Asuka had been temporarily ordered to return to Germany by the Ministry of Defense and there was no actual way for her to wiggle out of this. Luckily it was only for about two weeks and she did manage to get Shinji allowed to accompany her and now the two of them were about to touchdown in Munich.. without any chaperone.. Asuka nervously adjusts her eyepatch… she didn't want to go back.. but the thought of coming back to Germany with her missing eye and without being able to work her 'good girl' persona was really quite a scary thought.. She was not the same person coming back that she was when she left with Ryoji Kaji not even a year earlier.
"Asuka…?" Shinji could tell that Asuka was really nervous about coming back here.. he knew she didn't say all that much about Germany or she didn't say anything personal about Germany but he could tell that she didn't really like her step parents.. anything else he really had no idea about…
"Try not to embarrass me here baka this is still my home nerf people will remember me/" Asuka replies to deflect attention away from how scared she is.. she takes a deep breath…
"UN Charted Flight #AC137 will be landing in Zeppelin Airfield momentarily please fasten your seat belts and prepare for landing" came the words of the pilot..
"Right…." Shinji gives his own sigh.. he should probably have expected an answer like that.. he closed the Japanese to German dictionary and put it into his bag.. Misato's crash course in speaking German was about to be tested of all else failed he still could speak English.
After getting out of the plane.. the two kids were met by a small car driven by a uniformed man. He had a smile on his face as if he had probably requested coming to pick them up.
"Frauelin Soryu. and you must be Shinji Ikari, people have been talking a lot about you here. i'm Corporal Heinemann I'm here to drive into town. Dr. Langley is looking forward to seeing you. Do you remember me? I drove you a few times before you went to Japan?" he asks with much anticipation as if he would be deeply touched if Asuka had indeed remembered him.
"Of course I don't remember you…" Asuka replies with annoyance.. before slipping past the both of them and getting into the car. The last thing she wanted was to see her step father.
"I'll try and remember you… i uh sorry about that.. i uh i'm really not anyone impressive though…. i mean.. not really.." Shinji follows Asuka into the back of the car.
"It's an honor to meet Someone picked by the Marduke institute. There are only six of you in the world.. and everyone's heard your name everywhere although Asuka's been famous around here since way before she was a pilot. Her mom was a fixture here she's a genius in biology and math. Everyone remembers when they met her….." The driver went on and on. With Asuka clearly quite uncomfortable with the topic despite all of this being praise of her.
Eventually the car came to a very large house at the end of a winding street. The sign over the gate read "Schloss Soryu" in fadded letters.. clearly it was fairly old.. now that Shinji thought for a moment.. how long had there been a Soryu family in Germany?
"This…. This is where you grew up Asuka? It's really nice.. it's probably a little bigger than where i did.." Shinji gets out after the car stops in front of the gate.. actually he couldn't really tell if it was bigger than his aunt and uncle's house since European buildings were made differently than Japanese ones, but still this place was so much bigger than Misato's place.. he can understand where all those boxes actually fit.. that she had shown up with.
"Of course not Baka, this is my mom's house. I grew in my Step Father's house.. it's a lot closer to the NERV base here so when she died we moved our stuff there. Since the house is technically mine i decided we should stay here." Asuka says still rather distantly as she again leaves the car without saying anything to their driver.
"She seems a lot different than she did last time I saw her… i guess she matured a lot in Japan…. it must be pretty different actually being in combat than being the base mascot here… her eye?" the driver replied as Asuka walked off to unlock the house.. he seemed like he was genuinely worried about Asuka.
"I guess Asuka has changed a little since we first met…." Shinji replies in his best German.. he gives another small sigh.. yeah after everything they had gone through both of them were different than they had been weren't they? Very different..
"Asuka says her eye doesn't hurt anymore.. i think she'll be fine.. i uh.. do you know what we're supposed to do exactly today?" Shinji adds after a moment as he grabs his bags.
"Dr. Langley said he's stop by and give instructions later this afternoon so just have fun until then, i guess you're on vacation here so enjoy the scenery in Germany, Munich is actually one of the most well preserved pre 2nd impact cities. Almost nothing was destroyed here." The driver replied with a smile before taking off.
"okay…." Shinji went to follow Asuka inside the house. It was true he was only here because Misato wanted him to accompany Asuka here.. and if he thought about to for very long he thinks that was because Asuka had probably wanted him here herself and may or may not have talked to Misato about it… in which case it wasn't so much a vacation than he was making sure Asuka was okay…. which wasn't a mission he really thought he was going to be able to do. Everything with Asuka was tricky.. no matter what precisely it was.
The house itself was fairly empty.. the furniture was still all there along with a few personal items but clearly before the two of them had entered this place had probably been left alone since Asuka's mom had died that was 9 years ago. The house was not only big but with so much having been moved out it was almost absurdly spacious.
"Up here baka! I found something you will like!" Asuka calls down from up one flight of stairs. She had instinctively brought up her luggage to what had been her bedroom as a little kid.. walking there she had found her mom's old office. All the important papers had been removed years ago.. but standing awkwardly on a filling cabinet was a picture of Kyoko Soryu along with a recent married Yui and Gendo Ikari. The three of them were all decked in lab coats and standing in front of some kind of prototype entry plug.
"wow.. our parents really look young.. and happy.." Shinji says clearly rather surprised at the picture..both his and Asuka's mom's didn't really look like he would have expected.. actually they looked a lot more… more like normal happy people than Shinji imagined and from the look on Asuka's face she seemed to be thinking the same thing.. they also looked a lot like Asuka and he did.. both of them might as well be clones with different personalities.
After cycling through a rather large amount of emotions Asuka gave a smile.. which seemed genuine enough and looked over at Shinji for the moment at least the two of them were alone and didn't have anything important to take care of.
"I guess for the moment you are my guest baka. So how about i go make us some tea. We should have some airlocked tea around here that can't go bad. I will need to do some of the work with that though." she declares with more energy than she had shown since they had gotten on the plane here.
"I would love some Asuka.. i'll go and help i guess.." Shinji replies with a smile of his own… she did seem to be slightly more back to normal now.. and this was the side of Asuka he preferred seeing.. he didn't mind her bossing him around and throwing insults as long as she really didn't seem to mean them..
After a few hours of the two of them sitting in the abandoned living room with so sign of Asuka's step father showing up to give them whatever it was he needed to give them. For them to do whatever it was that Asuka had been called all the way here to do.
"Screw this! I am not just gonna sit here and wait orders. If I did that for too long I turned into Wonder Girl back home." Asuka declares standing up and about slamming her cup into the coffee table. It had been a long time and no one was here.. and she was tired of how nervous she was waiting.
"What else are we going to do?" Shinji asks sitting up straight almost at attention from Asuka's declaration. He understood that it seemed everyone forgot about them.. but what else were they gonna do?
"What else are we gonna do baka? I'm going to show you around Munich. There's probably something fun to do in walking distance. I remember a great arcade not one as nice as Tokyo's new ones but I good place I can show you."
"I guess that makes sense.. i'll get my jacket out of my bag…" Japan hadn't had weather other than early summer for years so the only jacket Shinji actually owned the was formal one from his uniform.. which sadly would really make him look out of place in Germany.
After you left the high end houses where The Soryu Family house was.. you eventually went down a side street and into a city block populated by shops which had probably been standing for over a hundred years or so.
Asuka seemed to remember at least partially where they were and were she was taking them. Her need to be the leader not withstanding not enough had changed that she could get too lost. She used to sneak out of class to grab food and window shop around here. The two teenagers eventually came to 'Herr Gold's Authentic Austrian Coffee.' Which Asuka decided was the place to stop. Of course two teenagers, one with an eyepatch and the other in a Japanese school uniform stood out completely. The crowd there looked to be college students who wanted cheap coffee with a somewhat fancy atmosphere. Not a place Shinji was used to at all.. or really thought they would be all that welcome.. actually he didn't even know how much stuff cost in Germany..
Ignoring whatever worry Shinji was having Asuka walked up the the counter and ordered. "Two cappuccinos whole milk, two slices of English style pound cake." She ordered naturally without even looking at the menu.. the idea was clearly to impress Shinji with remembering where to go to get something to eat but what to get. She paid for everything.
"I've seen you order Coffee Baka you don't anything about coffee I've been to enough viennan style coffee houses to know exactly what's good. " she had reverted to Japanese.. Shinji wasn't sure if that was on purpose or not with how out of it Asuka was acting.. she took a seat followed by Shinji and then followed immediately after by someone else saying something in Japanese.. or mostly Japanese.
"Oi, you two have a familiar look about you." A Burnett appeared out of her seat and plopped down right next to Shinji at the booth they had picked out.
"Really now this is quite a coincidence, only I think it really isn't especially with how cute both of you are." Her Japanese was accented not overly but enough for both Shinji and Asuka to notice when she spoke. Shinji really hadn't noticed before but Asuka spoke without almost any accent at all..
"Name's Makinami you both stick out quite a lot.. you look like maybe a Princess and her loyal puppy." The girl kept talking and talking quickly having invited herself to lean on Shinji's shoulder as she talked.. Asuka opened her mouth to shout and the girl simply kept going.
"Now then I totally recognize you two now. Not at all what I expected but both of you smell so nice. It's the distinctive metallic smell of blood."
There was of course the strange and rather inconvenient truth that Eva pilots no matter how many times bathed and what soap they used could never get the blood smell completely out of their hair and skin. The only people would have any idea about this at all were Eva Pilots and they're closest friends.
Asuka was already pissed by the interruption and even more so the fact that it seemed to be an interruption by NERV someplace she had gone to get away from her troubles with them.. she stood up and walks over to the other booth and before Shinji can say anything or do anything she takes a swing at 'Makinami'. being that she had spent the last several weeks either catatonic, in bed with injures and then slowly recovering from injures she was not in the physical shape needed to get into a brawl. Makinami dodged and the blow hit Shinji in the face.
"Oops I guess I shouldn't have done that, but you are kind of cute angry princess." The girl replied before Asuka managed to knock her to the floor with the hardest kick she could manage.
"Asuka stop! We're really going to get in trouble for this." Shinji calls trying his best to pulls her off Makinami who was smiling like some kind of rabid cat and throwing blows which were designed to be at the strength Asuka was actually managing to use.. this whole thing was getting absurd.. whoever she was she was certainly enjoying this fight.
In what seemed like no time at all two uniformed cops were pulling the three teenagers a part as the rest of the cafe seemed to watch in a mixture of shock and interest.. of course the cops although annoyed as hell backed off when the three dug UN Military ID cards from their wallets out all of which read in big black letters NERV.
Denied their coffee Shinji and Asuka were separated from Makinami and placed back in the same Military transport car they had arrived in to go straight to base. Before getting dragged off her parting words to the other two teenagers were simply
"Adults play some mean pranks sometimes. See you two around." Both Shinji and Asuka were dead silent the rest of the way to base.
NERV Munich was much smaller than the Tokyo 3 Geofront. It was a large artificial environment of some kind or another located several hundred yards straight down an elevator. A very confused Heinemann took the two pilots to a large office marked Langley: Chief of Special Sciences.
Shinji easily worked out that this was Asuka's step father who she had said nothing at all about and who Shinji was actually pretty scared to meet in person, especially under the circumstances.
The man in front of them was a tall blonde American who couldn't be confused as being biologically related to Asuka if you tried. He looked to Shinji in mannerisms like a decent relieve or Ritsuko.. or maybe if His father and Ritsuko had had any children and that person was sternly starring them down.. and for once Asuka looked terrified.
"What on Earth happened to you? Since when do you sneak out and start fights? And you look like hell. Major Katsuragi said you'd been injured in combat but you look like you've lost more than ten pounds and been through a meat grinder. What even happened to your eye? Is that thing for show?" Came the barrage of strange if absurd questions directed at Asuka.
Before she can answer his eyes dart towards Shinji.. who Shinji worried probably looked like the bad influence who he must think corrupted Asuka during her time away.. only Shinji knew that was how Asuka had always been.. and Misato seemed to know that.. so it did seem to say a lot that Langley didn't.. Shinji gave a large sigh.. nothing to do but get yelled at in German at this point.. something he was pretty used to.
"You look exactly like your mother. At least with you here I know my daughter can't get into too much trouble. You two get cleaned up and report back here in an hour for instructions and Asuka eat something you're underweight and beat up." Was what he actually said before rubbing his temples and leaving the room..
"I don't understand… but I uh.. guess I do a little bit I'm sorry about all this Asuka.." Shinji says once it seemed safe that no one was listening in on them.. he would assume Langley probably spoke fluent Japanese..
"You do have moments of being less stupid Baka. He likes you at least." Asuka retorted annoyed.. maybe a little at Shinji for making such a great impression by doing nothing but being the son of Yui Ikari.. which was doing nothing.
End of part one.