Disclaimer / Intro:
All characters etc. property of Gainax...... and I'd kill a man for a good piece of salmon....and then I'd kill em again if it would get me another piece.... and so on.....

OK well just real quick here. To get up to speed on this thing, get out your Eva DVD, LD or VHS or whatever, and go to episode 19. Now fast forward to Shinji bursting through the wall of the command center then into the Eva cages and shoving the angel onto the launch catapult and subsequently being launched with the angel up the chute. Now pause it, and that is where we pick up.



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Borderline Ego 1.00 (or "Reinventing the wheel in 30 days or less")
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d



As an old familiar voice picked up from somewhere among a crowd; superimposed over the din reverberating up and down his throat and through his spine, a thought came to him.

'I'm going to kill this thing.'

the realization came to him as something of a quiet surprise, but without anxiety and without argument. It was unexpected but there was no second guessing it. It simply became a matter of the fact.
There arose in him a light serenity and relief, to be so doubtlessly committed to that end. Not unlike the first step to a free fall from a cliff. The clarity was euphoric, he couldn't help but to smile just a little while he screamed.

The catapult he had forced the Angel onto, giving Misato the opportunity to launch them both from the main complex and back outside, reached the end of it's line, halting it's near supersonic ascent instantly. Unrestrained, the inertia propelled the eva and its's charges into the air and indeed, for a moment he was in free fall.

Gravity re-asserted itself on the flying giants, drawing them back down to the earth. Shinji barely had the presence of mind to keep his enemy positioned firmly between himself and the fast approaching ground. The impact of the landing shook him forward from his seat, though he held fast to the control grips in his hands.

He was trembling, his whole body shaken by the impact as well as the addition of this most recent burst of concentrated adrenaline it had convinced his body to release. He absently became aware of his own pulse throbbing in his ears. He almost felt la tinge of motion sickness coming on as he could feel his own pulse rocking his head forwards and back.

The Angel was beneath him, driven well into the terrain under his weight and the ungodly force of their landing. From this position, his method of attack seemed simple enough.
It can't move.
Beat it to death.

His heartbeat accelerated, his head continued to swell and contract in time to it.

He was punching, rending, pulling to that rhythm, now pounding throughout his head and in the veins at either side of his neck.
Punching. Smashing. Destroying.

Killing. Murdering.

Somehow amidst it all, this did not escape him. But it did not distress him as he might have thought it would. He was nauseous, a bit of bile adding a tang to the bloody taste of the LCL at the back of his throat. But it was somehow not totally unpleasant. It was not the nausea of guilt or anxiety, to which he was so firmly accustomed, but rather a twisting or an unwinding in his gut. A release. He felt no shame or remorse for this, his anointed task. This is what he was here for: to kill this thing. This was what had to happen since he got back in the entry plug.

He tore into it like a righteousness man, sure of his station and his god's blessings.

Shinji Ikari. Pilot of Eva Unit 01. Murderer of Angels. Because that's what eva pilots do.
This thing was an Angel, therefore it was a foregone conclusion that he should kill it. Because that's what eva pilots do. If it hadn't shown up, if it's presence hadn't required that he get back into the entry plug that he had SWORN he would never again enter, he wouldn't have had to kill it.

So death to it then; simple as that. Don't worry about the details, just kill thy enemy before thine enemy kills thee.

Kill it so that he might save them.
So that they may know that he was the one who saved them.

He. Shinji Ikari.

And for that, for being he, for being their eva pilot and savior, they would praise him. They would love him, take care of him.

Misato would praise him.
Ritsuko-San would praise him.
Father would praise him, as he had done that one time before.
Asuka, even she would have to admit he'd done a good thing, that he'd done a good job, and done it when nobody had expected him to. Not even she could deny that.
Kensuke would praise him, his ignorance enviable and his envy insatiable. His friendship irreplaceable.
Touji would praise him, an understanding between them now, as Touji knew what it meant to sit in the seat of an eva. He and Touji had suffered together.
And Rei.... Rei, he was almost certain wouldn't do anything but she would know, and that was almost enough really. He could hope, though, that maybe someday he'd see that smile again. For him.

Because he'd saved them.

As the triumph and dillusion flushed his cheeks, and the smile on his face widened, curling higher and higher around the the corners of his mouth, the timer for the eva's internal power supply expired. The high pitched chime alerting him to this like a cruel headmaster's school bell, signaling that play time was over.
The eva's backup battery, depleted after having been only partially charged to begin with and then used in high activity mode, had run out of power quickly.

Shinji jolted, his skin tingling all over, like the feeling returning to a numb limb. He felt small, compressed and short of breath like his lungs were no longer large enough to accommodate the breath he needed to draw. Shinji found himself wrapped in the emergency light illuminated confines of the entry plug, rather than the view of the outside world as before. The world he was just on the verge of saving he thought.

Shinji stared disbelievingly at the blank face of the wall ahead of him. Where there had been the image of his soon to be defeated enemy and the impending satisfaction of victory, there was nothing now but an unreadable barrier. He felt himself deflating through the opening left by his slack jaw.

He had no view to gauge his bearings from, but he felt a great upwards heave, as the Angel presumably moved, still pinned beneath Unit 01. The nausea in his stomach burrowed, in hasty retreat, deeper into his intestines as he felt a great shift in his balance. Then stillness. Then another impact as before when he'd been launched from the catapult, only this time he far from ready for it.

He slammed hard against the bulkhead of the entry plug with his left side, the momentum rolling him onto his front. hitting his head, biting into his tongue, and bloodying his nose as a result. His vision blurred momentarily, coming back to focus on the swirls of crimson floating in the amber LCL. He couldn't help but inhale the blood trailing out before him, not quite dissipated in the LCL, when his breath did once again find him.

A tepid few seconds passed and Shinji wondered in silence if the Angel had moved on, resuming its decent into Nerv headquarters or on to wherever it's destination was. Shinji knew nothing of any kind of motivation behind the Angels' presence and attacks. They had been simply outlined as his enemy, and one need not understand one's enemy he thought.

The image a bearded face with eyes obscured by glowing spectacles coming unbidden to his mind's eye.

He had been so close, he thought. He could still feel the Angel's tough carapace, giving way with each strike of the eva's fist. He could feel the slackening of the Angels attempts at resistance, the energy leaving it's body, while the enthusiasm behind his fury had only continued to mount with each blow dealt against the thing. He had not meant to stop even when he had the Angel defeated. He had meant to punish this one. Coming so quick on the heels of the 13th Angel, Shinji had ample venom to excise through this kind of therapy.

But that release was denied him now, the walls of the entry plug seeming to constrict around him while he himself continued to feel as though he were shrinking into a tighter and tighter frame.

There was just so much silence.

Then he felt the eva rock under some tremendous blow and the rumble of some explosion (he supposed) reverberating in the hollow plug. His fingertips stung with the pent up adrenaline.
But he could only wait.
He felt another blow struck against the eva, weaker than the first, but enough to shake the entry plug within the eva, and it was followed in short order by another, and another. He bent his head low and held it there in his hands.
And then the panic boiled over in his heart and it burned at the back of his eyes.



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Asuka, still in her plug, her nerves still scintillating with the phantom hum of synchronization, let her hand fall from it's place around her neck. The points where her fingers had been pressing with slowly increasing pressure over the past few uncounted seconds, going on into minutes, tingled a bit more strongly than the rest of her body. The notable exception being the line around the front half around her neck, which stung like a fine papercut.

Maya's fingers having been almost, but not quite fast enough to spare her that little bit.

Her arms, around her shoulders, had surpassed the realm of perceptible pain in a flash of adrenaline and rage, the sensation would come as the nerves there cooled, but then being only a fraction of their original magnitude anyway as the effects of synchronization wore off.

She reached out to engage the 'radio only' communication line after some more time spent breathing and she found the will to move had not left her completely. She was out of this fight, her connection severed and her eva disabled. She'd failed. She'd spent too long now with her own hand at her throat, trapped in the plug, thinking of nothing but that. She wanted any little thing now to think about rather than her own situation, and the radio would have to do. Even if it was just to fill her in on the static or screams that would precede the end of the world.

Seeing as how she'd been their last best hope and all.

Her hand stopped before engaging the line, her last line of thought giving her pause before she decided that the noise, whatever it was, would still be better than nothing and tuned in.

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Shinji was pulling at the controls spasmodically, alternating screams with whimpers. Some words and phrases came complete and intact from his mouth, some interrupted mid-enunciation as the next plea heaped on top of the preceding one.

The LCL was stinging the back of his throat, worn and abrased from the screaming and bile.

The pounding drowned his voice out, the ground falling out from beneath him, one brick at a time. He could feel his footing slipping, the hole beneath him opening up.

Then in Shinji heard it; the heartbeat, beating contrary to his own.

Then he felt it. It pulsed over his skin, swelling and contracting every one of his pores. The warmth leaving his body in an instant.
Then it pulsed in his bones, rattling them, twisting tendon around skeleton.

Then he felt his bones break.
Then he felt his skin disappear.
And then Shinji didn't hear the heartbeat anymore and he didn't feel it anymore, he just felt a breath moving through him. And he felt himself moving further and further away from where he'd been.

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Misato's ears were ringing. Ever since the Angel had crashed through the command center wall, her ears had been ringing.

The ringing now played an accompaniment to the the softer, low frequency hum of the elevator, she and several of the bridge staff now occupied as it ascended. A steady percussion was supplied by the the frenetic click clack of Maya's fingers at her laptop, continuing to monitor the eva unit and Shinji's fight from her place on the elevator floor.

Misato often felt the detachment of the different aspects of her self when she entered into a combat or command situation. It was almost ritualistic. The "Major" would step up to center stage and the other faces to her personality would shuffle off to the balcony section in the audience to watch from afar. Sometimes booing, sometimes cheering. In just the past few seconds, though, she'd begun to feel different. Detached still, but perhaps just a bit more in touch with her fear than she could recall ever having been before in a combat situation.

She'd been face to face with the angel, as it had smashed through the command center. Milliseconds from being annihilated, before Shinji, in Unit 01, made his own entrance. She had no doubt of the capabilities Shinji's fury coupled with Unit 01's sheer power, but she'd just seen this Angel walk through Units 02 and 00 like a steam roller over scarecrows. The bloody images of their valor ending in futility very fresh in her mind's eye. And so, as the elevator continued to rise, she felt more and more that a good part of her was still down in the command center staring numbly ahead, waiting for the silence of obliteration.

Amid her thoughts then, she heard, as if from the other side of a closing door, Maya's exclamation that Unit 01's power had expired. All activity had ceased.
Then all she heard was her own voice.


She ran through the short hallway leading from the elevator after she made her exit as soon as the sliding doors would permit. Her skin prickled as it met the cooling air outside. The tightness in her skin redoubled and spread even further down into her gut as she saw Eva unit 1 impact against the pyramid wall just a few hundred meters away.

Almost leisurely, the Angel righted itself from it's former position, where it had been laying on the ground, and floated over to the prone form of Shinji's Eva, stopping some distance from it. One of it's razor arms unfurled and lashed out, cutting into the side of the eva's chest. The severed blood vessels spewed their contents forth as a red geyser.
Misato momentarily flashed to fresh memories of the other two eva's defeats. Asuka's unit, surgically stripped of it's massive arms and then casually beheaded. Images of Rei, through the haze of an exploded N2 mine, dispatched with an incision through her head.

Was it the Angel's intention now to toy with them, patiently dissecting Shinji and Unit 01 into their component parts?

A bright light and an explosion and the armor covering the eva's chest was vaporized. A dull blood red orb visible underneath, set into the eva's flesh.

The instant sense of recognition surprised her. Misato's shock drew her back to herself. She became very acutely self aware with this new development - a core, the "heart" of the Angels, within the eva. In fact, she became almost disoriented as she adjusted to the heightened sensitivity to the slightest of stimuli: the chill of the air, the slight breeze, the irregularity of the land beneath her feet, her own heartbeat rocking within her ribcage. The vague mist of sensations milling about her was suddenly coalescing into streams of information flooding her through each sensory pipeline. She opened herself wide to accept it all, knowing ,somehow, that years from now she would be able to recall with perfect clarity and illusory tangibility the tang of ozone in every breath she drew then and the slight ride in her underwear. This was, of course, all dependent on her survival of the next few hours.

Something was happening, and if she blinked, she was sure she would miss the critical point in it all.

Perhaps it was simply that she wanted to be perfectly aware of the the moment she died.

In-as-much as one can read the expression of something so alien, Misato thought the Angel almost seemed puzzled itself by the this new development. It began to poke at the exposed core. smashing at it with those deceptively powerful arms, while Unit 01 lay immobile and defenseless.

Again and again, it pounded at the core. A methodical rhythm to the assault. Misato was having trouble breathing, a writhing tightness in her chest and her unconscious refusal to blink made her fit to pop.

Bang
Bang
Bang

If Rei had been present and conscious then, she might have thought that the sound reminded her of her own apartment. Though she probably wouldn't mention it.

Bang

Then Unit 01's good hand came up, and sparks streamed between it's fingertips as it grabbed hold of the Angel's arm.
Unit 01 pulled, and the Angel jerked over, crashing imbalanced, headlong into Unit 01.
For a moment, while fate reached out to turn over the next card, they were eye to eye.

Misato saw this and finally, in spite of herself, she blinked.


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"I don't know for certain what it is you've set in motion with this Ikari, but I can't help but think that this is a gamble, even for you.

The old sensei



Silence from the Commander, no longer at liberty to consider himself a man.



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a day and a night later
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"Have you taken your break yet?"

"No, not yet. Um, can you run this script down to the labs for me and then I can grab a coffee or something."

"No problem. Sit down for a while. The worst of it seems to be over and we're moving a lot of the less serious cases to outside hospitals, so our load should ease up pretty soon."

"Ah, thanks. (sigh) Oh, can you tell them in the labs that the script is for the pilot in 383. I don't want them to freak out at the weird meds we're giving our patients. We're always getting orders to fill her up with some bizarre cocktail or another."

*chuckles* "Ours is not to question why"
"Indeed, not where Nerv is involved"

A pause

"Anyway, go. Get some rest for a minute then see if they need help with the lunch pickup.

"Thanks, see you in a bit."


Two nurses
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Room 383
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Ayanami Rei measured these past waking hours by the opening and closing door, letting in doctors and nurses, light and sound. By the fading of the residual spots in her vision after she patiently stared ahead while a bright beam was aimed at her cornea. The tics of the machines. Watching the slow decent of the needle's plunger. The the gradual rising level of her own red blood filling narrow glass tubes, passing one thin white line then another.

She'd been unconscious since yesterday and most of that day she learned. The commander had not contacted her as yet.

When the doctors left, she continued to silently log the passing of time by the metronome rhythm of the painful throb in her forehead and between her eyes. It was becoming distressful.

The doctor, Akagi-San, had not come to check on her personally either. In the absence of those two persons, she was left with many unknowns concerning many things. She knew nothing of the details of her own survival or of the apparent resolution to the recent battle. She had her questions but having questions was not new to her. She had only to believe that what she needed to know would be eventually provided to her, all else was extraneous. All she had to do was to believe in that one constant.

Though some days, in the rare absence of that consoling, absolute faith - usually early in the morning or late at night, or whenever she strayed from her regiment of prescriptions - the questions persisted.

But it was not her business to worry over what she did not know. It never had been. Her business now was simply to recover. Recover so that she would be ready when needed. Ready to fulfill her purpose. All else was just the means to that end.

She had nothing to worry about.

It was a simple, though sometimes necessary, thing to keep reminding herself of these immutable facts of her existence. However, early on some years ago, during one of her frequent stints spent lying on her back, inspecting the hospital ceiling, she had reasoned to herself that idle thoughts and speculation were acceptable and, to an extent, worthwhile, just so long as she remained mindful that anything she concluded on her own terms may be refuted, without question, by a higher power. Her mind and thoughts were her own, to do with as she saw fit, just so long as she stayed within the framework outlined by the commander.

She had always been encouraged to practice rational thinking and actively engaging her own problem solving skills, so there was nothing wrong with mulling over some unknowns. This way she might find solutions to some of her problems of her own accord, supplying answers to her own satisfaction, without needing to approach the commander with her small uncertainties.

She took some measure of pride in these small accomplishments. She was self conscious to an extreme in this regard. As uncomfortable as she knew some people were under the lenses of her her binocular crimson scrutiny, she kept those eyes trained on herself with even greater scathing focus. There was not one thing about herself that she was not critical of, though that was not to say she was negatively critical of herself. After all, she need only be aware of her self and her condition, not have an opinion necessarily.

Still, she kept these small matters to herself, never broaching the subject of personal pride and accomplishment with the commander. Never coming to him outright for his praise in those matters. He gave her his attention, that was enough.

In time the nurses had made their final rounds, collecting dinner trays and making last notations to the status reports. The lights in the rooms were all turned down as the hospital staff prepared for the night shift.

Her cell phone, set on a table beside her bed, rang at last.

Sitting up and reaching over, she had little doubt who it would be as she had been waiting for this call all day.
Answering the phone, she spoke for the first time in a great while.
"Hai."
"Rei," A pause. "how are you?" That low, even, voice at the other end, that voice that spoke volumes if you read between the lines. It was doubly masked behind it's reserved tone and it's detachment, reaching her here, while it's source lay elsewhere. She settled herself onto her bed, at last feeling like making herself comfortable.

"My condition is stable."

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The day prior to Ayanami's awakening, another young pilot had been brought in to the hospital amid a flood of others injured in the attack, she was then rushed off to the specialized ward set aside for herself and her teammates. After just barely submitting to the most cursory of examinations by a pair of specialists from the special Eva pilot recovery team, she had been promptly released with no apparent injuries or complications from her own all-too-brief involvement in the Angel battle. Her shoulders did have some lingering ache in them and her underarms felt especially sensitive. These discomforts, though, were negligible in the face of the cold sickness she felt at the base of her gut. Her abdominal muscles clenched against the quickening of the malignant boil of injured pride and resentment rapidly gestating within her.

She made her way to the exit from her examination room, clad in her plug suit and a light jacket supplied by the hospital staff. She was eager to be away from the smell and white-washed vacuum light of the place. But most of all, to her mind, hospitals were a place of sickness, a place where people were treated for their weakness and had others lick their wounds; she sought to be out from the confines of such a symbol of defeat as soon as she could. She thought she might go mad otherwise.

The hallways were buzzing with activity. But a busy hive is still just a hive, and she had precious little patience for the drones littering her way.

The Geofront complex had taken severe damage and there were a great number of casualties. The Angel had done its fair share of damage, but in it's desperation, Nerv too, had taken liberties in the form of a close quarters N2 mine detonation which had damaged several shelters as well as the city of Tokyo 3 hanging from the ceiling. The hospital staff were trained for these types of mass emergency situations though. As a part of Nerv, the organization sold to the world as the fine line between destruction at the hands of the incomprehensible angels and survival, this hospital was prepared for worst case scenarios the likes of which made this seem old hat. Not every contingency plan revolved around the threat of angel attack either. Nerv may have been cast in the role of savior to the world at large, but that did not mean that it was without its detractors. And among those detractors, there were fanatics.

When she reached the exit, there was a Section 2 agent waiting for her outside. In contrast to the chalky flourescence inside, night had fallen in the time since the she had gone into battle. The darkness active with emergency vehicle lights and such moving about the landscape.

'All the king's horses and all the king's men...'

The Section 2 agent spoke: "Major Katsuragi will be late, handling the emergency situation at headquarters. I've been assigned to escort you home."

Asuka hadn't seen or heard from Misato at all since the battle. Up to now she'd been too preoccupied, grappling with her own inner turmoil to really notice or take it as anything unusual. Now, though, it became apparent that Misato would once again be too busy, too busy to come see her, too busy to worry about her. Her, the Eva pilot who couldn't win.

Because it is a difficult thing to understand a person - to appreciate all that one may do for another, and the difficulties that may arise to hamper or prevent one from expressing their desire to care for and take care of another - Asuka was hard pressed to understand that the presence of this Section 2 agent was in fact Misato's best effort to extend some presence of herself to protect and take care of her young charge after the battle, while she was forced to deal with things she had never thought possible.

Despite Misato's best intentions, Asuka wanted no company the likes of which the agent could offer her.

"Tell Misato to go fuck herself with a fucking broom stick, moron!"

The Section 2 agent did nothing as she strode past him into the night progressing beyond the building's lights.

After she'd passed, he stood there a few moments more before he prepared to turn and track her. He stopped mid turn when he heard from some distance:

"And don't fucking follow me, asshole."

He couldn't help but get a little unprofessional amusement from that.

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"And in other news this morning, Nerv a spokesperson issued a special notice of apprectiation on behalf of the spectacular efforts of all the hospitals, employees, and volunteers who helped through the recent tragedies associated with the latest Angel attack. The notice comes five days after the attack, amid continuing reconstruction of buildings and several shelters. The attack had claimed the highest number of casualties at one time since the mysterious creatures, dubbed 'Angels', began appearing.
It is widely believed that the statement is meant to boost morale and reassure the city's population that Nerv is taking to heart the concerns of the people under it's protection."

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Some days, Aida Kensuke just felt like turning his video camera on, directing it at no place in particular while he set it down atop his school desk, and then just shutting his eyes and putting his head down. If anything of note happened that day, his videocamera; unmoving, unblinking, and utterly oblivious, had as much chance of catching it as he did.

He was an incorrigibly resourceful boy, eager for excitement and any of the trouble that came traipsing on it's heels. Be that excitement in the form of action and mischief or through the subtle wiles of information and intrigue. His laptops at home and at school usually provided him with ample yarns to get himself wound up with. This provided the information and intrigue and that would have to suffice as despite his best efforts, he found himself increasingly left out of the action.

He almost couldn't help but to take it a little personally.

After all, he'd personally asked to become an eva pilot and that opportunity was denied him, that honor inexplicably passing over his head and falling upon the shoulders of unwilling candidate after unwilling candidate. First Shinji, Now Touji.

The last Kensuke had heard 'officially', Shinji had been leaving Nerv, leaving Tokyo 3, and turning his back on eva. That had been the same day as the last Angel attack though, and from what he'd overheard from Asuka in one of her rants to Hikari, 'Baka-Shinji' had been involved in the fight, piloting Unit 01.

Touji had not returned to school since his activation test and subsequent hospitalization for injuries he had somehow incurred, just a little over a week ago. The nature and extent of those wounds still not totally known to Kensuke. Despite their long-standing friendship, and Kensuke's normally rabid penchant of digging for data surrounding such things, he had not gone yet to visit his friend and had not found much in his less than thorough investigations of the matter. In all honesty, he was a little miffed right now.

Not truly angry with his friends, but feeling more than a little left out; he was sulking.

Kensuke held absolutely no maIice towards his friend and wished for nothing but a speedy recovery for Touji and peace of mind for Shinji, where ever he was. Kensuke was a natural optimist and young, these traits leading him to somewhat blindly assume that whatever Touji's injuries were, they couldn't possible be that bad. If they were anything serious, he would have heard about them, right? They were best friends after all, so Touji would have let him know somehow if he were really in trouble. That's what friends do.
Right?
Nevermind that he hadn't even been spared a notice that his friend would be an eva pilot now.

The prolonged absence was unexplained but perhaps Touji was not absent solely for the sake of his injuries, now that he was an eva pilot and all. There was probably training and procedure they were trying to impress upon him. Kensuke almost had to chuckle at the thought of that. Thinking of the headache involved in trying to get his friend to commit anything remotely academic or complex to memory. There was probably still several bits of ultra high tech equipment he had to familiarize himself with. Secrets he had to be sworn to secrecy on.

Insulating himself with these kinds of thoughts kept Kensuke from ever long considering that his friends were anything but missing under the typical Nerv circumstances. Which had always turned out alright in the end before.

In the midst of his musings, he missed the look the class rep wore as she walked over, approaching him. When she spoke up, standing before him he was startled and a little alarmed, by the concern in her voice.

"Aida-kun"

Jolting visibly; "Ah, hey class rep." collecting himself from the initial shock; "Um, what can I do for you?"

Hikari was hesitant, her smile crooked with nervousness and her words came out imbalanced, drawn out but then sharp and crisp at the termination of each word, like it just barely got out before her reservations clamped down on it.

"Have you... you've heard about Suzuhara-kun, right?"

Aida affirmed

"Have you gone to see him yet, in the hospital?"

Kensuke's eyes wavered from their contact with the class rep's, he leaned back away from her a bit as he sat sideways in his chair, his right hand flexing lightly on top of his desk, his other hand draped over the back of his seat.

"Um, no. I haven't gotten a chance to get by there, I figured he might be kinda busy, you know, with doctors and Nerv stuff."

Hikari saw that the boy's behavior was blatantly out of character. He would normally jump at the chance to be that much closer to anything smelling faintly of Nerv, to have one more person to quiz impossibly on it's myriad of technical data and details. She guessed that perhaps, though, he was more than just a little disappointed this time to have another chance pass him by. His great aspiration passing over him and instead selecting another friend as an eva pilot, while he remained a mere hopeful. Perhaps it was hard to see Touji because he was just a little jealous of his friend.

She felt for the boy's disillusionment but certainly felt some things were more important and so was still more than a upset at his balking. But she wasn't here to rebuke the boy, just to get him to help her.

"He's.... he would probably appreciate a visit, I think."

A small group of students filed through the classroom door. Hikari's eyes flicked over to see who it was that had walked in, then pressed on, eager to finish with her request before there were certain other people present.

"I went by to see him." Prepared to dissuade any misconceptions or potential embarrassments she added, hastily. "To check on him, as the class rep, as part of my duties. It was just once, last week after school but.... " She gently shook her head, clearing it of this excess, just meaning to come out with it now. "....would you mind going by there with me to check on him again, today after school." Still unable to leave it just at that, she tacked on as an afterthought, "He needs to at least get his papers from class delivered to him."

In the course of Hikari's starts and stops, Kensuke's eyes had unconsciously settled on Touji's desk towards the back of the room. His head slightly turned away from Hikari as a result. He kept his eyes there while he quickly tried to consider her request. He was flustered, confused as to why she was asking him this as well as confused and slightly irritated as to why he was being so hesitant. Finding no easy answers to his questions, he relented before the pause grew too awkward.

Turning his full attention back to her, he smiled; a tightness to it that he did not like thinking felt just a little guilty, and said: "Sure class rep, uh any time. We'll just, uh, head on over after school today, I guess?"

Hikari sighed, relieved, answering him now with a much lighter smile, "Yes, today after school." then her smile and her tone taking on a more firm, authoritative edge, "You have clean up today, so we'll go after your duties are done."

Kensuke sighed, resignedly bowing his head. He did not mean to look like he was resistant to go see his friend and he was more than a little annoyed at himself for seeming that way so much just now.

Hikari, satisfied, turned and went back towards the front of the class, to her seat. Where she would now await the arrival of her friend, Asuka.

Before class began she wanted to get a chance to talk to Asuka in order to figure out what was troubling the girl so. Asuka had only been back to school since the Angel attack, herself, a few days ago. Asuka had assured Hikari that she was perfectly fine and had sustained no injuries through the fight. Her absence the past few days was a result of some special training and increased testing that had followed the attack; all unecessary of course, as she was already perfectly well trained enough to defeat the Angels on her own terms. Hikari had no doubts of Asuka's conviction in this.

The part that Hikari had still felt some concern at was the perceptible skirting of the issue on the occasion that Ikari-kun ever be mentioned, particularly of his whereabouts after it was revealed that he had participated in the fight even after his alleged swearing off of Nerv and eva. Most of these details coming to Hikari after the fact as she had only heard from Kensuke that Shinji was to have left Tokyo 3, after she had heard from Asuka that he had been active in the battle. The situation was further convoluted when Asuka had made it seem though that she had not been supposed to let on about any of Shinji's involvement.

Nerv and everything involved with it, including the pilots, were just so complicated.

***************************************



***************************************

"Are you going to go check on the Suzuhara patient next?"

"In a minute, I need to go down to get a new script filled out for him. We're trying to lower the dosages on his pain medicine at his request." Chuckling "He's a headstrong young man he is; very proud, doesn't want to have to rely on any old pain killers. No, he'd rather suck it up like a man."

The Nurses laughed lightly between themselves for a moment at that. They'd both seen ample cases of the incurable brashness of youth being so loathe to rely on such crutches as modern medicine. His was just a particularly amusing instance, especially in light of the fact that he was so doggedly insistent that his younger sister, also in the hospital, be given the utmost in proper, modern care and comfort.

The two of them, the brother and sister Suzuhara, were as much cause for somber thoughts as they were of levity in that hospital; incarnations of tragedy and resilience as they were.

"Ah well, he's going to be released soon isn't he?"

"Yes, and not a minute too soon it seems. he's just barely begun to mend and he's all fired up to be back with his friends at school."

"Hardly seems the type to want to get back to school for his studies"

Chuckling "No. I suspect that pretty young lady that comes to see him has a bit more to do with it."

***************************************


In the aftermath of his injuries, Touji had at first been very reluctant to go see his sister, going so far as to ask the class rep to lie to his sister on his behalf. That first time his classmate had come in to see him, lying in that hospital bed, Touji had felt swept up in an irrational sense of shame. It may have been in part due to massive dosages of pain killers in his system; those medications that kept his eyes bleary and his speech slurred. But the shame had fundamentally been his own, whether it was blown out of proportion chemically or not.
He had not wanted his little sister to know that he, her big brother, had been injured. He had always tried to be the embodiment of physical endurance and empowerment to her. His own young predilection for sports and physical activities spurred on by the admiration he'd seen in his sister's eyes early on. He didn't want her to see him set back while she still struggled to recover.

He had also felt shamed in the class rep's first visitation by his condition then, in front of her. He had been gladdened by her visit, he did not mean to ignore that, but he couldn't help but wish it had been under different circumstances; any number of different circumstances.

It wasn't nearly as hard to have her see him physically incapacitated as it would have been to have his sister know him like that. She was older and had a different understanding of things like that. But as delinquent as he seemed, as little as he seemed to care for book smarts and intelligence, it shamed him to have Hikari see him as she had that first time. So...slow.
For that, he knew he had the drugs to hold to account. His speech was slurred, his wits dimmed, the effect of the medications there to encourage sleep and dull the pain from the head trauma he'd suffered.
No matter how colloquial or informal he was normally in speech, he was always witty, he thought. He had always tried to hold his own in that regard. He knew the stereotype that surrounded him, 'The Dumb Jock', and while he cared little in majority for who thought of him that way, the class rep was a different case.

Under sedation; his mouth full of ants and his mind riddled with the silk of caterpillars, he thought that, despite his efforts to seem casual through the whole exchange; to her, then, he must have looked a fool. A poor, pitiful, stupid, broken fool.

After some time though and Hikari following up her visit some days later with Kensuke in tow, Touji's spirits had risen considerably. News of, or rather, lack of news concerning Shinji, when that subject was broached, was still cause for a few moments of chewing on one's bottom lip and quiet deaths of laughter, but they each held to their own optimism. The two boys even offering some moments of levity as they supposed the young Ikari's fate in light of his living arrangements, his young roommate and their classmate in particular.

Bolstered by the rejuvenation he felt once his own recovery really began to take hold, he came to view his situation as less an inconvenience to his younger sister, and perhaps an opportunity for encouragement. Seeing his own successful recovery might help her now, knowing that her admired big brother could sustain injury and persevere just as she had. It wasn't long then, before he had gone to see his sister personally, then eventually with the company of his now frequent visitors.

Touji's physical health had only continued to rise with his friends help, but through their proximity, they all felt the queasy disquietude infecting the open wound left by their friend's disappearance. The cut having grown a light scab over it's surface, but without the antiseptic of a proper explanation from either the Second Children or from any of the Nerv staff in the hospital itself, the affected area was becoming raised and tender to the touch.

Still, Touji would be leaving the hospital soon. He looked forward to being able to go to school in order to question the Second Children now himself.

***************************************



***************************************

"Hey class rep?"

"Yes Aida-kun?" Horaki Hikari was presently shuffling some papers in order in preparation for the start of the school day and did not pause from her task or look up to meet the attention of the boy. She feared her manners were not what they ought to be, but feared that not strongly enough to change herself this instant.

It was a small slight easily forgiven between them now, he knew the tension she harbored quietly, and as they were many mornings these days, they were alone.

"Touji comes back today, right?" A redundant question, one he knew the answer too, but one not asked for the answer's sake.

"Yes," turning from her papers now, giving the boy a smile, almost sad, but mostly friendly, reassuring and not a little relieved. "he's coming back today."

***************************************



***************************************

"Hey Maya. Haven't seen you on the bridge much."

"Oh, hello, Aoba-san"

Lightly jogging to catch up with the slow moving woman in the hallway; "Man, you look worn. How many all nighters have you been pulling this week?"

Almost blushing from the indirect praise, but lacking the energy to do so, she readjusted the slipping stack of papers she cradled. "I haven't been to my apartment in almost a week and a half." She exhaled tiredly, "Akagi-sempai has been running over every simulation forwards and backwards....I've been....." Her train of thought drifted, her eyes falling down to trace the seam along the hallway they were walking down, where the floor joined the wall.
Finally, though, she concluded her statement with the one thought that kept her up at night....after night.

"We only get one chance at this."

"..... Yeah, I know."



***************************************



***************************************

For Ayanami, the past four weeks had been increasingly difficult, and this surprised her. Many of the routines and patterns that she had become accustomed to and, in a fashion, depended upon, were still carried out, but she detected much more of a secondary priority to them. The synch tests had always been mundane, but she had always felt that at least most of the participants understood to some degree the importance of the tests as necessary to their ability to combat the angels effectively. The tests may have been lacking in dynamic, but dynamics were counterproductive to the purpose of the tests, as dynamics implied variations and inconsistencies, the purpose of the tests was to maintain consistency and minimize variations in perfomance. The tests were a necessity and, until recently, had been a priority. Now, though, she felt the attention being granted to the tests and diagnostics were being performed with less than the utmost rigor.

She knew why, and understood as well the importance of recovering the Third Children, Ikari-kun, or at least the salvaging of Unit 01's usability, but she did not want her own duties and obligations to go lax and unchecked.

She was thankful, then, that here her sessions with the dummy plug still carried their same weighty secrecy, still demanded the same high level of performance and attention to detail from those scarce few involved. Every time, though she was reluctant to leave the great tank, her place of highest purpose and meaning, when the commander would inform her that the sessions were concluded, she always smiled.

She knew about the salvage plan. She knew about it's origins and it's success record. Knowing this, as the day for the plan to be implemented approached, she found herself more than occupied with thoughts of her missing team mate, and the very real probability that he was a person she may never see again.

'the plan to recover Pilot Ikari is to be carried out tomorrow. The commander has not talked of it much with me, beyond the orders that pilot Souryu and I will be on hand in our evas in case of an emergency.'

Unit 01's berserker tendencies were not lost on Ayanami. Her own Unit 00 was prone to inexplicable bouts of violence, though hers had never occurred without power or the presence of a pilot, as Unit 01 had. The prospect of having to combat another eva, after the incident with Unit 03 and the 13th Angel, did not appeal to her. The plan being that if there were any problems concerning a possibly berserk or out of control Unit 01, the 3 eva units would be ejected to the surface where Units 00 and 02 would deal with it.

Pilot Souryu had referred to that part of the plan as 'Just one more case where I have to clean up after Baka-Shinji.'

As she'd been during the time they waited to make their final assault on the 12th Angel, Ayanami felt...distressed at The Second's comments concerning the Third. There had been many such outbursts from her teammate. Ayanami had not confronted the other pilot those times as she had before, but had elected instead to puzzle over her reactions, then and now.

Ayanami was like a stuck record concerning her thoughts and feelings surrounding the Third, Ikari-kun.
Why had his behavior towards her always differed from others?
Why had she responded to him the way she had? He'd embarrassed her. She'd smiled for him. She'd...thanked him. Why had she seen fit to do so?
She's slapped him as well, but why had she singled him out, that one time, to lash out against. She heard many others say much worse about the commander regularly, yet never felt so compelled as she had then.
Why did she wish Souryu-san not to speak ill of Ikari-kun? He was not the commander, but to have the Second speak of Ikari-kun as she did...angered her, much as she had been angered when Ikari had spoken against the commander.
Why did it matter that she find answers to any of her questions or not?

"Why?"

That single word, she thought, was the impetus behind so much of humanity's strife and achievement. Empires and cultures had fallen and been ground to a fine powdery dust under the weight of the word. The dust settled across the expanse of humanity, then to be dispersed in a cloud of fine particles every time we roused ourselves to propose another query. The clouds obscuring our collective hindsight of things. It was humanity's tragedy and humanity's blessing all at the same time.

And she would help to resolve all that

Such thoughts as this were what Ayanami turned to, unconsciously, to keep from ever really recognizing her own despair. In this way, she kept herself constantly positioned in the context of the whole of humanity. It was a long standing, learned behavior.

She knew she had once told Ikari-kun that Eva was her bond to humanity. Though she was still struggling how to articulate it, she had begun to feel that perhaps she had something else there to bond her to humanity. She was under the impression that this was an idea that Ikari-kun had been trying to convince her of, as it seemed that he wanted to try to reach her somehow beyond the boundaries of Nerv and Eva. She did not believe that Ikari-kun might know something that the Commander did not, but she did consider that perhaps Ikari-kun might tell her something that the Commander might not.

She did not understand. It was still so incomplete. Again all she could come back to was the hollow space of 'why'.

***************************************



***************************************

Asuka had not had a good day in a good long while. For weeks now, though she and Ayanami still reported in regularly for synch tests, she knew that the bulk of Nerv's attention and resources were being focused squarely on the unoccupied length of Unit 01's entry plug. Baka-Shinji, of all things.

She'd seen the tapes, heard and read the reports, all as part of the pilots' regular debriefing. She'd suffered it all, shielded in scowl and silence. Her defeat and his victory.

Asuka could not get over how much she had WORKED to get to where she was, to earn every bit of skill and dignity she had, and how much that little nobody had just fallen into the role of hero. How he could just waltz in and save the day, just by showing up.

She wanted Shinji back so much she could taste it. She wanted him back so she could see him once again cowering through his life. Stumbling and apologizing and sniveling, not this fucking hero thing that the monitors painted him out to be every time they replayed Unit 01 smash through the command center and plow into that Angel. Shinji wasn't powerful. Shinji wasn't brave. Nobody else had to live with him, they didn't go to school with him. They didn't see what a small scared little boy he was, how weak he was, and undeserving of their praise and gratitude. He was just barely worth saving, but she did want him back, just so she could yell at him one more time.

She hardly saw Misato at home, and to Asuka, that suited her just fine. Misato would probably just drink herself stupid and then pine over Shinji's absence. It was enough that Asuka had to walk past "Shinji's lovely suite" every day. Sometimes she'd throw open the door ready to yell at him to wake up and make breakfast, just to let the outburst die in her throat after a moment and slam the door shut.

In school she'd had her hands full fending off the recently reunited Idiot Duo; still frantically searching for their third wheel, since one of them was currently operating with less than two good legs.

Their persistent nagging had been a barbed thorn in her side dipped in lemon juuice. It hadn't been so bad at first, especially when it had just been Kensuke by himself. But ever since Suzuhara's return when she walked into the classroom in the mornings, she could just smell the ozone and hear the pathetic grinding of the gears in their heads as they combined their efforts in the hopes of synthesizing a clue between the two of them. They thought they were being covert in their little operations, trying to slip her up with confirming or denying the garbage they dug out of the trash heap that was Nerv's false information system, designed to distract and confuse overeager fools just like them.

The one thing they had been most effective in annoying her with, though, was the subversion of her friend Hikari to their ignorant crusade. Apparently not even Asuka's influence was enough to immunize Hikari against the exotic disease that crippled the intellect as it chewed on the spinal column, gradually removing every last trace of a backbone in it's host. The illness making itself evident through acute symptoms of giving a shit about Shinji. So even from her best friend she suffered the questions, though she had to give Hikari credit as being far more refined and subtle in her interrogations.

And she definitely did not like the looks being exchanged between Hikari and the jock on wheels.

Thank God she didn't have to see him regularly at Nerv.

***************************************



***************************************

"Oye, Fireball, where's Shinji?"

God, weren't they as tired of asking that as she was of answering it? Asuka was almost thankful she could still get mad about it, as many times as she had been asked it, and subsequently blown it off; she didn't want to appear that her vehemence was wearing down.

"The hell if I know. I told you, they shipped him of for some special training or another since he was so incapable piloting like anything more than a rank amateur. It wasn't any of my business, and I sure as hell didn't care enough to ask."

"Seemed pretty capable ta me, last I saw 'im" Touji grumbled under his breath, but left it at that. He hadn't gotten anywhere the first thirty times he'd asked that, and he doubted this was the breakthrough he sought. He had not participated in a full scale public display with the girl since his return to school from his stay in the hospital. The majority of his classmates surprised at his changed demeanor. His spirits being much more somber and reserved in the classroom, more reflective and less expressive.

Also, judging by the girl's own slightly torqued disposition these past few days, it was hardly unwise of the boy to exercise a bit of caution. His injuries were enough as they were. He didn't need them added to or complicated any further.

Touji didn't know if he ought to feel lucky to have come away from his own foray in to the land of eva with a broken right leg, a concussion that required regular check ups, and a broken right forearm with multiple broken fingers on that hand. But he did, and he had ever since he'd first woke up in the hospital.

Despite Kensuke's well meant claims attesting to the "coolness" of the thing; the state of the art, tricked out, fancy shmancy wheelchair granted him by the technical geniuses at Nerv upon his discharge, afforded Touji a near poetic appreciation of the simplicity and grace of two legs walking in parallel synchronous motion.

The simplicity that had marked his life for as long as he could remember.

***************************************



***************************************

At school, Asuka had initially wondered if the First Children would ever dispute her claims as to the Third's whereabouts whenever she had to cover for him. Not that she thought Ayanami would tell the truth about Shinji's disappearance, she knew it was classified and Ayanami was loathe to defy any kind of order or protocol. Heaven forbid. But she had always wondered if the albino would blunder it up by offering some cryptic half truth in the case that she had not been implicitly ordered to lie.

But Ayanami had never offered anything, cryptic or otherwise, to those who asked such things of her. Her thorough iciness discouraging the petitioners of the information so effectively that Asuka was almost impressed with the girl's technique. If only it were anything but the girl's whole of a personality and there were something more there besides a uselessly stoic bitch without a will to call her own.

Ayanami had been another source of increased annoyance these days. She saw her in school, though that required no real acknowledgment, but then at the synch tests she was often left to periods of time with nothing but the presence 'if anyone could call it that' of the red eyed wallflower.

Ayanami had surprised her once, quite recently in the locker rooms as they waited for the green light to enter the testing chamber.

***************************************

"Do you feel Ikari-kun's absence?"

Asuka had to pause in a moment of surprise at the silence being broken at the other girl's initiative, and with such a stupid question too.

"Bah, Shinji? We're better off without his inept little show-off antics; tripping over his power chord or getting swallowed up in some black hole."

Asuka had been sitting on the bench leaning back against the locker doors, not looking in Ayanami's direction but she spared a sidelong glance to see if there was any response forthcoming from the girl. Ayanami was facing in her direction, but Asuka didn't feel the distinctive weight of those red eyes on her. Asuka turned her head, lazily, looking to see what had the other girl's attention. All that was there was the old blank expanse of the curtain dividing them from the side Shinji had normally occupied during these times.

"What? The little doll miss her little boy? Nobody to play with you and pull your string to try to make you talk?" 'never mind that she had started the conversation here.'

Asuka stood and walked over to the divider, throwing it open, she crossed over to Shinji's side. She took an overly appraising look around that side of the locker room, then sat down in a huff on the bench that Shinji normally would sit on. She sat, facing Ayanami back on the other side, crossing her arms and legs, a defiant smirk gracing her face.

"You know, I don't think this room misses the baka either."



Since then, Asuka had continued to use that side of the locker rooms, with the curtain divider drawn closed again.

Ayanami had found that practice to be...distressful for the distraction it caused her to think of that during the tests.

***************************************

"Weather today looks to be pleasant; mostly clear skies with high clouds and mild temperatures around 20 degrees with a light breeze coming in from the northwest. An area of cold air sitting off to the west of us might bring rain with it for the weekend, but nothing severe."

***************************************

Walking to school as she had been for weeks now, Asuka was feeling grossly chipper. The recovery operation was to finally happen tomorrow. The anticipation brought a smile to her lips, and an itch to her palms. The air was bright and cooled the back of her throat when she breathed deeply. She yawned a bit as well.

When she had opened the door of her bed room and stepped out into the apartment this morning, Misato wasn't there; no surprise there really, and Asuka convinced herself she felt nothing for it, one way or another. Getting a drink from the kitchen after she'd bathed and dressed herself, Asuka noticed a light blinking on the phone, indicating a message.

So whoever it was had left a message when they'd called at the obscene hour of around two 'o clock last night, or this morning technically.
Asuka hadn't been asleep when it rang, but she wasn't about to answer the phone at that hour, who knew what kind of a creep it would be calling like that.

And if it were anybody else, she didn't want them to know she'd been awake.

Tilting her head back, letting the cool drink fill and flow down her throat, she kept her eyes on the blinking light of the phone. She disliked the things; answering machines. They always seemed so incessantly pleading with their little passive aggressive blinking lights. 'Listen to me listen to me, I have something important to say.'
The idea of the little machines acquiring some sort of self worth as the mere voice box proxy through which people had to speak and relay their messages just seemed to dig at the skin beneath her fingernails. She wished she could excise the feeling just by flicking the things from their inanimate high horse.

The phone had started ringing again.

She considered answering it, with the empty glass still raised to her lips, little beads of liquid crawling intermittently down the sides of the cup, following the incline towards her parted lips.
She set the glass down, absently licking at the taste on her lips, and looked at her watch, deciding to let the answering machine have all the glory this day and take care of the call itself, she walked out of the kitchen to get her bag. She was leaving for school.

It was on the way there that she remembered what day it was, and what tomorrow meant. Again, she yawned, and again, she smiled.

She'd let the doctors have their turn with Shinji once he got back; scribbling their little notes, poking and prodding him to find out if he was animal, mineral, or vegetable.
Or just plain stupid.
She'd let Misato cry and snivel over her little boy and wrap him up in all her little misguided, malformed maternal instincts. Nursing his little ego so she could keep him coming back for more every time he stepped outside into the rest of the world where it was all so obvious to anyone with any intelligence that he was nothing.

He was lucky she'd been as forgiving of his sad little half-hearted existence as she had up to that point.

But after that, after they'd all had their turn with him, she, Souryu Asuka Langely, would step forward; letting her shadow fall like concentrated gravity around him so that he might get used to the idea of being in it from now on, and she would let him know; no matter what all these other people said they thought of him, no matter how they praised him or worried over him and said that they'd missed him, that she would never let him best her again, and that she, the only one smart enough to have an opinion that mattered, knew him for what he really was.

Yes, today would be good day; on the threshold of returning things back to their natural order in this corner of the universe, not even the depressed idiocy of her classmates would discolor it for her.

***************************************



***************************************

"Kensuke"

Without looking up from his laptop, "Unh."

Seated in his wheelchair at his usual place at the back of the class, with his foot in it's cast propped up, Touji spoke again after the last of the students had filed out for lunch to the cafeteria or outside and after he had spared a glance to Hikari on her way out, indicating his wish to eat alone today. She understood and went on, thinking on how to use this chance to get to the bottom of her other friend's strangely bright mood, and hoping it might be one thing in particular.

Leaning back against the padding of his seat; stretching in the now open space of solitude he shared with his co-conspirator. "Anything new?"

"No." Kensuke answered after a brief delay as he typed one more line into his computer. He sighed and leaned back in his chair, reversing the unhealthy curve his vertebrae had been taking on.
"Nothing new, just confirming some old bits of info here and there, nothing that answers any questions though." Kensuke stayed in his chair like that, leaning backwards, staring at the ceiling. The room's lights reflecting in his glasses.

"You think he's dead?"

It wasn't a new question to either of them, and one that they only ever ventured when away from the sensitive ears of the class rep. Rather than becoming easier to say with practice, as was usually the case for most anything else, the question just seemed to become thicker and thicker on the tongue with each utterance.

Even harder, these days, was answering it.

***************************************

"So, really, what's got you all so happy today?"

"Oh nothing much, just got a good phone call this morning that I'd been waiting for for a while."

"Really," Setting her bento on her lap while she handed the other, Touji's, to her friend. "who was it?"

"Just an old friend from back in Germany. I might be able to see them soon so I'm looking forward to that if it happens."

"Oh."

***************************************



The 31st day
***************************************

Misato was underwater, she had been since that day a month ago. Around her, swam schools of fishes, expelling bubbles of techno-babble that frothed about her and up over her head. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, her focus resting on the image of Unit 01 on the main screen.

The Unit's entry plug was partially ejected, with the hatch visible. There was a mess of cable and wires interwoven between the plug, the body of Unit 01, and the multitudes of monitoring stations set up on the catwalk around the eva. Each line an integral component of the net they were casting out into fathomless waters to catch the one small fish that had got away.

There were three sub windows set into the the main view. Two of those were Asuka and Ayanami; Ayanami impassive as ever, looking straight ahead, through the camera and right back at Misato; and Asuka, her head propped up on one hand, looking off to the side. Asuka's demeanor was not the one of flaming annoyance Misato had fully expected, the girls had been sitting tight in their plugs for more than 3 hours. Asuka's expression was sour, but it was the dour look of heavy concentration, not haughty impatience. She was waiting, waiting with great expectation, and she seemed to be heavily invested in that process.

Misato couldn't see it, but in Asuka's view, in a window set off to the side of the cockpit, she was staring at the image of Unit 01 and it's entry plug.

It pained Misato to see Asuka like this, and her professional scowl took on a more melancholy air. It had been so long since Misato had seen anything resembling a pleasant expression on the girl's face. Her contact with Asuka had for the most part been limited the role of "the Major" watching the pilot for hours onscreen during the synch tests. Every attempt she'd made for the past month to make some time with her had ended either in a broken promise, a cold shoulder, an argument, or an unanswered phone. Misato had been carrying a heavy pocket-full of regret that had just continued to grow with the accumulated mass of the lint from her uniform over the past few weeks.

As much as Misato wanted the boy back for her own peace of mind, she sincerely hoped that his return would bring some levity back to their home, and bring some bit of a smile, however mischievous, back to Asuka in particular.

The third window in the view screen was the empty cockpit of Unit 01.

***************************************



ten years later, the daughter would fail as well
***************************************

After a few long breaths spent staring in silence at the image of Misato crying on the walkway in front of Unit 01 and hearing Misato's outraged cries against herself and her science, Ritsuko swallowed hard to fight back the crack that was threatening to develop in her voice. She dictated her orders to Maya and the recovery team without looking away.

"Close down the fifth and sixth channels. Get a sample of the spilled LCL. we need to see if there was any change in it's composition"
Though she wondered to herself 'why'. The bottom line today was that they had failed in their objective, and there was nothing her mind could imagine to reverse that.
It was as much a failure as it had been those ten years ago. Science had not come so far in that time.

Ritsuko's frustration was multi-tiered. Her pride as a scientist was shaken. Her heart as a human being, watching, helpless, as another human being's life seemingly slipped through her fingers, stung her in places she had thought numb and withered away from neglect. Finally, though she let none of these feelings show through, her regret ran deepest and most potent at seeing her friend, Misato, like this. The image on screen, branding itself into her mind's eye.

She would see it in her sleep.

Ritsuko finally allowed herself to shift her gaze to see the expressions of the pilots in the two smaller windows on the main screen.

Ayanami. To one who had seen what little the girl had to offer in the way of expression during her secret outings concerning Rei and the Dummy Plug System, the shock was plain on her face. But there was another expression there, on her face, in her eyes. One that she could not quite discern, but very likely thought it could be the beginnings of fear.

'About time she learned the meaning of the word' she thought bitterly to herself before she had a chance to refuse the emotion.

Asuka. She wore her expressions more vividly and with much more splendor than her teammate. She too, bore shock plainly on her face. But there was more there, anger, disappointment, sadness, madness. Asuka wasn't looking ahead, and was instead watching something off screen. She was probably observing Misato on the catwalk through another window. Her lips were moving inaudibly, or perhaps audibly, Ritsuko couldn't tell, she wasn't really listening to know if the girl was saying anything.

Ritsuko at last looked away, deciding that she needed to occupy herself with any of the more technical, less personal, details that still needed resolving.

As she turned, putting her back to the main viewscreen, the image in Asuka's subwindow jerked violently as she ejected her plug from her eva and began to make her way, on her own, from the cockpit.

***************************************

"Misato!"

Calling out, none too gently, to the sobbing form collapsed on the floor, Asuka marched forward with clenched fists. She passed by nervous techs who had just begun to move sluggishly around their stations, as if just waking from a dream where success was a certainty, science was their good and just god, and everything generally came up roses. She reached down and grabbed a handful of Misato's hair jerking her head up so that they would be face to face, but Asuka found herself still shut out as Misato had her eyes shut tight, unwilling to let anything in while letting the tears out all the same. Misato's face was screwed in unfettered anguish. Drops LCL falling from Asuka onto her face mingled with the fountain of tears squeezed from the older woman's eye sockets. Misato had already been kneeling in a pool of the LCL expelled from Shinji's entry plug and the scent of blood and tears was becoming powerful.

With LCL dripping from her hair and off her now quivering upper lip, Asuka yelled again, directly into Misato's face.

"MISATO, Get UP!!!"

But Misato's kept her eyelids firmly pressed and made no move to get up off the floor, defying this harsh reality to draw her back into it's thrall. Her worst fear for the past month had been realized this instant despite the whole of Nerv's best efforts.
Her lips were sealed shut. A low strangled whine, the only sound her body could generate, was wheezing up from deep in her throat.
Veins and tendon were visibly protruding from her neck, her body straining beyond its threshold. The stress was approaching critical mass, creating a black hole that opened up inside her ribcage, right between her heart and spine.

Asuka had come over to Misato to get the woman on her feet. To get her up off the floor of the catwalk in front of Unit 01. To stop crying. To get her to let go of the death grip she had on Shinji's limp plug suit like some used up rag doll.

To get her to open her fucking eyes and look at her.

All of Asuka's old hard-wired programming codes concerning people, trust, dependence, and identity were up and running now, automating her thought processes with silicon efficiency.

Shinji was gone.
So get up.
They'd lived without him for a month. Now they just had to continue living without him, and finally get out from under the shadow of the hopes that he was somehow coming back into their lives.
They could finally get on with their fucking lives because they didn't have to worry about him anymore. This was practically a good thing.
He was done.
He was gone.

Dead?
That she didn't know for sure, but in her experience, gone was just as good as dead. Maybe a bit worse.

If he wasn't coming back to them, Fuck him. They didn't need him.
They should cleanup this mess and make a fresh start then from this point.
Unplug all this garbage, put Unit 01, the fucking monster, away in some massive closet, and focus on what they had at hand. Namely her.

All along she'd said Shinji was a baka, and now this had just finally proven that he really was too stupid to even get himself saved.

Asuka called out to Misato once again, shaking her forcibly by her hold on the Major's hair. However cold Asuka had meant to be, the woman's hysterics were unnerving. Asuka could feel the threads knitting together her hastily assembled semblance of composure beginning to pop from their seams.
She attempted to force some reason, some rational thought, back to the forefront of her mind with little success. Her frustration becoming more and more consuming as her emotions defiantly swelled perilously close to the zenith.
When she spoke, her voice came out level but husky with repression. The syllables slurred and stretched exaggeratedly as each part threatened to break out into a full-on scream of her own. She fought the urge down, willing each syllable to cohesion.

"Miii-saaa-toooooooo geeet UUUUUUPPPPPP!!!!"

Asuka's free hand unconsciously reared back, the stress of the anticlimax breaking her down. Her heart had undergone too many drastic fluctuations too quickly; going from hot to cold to hot again, the thermal expansion and contraction damaging her structural integrity. She became distantly aware of her hand in the air poised to lash out and resolved herself to it a moment before she began her swing. She was prepared to just slap Misato, to let the sting of skin on skin break her out of her pathetic grief, but in the breadth of time separating 'if' from 'then', Misato's eyes opened and Asuka's open hand, already in motion, closed into a fist.

***************************************

"Is this the payoff on the gamble you envisioned it would be, Ikari?" There was more than a little anger in the tone of voice, but it was held in check by a level of reserved uncertainty. The man addressed was ever one to defy convention, including conventional decency.

Standing from his position at the command tower, Ikari Gendou turned his back on drama playing out on the main view screen and was headed towards the exit. Unexpectedly, he spared his second in command a reply, as he adjusted his glasses, which had slipped.

"We will make adjustments."

With that, he dropped his hand from his face, letting it fall, somewhat reluctantly, back to his side, and exited the command room.

It was impossible to see, through the ever present white gloves, the white knuckles contained therein.

***************************************

Hours later, what was done was done.

Independently of each other, neither Misato nor Asuka found they could return to the apartment that night, and so each spent the night curled up in their own separate corners of Nerv underground. Exhaustion not able to coax either of them into sleep.



***************************************
to be continued.



Author's notes: ..........


ok thanks
d
idward@mac.com