Quick Notes: This story has a lot of allusions in it, none of which you must know to enjoy it. The "darktext" is taken mostly from T.S. Elliot. Throughout there is some Faulkner, some of the manga "Berserk," even a little of NIN's new Album "Year Zero," and probably others I've forgotten. The quotes from Elliot can be found in "The Wasteland" and "The Four Quartets."
Also, a thank you to my prereader, Fresh C. He's pretty well-writ in Eva himself so check his stuff out too.
1. The Dry Salvages
He remembered slipping. Like a nightmare where you wake up falling. Without the wake up part. Slipping, down, deeper, into the maw of it. Enemy.
Now just alone, floating in infinity spread blank and boring. Pointless. What a pointless way to die, he thought. As an Eva pilot he'd often imagined his own death. It was supposed to be a grand, climactic thing. Spectacle.
Heaps of blood and venom, oozing from his open wounds. He and the Angel grappling, locked in each other's death embrace. Pain unlike the quality and texture any other human could ever know, soaring through his torn appendages, igniting his maimed body. It seemed like the right way to die. Sound and fury. Not whimpering silence. Not this. Anything but this.
The descent eternal, meaningless in infinity, had transposed itself into his consciousness and found new passage there. Rather than sink into the void, the motion carried on within him—the void sank into him! Dredging out that which lies beneath. Where the dark things lived and swelled. The things Shinji Ikari could believe he never possessed if not for—
The voice spoke through a boiling furnace of metallurgy, booming certainty and the wretched tinny scraping of rust on rust, empty of any human inflection, a grating staccato of syllables wrenched and upended then flattened and exploded, total and sudden:
SON OF MAN,
YOU CANNOT SAY, OR GUESS, for you know only
A heap of broken images,
The Angel… or he himself? split the present, a great cleaving scythe of non-matter void, wickedly descending from heaven. It carved through time straight as laser, hewing it wide open, evaporating past and future, leaving only… constant? and gave a glimpse of the beforeafteralways rent and folded round on itself, a snake eating its own tail. The repetitions spiraling inwards, humanity imploding again and again, giving way ever to an identical universe and identical entropy. The chain extended in both directions, a strangely entwined double-helix, but beyond his digestion or comprehension because—and suddenly the certainty was upon him—the head of the snake, consuming its tail so voraciously, was always dictated by the misdeeds and shortcomings of Shinji Ikari.
Shinji Ikari, curled in fetal solitude, on infinite regress like some pink twisted seashell's spiral.
The pathetic being, suddenly stripped of physical artifice, laid bare the sniveling wretch it believed itself to be, blatant in every detail, worthless in every iota. He was the sum of humanity's self-cruelty and gasping self-pity, always seeking to claw its way from the pit of annihilation only to throw itself in again. How ironic the reigns of continuum were held in check by his frail, uncertain hand, a self which could not even love itself! The cosmic joke of an unknowable God.
He—it—they watched this repetition of destructionbirth, each collapse and renewal further energy added to the pyre within his mind, curling and compressing, as the seashell, with such incredible tidal pressure that the singularity shrinking and writhing, smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, had no choice but—burstfaltercollapse.
Shinji Ikari awoke to the dullard safety at the precipice of consciousness, nude save for pallid wrappings of the hospital bed, twisted into a tapestry of fever dreams and nightmares, primal fears which stalked him still from a lonesome childhood. Cold, sterile sunlight embraced his left, and, through the transparency, tainted the room's ashen opacity on a knife's edge of the faintest azure. Cicadas wept in summer humidity, their droning wail muted to careful murmurs from behind the insulated safety of the hospital. Out of sight, the electronic toot of machine voices, steady as a metronome's hand. Beep, wait, beep, wait, beep.
He would live yet.
An exhausted exhalation whispered between parched lips cruelly violated by plastic tubing, forcing his breath in and out. His eyes tracing unfamiliar grain on the empty plane of the ceiling. The suck and hiss of the resperator barely present behind the Cicada chorus. Fingertips pressed feeble and clenching, digging into reality for the reassurance of the cotton still holding tentative, like his grip on the dawn. The strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again, in time.
Then the slow, building fear. Presence. Other. At his bedside. No. Closer. Just… beyond reach, but definite. The slow rhythm of someone else's breathing, tracing its own counter-rhythm to the Cicadas' certainty and his own device's wheezing. Turning in and out of his steady repetitions, a slow eclipse of their mingled sounds. Stop.
Counted the sounds. Measured. In. Out. In. Just to be sure they were real, no further deception from a groggy imagination or the limping senses of post-sleep idling. A painful trembling, fearing his acknowledgement might disturb the unseen menace, rouse it to waking or action or violence.
Carefully now, like the child in the wolf's den, turning towards the noise. His neck, reluctant glacial ice, shifting with ancient strength. The temperfoam of the pillow depressing, frustrating dam against his desire to see the monster.
She.
Eyes closed, lips barely apart. Breath tickling his nose, smelling unfamiliar in its closeness. Safety in that smell, the sudden recall of mother's touch at the scent. Their lips were just fractions apart, nearly brushing against one another if not for the tubing as obstacle. Sudden desire flooding him and embarrassment and shame at the intimacy. Tousled red hair dowsed over an impossible expression of tenderness and vulnerability.
His eyes traced her outline under snowy peaks and valleys of bed sheets. She was curled and close, purposefully so. It was no accident he could pluck the obstruction taped in his throat, pucker, and steal a slumbering kiss like the one he'd imagined on the floor of the apartment a world away.
Turned on her side, one long pale and willowy arm snuck beyond the cover's lip, draped carefully over her swollen center.
Damage! … No.
Pregnancy.
Pregnant.
Child.
The glimmer of an almost-smile in her slumber, moaning to him from dreamscape, words thick with sleep:
"Shi…n…ji"
"I think, perhaps, you don't understand the seriousness of your predicament Ikari-kun."
The cuffs ached. Cold steel, like that of his bench, invisibly burning wounds into his wrists as if white-hot to the touch. They were catching and chafing with every motion. He thought he could feel sores developing. Or maybe that was just his imagination.
Alone and in the dark again, this time the cool cellar of the NERV underground complex, bound at the wrists and feet, drugged but sleep deprived, wretchedly thirsty, and edging on delirious, Shinji couldn't imagine how he could possibly not sense the seriousness of his predicament. It had been serious from as far back as his memory would willingly take him.
"Shinji? Have you stopped listening again?" Akagi's voice was nearly gentle, even through crackling distance imposed by the intercom.
"No, ma'am."
"And you understand? Understand what I'm telling you?"
Why was he wearing the restraints, he wondered. It wasn't as if he could escape. He certainly wasn't strong enough to break down the door. He wasn't even sure he remembered which way he entered. How long had he been down here anyway?
"Yes, ma'am."
"And you do want to cooperate, don't you?"
Hours? Days? Seconds… or years? Time was fleeting, eluding him. He'd felt that once before, hadn't he? Somewhere. Somewhere else, somewhere dark like this…
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then I need you to tell me about the Angel."
"Okay."
"I need you to tell me about what happened to you Shinji. What you remember."
"But… I don't remember anything…" He'd explained this to her before.
Gzzzz. His mouth made that noise. At first, like always, he thought there was some buzzer in the room. Like on a game show when you give the wrong answer and—buzzzzzz you're out! But it was always his mouth making the noise, as the electricity coursed into his abdomen. Every muscle went taught and his tongue curled and coiled. Shapes in the darkness his imagination had long been playing with erupted in newfound euphoria, sketched in new color and energy and vibrancy, quivering with the convulsions. Beautiful new shapes to match the new agony inside him.
"Duh-on't d-do th-a-a-t," he gurgled when the juice cut out, hot tears coursing down his face. He was thankful for the darkness then. Thankful no one could see him cry. Or the urine soaking his pants. What a dirty uniform, he couldn't be wearing that to school, he'd have to get it washed before—
"We need you to explain what happened. Shinji. You were inside it for more than sixteen hours. Something happened. Start from the last thing you can remember and work forward."
He tried. Tried so hard to think but his mind wouldn't make the memories come.
"I don't, I don't," he paused, expecting the shocks again.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
"Filter," he wheezed
"What filter?" the speaker crooned, enticing him.
He shivered. Saw it again. Crumbling ephemeral flakes, hovering and twinkling in his vision, the last signs that the LCL filter was slowing down, giving up, like everyone else already had. The Entry Plug failures had been slow and cascading, after his shutdown of all the non-essential systems. For a while, the unit had sustained him as its priority, but the power began to slip away. The fear. The need to get out. Pounding at the hatch. Claustrophobia.
"The LCL filter. It was failing. I could see…" Craning his neck, squinting into his past, trying to envision it again. "Dust. Or. Something. I think the oxygen was starting to run out."
"Describe the nature of the particulates."
"I don't know…"
Gzz. He yipped, a puppy kicked by the unseen foot of his master.
Desperately, trying to escape any further pain. "Like flakey! Small. No bigger than a fingernail."
"And after that…" she led him on.
"Cold. I was very, very cold. I curled up, I think. Trying to stay warm."
"And then?" She sounded so expectant, so ready to listen.
They'd reached this juncture a thousand times before from a thousand different ways. The ending was always the same. The questions always led to nowhere, then the pain, disciplining him, punishing his inadequacies. Then a new beginning, from somewhere else, another location he'd started at a thousand times. Ritsuko always sounded so disappointed in him. It was familiar in a way, these conversations and their looping motion. The strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again, in time.
"And then." He sighed. "And then I wake up. The rest is… gone."
Silence on the intercom. Would the pain come now? There was little other than the whir of ventilation somewhere high above his downcast head. It was a very lonely place without Ritsuko, he realized. Haunted by its industrious sterility, conditioned to the antithesis of human comforts and the overriding sense one was caught in the core of a machine much larger than one's self—that the safest course was to not impede it, lest one wind up under the claws and pincers tumbling forward, ever forward, in its absurd bureaucratic/animalistic drive.
In a way, it was like what little he could remember of his time spent in the Angel. Lonesome, alienating, fearful, Ritsuko's voice always looming out of the darkness like someone in the shadows, flitting away before he could locate her. Is that why they put him here? To remind him of the Angel? Or was it just coincidence? His father must have known, must be keeping him here, for one of his obscure reasons. Keeping him locked up, and asking the same stupid scripted questions over and over.
"Shinji… why don't you tell me about the hospital? You said you woke up there, right?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Describe it to me. What do you remember?"
"Asuka," he blurted before he could contain himself. He regretted the honesty, though still knowing the conversation would have led there eventually.
"What about her?"
"She was there. She was… pregnant." The word sounded unreal when connected to her.
Asuka pregnant? How long had he been out of it? From the shape of her belly, she could have been into the second trimester. That meant months, months inside the Angel. No way. He'd be long dead by now. Maybe he was. Maybe this was hell?
"You sound surprised, Shinji."
"Yes. I mean, I was. Surprised."
A calculated pause.
"Surprised because..?" Leading him again.
He couldn't resist asking any longer. "I mean, when did it happen? I couldn't have been in the Angel for more than a day. Was I… was I in a coma? Is that when she got…" Embarrassment killed off his trail of thought before he could go any farther.
"I'm sorry? What?" Ritsuko sounded mystified.
"Eh?" Thinking she needed further elaboration. "When she… you know… with, uh, I mean, someone, right?"
"I have to confirm something with the commander," she rattled off hurriedly. "Hold on."
The line fell dead with awkward swiftness. The static hiss of the intercom fled the room and Shinji was left contemplating her disappearance, itchy palms clasped. The smell of his pee was beginning to bother him. Seething anger at this mistreatment hummed to him, daring him to indulge. How could they do this to him? He had defeated the Angel—wasn't that enough? But now, to treat him like some… spy. It was if NERV had gone haywire in his absence. His father could be petty and cruel, when the situation or timing demanded, but not needlessly so. This interrogation seemed out of place.
Something must have gone really bad with the operation, he thought. Maybe the Angel hadn't been destroyed after all? And what then? We're they holding him responsible?
Shinji might have believed he'd been captured. If not for the reassuring patience in Ritsuko's voice and the familiar utilitarian texture of NERV architecture beneath his hands. The hospital had been real. This was real. They were keeping him here, because he wasn't safe, Ritsuko said. From what, he wondered. Who's after me?
The tired weight of exhaustion blanketed him smoothly, slowing down the growing anxieties. It was heavy with the texture of thick wool. He had an overwhelming urge to lie down and…
The intercom interrupted, faintly drawing into the cell again.
"Nevermind. It's not important."
What had she been doing? Something about Asuka and… The memory fled, swallowed up into the endless conversation and questions, all muddled together now, the same darkness, Ritsuko's tired voice carrying on. And on.
"Let's go back to the Entry Plug."
"Um, okay."
"I'm going to try saying some phrases and words, and I want you to tell me what you think of first when I say them, okay?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Just say anything at all," she continued as if unsure of him.
"Right."
"Sea of Dirac."
"Uh… water."
"Good. Shrödinger's Cat."
Shinji giggled despite himself and drool escaped his lower lip, disappearing into his shirt before he had noticed. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Math. And really hard physics."
"Negative energy quantum vacuum."
"Einstein."
"Leliel."
I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed,
"I WAS NEITHER
LIVING NOR DEAD, AND I KNEW NOTHING,"
"What did you just say?" the intercom gasped.
"Hmm, these seem a bit superfluous don't they?" Was that his voice? It sounded so calm and certain. He thought he was speaking. Or someone had been. Somewhere.
The cuffs clattered as they hit the floor, metal on metal thrumming through the confines of the chamber.
"Shinji?"
Someone stripped him in the dark.
Naked, he approached the entrance. He glanced at the faint red glow, emitting its access denial message at him. Red turned green in some Christmas parody, and the message changed as the lock released itself. The door shot into the ceiling with the hiss of pneumatic action.
"Goodbye."
"Wait! Shinji, the consequences of you leaving that room—"
The door closed on her threats with another compression of air and the crank of magnetic locks inside it.
Coma. The word had haunted her for a long time. The things they did to him, no she did to him, the situations she put him in. It was a crude sort of insanity—sending children to fight inconceivable monsters. How could they have done such a thing, dreamed once unconscionable by the Geneva conventions, the very same international law NERV had been permitted to operate outside of. They weren't really child mercenaries if their egos were doing half of the fighting, and if those… things were doing the other half, right? Good enough, for the lawyers at least.
She'd lived in loopholes since she'd taken this ridiculous job. Saving the world had never looked so dirty, so ugly at the beginning.
Shame on us. Doomed from the start. May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts.
Naiveté wasn't an excuse. She knew every time she'd put him in that cockpit might be the last. They were all, though Asuka would cringe at the wording, just little dolls. Useful things for Gendo's schemes, old men's ambitions, country's desires, self-preservation, and a list of selfish perversions that would go on for as long as she dared to think about it.
Shinji Ikari, pronounced brain dead on recovery. A shadow eighty-nine kilometers in diameter had stolen his soul. She'd put in him inside it.
Asuka absolutely believed he would wake up some day. How mystifying was that? It was almost like a repetition of the behavior she used with her delusional mother, time-warped forwards to a catatonic, unresponsive Shinji. Though her synch scores dwindled further which each passing day, hope, of all places, bloomed in that girl's heart. God was a cruel, clever little man if he existed.
But now it was just her and the Johnny Walker Black. All day, all night. She didn't go to work. She didn't go anywhere. Except further and further into the bottle.
Conversations with Asuka had been a blur and the need to censor herself had long gone away. The girl didn't try and intrude on her coping methods, so Misato didn't intrude on hers. Fair trade.
Was she fired yet? She didn't know. It didn't matter. The drink sloshed onto the table as she poured another glass full.
Where had Kaji gotten to? He'd been just as stirred up as NERV when the Angel fluttered away, pranced into another dimension or whatever theory Ritsu was cooking now. Bullshit, she thought personally. Shinji defeated it, she had screamed as the circle shrunk. Until it shrunk to nothing. And he was still gone.
Then Unit 04 had disappeared during the activation test along with the Second Branch. One of their remote observation posts had gotten the blip of the AT field, the same as they'd seen right before Shinji… left.
She'd thanked God when they found him, curled up on the park bench downtown, naked, just two hours later. God gave her the doll back, but all broken up inside. Shinji, if he'd ever lived, was long gone now.
Shame on us. For all we have done.
The bell rang. She swung round at the door. It wasn't supposed to do that.
"Who," she muttered. The door slid open—
—and there—
—he was.
"You!" Misato shrieked, actually taking flight as the door pulled back.
He got a quick loot at her face. She'd been crying recently. A lot. He realized, watching her clumsily get to her feet, he'd never seen her drunk before.
"Um, hi. Misato."
She galloped straight into him, almost knocked him over before the hands had reached around and hugged him, muffling any further greeting in her breasts and covering it with her own furious sobbing. She closed the door on their embrace.
He waited, trying to ignore the stench of liquor wafting into his scalp. He wanted to let the moment sit, maybe forever, but he was running out of time. They would be coming. He had to tell her. Before it was too late.
"Misato, they…" He almost didn't believe it himself. "They tortured me."
The hands loosened their grip on him. The syllable came clipped and compressed. "Who?" He could hear violence behind it.
"NERV." He wouldn't dare name the true perpetrator, probably Ritsuko on the orders of his father. "NERV tortured me, Misato, for the last fifty-seven hours. Electric shock, and drugs too, I think. I know actually, I, I have the logs."
She pulled him to the kitchen table firmly by one hand, making no response. Shinji decided he'd better let that settle before he went on. She put him into a seat opposite her, plopped down and hastily shuffled the half-empty bottle out of view. He felt himself shrink under the emerging stare, vigilant, angry, and a little scary.
"How can that be true?" she asked, finally composing herself.
He pushed a crumpled sheet of forms across to her, the pages which detailed the agonies of his ordeal as proscribed by no one—there were no signed orders for things like this he suspected. The fig leaf letterhead visible at the top, photocopy black. She smoothed it out on the table.
He watched it register. The expression sunk and sunk as her gray eyes coasted down the page. Stapled to it was Section Two's orders page regarding him. Shinji watched the transformation, butterfly of vengeance out of caterpillar of mourning—saw the look Misato would sometimes get, facing an Angel that looked impenetrable, impossible to defeat. She had this way of quirking her brow when in deep shit like the kind he'd put her in once he'd walked through the front door. She was hunkering down. Preparing.
"How did you get this?" she asked, still caught in the details of Section Two's lengthy extermination clauses. The euphemisms had been tough to pick through. He'd only skimmed it in the elevator.
"I don't remember," he admitted. His hands tightened around each other, taming imaginary pythons.
She looked up and waited for him to fall into eye contact.
"You don't remember?" she parroted when he matched her gaze.
"I've been having these… spells. Where time just sort of, I guess, sort of goes away."
Now the gray eyes crumbled from their dead set tenacity to worry, doubt.
"It's like I'm still there," he continued, looking away uncomfortably from the concern in her face. "But I'm not there too. You know?"
"Shinji. You're scaring me," she said without affect.
"I'm in trouble, Misato," he managed before his voice went ragged with his own dread, and came to a stop lest he break down right there at the table.
How did everything get so fucked up? How did I fuck this up? I'm sorry, Misato.
"Bad trouble," he whispered.
She reached out and put a cautious hand over both of his—they were nearly white-knuckling each other. He felt his grip slack under her touch.
"Shinji, they have no reason to follow through on these orders do they? Other than this?" she asked, indicating the paper for a moment. She had the sort of look that she'd seen, perhaps even been given such orders before.
"I broke out of the interrogation—"
"What?" Her eyes widened. "How?"
"I don't know. I don't." He sighed. "Remember."
"But you're sure?"
"Yes."
She swallowed. Sat back. She looked away from him, out of the window and into ravaged Tokyo-3, sun high and out of view on the zenith of noon.
"We'll get you out of the country, out of Japan. Far away from NERV. Kaji, he knows how to—"
"You will do no such thing, Major Katsuragi, and I will very kindly pretend I did not just hear that."
She had kicked away from the table. Shinji could see her hand on the hip holster as they turned at the voice. Fuyutsuki stood in the doorway, squinting at them evenly. His hands were held at his back.
"Now, if you would both come with me, I have some men with guns down the hall who I've convinced on my word that you two would make no fuss."
Shinji made to get up, stopped, and resumed his seat when he saw no such motion from her.
"What assurance do we have you won't try and kill him?" she said so flatly it startled Shinji. She still hadn't removed her hand from the holster.
"None."
She gritted her teeth, unclipped the holster's strap.
"Don't." He laughed, patronizing her. "You're stone drunk. I can smell the booze from here."
The pistol was suddenly leveled at him. Fuyutsuki took a step back. He raised his palms.
"Oh, I'm a mean drunk, Kouzo," she drawled, grinning broadly. "Didn't Kaji ever tell you? I'm an even meaner shot."
"Misato," he started, nervous smile setting in. "You fire that weapon, Section Two will rush this apartment killing you and the boy."
Misato shrugged as this, chewing on her lips, considering the outcome.
"You don't leave me a lot of options, sir. I walk out with you, he might die, I blow you away and at least I get one of the fuckers who ordered the interrogation."
"I—"
"Oh yes." Her laughter sounded like teeth skittering over a dentist's floor. "I know all about your little Q&A session. How? Because I've got the GODDAMN ORDERS right here!" She slammed the table with her free hand.
"Keep your voice down," he hissed. "Or they will think there's trouble. Now." He straightened his collar sharply. "You're hardly in the position to be questioning us, Katsuragi. But if you must know, I find Shinji's death highly unlikely given that the commander wants Unit 01 back and he," Fuyustsuki motioned at the boy, "appears to be the only one that knows where it went."
Suddenly they were both looking at him.
"Now let's get moving before Section Two gets nervous and sees you with the gun at my head."
The Sephirot looms threatening and immense, black veins curling and twisting like an impossible nerve system carved into the marble ceiling. How do I even know what that is?
Kaji was there, tie loose as ever, looking startled and uneasy. Looking tired. He gave a weary glance at Misato who returned it with stony silence.
Fuyutsuki and the unshaven man retreated wordlessly, leaving them staring back at the tinted lenses of the commander, perched and motionless behind the imposing desk. Shinji realized the effect of the nearly non-existent décor was to intimidate any who would dare place themselves in front of it. The distance one needed to cross just to reach the man was absurd. Gendo's throne room, that's what this place was, even if the chair was not the gold emblazoned altar kings had placed themselves on once, the psychosis behind it was identical.
"Your presence is not required here."
The order was presumably addressed at Misato but she made no sign of recognizing it. His stare, though Shinji was not sure how he could tell, seemed to harden even though the distance and stillness betrayed nothing.
"I'm not leaving him alone with you," her answer boomed back after waiting him out, tone matching his.
One hand rose to stroke at the beard as if considering this reply before returning into the other.
"Very well. Shinji, you know why you have been called here, do you not?"
His throat closed. Like every conversation he'd ever had with his father. The anger, rage at the man he'd kept in check for that man began to struggle to the surface, threatening to reveal itself. Shinji hated him, and hated himself for the longing he felt towards that man at the same time. Praise me, one part of him cried. And the other muttered vicious nothings to itself. The strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again, in time.
He felt both of them staring, waiting on his reply.
"Yes, father."
"Then you will tell me the location of Unit 01."
Something else, crawling through subconscious mud, released itself from shackles Shinji had never known were there and exposed itself brazenly, reptile sunning itself on the lagoon's bank. It sneered at his father, a mouthful of sadistic, vengeful teeth.
"You've been listening to my torture for the past two days, don't you think I would have told you where it was by now if I knew?" Shinji's jaw went numb as the last few syllables finished. He had never, never openly defied his father. He felt as shocked as the stunned face of Misato nestled in the corner of his eye.
"Ristuko's information was unsatisfactory." Shinji saw Misato grasp for the gun that had been stripped of her, tensing suddenly. She knew now. Whatever she would to her ex-friend would be up to her. "I instructed them to bring you to me so as to confirm her conclusions personally. You have no answer then?"
A presence swept over him, the whisper of a premonition that his reply hinged incredible motion, angled it with spectacular precision to a future beyond sight. The sense that his hand now hovered over some gargantuan wheel, a million fates of others spinning forever, embedded in the chiseled granite of its surface, chasing one another round and round, until his touch placated them. Like grasping a Buddhist prayer wheel. And his wrist was falling upon it, unable to stay in flight; it was drifting closer and closer to the surface, the unenviable surface that would bring an end, a final rotation. Something other, not Eva nor Angel, had set these events into motion but now the mysterious mediator had vanished leaving the finality of choice, of destiny, entirely to him. The wheel, spinning prayers up to Heaven would find an end from his delicate palm, though where he had no idea. How it would arrive there, he supposed, was what had been left up to his discretion.
"I have no answer."
The man behind the desk tipped his head vaguely, though in acknowledgement Shinji could not say. He lifted a phone from the desk.
"Yes, it's as you suspected."
"Yes. It is the only course available to us now."
"You may inform Dr. Akagi."
He set the phone down.
And any action
"Major Katsuragi, you will update the operational procedures with Unit 02 assuming the primary position, and Unit 00 in back-up. Unit 03's profile will be updated for an activation test with Pilot Ikari."
Is a step to the block,
"Who will pilot Unit 02?" Misato rasped, a note of fear mingling with the dry voice.
to the fire,
"Asuka will."
down the sea's throat
"No—she can't!" She flung her fists down with the force of the words. "Her child, her baby…"
Or to an illegible stone:
"It has been decided. The pregnancy is being terminated as we speak."
and that is where we start.
Misato rushed blindly before a little dart embedded itself in her back and fell her to her knees. Her gasp echoed off the heavy stone work, full and hard as Section Two cuffed her and dragged her away.
What was so important? Shinji couldn't remember. What had his father said? The words would not come. He felt the stone smudge under his stroke, the first few symbols beginning to wipe away into the obliteration of his grip. The reverberation of prayer beginning to be cut short, as the words faded away at his touch, runny ink smearing to incomprehensible possibilities.
The Sephirot and its incredible branches bloated as his head drooped back. His breath, slowed to a stop as time crumbled. Hush in the stillness swamped over the sounds of Misato's departure. The two agents, held frozen in mid-stride, posed ridiculous over the feeble woman. His heartbeat's thump stretched longer and deeper until he could hear nothing more than gaping emptiness.
With the rest of the world at falter, the Sephirot's shape began to unfurl to something greater than its two-dimensional symbols. He'd seen it in the sky before, he realized. White, iridescent and—burning.
The Hebrew and pathways, lei lines for something much larger… Like a tree unfolding now, expanding. Always new branches but always leafless, dead. Always dead. Like the dendrites of some massive brain, growing in chaotic fractal intensity. There was no room any more, no Gendo, no Misato, only the carvings filling his vision, stretching away, gnarling into all directions, blooming night. The darkness of the stonework deepened its shading to a black for which he had no words because he'd never seen such a color before.
Eyes like angelfire blinked open from the center of the trunk, and stared through him burning away his lies like the flames that threatened to burst from their sockets. The edges were feathered, tapered in a pattern he'd once known so closely. Who?
A hand reached out of marbled shadow and beyondshadow, superluminal in its haste, and steel fingers groped for him, blind but stumbling closer. It was his own hand he realized, finally reaching the end of the wheel, ready to smudge him from existence. Its violet edges brushed his legs then recoiled. The palm opened for him to reveal an eye piercing the center like stigmata, iris crimson. It reached for him, cradled his fragility in the nook between thumb and finger. It was the massive grip of Evangelion Test-type Unit 01. The hand tightened.
His breath left him under the iron accelerating pressure. Muscles mashed softly, squirts of burst arteries. His bones, squealing and grinding before a series of snaps at their failure. His head had come off and—
He was pointing at his father.
"The unfaithful will convert, the sextant shall be purged, til God is in his Heaven, and all's Right with the World," he murmured; his hand, index finger extended in the shape of a gun, banged soundlessly.
Gendo's rock-like face was twisted strangely a moment. Scared, Shinji realized.
The child's world tumbled down into unconsciousness. Back to where the dark things lived and grew.
He remembered slipping. Like a nightmare where you wake up falling. Without the wake up part. Slipping, down, deeper, into the maw of it. Enemy. Then—
—the strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again…
In Time.
The heartbeat was like a war drum, a Buddhist gong resonating into a distanceless chamber, echoing in eternity. Th-thump.
"Who's there?"
Th-thump.
"Mother?"
Th-thump.
"God?"
A choir of agony and ecstasy over a million Cicadas' screeches, the sound of roaring, approaching ocean, and the primal howl of something much, much vaster than he.
"Welcome."
"Are you God?"
"I am…"
Groaning inhalation. A typhoon's squall winds, the grumble of volcanoes' jaws, the sighs of unsatisfied Greek orgies and Bacchic revelries as great lungs filled and sucked in the nothingness.
"The idea."
Fin
This didn't take me nearly as long to write as to revise and I worked particularly hard on the language and pacing. This may seem incomprehensible but it should be resolved by the next two parts. If it goes longer than that, please don't get angry. Just consider it a nifty feature! I hope you guys appreciated it. Obviously this will raise more questions than answers but I've been thinking about writing this fic for a long time so trust me when I say "it will all make sense by the end."