; survival, without current technology.
Asuka had fallen back asleep about half an hour after she had initially woken up. After she confessed how she truly felt about everything to me, she began to complain that her chest and stomach hurt a lot. Like a groom carrying his beloved over the threshold, I carried her across the beach as soon as I had it in me to do so. It was strange… she seemed so amazing lightweight, that it felt as if I could carry her this way for days if necessary.
As luck with have it, I didn't have to. Along the beach I found a small house, seemingly abandoned. Though it was in fact disserted, there were no empty piles of clothing with puddles of LCL beneath them inside the house like I was expecting. The residents must have been away during Third Impact. The house was relatively plain, as if the person or persons who lived there kept a Spartan existence… and that told me nothing of the people that once called it home.
Finding a small but comfortable bed, I gently laid Asuka down. She moaned in pain lightly in her sleep. A small beeping sound coming from her wrist told me the suit was about out of power and would auto-depressurize soon. I gently ran my right hand over her stomach and found small bumps under the suit that felt a bit squishy.
Suddenly, I got a vision of something that happened during Third Impact, before I arose from the Black Moon that used to be NERV HQ. It was as if I had a moment of clairvoyance, and I was haunted by a vision of a torn asunder Unit 02 being lanced with nine proxies of the Lancea Longini. I would learn soon enough that the term "clairvoyance" was not entirely accurate, but certainly close.
"She must still bear the wounds from that battle," I thought aloud, and I knew that if that were true, the only thing keeping her blood in her body at that moment was the pressure from the suit. Once that gave out, she could bleed to death depending on how bad the reciprocal wounds from her synchronization were.
On task, I quickly began searching the house for first aid supplies. Though I never used the skills myself, my training as a pilot for NERV taught me how to treat injuries. It was funny though, a few hours ago I was trying to kill her, now here I was trying to save her life. I couldn't help it… I was alone in this world now, and she was the only other soul as far as I knew then. I couldn't let her die… besides, if I had, I'd never have been able to tell her how I truly felt about her.
She had spent the last year dragging me down and kicking me around. "Baka do this, Baka do that, Baka Hentai…" It was almost too much for me to take, and yet… I had fallen in love with her. Because I knew for all her irritability, for all her arrogance, she was an emotionally scarred little girl… and she hid those scars behind her walls of arrogance and superiority. Just like me, she never was able to cope with her loss… that made us the same in a way. But while she hid behind a mask of strength, I hid within myself… disassociating myself from the rest of society as much as possible. I thought that by avoiding everyone, I couldn't hurt them. But now, after the world has all but stopped turning, I realize I was wrong… so very, very wrong.
In the bathroom I was able to find a small storage closet with plenty of first aid supplies. I thanked whatever deific figure was still out there that the former owners of his house saw fit to stock such things, and I made it back to the bedroom in time to hear a hissing sound as the suit finally gave out completely. Working quickly I stripped the upper half the suit off of her and saw what I was dealing with.
The wounds were not as bad as I had thought they were being mere echoes of the damage she had taken in her battle. But they still oozed and bleed, so I had to work fast. I worked quickly but thoroughly, cleaning out each wound and then placing a gauze pad on it. Once they were all cleaned and covered. I gently sat her up and began to wrap up her upper body to both hold the pads in place and to keep her from moving too much in her sleep so she had less of a chance of reopening them.
There were two other wounds that needed immediate attention. Her right arm was sliced down the center from between her middle and ring fingers, all the way up to her shoulder. It looked like her arm had originally been split in half, but somehow managed to reseal itself up. A nasty bloody scar ran up her entire arm however and it still bled in places. I took extra care to clean that and wrapped her arm up so she couldn't move it too violently; there was no telling what it would take to reopen such a wound.
The last wound was the one I was dreading. Her left eye was still bandaged up with an old bandage. I gently removed it and was treated with a sudden run of a thin stream of blood. Quickly, I cleaned that away and looked at the condition of the eye itself. It was a red ball of flesh in her head but no outside physical damage could be seen. The bleeding was coming from behind it and around the outside. I carefully cleaned the exposed tissue and placed a new pad over the eye, gently wrapping this too.
I looked over my work and for the first time since I started this project I realized something… Asuka was now lying naked on the bed in front of me. Sometime during my work, I completely removed her plugsuit. It wasn't until later that I would realize something else… that I wasn't concerned with whether the carpet matched the drapes (there is no carpet by the way), or with preventing a red tide from exploding from my nose, because I was still more worried about her health. Rather than think of how beautiful she was even all bandaged up, I thought that it would probably get cold tonight and she needs to be covered up.
Just before Third Impact, I had thought that Asuka was right about me all along, that I was just a pervert. But I realize now that this was never true. I do not simply think she's hot… I love her, and when you love someone, you look at them in a different light. She was not someone I simply wanted to have sex with, or wanted to ogle all the time, she was important. I cared about her…I think that that time with her, cleaning her wounds, and dressing the broken body with gauze and medical padding, that was when I truly became a man.
After all that work was done, I cleaned up a bit, disposed of the old bandages in the garbage and searched for more sheets and blankets. It was beginning to rain that awful bloody rain again, and the temperature was starting to become colder than I ever remember it being. After a short search, I found a linen closet full of sheets and comforters. I draped two sheets over Asuka and tucked her in under a thick comforter. Then I provisioned myself a pair of sheets and a comforter to sleep under.
As I lay there, I thought about how I put all the bloody bandages in the trash can, knowing full well that no garbage men were going to pick up the waste this Tuesday. It's amazing how even in the direst of circumstances, the most basic of habits are still followed. These thoughts followed me as I fell asleep.
I'm sure I'll look back on this sometime in the future and laugh about the absurdity of it all. There we were… two children, a few years from truly being adults and now we must fend for ourselves in a broken wasteland of a world…
… why the fuck did I come back here?
Shinji Ikari
November 5th, 2017
Morning came with the sounds of thunder loud enough to shake the small house and rouse its occupants from their slumber. Shinji was the first to awaken, slowly sitting up and rubbing his eyes in time to almost be blinded by a flash of lightning. He grumbled about the weather and began to nurse a headache he was now feeling in full force.
Asuka opened her one uncovered eye and realized she was staring at a ceiling. She didn't know where she was, and was more than a little confused. The last thing she remembered was saying that she felt sick to the obviously mentally broken Shinji. Now she was laying here feeling tightness over much of her upper body. Did he take care of her? Her head slowly turned towards the other bed in the room.
The room was small, and she could see the other bed was against the other wall parallel to hers. He was there, sitting up and rubbing his temples and appeared to be wearing the same outfit she remembered though now it was stained with blood in many places, especially the shirt. She grimaced at that, wondering if it was her blood or if he somehow managed to hurt himself.
Shinji carefully turned towards her, still sitting on the bed and notice her looking at him. Her visible eye seemed somewhat brighter and healthier even in this dark room.
"You're awake," he said as he approached and kneeled next to the low bed. "How do you feel?"
"Sick… still," she replied. "I'm… I'm so sorry Shinji-kun… I never realized what I was doing to you all this time." A low rumble of distant thunder accented her apology and a single salty tear formed in the corner of her eye. It quickly broke loose of its own surface tension and tailed down her face.
Shinji's heart seemed to wrench at her small voice and he felt so sorry for her. "It's okay Asuka-chan," he assured her, as he wiped away the tear. "I forgive you for everything."
"I wish… I wish I was more like you. You had the strength to carry me off the beach and take care of me. I don't know if I could have done the same."
"I know you would have tried," he replied. "Don't be so hard on yourself. None of us are perfect… and we each deal with pain differently." Then he frowned. "Don't try to make me out to be the big hero… I don't even know where I got the strength to come this far."
"You're cutting yourself short ba… Shinji-kun." Asuka managed to catch herself before she called him an idiot yet again. After witnessing everything he went through under her tyrannical rule, she promised herself she would be more careful about using that word. "I'd probably be dead now if it wasn't for you."
Shinji was silent for a few moments before he finally spoke up. "I couldn't leave you there…" his voice trailed. "I won't abandon you like everyone else seemed to after your mother…." He couldn't finish the sentence. Experiencing her pain along with his own made him feel like he had lost two mothers.
"I never really told you about Mama. I wish I would have been more open with you instead of being das uber bitch and keeping it all inside."
She was right of course. Asuka's soul was with him during Instrumentality and though that unholy event, he saw though her eyes witnessing the pain she had experienced felt it and lived it along with her, just as she experienced his. Now, he understood her better, and somehow he loved her all the more. He knew he needed to take care of her and that was what he was going to do. She had to get her strength up before….
He shook his head trying to get the visions of horrible weather out of his head.
There is time, there has to be…
Asuka saw into his soul as well during that event. She knew what it was like to be truly abandoned now, and realized he was never truly weak… he simply did not know how to be strong. She couldn't kid herself anymore; she was in love with him, and it meant the world that he was willing to set aside his own comfort and risk his own chances at survival to take care of her.
"The world has changed again," Shinji said ominously. "Everything is different now. I even feel different… somehow things seem clearer to me."
"Oh?" Asuka asked. "How do you mean?"
"I saw the battle… in my head, when you fought the EVA series."
"We were all linked during Instrumentality, you probably…."
"No, I never saw that during Instrumentality."
Asuka's eye widened again. "What are you saying?"
"I… I don't know for sure. I'm getting images in my head of things that haven't happened yet. The world's climate has shifted again, and the endless sixteen year long summer this world has suffered though is coming to an end."
Asuka shifted so that she was back to staring at the ceiling. "Are we returning to a four season climate again, like it was before Second Impact?"
"Not exactly," Shinji said ominously. "The world has been heavily damaged. Third Impact destroyed the balance of our climate and the earth's axis has shifted again. We may return to having four seasons, but for now, the world must rebalance itself."
"An Ice Age," Asuka whispered. "Do… do you think we can survive something like that?"
"I don't know, but I'm not going to give up," he said with conviction as he stood up. "If I understand these odd 'visions' I've been getting, we have maybe a week before the temperature drops low enough to start snowing. Hopefully, you'll be able to move by then and we'll be able to find a place where we can weather the storm and survive."
Asuka nodded then looked down at herself. "Why do I have these wounds anyway? I thought that we all became one during Third Impact and my body was recreated from the LCL."
"That was the condition of your body when you died," Shinji explained.
"No, I was in worse condition than this… The EVA Series… they tore me to pieces… I should have scars all over my stomach, but the only injuries I seem to have were the ones made by the lances. If they haven't healed by now, will they ever?"
"I wouldn't worry too much; you seem to be healing fast. I wasn't even expecting you to be able to move, let alone talk when you woke up, so the injuries can't possibly be permanent."
Asuka nodded in agreement, though she didn't feel like she was getting better. It stuck out in her mind that the lance injuries where they only ones she still had, but even she couldn't begin to fathom what that meant. She shifted to a sitting up position, feeling the wounds pull slightly beneath their confines. As she did so she lifted her covers and looked down at herself, realizing that other than the bandages that covered most of her chest and stomach, she was completely naked.
"Suit gave out?" Asuka asked with a bit of playfulness in her voice. There was no way she was missing an opportunity like this, end of the world or no. Shinji turned slightly red when he realized that she just figured out she was naked under her sheets and blankets.
"Y-yeah… had to get those wounds covered and cleaned."
She returned her coverings to their previous position. With a bit of twinkle in her eye and a devious smile on her face she whispered in an almost sultry voice, "You liked what you saw, ja?"
Shinji didn't answer her, but the profuse blushing and the sudden need to leave the room told her all she needed to know.
"Still so easy to tease," she whispered with a giggle then stopped herself realizing where she had heard those words before. "Mein Gott, I'm starting to sound like Misato."
At least one of the residents that lived at the house Shinji and Asuka claimed for the time being was female. This he was able to figure out by the clothing. Asuka needed something she could get into and out of easily as her wounds still needed tending, and luckily, Shinji found something… a black jumpsuit with a zipper back that looked like it would fit. He brought it to her after she had taken another nap and left the room politely to allow her to dress; she seemed strong enough to stand now, which to Shinji was a miracle in and of itself.
Asuka didn't get fully dressed though; she put it on but did not put on the top half as she knew Shinji needed to check her bandages again. He reentered the room now that she was covered at least from the waist down and got out the First Aid supplies again.
"Ok, let's take a look now," he said as he carefully removed the bandages from her upper body. Slowly her bare frame became more visible and Shinji tried his best not to stare at her chest too much, at least the parts that weren't wounded. Upon removing the first pad from her chest he was immediately flabbergasted.
"You're almost fully healed already?" he questioned with surprise. The wound which before was about the size if a saltine cracker was now less than a quarter inch wide. There wasn't even any scarring left behind. "How is this possible?"
"I don't know," she replied. "My energy level is up a bit too." She held her hand up and flipped her wrist around so that she was looking down the back of her hand as if able to examine the minutest details of her skin. "Everything seems more focused… details more noticeable. I can't help but wonder if Instrumentality somehow did something to us."
"Maybe," he replied feeling a bit nervous now. "Since we returned I've noticed some strange things about myself that I haven't been able to fully explain."
"Your premonitions for one?" Asuka offered.
"Yes… and the fact that physically I'm stronger than I've ever been. It's almost like we're taking on… angelic properties."
"We're becoming Angels?"
"Either that, or Angelic creatures of some form. Ritsuko herself said that the DNA of an Angel and a Human were extremely similar, maybe… somehow… humanity being combined into one being unlocked some hidden potential?"
Asuka thought about that. "That would explain why the lance injuries were the only ones I still had, the lance is an anathema to them isn't it?"
Shinji nodded.
"Also, we were piloting EVA for about a year or so before Third Impact, and we learned that LCL is actually angelic blood. Perhaps our exposure to it over time was what triggered these changes and Third Impact was the catalyst that set the metamorphosis in motion?"
There she was using big words again. Shinji loved it when she used intelligent speech… he knew she was much more intelligent than he was. Even at her most arrogant, there was something beautiful about her mind as well as her body.
"Maybe," Shinji wondered aloud, derailing his thoughts about her beautiful brain. "It would make sense… either scenario would. And perhaps the truth lies in a little of both… but I wonder how much we're going to change?"
Shinji looked at Asuka after saying that last, and scariest thought and noticed she was trying to remove the bandage over her eye expressing a bit of worry in her actions while doing so. Shinji helped her with it and looked at it now that it has had time to heal.
There was still some red inside the eye, making her normally brilliant blue a more violet color. A faint redness existed around it but the skin was mostly healed and there was no exposed flesh anymore.
"I can see out of it pretty well. Does it look bad?"
"A lot better than it was," he replied. "When I first saw it, it was a blood filled red orb, now it's still a bit red but not as bad. The cornea looks a bit purple rather than blue so it's possible there's still some blood in it."
Asuka thought for a moment. "Do… do you think our eyes will turn red… you know… like Kaworu's and Ayanami's were?"
"I don't know," he whispered. "It would be a shame for you to lose your eye color… I really love your blue eyes."
The outwardness of his comment surprised her, but she was starting to like this more forward version of Shinji. "So do I," she whispered with a smile. Distant thunder rolled over the house and another rumble shook the former Second Child. "Wow… I'm hungry."
"There is some canned meat in the pantry. It's not a home cooked meal and I think it's safe to assume that we're not getting one of those for a while."
"Too bad, I really loved your cooking."
"Thanks," Shinji replied as rain began to batter the house. His attention was drawn towards the window where the water running down had a crimson tint to it.
"It's raining blood," Asuka said with disgust.
"It's been doing that on and off all day. It's not as red as it was earlier today. I think some of the LCL got in the atmosphere and the sky is working on getting it out."
"But LCL is orange. Why is the sky raining blood?"
Shinji stood up and walked towards the window as Asuka put on the top of her outfit and began to zip up, realizing she's been holding this entire conversation while topless.
"It's as if the world is crying tears of blood," he whispered almost poetically. "Mourning the loss of the human race despite the horrors our species have visited upon it."
"Shinji-kun, do you think anyone else will return to this world?"
His head tilted down as a small twinge of fear crept into his heart. "I don't know Asuka-chan… I don't even know why I'm here…"
I had often wondered what it would have been like if Instrumentality actually went off according to plan. Would we have become some kind of god? That was the purpose wasn't it? I mean, I can't believe SEELE would have meant for what really happened to happen as it did… reduce this world to a realm of nightmares…
Over the next few days, we would begin to gather supplies from the surrounding area, ranging further from the house with each passing day. I was thankful when we found a working truck, and even more thankful when Asuka told me she knew how to drive. As we prepared to move out, the temperature started to drop more and more each day. But that wasn't what truly worried me. Oh the cold was going to get really bad, but we had supplies to deal with that… there was something far more pressing on my mind.
I had another vision… a vision of a demonic creature that had come to kill us, tear our flesh from our bones and eat our souls. The creature wasn't clear in my head, but demonic was about as good a description as any for what I saw, and it was the only way I could really convey what it was to Asuka. We both tried to write it off as just a bad dream, something from a world of nightmares that was leftover from my childhood. We tried hard to convince ourselves that nothing like that could possibly exist in this dead husk of a world.
We were wrong.
Shinji Ikari
November 7th, 2017
Send a heartbeat to the void that cries though you,
Relive the pictures that have come to pass
For now we stand alone, the world is lost and blown
And we are all that's left, disintegrate
With no more to hate…
-The Smashing Pumpkins, The Beginning is the End is the Beginning
