Imprinting
In the carnage, his heart shivers.
Shinji is not sure if that is just an echo, like a handprint from a past that does not matter anymore; but is definitely there, pounding and alive and sticky like the blood spraying through the sky.
He has just enough room to let it happen, a wing beat, and yet the impression stays. It lingers at the back of his head, long after the horror ends — it always takes him hours to let it dissolve, in the quiet solitude of his bedroom.
It is nothing new, that much is certain. It runs in his veins. As far as the origins may be, it has been within Shinji since his world began.
It was never stranger to him, not even the first time. The vibration kicks in as soon as he enters the Eva. It starts in synchrony with his own reaction, giving him a subtle sense of loss — the link between them is thin like fabric, like lost arms around his skin.
Shinji feels warmer, numb. His heart stings. One moment later, terror gets the best of him, and the slaughter begins.
The feeling grows with the violence of the fight. It resonates with the flesh he tears apart, wildly, like an instinct — the fingers that digs and grasp are his own, his own is the hunger, the scream, the rage.
The drive to protect.
Shinji cannot see that side of the world. Not yet. The intimate connection between devouring and giving birth, ending and creating life — he is too blinded by horror to understand, while he obediently does what he must.
The starting and final point of the universe is one. All life and death are the same. That much, however, he cannot know.
He knows the price of killing, burnt on his own skin. What he does not fully remember is the darkness that comes afterwards — the warm embrace of LCL as he passes out, the nest, the need to keep him close.
He does not know. Neither does the creature that envelops him. It works anyway, somehow, on levels foreign to man.
And every time Shinji wakes up, staring at the hospital ceiling, his nostrils hold a trace of the same smell. It never last long, but he treasures it — he it is one of the few things he can trust.
It is curious, how it smells like family.