Thy Kingdom Come

Prolouge - On the first day

Makoto opened his eyes to find the deep purple heavens staring right back at him. For a moment, the man could do nothing but numbly blink at the sparsely spread, winking stars that dotted his seemingly endless view…

And then the man sat bolt upright, shattering the moment as his spine seemingly snapped in two tearing himself up from the sand the second the revelation hit home.

He was alone. Utterly and completely alone. It wasn't in the sense that he was the only soul to be seen on the bank of white sand that ran for miles. Nor was it that his guttery gasp was the only sound to puncture the silence asides from the gentle hiss of the now blood red sea as it licked the beach. No, it was something far, far deeper than that. The man clutched at his chest, doubling over as he fought against the emptiness that seemed to be eating him from the inside out like some kind of ravenous worm. The only thing his raving brain could possibly compare it to was like waking up to find someone had just emptied a shot gun cartage into his thorax at a mercilessly point blank range. Not that that had happened to him recently, but a little bit of imagination can work wonders.

"Oh… oh god." He eventually managed to choke, his digging fingers hardly believing that they where touching something solid rather than some thin, hollow, empty husk. Eventually, when his heart had stopped hammering fit to knock a hole through his rib cage, the man shakily got to his feet and looked around but for what, he didn't know. The skeletal remains of Tokyo-3 certainly didn't offer any answers as they loomed over the tiny figure, looking out over the crimson sea like the ghost town it was.

8 8 8

Makoto walked along the beach. It sounded picturesque but the man felt his stomach quail every time the lapping water ran up to greet him. The colour sent a chill down his spine but still, it provided a distraction for his frayed brain as it tripped over the question of what the fuck had just happened. Sure, the technician could pick apart even the most sophisticated computer programs thrown at him but even the ones he's have to spend a few days wrinkling his brow over looked like a particularly tame piece of cake in comparison to what just happened. If only there was someone…

The man stopped in his tracks, fixing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. There was something further up the track of sand, breaking the monotonous pale strip if only for a moment. Makoto squinted, but the tension biding his face quickly broke and he found himself resuming his walk at a gallop.

8 8 8

"Maya!"

Maya Ibuki flinched at the sound of her name. Slowly, she peeled her eyes away from the achers of red water that ran off into the distance to meet the dark horizon and looked to the source of the noise. There was Makoto, hands on his knees as he gulped at the air. You would have though the man had just sailed past the finishing line of the marathon but then, being trapped in a job where the only work out you get is mashing fingers against a keyboard doesn't exactly turn you into the pinnacle of physical fitness.

"Thank god," The man gasped like some fish hulled fresh out of water. "I…was starting to… think that I… was the only one… here." He collapsed on the sand next to her in a heap, still chasing after his breath.

"Makoto?" the dull sound of his name in his ears made him stop. He glanced at the girl who was staring blankly back at him. "It is you, right? Just you?"

"Yeah… just me."

Silence, save for his raged breath and the sigh of the water. Makoto shifted uneasily. From the moment he'd found himself lying on the sand half a mile away he'd wanted nothing more than to stumble across someone else in this alien landscape, hell, he'd been starving for human contact, but there was something about Maya's question that made him think that he was going to have to face the very thing he'd been hoping to find a distraction from.

"What happened to us?"

And there it was.

Makoto bit his lip. Dodging the eyes of his co-worker, he suddenly became fixated with the trench he was scoring in the sand with his fingernail. He didn't want think about it, hell, he couldn't even begin to understand it, even if he were given a millennium to ponder the question. Being a man of facts and figures, that simply terrified him.

"I don't know." He stated, hoping that would be the end of things and they could move briskly on. Alas, that wasn't to be as Maya opened her mouth, posting yet another question that made him want to do nothing more than burry his head in the sand.

"What's the last thing you remember?" She glanced at him. The blank slate that was her face was beginning to be chipped away at with something that looked scarily like desperation.

"I…" He was going to dance around her query but that look she was giving him froze his tongue and before he could rein it in, it was off on a more truthful path. "I though we was going to die. The UN's troops had us pinned down in the command centre and were slaughtering everyone, then Lilth appeared and everything went…" He paused, searching for a word that could possibly encompass the chaos that had erupted as that blanched entity had ascended through the base. "…crazy…"

Maya silently shuddered next to him as he continued, staring off, eyes searching for the point where the sky crashed into the sea and the two bodied became one. "But it was weird. Even with that all going on, at the very end I was…so happy." He trailed off again. It didn't even begin to describe the feeling that had rushed through him when the first child has suddenly popped up on his consol as it flashed and beeped, helpfully informing him that the world was ending and there was fuck all he could do about it. At first he though his mind had snapped, and his faith in his sanity was hardly restored when the albino melted into the form of Major Katsuragi but suddenly, it didn't matter if he was crazy or not. No, she'd been the one person in the whole world he'd wanted to be there at that moment and there she was. Right in front of him.

And then she was kissing him.

It was like all that passion and hunger that hade been gnawing away at him for months on end had been transplanted into the object of his unknowing affection. He couldn't breath. He couldn't think or question how reality and fantasy had converged into something so wonderful. Most of all though, he couldn't stay afloat the torrent of sheer ecstasy that had swept him away as Misato pressed into him. The man lost himself to the memory, reliving the experience. He didn't notice the woman next to him clench her eyes shut, hugging her knees that little bit tighter.

"And then I just stopped."

The two sat in silence on the sand, letting the sound of swash and back wash have full reign over the beach. Makoto knew that he was skimping out on details but no words could truly describe what happened next. Yes, he had stopped, but something else had started. Something huge and immense that had assimilated him, breaking him down and building him into something new. Death and Rebirth.

But he'd come back.

Mokato pulled himself out of the deep pool of meditation he'd found himself slipping into, rising to his feet and picking up his march once again mumbling something about them getting moving. The motion dragged Ibiki free from her own fog of though and the woman scurried to her feet.

"Wait, where are you going?"

"We can't just stay here. Besides, what if there are other people out there? We need to find them…" Ever since he'd opened his eyes and found himself strewn across the sand, there'd been the yammering compulsion to find someone… anyone. Was this crusade of his just some pathetic attempt to fill the void that was now yawning within him? Whatever the reason, Maya must have shared it on some level for the girl bucked up a little the moment she processed the words. With a nod, she fell in tow and the two rambled off, their shoes stamping the damp sand, leaving mementos to their existence.

8 8 8

"-should be ok, you know. For once it doesn't look like there's too much structural damage which, knowing this place, is a-"

"Mokato…"

"What?" The man turned from his inspection of the entity of glass, steel and concrete that was the city he'd called home.

"Is that?" The girl at his side asked, pointing at some anomaly in the landscape but before he had a chance to restore his glasses to their rightful place on the bridge of his nose, Maya had seemingly confirmed some terrible truth to herself and was sprinting off, leaving nothing for her comrade asides from the oh so informative revelation "oh god it is" and a trail of dusty sand. By the time he'd finally caught up with her, she was already huddled over something, staring at it with wide eyes while a hand cupped her mouth.

"Maya, what the hell-" But that was as far as he got as his eyes took in the sight before him. There on the sand before him lay the prostrate form of the second child, Asuka Langley Soryu.

The last time he'd seen her, the girl had been ablaze with fury and pride, revealing in what she did best (i.e smacking the living crap out of something). It was chilling to think that the listless ghost boring holes into the sky with eyes that seemed utterly oblivious to the two bridge technicians was the same person, but that wasn't the only reason Makoto felt his stomach turn to water at the discovery.

"Asuka? Asuka, can you hear me?" The older woman tried, feverishly checking for a pulse. No answer came the loud reply but Ibuki seemed to find what she was looking for. Realising that Sorhy was going to be as responsive as a particularly mute piece of granite, she sat back on her haunches. "She's alive but how... how is this even possible?" Maya choked from behind her hand, goggling at the discovery. "The Eva series… for god's sake, we watched them tear her apart." Her eyes lingered on the bandages that laced the side of Asuka's head and arm. The images from the video feed played over and over again in the privacy of her own skull, lingering on the image of the lances burying themselves into the red behemoth that was Unit 02. it was enough to make her shut her eyes, but of course, that did nothing to exorcise the visions. "She couldn't have survived that, could she?"

"Right now, I wouldn't be surprised if we bumped into Father Christmas himself given everything that's happened" Makoto offered dryly, a comment that earned him a glare from Maya. He didn't care if it was in bad taste, this was all too surreal.

The trio lingered there for awhile trying to pull together a plan of action. The catatonic pilot didn't really get a say in this debate (which, Makoto noted, was a change from usual) and eventually it was decided they'd venture into the city and see what was what. Perhaps they would have come to a different conclusion if, in their bewildered state they'd noticed a set of unclaimed foot prints wondering away from the spot they'd stumbled into Asuka.

A/N- it's been a good long while since i've even though about this site but the other day the reading bug bit and i've been wanting to do another HUGE project for yonks. hopefully, this will be it. it's been knocking about my head for ages along with a bunch of other junk and i really needed to do some internal, unseasonal spring cleaning.

ttfn!