PROLOGUE: After Impact
After Impact it was empty.
Just a spilling, constant red lapping up the cracked and barren slabs of remaining earth.
And wind. A howling, aching wind.
That was the first thing he felt on his fingers. Wind. It was dry.
Ikari Shinji felt his mind solidify. He felt a pinpoint sensation that told him he had blood and skin and fingernails and a dry, rolling wind sliding between them.
He clenched his fingers into his right palm, relaxed them, and repeated the motion. His joints were sore at the knuckle.
When he remembered that he possessed eyelids, he cracked them slowly open, taking in the sharp light until his pupils adjusted.
The sight was at once unreal, cathartic, reaffirming, and nauseating.
The ugly panorama of the end of the world filled his vision. The afterbirth of Third Impact. The little scraps of dirt and earth that Shinji childishly refused to set free into the sweeping waters of Instrumentality. He stared out into the blunt, limited palette of the apocalypse, the ruddy shades of red, brown, off-black, and bleached white.
His eyes produced tears, but he wasn't crying. No, the response was less emotional and more physiological, more akin to an allergic reaction. The saltwater spilled out of his lids, but his face held no emotion.
A streaking line in the dead sky split the hanging moon. The blood waves rolled against the shore, providing the only piece of sound in what was essentially a vacuum.
Shinji squeezed his fingers again. He breathed in deep and watched his chest expand. Salt dried on his tongue. He exhaled through his nostrils. A pair of shadows stretched out from where he lay.
It occurred to him that he wasn't alone.
His eyes rolled around in his sockets, eventually fixating at the other body lying beside him. It was breathing. It was real. It was familiar and it was female.
Shinji crooked his neck toward the silent, half-bandaged form of Soryu Asuka Langley—or maybe it was Shikinami. Shinji was never sure.
Asuka's eyes were technically open, but no light escaped them. She remained unmoving, nose to the blackened sky, breathing in a shallow rhythm. From where he lay, Shinji could observe the cresting and falling of her breasts. The curved, red plating of her breastplates—still fastened to the tattered remains of her plugsuit—glittered as it reflected the moonlight.
From somewhere in his mind, Shinji heard a girl's voice. No one had actually spoken on the beach, but the words were near-deafening in his ears.
"Ehhhh?" a voice somewhere, somehow responded. "Is that what you like, then?"
Shinji rolled onto his side and buried his face behind his hands. His ribs hurt.
"Hentai!" the voice taunted him. "I knew you were looking at me!"
Shinji squeezed his eyelids together, so hard it felt like the skin would melt and fuse together. Gently, he slid his right hand outward across the hard earth until his outer two fingers brushed lightly against the skin of Asuka's hand.
The girl's shallow breathing changed up its rhythm, if only momentarily.
Behind closed eyes, Shinji breathed in stale air until it became water. Liquid flowed through his lungs, and with his conscious mind welcoming the shift, he again found his waking form submerged and suspended in endless LCL.
Maybe the tides shifted to match his constitution. His will. Life. Death. He wasn't even sure of the distinction lines that clarified one from the other anymore.
He didn't open his eyes, but he let himself feel the sway of the current around his body. He chose not to let his limbs dissolve again into the soup, but instead remain solid. He thought he might like the sensation, the play of the sinking weight of flesh stirred about by the flood and current.
Shinji sank deeper, as if clutched by the ankle, down into an undertow of his own design. He wondered if the LCL had Asuka as well. He wondered if she'd even make a choice.
The sway of voices and sensations spun around Ikari Shinji as he floated somewhere between all-feeling and nothingness.
"Well," taunted the voice in his mind. "If you like staring at me so much, I'll give you something to stare at."
Shinji floated along in sunken isolation. He bent and outstretched his fingers again. As he did, a thought struck.
Freedom or adherence. Acceptance or rejection. Contentment or contempt.
There was always a choice.
Ikari Shinji could stay in the world of Impact. He could will himself away to nothing.
Or maybe, just maybe, he could try to turn the wheel again.
The surge of LCL spun itself into a great foam. Shinji writhed and thrust his chin upward, choking for the first time on the liquid in the throat.
Maybe he could turn the wheel.
The thought was deafening. Though his eyes didn't open, his vision somehow grew blacker.
It was time to reset the rhythm.