{Sotto Voce}

This is the show that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. We fight at noon and die at night, just don't cry for me all right? Tomorrow is another day, so drink up and go play. For this is the show that never ends. It just goes and and on, my friends.

[Repeat]

-Battle Song of the 4th Company, 1st Battalion, 25th E.V.A. Regiment. NERV.


IA Seldon Presents

An Etherworlds Studio Production

The Atheist God


The humvee rolled to a weary stop in the top level of a massive underground bunker complex designed to house the combat vehicles of the joint UN/NERV 121st Combat Regiment. There was no one there to greet them. No one to rush up and whistle at the incredible punishment the humvee had suffered before it came limping home. No mechanics, no medics, no ordinance personnel to off-load the extremely volatile weaponry and munitions scattered all over the interior.

It was at this moment that Asuka Langely Sohryu, pilot of the Evangelion Unit 02, unflappable veteran of over a dozen sorties against the horrific monsters code-named "Angels", began to panic.

The 9mm pistol pressed against the back of her head had a lot to do with it.

"What are you doing?" hissed the driver, a tall blonde girl in her late teens. Asuka glanced at her from the corner of her eyes. She looked very strange, as did the other girl, the shorter one with the long black hair. Both were dressed in tight-fitting white leotards, trimmed in yellow and dark blue for the blonde and red and purple for the brunette. Around their waists were the remains of matching mini-skirts so daring that Asuka felt herself blushing at the thought of actually walking around Tokyo-3 in one.

Both girls were filthy, and both were caked in what Asuka intellectually recognized as dried blood.

"Are you going to kill her?" asked the brunette cautiously, watching the fourth passenger with a bone-deep weariness and antipathy.

Asuka felt the muzzle of the pistol tremble against her skull. Finally, a filtered speaker clicked on and a heavy voice said, "No." Asuka felt a shameful relief spreading in her chest. Then the voice went on, "But we can't let her go running off...not yet. Tenoh!"

"What?" the blonde growled.

"Find something to tie her hands. Hino? Sort through this mess and find us some weapons."

Hino, the brunette, spread her hands in resignation, "There isn't much left if one of them attacks. You used up pretty much everything there was in the get-away."

"No," the voice said softly, "I want the small calibers."

"What for?" asked Tenoh, getting out of the humvee. "You said the small stuff wouldn't do shit against their kind except piss them off." She slammed the door shut and stood still for a moment, then, a light bulb went off in her head. "No...you told me to come here for a reason. All those directions you were shouting out. You...you know where we are."

Behind her Asuka heard the other girl, Hino, rummaging around the hundreds of empty shell casings and munitions boxes and discarded weaponry. Without stopping her search she asked, "Where are we?" A tiny sigh, "When are we?"
The mechanical voice was silent for a long time. Too long. Asuka heard a heavy movement behind her back, got the feeling that someone - something - was glaring over her shoulder at Tenoh. She glared back stubbornly, then lowered her eyes and mumbled something before she disappeared around the side of the humvee. When she reappeared it was with a length of bungee cord in her hands.

A white hand moved into Asuka's field of vision. It wasn't a flesh-and-blood hand, but metal. It opened the door for her. The voice clicked back on, "Get out."


Chapter One: In Media Res


He had been in the Tertiary Storage Facility, deep underground, when the first alarms went off. That was inconvenient. The Bridge lay some fifty levels higher in Central Dogma from his position, and transit, even on the rapid-rail, would take half an hour at best.

A half-hour could mean the difference between life and death, Gendo Ikari knew.

During the transit he coldly disciplined himself to keep his hands off the emergency communications link in his pocket. The Bridge would be flooded with priority communications by now, and after only five minutes he could hardly have expected any rational briefing over purely audio connections. No, he would have to wait until he reached the Bridge, and trust that Fuyutsuki and Akagi could control the situation until he arrived.

Katsuragi, though...

He frowned, a stern face twisting into ugliness at the thought of the Major in command of Tactical. She was a useful woman, clever and passionate and dedicated; and a dangerous woman, for those very same reasons. Section-2 kept a tight watch on her movements and conversations, but not nearly tight enough. Certain hints, caustic glances when she thought no one could see her.

She knew something.

Too much.

Too valuable to lightly toss aside, however.

Dilemma.

The pilots trusted her, too; which would make it all the harder to discreetly remove her.

Well, no matter. The tonal wail of the alarms had changed; it was a full-on Angel attack. If it was beginning again, then the good Major would have her hands full fighting the war. That was good.

Gendo frowned, questioning once more just why there had been so long a lapse between the last attack and this one. Five years. The delay was...imponderable, it seemed. There was just no reason for it. Yet it was so.

Curiosity, such a familiar and damning itch, slowly forced his hand over to the lift controls. He punched in a seven digit code, patching him into the comm chatter of the Bridge.

"-Units 17 and 24 launching!"

"Sit-Rep on pilots one through eight!"

"One, Four, Seven and Eight are boarding their units now! Pilot Ikari is currently en-route to base via the rapid-rail. Pilot Horikai is in the 2nd Medical Ward, treatment for flu."

"And Asuka?"

"Last reported location was near the Fifth UN Munitions Depot!"

"...then the angel is right on top of her."

Gendo cut the link. He looked up at the ceiling of his lift and began impatiently tapping his foot.

"This is taking far too long."

Thirty minutes later and Gendo walked onto a Bridge that was deathly silent. He swept his frigid gaze across the crew, then coolly walked across the high platform for the stationary figure of Major Misato Katsuragi.

"Report," he ordered brusquely.

Katsuragi, a cheeky woman in her early thirties (she tried to pretend otherwise, note the fashionable purplish streaks she dyed her dark hair with) turned to look at him with a slack-jawed shock. She blinked once or twice, and Gendo repeated his order, wondering if she'd been drinking on the job again.

"S-Sir," she saluted. Gendo ignored the gesture. "Angel...is destroyed."

He felt as though something was being left out. He glanced at the tactical map. A bright blue marker hung over the eastern ridges, the only tombstone an Angel would ever receive. Darker markers in red were converging on its location: the Evangelions. Some twenty were deployed already, and more were surfacing even as he watched.

It puzzled him.

Misato cleared her throat. "Ah...the target. Is destroyed. Twenty minutes after it appeared."

Twenty minutes. Something about the way she said it made his eyes narrow in concentration. Then it clicked. The earliest reaction time NERV had for rapid deployment was sixteen minutes. The fastest it had destroyed an angel was forty minutes after first contact.

Twenty minutes...was impossible.

He looked up to the command platform, his station. Fuyutsuki was there, standing to one side as always and looking just as shocked and confused as anyone else. It was an unbecoming look for the old man, very at odds with his distinguished grey looks.

Gendo moved away from Katsuragi, coming up behind a short, energetic woman with bottled-blonde hair. "Akagi," he announced himself.

She shook her head, upsetting the delicate balance of her glasses but not caring that she did so. "The MAGI has no conclusions. Remote feeds were destroyed during the angel's brief appearance, and cloud-cover has rendered the geo-sat useless for observation."

"And your own observations?"

"Well, after review of the data, the strength of the Blue Pattern, and taking into account some very strange atmospheric anomalies that pattered across a five kilometer area in the moments just before and after the Angel's appearance, there is only one real conclusion I can reach." She leaned back into her chair, aware of the many eyes from the crew watching her. She shrugged, reached for a pack of cigarettes. "And that is that I have no idea."

Gendo resisted the idea of throttling the good doctor. There were too many witnesses.

A high-pitched beeping startled one of the Bridge crew. She keyed her set and spoke rapidly into the microphone, then looked up and shouted, "Major! Visual from Unit 23!"

"Send it to the display!"

The Bridge went very, very still when the first images flickered across the gigantic holographic display.

Dr. Akagi, her unlit cigarette dangling from her lip, stood up slowly. "What in the name of God happened out there?"

No one could answer her. Everyone remained still and quiet as the pictures continued to flow across the display. Pictures of devestation, of ruin, of thousand-meter tall skyscrapers lying flat on their sides, burning.

Gendo was frowning. "What section of the city is this?" he asked.

"This...this isn't a part of the city," someone answered. "It's twenty-five kilometers outside Tokyo-3's municipal limits."

"Then," Misato Katsuragi asked slowly, measuring her words, "Where did those buildings come from?"

No one answered.

A second high-pitched beeping startled the crew. A technician dropped into his chair and keyed a command. He shouted out, "Major! Confirmed location of Pilot Sohryu!"

"Where?"

"Main access outside of the 121st Combat Regiment vehicular complex, she just used her key-card to gain entry. Patching in a visual...now!"

The new pictures caused a new stir to ripple through the Bridge. Mistato felt a chill run down her spine as she digested the images and recognized their meaning. Without hesitation, she ordered, "Sound base-wide alert! Issue orders to the 121st, the 45th, and Section-2's reaction teams! Pilot's life endangered!"


He...no, It, stood nearly two meters tall. Machine? Powered exoskeletal body armor? Asuka had no way of knowing. Once it had been white in colour, now it was mostly a lightish grey with mottled patches everywhere else. Dents, burns, cuts and abrasions covered nearly every square inch of its surface. It looked vaguely human - that is to say, all the right dimensions and most of the pieces were there, but it wasn't human. No human bled orange.

There was no face. Nothing but a blank whitish-grey mask with a disturbingly thin slit running approximately where a mouth should have been. No eyes, no ears, no nose. Yet it saw her, watched her, spoke to her and heard her reply.

She found it repulsive and terrifying.

And very intelligent.

At the first door, sealed tight during the Angel attack, It had turned to her and almost casually asked for her ID card. She'd said nothing. Then It laid down an ultimatum. "Either you tell me, or I'll search you for it. Thoroughly." She'd glanced appealingly to the two girls standing to either side of her, but they didn't seem to care, or were too tired to care.

It had taken one step towards her before she stuck out her left hip and pointed to the cargo pocket of her fatigues. It dipped a quick hand into the pocket and pulled out her ID, no funny business at all.

"Thank you," the metallic voice had said.

The thing's politeness was unnerving.

It had apologized for the necessity of tying her hands and elbows, a mumbled excuse about not wanting her to run off and get into any trouble. It had also apologized for the necessity of having a third piece of cord tied around her neck, the end of which he gave to the blonde woman, Tenoh. It'd also given her a pistol, chambered and with the safety off.

"Please don't give her a reason to use it," It had asked.

It'd given Hino, the brunette in red, another pistol and a bag of ammunition. The Thing itself carried something slightly more lethal: a short-barreled FN FAL. A bandoleer of magazines went around its waist, along with two grenades.

The last additions made Asuka worry. The munitions she'd taken from the storage depot were over twenty years old, relics from the UN stockpiles, made during the hellish wars right after Second Impact. The might be safe, or they might be unstable; either way, they were volatile. She hadn't been too worried when they were still in her humvee - they'd been locked securely in foam in a crash-proof box. But now, standing three meters away, it was a whole 'nother story.

She felt calm.

There was no point in resisting - not yet, anyway. Alone, bound, and without a weapon she could do very little. Kick in the blonde girl's stomach, certainly; the brunette didn't look to good - shock maybe - so only a minor worry there, but the Thing...?

Asuka was a very intelligent woman. Graduate of the Universität Leipzig at the age of fourteen, prodigy of mathematics and music, she was also nobody's fool. She could handle the two girls - hell, they looked like children to her! No problem! But the Thing in the white...armour? No. She needed something more.

Something like a general alarm and three battalions of UN soldiers.

Watching the Thing slide her identification into the access slot to open the door, she had a warm feeling that both of those conditions were soon to be fulfilled.

Covertly, she slid a finger into her belt and palmed the tiny stiletto hidden there. The cords wrapped around her wrists were expertly done and a pain in the ass to cut furtively, but she started sawing away nonetheless, getting ready for the right moment to spring free.

The massive blast doors slid open. Asuka glanced once at the camera at the far end of the hall, then started counting the beats of her heart. The Thing chambered a round into the rifle and took point, ambling down the corridor without any sense of urgency at all. A nudge from the blonde girl was all it took for Asuka to follow Its lead.

'...Zweiundzwanzig...Drieundzwanzig...Vierundzwanzig-!"

A harsh, atonal wail shattered her hearing. Blood-red lights clicked on, blast doors ahead of them as well as the one behind slammed shut with terrifying force. Asuka worked the stiletto furiously, feeling the cords slacken as she sawed half-way through the line. The brunette crashed down to her knees against the wall, her eyes wide and frightened as she waved her pistol around wildly. The blonde tried shouting questions, but her voice was drowned out by the sirens.

The Thing in white ignored it all and continued walking to the next blast door.

Then, abruptly, the sirens clicked off and the intercom clicked on.

"Attention! Attention! Intruders in the base, exterior tunnel 12-Alpha-7. Reaction forces to assume defensive perimeters!"

The Thing stopped a meter short of the blast door. And studied it.

"What now!" Tenoh shouted.

"They'll come for us," mumbled Hino, a tear caressing her cheek. "What a way to die!" she sobbed. "To survive...all of it, and now to get killed in a place like this."

"Shut up!" Tenoh shouted at her. "We're not dying here! Right?" She looked at the Thing. Screamed, "RIGHT?"

It turned around. Asuka quickly concealed her stiletto. The mechanical voice clicked on, "Stop shouting. Nothing will happen to us."

Asuka pulled a face. "You're kidding, aren't you? Did you just hear them now, or is the stupid too loud for you? Reaction teams. Do you know what that means? It means close to a hundred guys in body armor and automatic rifles, sniper teams, tear gas grenades and flash-bangs. All the doors are locked down now, and you're not moving an inch unless its in handcuffs or a bodybag."

The Thing came closer, lifted the rifle and gently laid its muzzle to rest on her cheek. "We've got you, and I know you're important to them."

Asuka snorted, "Boy, you sure are fucked up, aren'tcha? I'm just a captain here. Dime-a-dozen captain. They'll try to keep me alive...but, if worst comes to worst, they've got plenty more just like me."

Sheer bravaura, and a fine bit of acting, if she might say so herself.

I'd like to thank the Academy...

That confidence cracked a little when the Thing...smiled?

'That's...not possible. It's a mask. A mask!'

"No, no," the Thing said quietly. "Your rank might just be a captain, but there is no one quite like you, is there? You're special in this place."

Keep it up, keep acting your part. Don't give It anything! "Oh, yeah? How do you figure that?"

The Thing lowered its rifle, "If you were just another nickle-officer, they wouldn't have sounded an alarm and let us know we were spotted. They'd just set up an ambush and kill us all - you, me, them," It pointed to the two girls. "No, you're important. And just what I need to get where I'm going. Now, be quiet for a moment."

It turned away, back to the blast doors leading farther into the base.

Asuka snorted, "You're not gonna get through."

"You might be surprised."


Misato glared into the security display. "I wanna know what that is. Where it came from. How it got there, and I wanted it ten minutes ago!"

As a show of competence and force, it was impressive. Precisely the reason Gendo had hired the woman. For an incursion of this scale, the majority of the Bridge crew were just so much dead weight. Idle hands are worrisome hands, and those hands were notoriously fumble-fingered and prone to "accidents." Giving the unoccupied crew a meaningless task was a sharp decision.

It meant fuck-all right now, though.

No one knew what the thing was (A Martian.) Or where it came from (Mar-...no, Venus? How curious.) How it had gotten there was self-evident. Captain Sohryu had allowed herself to fall into unfriendly hands. He made note to have Katsuragi give the young woman a dressing-down for that failure.

If she survived, of course.

Accidents.

A trickle of reports started coming in as Gendo mounted his own, personal platform in the Bridge. Fuyutsuki nodded to him but said nothing, and the pair listened in to the combat chatter sprinkling the comms as the reaction teams hastily geared themselves and started off into the labyrinthine corridors of NERV.

Twenty minutes, and then the MAGI would override the lockouts on the blast doors surrounding the intruders and the reaction teams would storm in.

A lighter selection of voices joined in on the comm. The Evangelions were returning to their extraction points and were being shuttled down into the launch bays from the surface. A few reported seeing something "unusual" in the streets above. Something dark and spindly - none of it made any sense and sometimes was quite contradictory. A seasoned lieutenant asked them for clarification, but none had gotten a good look at the thing, and then it had vanished altogether in the atypical explosion common to all defeated Angels.

But on one thing they all agreed: whatever it was that they saw was far too large to have been an Angel, and the explosion so large that it had dwarfed anything they'd ever seen before.

That puzzled Gendo. He turned to Fuyutsuki, intent on asking him a quiet question.

He almost missed seeing Ritsuko spit out a mouthful of scalding-hot coffee onto her lap.

Priceless.

"BLAST DOOR OVERRIDES HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED!"

"What!" Fuyutsuki snapped, hustling forward to the railing of the platform. "Rescind the override!"

Ritsuko was already doing so, bashing in one lightning-quick command prompt after another. "I can't! The MAGI aren't responding to me anymore!"


Asuka gaped silently when the blast doors, with a resigned hiss, opened.

Then she shut her eyes, hunched her shoulders and waited for the first BANG!

Instead, she heard, "What are you doing?"

Asuka opened an eye, peered around. 'Blondie, brunette, and...that one.' No UN troops, no Section-2 security detail.

The Thing's harsh voice clicked on, "Surprised, no?"

Asuka didn't know where to begin.

The Thing shifted its rifle into a two-handed grip. "Okay, now we start running."

Asuka couldn't quite stifle a groan and a mutter, "I hate running."


The Bridge descended into chaos. Worse, it was uncontrolled chaos. Terminals all over the bridge shut down, re-booted, or found themselves twisted into electronic pretzels as their formatting was crash-overwritten. Ritsuko and her assistants were in a mad-mouth froth, shouting orders with one part of their mind while burning keycode command after command into the primary programming in a valiant struggle to re-assert their authority over the digital fiefdoms they ruled.

Like the French, they were having a hard going against their serfs.

Misato was bellowing orders to anyone and everyone she could raise on the communications network. Gendo listened to it absent-mindedly. 'A very smart woman, she is.' It had taken Misato a full minute to realize it, but once she did she started spewing a string of commands instantly.

The blast door overrides were themselves overridden. For NERV, that was a singular event, used only in the case of catastrophic fires or flooding. It meant that everywhere in the base was free and open now. Admission for the general public: about $3 U.S. currency.

The hunt, as they say, was on. The hunters? A full division of the UN's finest soldiers. And a few hundred Section-2 men. All armed to the teeth.

Fuyutsuki took a similarly equanimical view to it all. "Well, we always wanted to have a full-on invasion drill. This just saves us the annoyance of wrangling for the funding to do it."

"Hmm," was Gendo's eloquent response.

One-by-one, the security cameras began going dark.


Asuka was trim. Asuka was lithe. Asuka was a good candidate for a modeling agency's wet dream.

She was not, however, fit. Twenty minutes of flat-out running proved it.

The one called Tenoh seemed to think that funny. "What'samatter? They don't put you military girls through a physical fitness test every now and then?"

"...Shut..." was the best Asuka could muster.

Five meters ahead of them, the Thing stuck out a hand and waved them to a stop. It was at a corner and cautiously poked Its head around and scanned the hallway beyond. "This way," It said.

This Way turned out to be an elevator bank. Asuka thought it preposterous. Surely they were all shut down after the alarm went off. When a chorus of dings chimed out and every door of the five car bank opened up in unison she felt like someone was making a great fool of her today. The Thing bustled them all into the middle car, covering the hallway behind them with Its rifle until the doors slid shut.

Without a touch of a button, the elevator began descending.

Hino slumped down, exhausted and staring away at nothing. Tenoh leaned against the wall, trying unsuccessfully to hide how raggedly she was breathing. Asuka sneered at her, then focused on regaining her own breath. The Thing didn't move at all.

Ten minutes later and they were still dropping.

"...How are you doing this?" Asuka asked.

She caught Tenoh glancing at the Thing in white, and she waited expectantly for an answer. None was forthcoming.

Twenty minutes after entering the car it began to slow.

"Move to the sides," the Thing ordered. Tenoh gave Asuka's neck-rope a tug and unkindly flattened her against the hand-rails. Hino looked up apathetically, then scooted over. The elevator came to a stop and with a chime the doors parted.

Asuka heard, "HALT!"

The Thing traversed the muzzle of the FN FAL and squeezed the trigger.


A squeal of electronic gibberish cut through the chatter of the Bridge.

"Contact! We have cont-"

Then the screams started.

"Level!" Misato barked into her headset. "What level?"

The sharp reports of gunfire was all the response she got.


There was a ringing in her ears.

Five shattering bursts in a confined space at less than a meter's distance would do that to a girl.

After the fifth shot, the Thing in white had bulled out of the elevator. Asuka knew damn well not to follow him. So too, apparently, did the girls with her. They flinched as a succession of bullets zipped through the open door and punched out the thin metal wall at the back, heard even more weapons open up in the hallway beyond. A good firefight, Asuka realized, perhaps a squad of twelve men or more. Salvation, it seemed, was near at hand.

The gunfire rose to a feverish pitch, then went silent.

The air was full of the acrid stench of cordite.

Asuka felt the restraints around her hands relax. She'd finally sawed through the cord. She wrapped a finger into the bungee cord, tightening it back up again; but she was free, now. Well - freeish; there was still another length of cord around her elbows, and those were run behind her back, but with her hands free her options had just grown, however minutely.

'Now, hopefully that Thing is lying out there with a few nice holes in It, and soon they'll start shouting for these two to surrender and come out. Blondie is close, if I can stick her somewhere soft - kick the other one in the face - then make a run for it...'

She felt a tap on her shoulder. Looked up to see It standing over her.

"You can stop plotting now."

Tenoh stood up slowly. "Are they?"

The Thing nodded.

Tenoh swallowed heavily.

Hino, dazed on the floor, said, "You've been shot."

So it had, Asuka realized. Twice. One was in a shoulder, a flesh wound (or, better yet, maybe in the shoulder socket, shattering the bone.) The second hole was in the chest, in an area that should have been the right lung. Both holes were leaking a thick, syrupy orangish-red goo.

The Thing's blank face looked down at Hino. "I'll be fine," It said, a fleeting hint of emotion touching the unemotional hiss of the electronic voice.

"Fine, like hell! You've been shot," protested Tenoh.

The Thing's head snapped to her face. Asuka got the impression it was glaring a hole into the blonde's forehead. "I'll. Be. Fine. Now, get her up and start running."

"More running?" Hino sighed.

"Not very much more," the Thing assured her. "We'll be there soon."

Asuka was jerked to her feet and pushed out of the elevator. She stumbled with her first step, sliding on a handful of shell casings, which seemed to just about cover the floor. Where they came up short the blood began, and in the middle of the blood were the bodies. Section-2 men, all of them. She recognized them by the conspicuous lack of anything in sky-blue, and the crimson fig-leaf with NERV protruding out of it.

There had been nine standing guard outside the elevator banks.

'Where am I?' Asuka quickly read the level number off of the walls. 'Level 51-Alpha? That's the Bridge!' It wasn't, not really, they were still a good twenty minute's walk from the Bridge; but they were very close.

"Ready?" the Thing asked.

Hino was staring at the bodies.

"Hino? Hino." The Thing looked to Tenoh. "Get her moving," he curtly ordered.

Tenoh let Asuka's neck-rope drop and went over to the other girl, cupping her face and tilting it up to look in her eyes. "Rei, Rei girl you need to get up. We have to keep moving." She gave Hino a gently shake and a soft slap. "Rei. We have to keep moving."

Asuka inched away from her captors, heading surreptitiously for a corpse and the MP5 submachine gun slung around its shoulder. She was almost on it when she heard a tiny burst of static and a frantic voice shouting, "-espond! Contact reported, where? Sound off! What level?"

Asuka felt her whole body trembling with anxious energy. She unwound her finger from the bungee cord and let it fall slack. No one seemed to notice, they were busy with the Hino girl. Now she had to make a choice. Gun, or go for the mike bud she saw sticking up from the collar of the deceased Section-2 agent.

'Either one could get me killed,' she processed logically. 'Have to make a choice fast, the brunette is getting up! Come on, Asuka, choose!'

She flung herself at the corpse. The blonde girl shouted an alarm, and she heard the Thing whipping around, felt the cold touch of the rifle's muzzle tracking up her leg and onto her spine. She stretched out her hands...

"Fifty-one Alpha! Contact on-"

A powerful hand snagged the back of her collar and carelessly wrenched her away from the dead man's microphone. Asuka heard an animated buzz of questions in the earpiece, then she was too far away to hear anything at all.

Feeling nothing at all to lose, she spun in her clothes and launched herself into an attack, thrusting blindly with her stiletto at the Thing and beating its restraining arm with her right fist while her feet lashed out at Its kneecaps.

Metal plating on its ribs turned the springy stiletto aside like it was made of plastic. She bruised her fist on the Thing's arm, and felt a strange, painful reverberation run up her feet and legs when she kicked Its kneecaps.

It dropped her unceremoniously.

"Are you finished?"


No one was answering anymore, but that didn't matter. Misato knew where the enemy was, and, furthermore, Asuka was alive.

'No, she may be alive.' The silence that followed her burst was ominous. Misato shook it off. 'No time for that.'

She keyed her mike, "All units, converge on Level 51. All units, Level 51!" After a moment's hesitation, she added, "I am declaring a free-fire zone. Level 51, exclusive of Delta Compartment."

A few of the techs were staring at her. She had, with but a few words, turned every compartment, every storeroom, every hallway and every cupboard save the Bridge itself into a shooting gallery. Anyone and everyone was a target - even if they happened to be dressed like a member of NERV. Anyone not pugged into the tactical net was a dead man.

Misato closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 'It can't be helped. We have to stop them, before they get too close.'

A joyful shout from Ritsuko's section swung everyone's attention away from the depressed Major. Maya Ibuki was cheering like mad and clapping her hands. "I've got partial control for the MAGI restored!"

"Can you seal off the blast doors?" Ritsuko snarled.

"Uh...no."

"Then keep at it and tell me what we do have!"

"Uh, yes ma'am! We have: launch bay, elevator control, environmentals-"

The report was cut short by a burst from the launch bay. "Pilot Ikari has arrived and is entering his Evangelion!"

Misato processed the information with a grunt, then mumbled a bit as a thought came to her. "We have elevator control?" she asked.

Maya hesitated, "Yes...yes, ma'am. We do."

"Unit 01, do you read me?"

Shinji's anxious voice came almost instantly. "Roger, reading you."

"Deploy your unit to the nearest heavy-lift cargo elevator, on the double. Move it, mister!" She turned on Maya, "Re-rout his elevator to this floor. Top priority! Have him station at the nearest choke point to 51-Alpha."

"Yes, ma'am!"


Her arms were tied up again, but now her elbows were free. She wasn't dead (yet,) wasn't hurt (save what she'd done to herself,) and, to top it all off, the Thing had seemed amused by her attempt to escape or go down fighting. It had even shaken Its head whimsically, as if it had all been a private joke that only It could understand.

The Tenoh girl was not as amused. She frog marched Asuka ahead of her now, a pistol pressed hard into the small of her back.

"One more trick like that and you'll never walk again," she'd hissed into Asuka's ear.

Asuka believed her.

'Doesn't matter,' she told herself. 'I got our location out to Misato, and they had to waste five precious minutes tying me back up.' Reinforcements, she prayed, were galloping on their way.

After a while, their pace, as always set by the Thing leading in front, slackened. Then it stopped altogether. The Thing slumped sideways into a wall, and Asuka could see Its shoulders moving up and down heavily, as if It were breathing.

'So...it's some kind of body armor,' she realized.

Hino, somewhat alive and aware to herself, went over to the Thin-...to him, and slid one of his arms over her shoulders. "How bad is it," Asuka heard her ask.

The man inside the suit gave his head a little shake. "Not bad." He pushed himself off the wall, removed his arm from Hino's shoulder and staggered forward. "We need to keep moving. There isn't much time."

'Damn right there isn't,' thought Asuka triumphantly. They were getting closer to one of the strategic choke points scattered all across Level 51. If there was any chance of stopping them short of the bridge, it would be there. She readied herself for another chance to escape.

Just before they turned the blind corner and approached the narrow gap spanning into the Delta section the man stopped and leaned against the wall. "Hino...peek around the corner. Do it quick. Tell me what you see."

The girl did as she was told, quickly out-and-back. She blinked rapidly, then did it a second time. She darted back with a yelp and everyone flinched as a buzz-saw of bullets chewed up the wall behind her.

"Some kind of robot!" she shouted.

"Robot?" the man questioned. "What kind?"

"I don't know! The big kind!"

The man leaned down, almost pressing the blank face of his mask into her nose. "How big?"

Asuka figured it out first. Before the Hino girl shrugged her shoulders and said, "Maybe ten meters?"

"Ten meters? Only...only ten meters?" The man shook his head again, his shoulders dropping with resignation. Then he straightened, "What did it look like?"

"I didn't get a good look-"

"Anything at all?" the man demanded impatiently.

Hino fumbled for a word, "Purple! I guess."

Asuka stiffened. 'Oh, dear God...him."

The man cocked his head, "Purple?" Slowly he turned to look at Asuka. "Purple..."


He watched her for a long time. Long enough for Asuka to start fidgeting underneath his unseen gaze. Then, in a startling movement, he pushed off of the wall and held out his rifle to Tenoh. "Give me your pistol."

Whenever he was in doubt, Shinji Ikari, pilot of the Evangelion Unit 01, hesitated. This moment in his life was no exception. Oh, he'd sent of a burst of 7.62 chain-fire when he spotted a dark shadow peek around the corner of the blind a second time, but then he magnified the image and realized that the shadow he was blindly firing at was, actually, a girl. A young girl.

"What is going on here?" he wondered aloud. The launch and maintenance techs had only given him some bare facts, and Misato almost less, before he'd been hey-diddle-diddled up to this choke point and told to shoot anything and everything that didn't register on the tactical network before poking around the corner.

But, a girl? Was she in NERV, or attached to the UN forces? He couldn't just up and massacre some young girl for no better reason than that she'd wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

Could he?

He thought about raising Misato on the comm, asking her for some clarification about his orders; but, before he could, someone else was coming around the corner.

Mind full of the image of some girl's head exploding like a watermelon, Shinji Ikari, true to form, hesitated. A moment later, he didn't feel quite so bad for having done so. There was only one woman in this base with hair just that particular shade of golden-red. Only one woman who managed to make even drab fatigues look...arousing.

He toggled his external speakers, "Asuka! What are you doing up here? I nearly blew your head off!"

Asuka frowned at him. Nothing new. But then she started cussing him. Roundly. In German. She only saved those particular expressions for when she was Truly, Utterly, Extremely Pissed at him or something he'd done.

The picture pieced together slowly for the poor man.

"Asuka...why are your hands tied?"


'Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.' The litany was monotonous. The litany was without heat. It was just about all Asuka had to keep her from charging the purple monstrosity sitting squarely across the short bridging divide and kicking the hatch open and then kicking the man sitting inside of it. 'I knew he could be slow sometimes, but JESUS CHRIST!'

The cold point of the pistol pressed against the back of her ear forced her forward again, the leader now in this round-robin formation they were shifting through. "Keep moving," said the man.

Slowly, with Hino and Tenoh trailing cautiously behind them, they crossed halfway over the bridge.

"Stop," said the man. Then he addressed himself to the ugly bulk of Unit 01. "Come on out, son."

"...I have orders to shoot anyone who tries to cross this bridge."

"I know you do," agreed the man sympathetically.

"You know?" Shinji sounded amazed. Asuka groaned. It was obvious - to her at least - what his orders had been. The three second burst of chain fire had made his orders abundantly clear.

But the man let no trace of impatience into his filtered voice. "Yes, I know. But, you're not going to shoot us."

"...I have my orders."

The man was shaking his head. "But you're not going to follow them. Are you?" He waited for a reply, then prominently displayed his pistol, setting it flush against Asuka's right temple. "Are you?"

'Shit,' thought Asuka. 'I have to do something or this idiot's going to let them go through!'

She started talking rapidly, lying her ass off. "Yes he will! Do you know who's in that Evangelion? Shinji Ikari! You've no doubt heard of him. The most fiercesome pilot of the entire Evangelion program. He's fought in fifteen separate engagements against the Angels, three more than me even! He's gunned them down, chopped them up, and blown them apart. There's no way you're gonna get past him - so, set your weapons down, give yourselves up, and I promise they'll go easy on you."

She said every word at the highest volume her voice would allow, and felt like biting her tongue off every second syllable.

The man behind her - laughed.

"He sounds like a great warrior."

"He is!" Asuka snarled, glaring daggers at the lumpy bulge of the cockpit.

"What was it you said? Three more than you?" The man chuckled. "So, one might say he's the best pilot in all of the Evangelion program?"

Asuka ground her teeth together. "Yes. He. Is."

"So...he'd have no problems at all gunning you down in cold blood, would he?" The man looked over her shoulder at the Evangelion. "Well, then - let's have it, boy. Come on! We're all here, waiting. No place to hide..."

The Evangelion made no move.

The man nodded. "Come on out, Shinji Ikari. I won't hurt you." He waited a beat, then nodded at Asuka. "Or her."

A moment passed. Then Asuka heard the tell-tale hiss of depressurization and saw steam coming out around the edges of the cockpit hatch. "Don't! Don't you DARE!"

Shinji hid his deep blue eyes beneath a fall of his dark hair. He couldn't look Asuka in the eyes, just as he couldn't kill her.

By her threats, both loud and verbose, she did not seem to share the same qualms.


Misato took out her H&K and chambered a round. "Report!" she snapped.

"No contact with Unit 01's pilot!"

Ten minutes and still no contact. She'd heard the gunfire. Everyone had heard the gunfire. A cold, anxious little pit was forming in the back of Misato's stomach, growing larger and colder with every passing minute.

'Impossible. Three people just simply cannot take out an Evangelion lying in wait for them around a blind corner and across a bridge. It just can't happen!'

There was a darker fear she had. One she absolutely refused to face. But, in the corners of her mind, there was a malevolent whisper mocking her.

He killed Asuka.

It might have happened. She'd damn well sure sent him there knowing it could happen.

'No. That's not gonna happen. It won't.'

She was alwasy lousy at reassuring herself.

With a start she snapped back to reality. "Brass check your weapons! Live rounds, find cover and check your targets before you fire!"

Many of the Bridge crew were armed now. Barely armed, as it were, because there was very little in the way of small arms stores on the Bridge. Pistols mostly, a few submachine guns. A pittance, if what might come through that door had enough power to take on an Evangelion in an unfair fight and best it.

'Ah, the wonderful things I dream of,' Misato thought wryly as she slid down behind a sturdy-looking console. She spared a glance up above at the Commander and Sub-Commander, both of whom had refused weapons and declined to seek shelter.

"Handle it," was all Gendo had said.

"Fine, fine, I'll handle it," Misato mumbled to herself now. "Just don't blame me if you get your beard clipped."

She was just moving on into a good laugh at the thought of that happening when the door to the Bridge hissed open. "HOLD FIRE!"

Standing in the open hatch, hands held up and a downcast, hangdog look on his face, was Shinji Ikari. He was having his ear bent by a loud, vehement, vicious, unrelenting torrent of sharp German curses. Misato felt her breath catch and her heart soar.

'They're alive. They're both alive!'

She came back down with a bleak plummet. They were now hostages.

Shinji, pushed from behind, came stumbling into the Bridge. Asuka, still in full spate, was unceremoniously shoved in after him. At their backs stood a two meter tall behemoth, a monster in mottled white-and-grey. Burnt, scratched, shot and bleeding...orange? Misato brushed that last bit aside, focusing instead on the leveled FN FAL that was aimed, it seemed, straight at her forehead.

'...Jeez, that thing looks big.'

The white...Thing stepped into the room. Behind It came two young girls, teenagers wearing daring outfits that made even Misato pause for a moment. However, they too carried weapons, and they looked like they knew how to use them.

Time to do something. "Put down your weapons, now!" she shouted.

The Thing cocked its head - mask? - and looked blankly at her like she was stupid.

"On the deck. NOW!" Misato shouted again.

The Thing's face turned away, ignoring her. She felt her blood pressure race up.

There was a static clicking. A voice, dry and filtered, boomed out from the Thing. "Hino, Tenoh, stay here and watch them. If anyone so much as moves, shoot both of them in the back of their spines."

The two girls shared a quick glance, then cautiously leveled their pistols at Shinji and Asuka. Misato had the instant forebooding that, push come to shove, these two teenage girls would do what they were told, without hesitation.

She fumbled with her voice. "H-Hold fire!"

The Thing ignored her entirely. It had lowered its rifle and was moving, limping actually, across the Bridge. She watched it go, powerless and angry as hell. It walked over to the access stair to the Commander's Deck, leaned heavily on the railing, and slowly started up, one stair at a time.

Gendo watched It come. There was no fear in him, that was an emotion he'd discarded years ago, when the course of his life had become utterly, irrevocably set. Fuyutsuki behind him watched with trepidation, but he showed very little of it in his face and his eyes.

The Thing came slowly, painfully it seemed. Gendo's alert eyes quickly spotted the bullet holes in the chest and shoulder, wondered how it could even stand upright. In an excruciating length of time, the Thing moved up before his desk, turned to face him, and stared.

Gendo, his hands interwoven beneath his nose, stared back.

The Thing bent down, and placed Its rifle down on the floor.

Gendo watched It carefully now, surprised at the unusual guesture. He was even more surpised at what happened next.

The armor - as he guessed it to be - rippled. It split, dark lines appearing and retracting, folding in and up and around on itself. A steamy fog, redolent with a foul stench of blood and ripe, unwashed flesh rolled out across his face. He heard a soft noise, slick flesh dropping heavily down onto the polished floor of the Deck.

A body emerged. Terrible. Mutilated. Powerful. Dozens of scars, nearly invisible against skin so pale and white that it looked as if had not seen the sun in years. Other scars were more obvious, if only because they were not so much scars as chunks of flesh simply torn away and left to heal as best they could. Two bullet holes marred the chest with dark, bloody wounds. One in the meaty part of the shoulder, the other squarely below a missing nipple and above a riot of old scars that criss-crossed the entire abdomen. They leaked in faint pulses.

Gendo looked up, the man was enormous, perhaps 186 centimeters in height. His face, partially hidden beneath an unwashed and reeking mop of brown hair shot through with silver and an unruly beard, was deeply lined, but, as Gendo saw, still young. Far too young. Here, too, there were scars; the most prominent being a lump of tissue closing the man's left eye. His right one was a deep, dark blue. An ocean of so many mixed emotions that it was impossible to understand.

The man started trembling like a leaf in the wind. He swallowed once or twice. Coughed.

Then he braced to attention, his right hand snapping up into a salute of metronomic military precision.

Unable to help himself, Gendo felt his lips part slightly in a silent gasp.

"Pilot..." the man said, his voice barely a whisper it was so rough. "E.V.A Unit...257. Commander...Second Battalion...25th E.V.A Regiment. Lieutenant Colonel...Shinji Ikari.

"Reporting for Duty."


AN: Two things. One - this story has been kicking around in my head for two years now. Sat down and worked it out. Might continue it, if I have the time and come up with some interesting ideas.

Two - This is an AU, obviously. It also contains some parts that could be considered "Crossover". It isn't. And I feel no need to explain more than that. Take it or leave it as it is.