Episode 1
A Tear For You/Rats In A Maze
Opening scene. It's the NERV infirmary, Neural Division... and Ikari Shinji and Sohryu Asuka Langley are both at the lowest point of their respective lives' roller coaster ride.
A pillar of golden light falls from a window, muted by half-drawn white curtains. The pillar envelops the bed, drawing a wide oval of light around the head of Asuka, as she stares into space with eyes full of death, unblinking. The light slides over the sheets and pillows and falls just short of Shinji who is sitting in a chair next to her. The tips of his knees are brightly lit by the edges of the shaft of sunlight; the rest of him, including his face, is in the gray shadow cast by the curtains.
AN ANNOUNCER: (over loudspeaker) Attention all NERV personnel. In connection with the recent state of emergency, siege and invasion drills B3 and C12 will be conducted two hours from now, at 1400 hours. All personnel will prepare for the drills accordingly.
SHINJI: (Internal Monlogue) I can't believe I had the guts to crawl back. It's disgusting. I'm disgusting. Cant believe I ever thought I might... me and her...
He looks over to the bed Asuka is lying on. His eyes, furtive like a pair of thieves, shift to her covers. They are all replaced, but his eyes linger, fixed to where, but a few hours ago...
SHINJI: (I. M. continues) Why didn't I leave? Even if she can't see me... how can I stay here after... that...
He contemplates going out there to face Misato... the void left by the absence of his friends... the void left by the contempt his father holds him in... the void left by Kaworu's death...
SHINJI: (aloud) Rei...
He jerks up from his chair and runs over to Asuka, intending to cry on her shoulders... and suddenly meets her eyes. Two totally empty, dead, blue pools of cornflower-colored glass, glinting up into his eyes like twin shards of a shattered stained-glass window. Facing him, but not looking, not seeing, simply... glinting with the muted reflection of the day-glow lamp. The mindless stare of catatonia encounters the dull agony of depression.
Shinji staggers back, collapses in the chair he sat in before his sudden impulse and begins to weep. His own eyes are shot with blood. Before, he sought sleep as a welcome escape, at any time he could. After Kaworu... In 15 days since that day, he slept maybe enough for one night. As he cries, several more capillaries burst, and the drops of his tears tinge the lightest pink as they run between his fingers.
Finally, unable to take any more of this, Ikari Shinji's head sinks on his chest and he slumps against the back of the chair, slipping down the chute of oblivion.
A nurse and an intern walk in to check on Asuka, conversing tensely:
NURSE: (Laughs nervously. She is new at this, and trying to hide her unease under chatter.) And with the things I've been reading! You know, Dostoyevsky just isn't the best selection for... what's been happening... but it's, you know, like a compulsion. The characters are so intense...
They pause by the bed, the intern abstractedly reading Asuka's charts, the nurse looking at Shinji asleep in his chair.
INTERN: (looks up from chart, marking something with his pen) You don't say... (mutters) bloody drills in two hours... can't ever get that damned report ready...
NURSE: (quietly, she does not want to disturb the boy) Yes, Maruzo-san. Have you read "The Karamazov Brothers"?
INTERN: (moves towards door) Uh-huh
NURSE: (still looking at Shinji) Well, do you recall the question... about paradise?
INTERN: (suddenly attentive) Paradise?
NURSE: (slowly, in a meditative tone) Could we force ourselves to live in bliss -- in a paradise that we knew was purchased with the tears of a single child?
INTERN: (tersely) Luckily, we'll never know. Not even millions of crying children brought any of us any closer to paradise. Not since the dawn of time.
He goes out the door. The nurse follows him.
NURSE: (leaving) I suppose. If we're all miserable, it's easier not to care about others being sacrificed...
Door closes on the Children.
***
A close up of Asuka's face. Her eyes look painted on. Her thoughts are...
ASUKA:(as we zoom into her dead eyes; a voice-over from behind the camera) I want to die. I want to die. I want to die...
***
A close up of Shinji asleep. Zoom into his unconscious face.
SHINJI:(face twitches in a nervous tic; an internal monologue) Kaworu... Rei... no... Asuka... I'm sorry...
***
Asuka's unseeing eyes, a zoom inside.
We see the inside of Asuka's mentalscape. A black, blasted plain, cracked in the middle and oozing putrid blood. Asuka is hanging by her black-gore-dripping guts from a gibbet sticking up like a black needle. An old friend shares the perch with her.
The crimson angles-and-planes shape of her Unit-02 is melded into the gibbet as an ingrown p-a-r-t of it, its scarlet carapace stained and splattered with a foul onyx slick that is one with the needle's substance. The Eva's parts seem to be flowing into the gibbet needle's blackness, long legs standing at "attention" with heels locked together treading empty air at a height half again that of the Evangelion. Its arms and shoulder guards, yanked out of their places in the EVA's joints and still dripping with gore, are crossed below Asuka's swinging feet like a trophy on a pole, the EVA's head, active and peeping about curiously, is sticking out of the middle of the needle's tapering point above Asuka's, craning down and looking into her cringing face with a savage glee. The EVA's four orange-flaring eyes swivel to look at her as if she was something you scrape off the sole of your shoe. The metal-plate armoring its mouth bends as the Eva's limbs curl in a mordant sneer, then something hot and searing singes the flesh of her cheek to the bone as she realizes that Unit-02 just spat on its unworthy pilot.
Asuka's hands are tipped with razors as she incessantly, desperately tries to claw out her eyes, but despite the agony of the razors slashing them to a bloody pulp, she can still see.
ASUKA:(voiceover) I am dead. Why don't I die! I must be dead! Why can't I die!
I should be dead. I must die! I want to die! I want to die!
Suddenly the view changes. It is now apparently the inside of an immense bottle of a blue material that seems neither glass nor plastic but something totally alien. A man in formal business attire is running on all fours over the walls of the blue stuff like an insect trapped in a glass.
***
Shinji's sleeping face, a zoom as he moans without awakening.
The inside of Shinji's dreamscape. We are staring into a huge close-up of Asuka's face. It is her face, but it is no longer the face of a human. Whereas in his waking world, her face was dead and void of all reaction, now it is a contorted inhuman grimace of pain and hatred, animated by a snarling beast that has nothing to do with a human soul. The view pull back and we see that she is in her entry plug, dressed in a plugsuit.
Shinji looks down to discover that he is in his plugsuit as well. He is apparently at the controls of EVA Unit-01.
GENDO'S VOICE:(over the comm channel) I see you are deployed, pilot Ikari. You will now proceed to neutralize the rampaging Unit.
MISATO'S VOICE:(tinged with the familiar rhythms of powerless compassion, but ever determined like a proper officer at her post) Yes, Shinji, we have no choice. You must destroy her, Shinji. It's not your fault, you didn't choose this.
SHINJI:(as he realizes all his decisions have already been made for him and he is only left to go through the motions) No... no... it can't be...
***
Asuka's eyes.
Back in Asuka's head, she stares at the man in the huge bottle, surprise cutting through agony.
THE MAN:(screams out an endless ocean of guilt and agony) No! Atsaro! I'm sorry! I can change! I can change! (An inarticulate scream. He starts bashing his head and arms against the wall, still screaming)
Asuka stares, dumbfounded, as a writhing, black and yellow vermiform tentacle reaches into the bottle, some eerily glowing protrusions swelling up out of it. Some of these protrusions begin to glow, off-color shades of magenta, cinnabar, neon pink, and electric white, blinking in response to each other as if communicating in semaphore.
***
Shinji's face.
In his dream, Shinji is startled as the entry plug's controls begin to move on their own. With deadly, ponderous inevitability, Unit-01 plods forward towards its intended prey. Shinji's heart jolts with the searing, paralyzing, icy touch of realization, as it hits him what the Evangelion is about to do -- again. He can feel the precise moment when his heart tears like rotting cloth and the shreds plummet down an icy chute of pain.
SHINJI:(with the voice of the eternally damned) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
Asuka's eyes.
A new... appendage enters through the blue walls of the container in Asuka's vision. It resembles nothing on Earth so much as a bizarre cross between an antler and a feathered bird's wing, covered with softly humming cyan cactus spines. It had articulated joints that looked like either a slinkie or a 3-D model of a biomolecule, and it shot out pastel-hued laser pulses from its translucent central core.
One of such pulses hits the forehead of the agony-wracked writhing heap of madness and torment scuttling along the softly glowing dusky blue walls, and the man rolled down the opaque smoothness precisely like an insect suffering a direct hit from a can of "Black Flag". After tumbling down a few spans, he seemed to stick to the wall again, held apparently by surface tension like a raindrop in Asuka's waking world.
Raising a human head with the expression of a vivisected animal on it, the man shrieks into the void above him, which seems to listen with amused fascination.
THE MAN:(suddenly discovering that he only thought he knew true damnation before) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! It was I... I killed them... left her to the rats... HOW?????? HOOOOOWW?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
Shinji's face.
SHINJI:( tugs at controls uselessly, watching his EVA pounce on Asuka's Unit-02 like a snake of a hatchling chick) Stop! No! You can't!!! Asuka, run! Save yourself!
BEAST-ASUKA:(Yawps ferociously, mind consumed with fury and agony) GraAAAAAAAAAAAAArGH!!!!!! Die, you glob of squawking putrid crawling compost!
A crimson mad beast, Unit-02 leaps at Unit-01. The purple-green harbringer of death stands steady as a rock, taking the impact of the crimson horror's berserk tackle. With the legerdemain of a practiced juggler, the sinister purple shadow twists in a ballet-like pirouette, deftly plucking the silvery cylinder of the entry plug from the armor-scaled back of the blood-hued hellion that is simultaneously smashing its head to a purple-blotted pink-black pulp. As the entry plug is removed, Asuka's EVA drops to the ground, inert and contorted into a twisted pose of impotent fury like a monstrous insect dried up between a pair of twin window frames. It splashes into the churned mud with a heavy thud of failure as the head of Unit-01 reforms from the mashed gore left by its victim's flailing claws. Without its armor plating it looks like what it is - a ravenous, soulless beast. The hand in armor plate glove rises, holding Asuka's entry plug like a candy bar.
***
Shift to directly inside Asuka's vision. The antler-like appendage reaches out again, and the zumming hum of its airy cactusoid spines changes, as if it is receiving a different station. The edges of its antler-like tines, vicious weapons with smooth organically flowing curves and planes, shining like veined jade and whimsical like sea-sculpted driftwood, seem to writhe and bud new awl-like prongs, stretching hypnotically toward the man in the bottle, whose tongue is hanging t-h-r-o-u-g-h his teeth's gaps now, shredded to gore-and-froth-dripping ribbons. Inarticulate moans gurgle their way past the man's clenched jaws, like the sounds of a hunted animal afraid to make a sound but unable to control the pain. The outlandish appendage swings down...
***
Shift to Shinji, as he sees Unit-01's aubergine fist, bloated with darkness like one fist-shaped swollen bruise, reach up, holding its fallen crimson brother's entry plug. Up... up... as Shinji, convulsing in his LCL from the revelatory experience of feeling Unit-01's head get pulped and regenerate just as vividly as he would feel his own, simultaneously feels the newly re-grown head bend forward, feels "his" jaws ponderously opening like the jagged wheels of a medieval torture device creaking at their hinges as they grind away their dark purpose... and at that precise moment he sees Asuka's face appear once more on his comm screen!
ASUKA:(looks him in the eye, her face is no longer bestial, her eyes now filled with that merciless contempt that only a human and a hero can give to Death in the end moments) Go ahead you worm! That's all you're ever good for, sitting there moaning while the rest of us die, isn't it? Isn't it?!
Shinji tries to answer her, but his jaws only move in a repulsive tearing motion as Unit-01's own slavering maw crunches Asuka's entry plug like a stalk of celery. Shinji tries to scream, but instead his jaws move in a grinding, chewing, inexorable rhythm as he can vividly t-a-s-t-e Asuka's limbs and innards getting masticated to a bloody glop by Unit-01's gargantuan molars.
***
Asuka's vision. Her view expands suddenly, encompassing the bottle where the man is being tortured, two beings standing outside the bottle, looking like they have been designed by a committee of Bosch, Escher and Van Gogh, after watching microbiology slides on crack. Weird geometric patterns flash on their various surfaces as they apparently discussing better ways to create one man's personal hell.
Behind that bottle, there is a field, covered with infinite billions of them. Tall towers of softly glowing blue material, each slightly... out of focus somehow when seen next to the others, as if not quite in spatio-temporal sync with its neighbors. Each held a human, locked away, isolated it his or her own little pocket chibi-universe. Each such pocket held an eternal infinity of hell.
ASUKA:(murmurs) Am I stuck in one of those things and can't see it? (Frowns.) Ach, scheisse!
She peers into the distance.
ASUKA: (whimpers, then bites lip to stifle it) Misato? K-Kaji? What are they doing to you?
Her view zooms in, in such a way that it is impossible to tell, is her field of vision charging forward or are surrounding bottles rapidly streaking back. Finally all her senses are riveted on a particular bluish container, glowing amid the black plain and gray sky like a soft fluorescent lamp powered by the burning of a damned soul. And within the bottle's towering immensity, all her senses are riveted on one tiny speck.
Misato is collapsed, fallen to her knees, on her bottle's wall. She is crushed, utterly shattered beyond any hope of relief or melioration. Pink foam drips from her lips and nose.
MISATO:(heartbroken, not moaning but rather weeping verbally, questioning the dead in a gentle, plaintive voice) Why, Asuka, Shinji, why? You were like my own to me... I did what I could... I did, I swear! Why... could it not be enough? Maybe if I drank less... wasted less time hanging on to that bloodsucker Gendo's every word... Kaji... if I wasted less time on Kaji, maybe Asuka wouldn't have snapped! If I talked to them more, instead of my stupid teasing... I probably treated Pen Pen better...
***
Shinji's view. Asuka has been eaten, but her screams can still be heard. Shinji realizes they are coming from inside him. He sinks his fingernails into his own throat, trying to rip it out. The veins burst, and his hands yank the esophagus, stretching it like white putty.
***
In her own vision, Asuka sees Shinji in a bottle, hands in his own gore up to elbows. He is trying to scream, but his windpipe has long been broken, though he seems to be as healthy as ever.
ASUKA:(gulps) I can't believe it. Him? This is like watching a kitten being tortured! Take him out of his Eva and he's helpless! These... Angels, whatever they are, are using cosmic powers to torture the one most pitiful loser ever produced by humanity!
A MYSTERIOUS VOICE(rings in her ears suddenly) Touched to the quick now, are we?
ASUKA:(seething to the point that she doesn't notice she is apparently addressing an auditory hallucination) Damn right! It's... abscheulich... having to watch this! That idiot is messed up enough, he doesn't need this!
THE VOICE:(seems to sound from everywhere at once) Want to stop it, you little ball of misspent spunk? Will you even try? Do you even have the guts left for this much? It seems like you ran out the moment one of the lesser sparrows held a mirror up to you!
***
Shinji, still chocking on the warm salt taste of mashed Asuka, hears his father's voice come from the entry plug comm set.
GENDO'S VOICE:(smug) Excellent performance, Pilot Ikari. I will enter a commendation in your records. (slightly muffled, but still audible) Oh, security? Take away Major Katsuragi, she seems a little too... distraught... to remain on bridge.
Shinji can feel his soul die inside him, like a flower dipped in toxic fecal matter. He tries to chock himself unconscious, but with his windpipe already crushed, what more can he do? His hands yank, trapped in the putty of his esophagus like fly claws on sticky paper.
***
Asuka is almost relieved. Attacks by others are not going to phase her, not after facing down something that slashes her arms off and then amputates her head. It's the horror that broods and swarms within her soul like a seething mass of scorpions, that she can't face. But now she can finally let some of that boiling darkness fly full blast in a verbal exchange!
ASUKA:(doubtfully) Do I know you, you skulking rat? What, you've been splattered all over the landscape, or are you just afraid I'll see your ugly puss?
VOICE:(admiration evident) That's the spirit, Asuka. You truly are your mother's daughter, despite all your trials.
ASUKA:(with a spare-me-the-cheap-Vader-act attitude) Lemme guess. YOUUUUUUU ARRRRRRRE MUH-Y MOTHTHTHTHRRRRRRR?
VOICE:(dodging subject and not bothering to hide it) Never mind who I am. You know the way to stop this. Do you have what it takes to get back into that?
Noise like gnashing teeth makes the tormented girl's head jerk upwards. As she lifts her razor-mutilated face, empty eye sockets stare into the grinning visage of Unit-02, looking like what Jeffrey Dahmer found on the other side of the tunnel of light, at least if afterlife was made to our order.
Unit-02 snaps its teeth in Asuka's direction like a lunging cobra.
ASUKA:(she'll be damned if she shows A HINT of just h-o-w shitless she is at the moment) Yeah, I saw a dog snap like that once when I was a kid! Of course that was the post-Schlag years, so we made s-o-u-p outta him! You wait till I'm up there, then we'll see if it's in your best interests to be nice and do tricks when I tell you!
Unit-02 shudders and starts to melt. The gibbet-needle follows.
ASUKA:(realization dawning) That wasn't my Unit-02! Just some cheap mockup you threw together to test me! Hey, whoever you are! You better hide, 'cause when I find you, I'm gonna have your mangy hide off all the way down to your freakshow-reject's skeleton, ya hear me?
As she screams, the scene fades. A tunnel of light seems to rush up and swallow her.
***
It is some hours after Shinji passed out. The shaft of sunlight has moved from Asuka's face to her legs. Other than that, time seems to have stood still for the little isolated room, as it is walled off from the turmoil of the GeoFront under siege.
(A death rattle, the sound of the dying's last breath in a constricting throat, sounds through the room)
SHINJI:(eyes still shut) AAASUKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Shinji jerks awake in the chair, his shirt soaked with gelid sweat. His head lifts, revealing bloodshot eyes. It sways in the air; Shinji is obviously half-comatose himself.
SHINJI: ?????? (mutters, teeth chattering) I'll kill myself before I sleep again... any torture is better... Asuka... I'm... sorry...
The door is moving slightly, as if something swung it half-open and it has not yet stopped in its arc.
SHINJI: (teeth rattling, head darts around) Uh... is...
A... presence passes down from toward the bed. As Shinji squints at it, all he can make out is a shimmer in the air, a moving spot in which the subdued light from the fluorescent lamps bends as if passing through perfectly clear water. As nearly invisible distortion moves past Shinji in his chair, he hears the death rattle again, like the final chocking gasp of a shooting victim.
SHINJI: W-what... Hello?
The mysterious mirage stops before Asuka's bed and, as it stops its progress, suddenly outlines into a concrete almost-silhouette, transparent as glass but no longer blurred by motion. If an observer squints wrong, the minimalist mirage becomes invisible. Shinji happens to be squinting just right.
As he stares in bewilderment, Ikari Shinji sees a 4-meter tall gaunt outline that seems to appear and vanish every time a chance breeze from the air conditioner stirs the curtains a hairsbreadth. It is vaguely humanoid, but less bulky and sharp-angled than an EVA. As it bends its head and stretches a 75% invisible arm - or rather a vague hint of an arm -- toward Asuka's dead-eyed face, the death-rattle sound groans out again, like a mocking prophesy.
The apparition keeps blinking in and out of visibility. Its phantom hand, like a trick of the light, less distinct than the dust motes in the sunlight, darts forward and blurs into a shapeless airy streak in its rush towards the girl's forehead. Almost simultaneously, the blur suddenly resolves into near-precise outlines of fingers and these in turn stretch into tapering talons ready to pierce living flesh. But instead, the hand hovers, stopping short of completing the stab, claws flexing to touch the pale skin in a ghastly satanic benediction. Head bowed, the whole mirage looks like a transparent premonition of a mourner at a funeral, or perhaps a victor in a duel administering the coup de grace.
SHINJI:(terrified but hoarse from weeks of crying) What... what are you doing to her?!
His voice breaks in a fit of coughing.
A sigil flashes silver and crimson on Asuka's forehead, vanishing too quick to make out.
Her nostrils flare, and simultaneously, another death rattle is heard.
SHINJI:(hands doing the "fist tic", jumps from his chair and charges the creature) Get away! Don't you touch her, you... huh?
The apparition vanishes. Shinji, like a dizzy, pencil-thin juggernaut, rams straight through the place where he thought he saw it - now no longer sure it was ever there at all. He stumbles, flailing his arms so as not to fall over on Asuka's bed.
Behind his back, midway between him and the door, something passes through the air that the eye can't quite focus on - as if some miniscule patches of something 95% invisible blink in and out of existence. Shinji, focused on nothing but a pitiful effort at regaining his balance, cannot see it.
At the door, however, the unresolvable spots suddenly re-outline as before by the bed, but now only the being's head is visible, a face like a quicksilver mask appearing to float on nothing but a rapidly dissipating air distortion. The face is perfectly featureless, eyeless and mouth-less, with its nose not a feature in itself but rather a natural culmination of the sharp angular planes of its forehead and cheekbones. It is like nothing as much as a smooth, aerodynamic, face-shaped missile aimed directly at the two children.
The creature's face jerks in the air, its ghostly outlines jagging like lines on the screen of a TV getting static. It vanishes.
Suddenly, a very human tear impacts on the linoleum floor beneath the vanished head.
The door creaks shut. Shinji jerks around to follow the sound.
SHINJI:(past all care) Who are you? What have you done to Asuka? Come out you monster! Stop... (he sinks to his knees, only his hand on the bed's rim stopping him from collapsing completely) torturing... me...
At that moment, he is disturbed by another sound. But that one does not come from any ghostly apparition.
ASUKA:(half-conscious) Shinji...
Shinji's head is beginning to feel like a weathervane in a twister as he snaps it over to Asuka and sees that she is still far from conscious. On the other hand, the dead stare of catatonia appears to be replaced with a woozy state, as if the girl is just waking up after having an appendix out.
SHINJI(Internal Monologue) She called my name waking up! If she only knew...
ASUKA: (still in la-la land) take your damn fingers off my knee or I'm getting a pair of garden shears with your crotch's name on them...
Shinji, who had been - by pure accident -- brushing against her knee as he held on to the bed to keep his balance, yanks himself to his feet, jerking his hand away like Asuka was made of untarnished plutonium.
ASUKA:(blinking at the sunlight) Dammit, not only am I not dead, I'm hungry too... (Her forehead and neck are shining with sweat beads. Still blinking, she apparently questions the ceiling) Was that the UberChicken I heard scream earlier?
She pouts, staring at the ceiling, while off to the side, Shinji passes out on the floor.
MISATO(walks in) Shinji-kun... look, I brought some supper... (nearly drops it as she takes in the tableau of Shinji plastered over the linoleum and a confused Asuka sitting up in bed. She does not q-u-i-t-e drop the tray she is carrying.)
ASUKA(takes in the tableau from her POV) What? I didn't do it.
Next Episode: Who is the mystery killer that disembowels Akagi Ritsuko? What about the one trying to do put a bullet in Ibuki Maya? And who is the mysterious woman holding Commander Ikari at gunpoint? And why are the MAGI acting so weird? See NERV try to survive as Tokyo-3 and the GeoFront come under siege by the Japanese Strategic Self Defense Forces... while another battle for survival rages within its corridors.
Also, see Asuka on her way to recovery from the horror she lived through. See Misato try her best to help her. See Shinji... well, he should be happy to have Asuka back, but he'll have to remind himself of that... a lot. All in the next episode of Evangelion: The Apotheosis!
A Tear For You/Rats In A Maze
Opening scene. It's the NERV infirmary, Neural Division... and Ikari Shinji and Sohryu Asuka Langley are both at the lowest point of their respective lives' roller coaster ride.
A pillar of golden light falls from a window, muted by half-drawn white curtains. The pillar envelops the bed, drawing a wide oval of light around the head of Asuka, as she stares into space with eyes full of death, unblinking. The light slides over the sheets and pillows and falls just short of Shinji who is sitting in a chair next to her. The tips of his knees are brightly lit by the edges of the shaft of sunlight; the rest of him, including his face, is in the gray shadow cast by the curtains.
AN ANNOUNCER: (over loudspeaker) Attention all NERV personnel. In connection with the recent state of emergency, siege and invasion drills B3 and C12 will be conducted two hours from now, at 1400 hours. All personnel will prepare for the drills accordingly.
SHINJI: (Internal Monlogue) I can't believe I had the guts to crawl back. It's disgusting. I'm disgusting. Cant believe I ever thought I might... me and her...
He looks over to the bed Asuka is lying on. His eyes, furtive like a pair of thieves, shift to her covers. They are all replaced, but his eyes linger, fixed to where, but a few hours ago...
SHINJI: (I. M. continues) Why didn't I leave? Even if she can't see me... how can I stay here after... that...
He contemplates going out there to face Misato... the void left by the absence of his friends... the void left by the contempt his father holds him in... the void left by Kaworu's death...
SHINJI: (aloud) Rei...
He jerks up from his chair and runs over to Asuka, intending to cry on her shoulders... and suddenly meets her eyes. Two totally empty, dead, blue pools of cornflower-colored glass, glinting up into his eyes like twin shards of a shattered stained-glass window. Facing him, but not looking, not seeing, simply... glinting with the muted reflection of the day-glow lamp. The mindless stare of catatonia encounters the dull agony of depression.
Shinji staggers back, collapses in the chair he sat in before his sudden impulse and begins to weep. His own eyes are shot with blood. Before, he sought sleep as a welcome escape, at any time he could. After Kaworu... In 15 days since that day, he slept maybe enough for one night. As he cries, several more capillaries burst, and the drops of his tears tinge the lightest pink as they run between his fingers.
Finally, unable to take any more of this, Ikari Shinji's head sinks on his chest and he slumps against the back of the chair, slipping down the chute of oblivion.
A nurse and an intern walk in to check on Asuka, conversing tensely:
NURSE: (Laughs nervously. She is new at this, and trying to hide her unease under chatter.) And with the things I've been reading! You know, Dostoyevsky just isn't the best selection for... what's been happening... but it's, you know, like a compulsion. The characters are so intense...
They pause by the bed, the intern abstractedly reading Asuka's charts, the nurse looking at Shinji asleep in his chair.
INTERN: (looks up from chart, marking something with his pen) You don't say... (mutters) bloody drills in two hours... can't ever get that damned report ready...
NURSE: (quietly, she does not want to disturb the boy) Yes, Maruzo-san. Have you read "The Karamazov Brothers"?
INTERN: (moves towards door) Uh-huh
NURSE: (still looking at Shinji) Well, do you recall the question... about paradise?
INTERN: (suddenly attentive) Paradise?
NURSE: (slowly, in a meditative tone) Could we force ourselves to live in bliss -- in a paradise that we knew was purchased with the tears of a single child?
INTERN: (tersely) Luckily, we'll never know. Not even millions of crying children brought any of us any closer to paradise. Not since the dawn of time.
He goes out the door. The nurse follows him.
NURSE: (leaving) I suppose. If we're all miserable, it's easier not to care about others being sacrificed...
Door closes on the Children.
***
A close up of Asuka's face. Her eyes look painted on. Her thoughts are...
ASUKA:(as we zoom into her dead eyes; a voice-over from behind the camera) I want to die. I want to die. I want to die...
***
A close up of Shinji asleep. Zoom into his unconscious face.
SHINJI:(face twitches in a nervous tic; an internal monologue) Kaworu... Rei... no... Asuka... I'm sorry...
***
Asuka's unseeing eyes, a zoom inside.
We see the inside of Asuka's mentalscape. A black, blasted plain, cracked in the middle and oozing putrid blood. Asuka is hanging by her black-gore-dripping guts from a gibbet sticking up like a black needle. An old friend shares the perch with her.
The crimson angles-and-planes shape of her Unit-02 is melded into the gibbet as an ingrown p-a-r-t of it, its scarlet carapace stained and splattered with a foul onyx slick that is one with the needle's substance. The Eva's parts seem to be flowing into the gibbet needle's blackness, long legs standing at "attention" with heels locked together treading empty air at a height half again that of the Evangelion. Its arms and shoulder guards, yanked out of their places in the EVA's joints and still dripping with gore, are crossed below Asuka's swinging feet like a trophy on a pole, the EVA's head, active and peeping about curiously, is sticking out of the middle of the needle's tapering point above Asuka's, craning down and looking into her cringing face with a savage glee. The EVA's four orange-flaring eyes swivel to look at her as if she was something you scrape off the sole of your shoe. The metal-plate armoring its mouth bends as the Eva's limbs curl in a mordant sneer, then something hot and searing singes the flesh of her cheek to the bone as she realizes that Unit-02 just spat on its unworthy pilot.
Asuka's hands are tipped with razors as she incessantly, desperately tries to claw out her eyes, but despite the agony of the razors slashing them to a bloody pulp, she can still see.
ASUKA:(voiceover) I am dead. Why don't I die! I must be dead! Why can't I die!
I should be dead. I must die! I want to die! I want to die!
Suddenly the view changes. It is now apparently the inside of an immense bottle of a blue material that seems neither glass nor plastic but something totally alien. A man in formal business attire is running on all fours over the walls of the blue stuff like an insect trapped in a glass.
***
Shinji's sleeping face, a zoom as he moans without awakening.
The inside of Shinji's dreamscape. We are staring into a huge close-up of Asuka's face. It is her face, but it is no longer the face of a human. Whereas in his waking world, her face was dead and void of all reaction, now it is a contorted inhuman grimace of pain and hatred, animated by a snarling beast that has nothing to do with a human soul. The view pull back and we see that she is in her entry plug, dressed in a plugsuit.
Shinji looks down to discover that he is in his plugsuit as well. He is apparently at the controls of EVA Unit-01.
GENDO'S VOICE:(over the comm channel) I see you are deployed, pilot Ikari. You will now proceed to neutralize the rampaging Unit.
MISATO'S VOICE:(tinged with the familiar rhythms of powerless compassion, but ever determined like a proper officer at her post) Yes, Shinji, we have no choice. You must destroy her, Shinji. It's not your fault, you didn't choose this.
SHINJI:(as he realizes all his decisions have already been made for him and he is only left to go through the motions) No... no... it can't be...
***
Asuka's eyes.
Back in Asuka's head, she stares at the man in the huge bottle, surprise cutting through agony.
THE MAN:(screams out an endless ocean of guilt and agony) No! Atsaro! I'm sorry! I can change! I can change! (An inarticulate scream. He starts bashing his head and arms against the wall, still screaming)
Asuka stares, dumbfounded, as a writhing, black and yellow vermiform tentacle reaches into the bottle, some eerily glowing protrusions swelling up out of it. Some of these protrusions begin to glow, off-color shades of magenta, cinnabar, neon pink, and electric white, blinking in response to each other as if communicating in semaphore.
***
Shinji's face.
In his dream, Shinji is startled as the entry plug's controls begin to move on their own. With deadly, ponderous inevitability, Unit-01 plods forward towards its intended prey. Shinji's heart jolts with the searing, paralyzing, icy touch of realization, as it hits him what the Evangelion is about to do -- again. He can feel the precise moment when his heart tears like rotting cloth and the shreds plummet down an icy chute of pain.
SHINJI:(with the voice of the eternally damned) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
Asuka's eyes.
A new... appendage enters through the blue walls of the container in Asuka's vision. It resembles nothing on Earth so much as a bizarre cross between an antler and a feathered bird's wing, covered with softly humming cyan cactus spines. It had articulated joints that looked like either a slinkie or a 3-D model of a biomolecule, and it shot out pastel-hued laser pulses from its translucent central core.
One of such pulses hits the forehead of the agony-wracked writhing heap of madness and torment scuttling along the softly glowing dusky blue walls, and the man rolled down the opaque smoothness precisely like an insect suffering a direct hit from a can of "Black Flag". After tumbling down a few spans, he seemed to stick to the wall again, held apparently by surface tension like a raindrop in Asuka's waking world.
Raising a human head with the expression of a vivisected animal on it, the man shrieks into the void above him, which seems to listen with amused fascination.
THE MAN:(suddenly discovering that he only thought he knew true damnation before) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! It was I... I killed them... left her to the rats... HOW?????? HOOOOOWW?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
Shinji's face.
SHINJI:( tugs at controls uselessly, watching his EVA pounce on Asuka's Unit-02 like a snake of a hatchling chick) Stop! No! You can't!!! Asuka, run! Save yourself!
BEAST-ASUKA:(Yawps ferociously, mind consumed with fury and agony) GraAAAAAAAAAAAAArGH!!!!!! Die, you glob of squawking putrid crawling compost!
A crimson mad beast, Unit-02 leaps at Unit-01. The purple-green harbringer of death stands steady as a rock, taking the impact of the crimson horror's berserk tackle. With the legerdemain of a practiced juggler, the sinister purple shadow twists in a ballet-like pirouette, deftly plucking the silvery cylinder of the entry plug from the armor-scaled back of the blood-hued hellion that is simultaneously smashing its head to a purple-blotted pink-black pulp. As the entry plug is removed, Asuka's EVA drops to the ground, inert and contorted into a twisted pose of impotent fury like a monstrous insect dried up between a pair of twin window frames. It splashes into the churned mud with a heavy thud of failure as the head of Unit-01 reforms from the mashed gore left by its victim's flailing claws. Without its armor plating it looks like what it is - a ravenous, soulless beast. The hand in armor plate glove rises, holding Asuka's entry plug like a candy bar.
***
Shift to directly inside Asuka's vision. The antler-like appendage reaches out again, and the zumming hum of its airy cactusoid spines changes, as if it is receiving a different station. The edges of its antler-like tines, vicious weapons with smooth organically flowing curves and planes, shining like veined jade and whimsical like sea-sculpted driftwood, seem to writhe and bud new awl-like prongs, stretching hypnotically toward the man in the bottle, whose tongue is hanging t-h-r-o-u-g-h his teeth's gaps now, shredded to gore-and-froth-dripping ribbons. Inarticulate moans gurgle their way past the man's clenched jaws, like the sounds of a hunted animal afraid to make a sound but unable to control the pain. The outlandish appendage swings down...
***
Shift to Shinji, as he sees Unit-01's aubergine fist, bloated with darkness like one fist-shaped swollen bruise, reach up, holding its fallen crimson brother's entry plug. Up... up... as Shinji, convulsing in his LCL from the revelatory experience of feeling Unit-01's head get pulped and regenerate just as vividly as he would feel his own, simultaneously feels the newly re-grown head bend forward, feels "his" jaws ponderously opening like the jagged wheels of a medieval torture device creaking at their hinges as they grind away their dark purpose... and at that precise moment he sees Asuka's face appear once more on his comm screen!
ASUKA:(looks him in the eye, her face is no longer bestial, her eyes now filled with that merciless contempt that only a human and a hero can give to Death in the end moments) Go ahead you worm! That's all you're ever good for, sitting there moaning while the rest of us die, isn't it? Isn't it?!
Shinji tries to answer her, but his jaws only move in a repulsive tearing motion as Unit-01's own slavering maw crunches Asuka's entry plug like a stalk of celery. Shinji tries to scream, but instead his jaws move in a grinding, chewing, inexorable rhythm as he can vividly t-a-s-t-e Asuka's limbs and innards getting masticated to a bloody glop by Unit-01's gargantuan molars.
***
Asuka's vision. Her view expands suddenly, encompassing the bottle where the man is being tortured, two beings standing outside the bottle, looking like they have been designed by a committee of Bosch, Escher and Van Gogh, after watching microbiology slides on crack. Weird geometric patterns flash on their various surfaces as they apparently discussing better ways to create one man's personal hell.
Behind that bottle, there is a field, covered with infinite billions of them. Tall towers of softly glowing blue material, each slightly... out of focus somehow when seen next to the others, as if not quite in spatio-temporal sync with its neighbors. Each held a human, locked away, isolated it his or her own little pocket chibi-universe. Each such pocket held an eternal infinity of hell.
ASUKA:(murmurs) Am I stuck in one of those things and can't see it? (Frowns.) Ach, scheisse!
She peers into the distance.
ASUKA: (whimpers, then bites lip to stifle it) Misato? K-Kaji? What are they doing to you?
Her view zooms in, in such a way that it is impossible to tell, is her field of vision charging forward or are surrounding bottles rapidly streaking back. Finally all her senses are riveted on a particular bluish container, glowing amid the black plain and gray sky like a soft fluorescent lamp powered by the burning of a damned soul. And within the bottle's towering immensity, all her senses are riveted on one tiny speck.
Misato is collapsed, fallen to her knees, on her bottle's wall. She is crushed, utterly shattered beyond any hope of relief or melioration. Pink foam drips from her lips and nose.
MISATO:(heartbroken, not moaning but rather weeping verbally, questioning the dead in a gentle, plaintive voice) Why, Asuka, Shinji, why? You were like my own to me... I did what I could... I did, I swear! Why... could it not be enough? Maybe if I drank less... wasted less time hanging on to that bloodsucker Gendo's every word... Kaji... if I wasted less time on Kaji, maybe Asuka wouldn't have snapped! If I talked to them more, instead of my stupid teasing... I probably treated Pen Pen better...
***
Shinji's view. Asuka has been eaten, but her screams can still be heard. Shinji realizes they are coming from inside him. He sinks his fingernails into his own throat, trying to rip it out. The veins burst, and his hands yank the esophagus, stretching it like white putty.
***
In her own vision, Asuka sees Shinji in a bottle, hands in his own gore up to elbows. He is trying to scream, but his windpipe has long been broken, though he seems to be as healthy as ever.
ASUKA:(gulps) I can't believe it. Him? This is like watching a kitten being tortured! Take him out of his Eva and he's helpless! These... Angels, whatever they are, are using cosmic powers to torture the one most pitiful loser ever produced by humanity!
A MYSTERIOUS VOICE(rings in her ears suddenly) Touched to the quick now, are we?
ASUKA:(seething to the point that she doesn't notice she is apparently addressing an auditory hallucination) Damn right! It's... abscheulich... having to watch this! That idiot is messed up enough, he doesn't need this!
THE VOICE:(seems to sound from everywhere at once) Want to stop it, you little ball of misspent spunk? Will you even try? Do you even have the guts left for this much? It seems like you ran out the moment one of the lesser sparrows held a mirror up to you!
***
Shinji, still chocking on the warm salt taste of mashed Asuka, hears his father's voice come from the entry plug comm set.
GENDO'S VOICE:(smug) Excellent performance, Pilot Ikari. I will enter a commendation in your records. (slightly muffled, but still audible) Oh, security? Take away Major Katsuragi, she seems a little too... distraught... to remain on bridge.
Shinji can feel his soul die inside him, like a flower dipped in toxic fecal matter. He tries to chock himself unconscious, but with his windpipe already crushed, what more can he do? His hands yank, trapped in the putty of his esophagus like fly claws on sticky paper.
***
Asuka is almost relieved. Attacks by others are not going to phase her, not after facing down something that slashes her arms off and then amputates her head. It's the horror that broods and swarms within her soul like a seething mass of scorpions, that she can't face. But now she can finally let some of that boiling darkness fly full blast in a verbal exchange!
ASUKA:(doubtfully) Do I know you, you skulking rat? What, you've been splattered all over the landscape, or are you just afraid I'll see your ugly puss?
VOICE:(admiration evident) That's the spirit, Asuka. You truly are your mother's daughter, despite all your trials.
ASUKA:(with a spare-me-the-cheap-Vader-act attitude) Lemme guess. YOUUUUUUU ARRRRRRRE MUH-Y MOTHTHTHTHRRRRRRR?
VOICE:(dodging subject and not bothering to hide it) Never mind who I am. You know the way to stop this. Do you have what it takes to get back into that?
Noise like gnashing teeth makes the tormented girl's head jerk upwards. As she lifts her razor-mutilated face, empty eye sockets stare into the grinning visage of Unit-02, looking like what Jeffrey Dahmer found on the other side of the tunnel of light, at least if afterlife was made to our order.
Unit-02 snaps its teeth in Asuka's direction like a lunging cobra.
ASUKA:(she'll be damned if she shows A HINT of just h-o-w shitless she is at the moment) Yeah, I saw a dog snap like that once when I was a kid! Of course that was the post-Schlag years, so we made s-o-u-p outta him! You wait till I'm up there, then we'll see if it's in your best interests to be nice and do tricks when I tell you!
Unit-02 shudders and starts to melt. The gibbet-needle follows.
ASUKA:(realization dawning) That wasn't my Unit-02! Just some cheap mockup you threw together to test me! Hey, whoever you are! You better hide, 'cause when I find you, I'm gonna have your mangy hide off all the way down to your freakshow-reject's skeleton, ya hear me?
As she screams, the scene fades. A tunnel of light seems to rush up and swallow her.
***
It is some hours after Shinji passed out. The shaft of sunlight has moved from Asuka's face to her legs. Other than that, time seems to have stood still for the little isolated room, as it is walled off from the turmoil of the GeoFront under siege.
(A death rattle, the sound of the dying's last breath in a constricting throat, sounds through the room)
SHINJI:(eyes still shut) AAASUKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Shinji jerks awake in the chair, his shirt soaked with gelid sweat. His head lifts, revealing bloodshot eyes. It sways in the air; Shinji is obviously half-comatose himself.
SHINJI: ?????? (mutters, teeth chattering) I'll kill myself before I sleep again... any torture is better... Asuka... I'm... sorry...
The door is moving slightly, as if something swung it half-open and it has not yet stopped in its arc.
SHINJI: (teeth rattling, head darts around) Uh... is...
A... presence passes down from toward the bed. As Shinji squints at it, all he can make out is a shimmer in the air, a moving spot in which the subdued light from the fluorescent lamps bends as if passing through perfectly clear water. As nearly invisible distortion moves past Shinji in his chair, he hears the death rattle again, like the final chocking gasp of a shooting victim.
SHINJI: W-what... Hello?
The mysterious mirage stops before Asuka's bed and, as it stops its progress, suddenly outlines into a concrete almost-silhouette, transparent as glass but no longer blurred by motion. If an observer squints wrong, the minimalist mirage becomes invisible. Shinji happens to be squinting just right.
As he stares in bewilderment, Ikari Shinji sees a 4-meter tall gaunt outline that seems to appear and vanish every time a chance breeze from the air conditioner stirs the curtains a hairsbreadth. It is vaguely humanoid, but less bulky and sharp-angled than an EVA. As it bends its head and stretches a 75% invisible arm - or rather a vague hint of an arm -- toward Asuka's dead-eyed face, the death-rattle sound groans out again, like a mocking prophesy.
The apparition keeps blinking in and out of visibility. Its phantom hand, like a trick of the light, less distinct than the dust motes in the sunlight, darts forward and blurs into a shapeless airy streak in its rush towards the girl's forehead. Almost simultaneously, the blur suddenly resolves into near-precise outlines of fingers and these in turn stretch into tapering talons ready to pierce living flesh. But instead, the hand hovers, stopping short of completing the stab, claws flexing to touch the pale skin in a ghastly satanic benediction. Head bowed, the whole mirage looks like a transparent premonition of a mourner at a funeral, or perhaps a victor in a duel administering the coup de grace.
SHINJI:(terrified but hoarse from weeks of crying) What... what are you doing to her?!
His voice breaks in a fit of coughing.
A sigil flashes silver and crimson on Asuka's forehead, vanishing too quick to make out.
Her nostrils flare, and simultaneously, another death rattle is heard.
SHINJI:(hands doing the "fist tic", jumps from his chair and charges the creature) Get away! Don't you touch her, you... huh?
The apparition vanishes. Shinji, like a dizzy, pencil-thin juggernaut, rams straight through the place where he thought he saw it - now no longer sure it was ever there at all. He stumbles, flailing his arms so as not to fall over on Asuka's bed.
Behind his back, midway between him and the door, something passes through the air that the eye can't quite focus on - as if some miniscule patches of something 95% invisible blink in and out of existence. Shinji, focused on nothing but a pitiful effort at regaining his balance, cannot see it.
At the door, however, the unresolvable spots suddenly re-outline as before by the bed, but now only the being's head is visible, a face like a quicksilver mask appearing to float on nothing but a rapidly dissipating air distortion. The face is perfectly featureless, eyeless and mouth-less, with its nose not a feature in itself but rather a natural culmination of the sharp angular planes of its forehead and cheekbones. It is like nothing as much as a smooth, aerodynamic, face-shaped missile aimed directly at the two children.
The creature's face jerks in the air, its ghostly outlines jagging like lines on the screen of a TV getting static. It vanishes.
Suddenly, a very human tear impacts on the linoleum floor beneath the vanished head.
The door creaks shut. Shinji jerks around to follow the sound.
SHINJI:(past all care) Who are you? What have you done to Asuka? Come out you monster! Stop... (he sinks to his knees, only his hand on the bed's rim stopping him from collapsing completely) torturing... me...
At that moment, he is disturbed by another sound. But that one does not come from any ghostly apparition.
ASUKA:(half-conscious) Shinji...
Shinji's head is beginning to feel like a weathervane in a twister as he snaps it over to Asuka and sees that she is still far from conscious. On the other hand, the dead stare of catatonia appears to be replaced with a woozy state, as if the girl is just waking up after having an appendix out.
SHINJI(Internal Monologue) She called my name waking up! If she only knew...
ASUKA: (still in la-la land) take your damn fingers off my knee or I'm getting a pair of garden shears with your crotch's name on them...
Shinji, who had been - by pure accident -- brushing against her knee as he held on to the bed to keep his balance, yanks himself to his feet, jerking his hand away like Asuka was made of untarnished plutonium.
ASUKA:(blinking at the sunlight) Dammit, not only am I not dead, I'm hungry too... (Her forehead and neck are shining with sweat beads. Still blinking, she apparently questions the ceiling) Was that the UberChicken I heard scream earlier?
She pouts, staring at the ceiling, while off to the side, Shinji passes out on the floor.
MISATO(walks in) Shinji-kun... look, I brought some supper... (nearly drops it as she takes in the tableau of Shinji plastered over the linoleum and a confused Asuka sitting up in bed. She does not q-u-i-t-e drop the tray she is carrying.)
ASUKA(takes in the tableau from her POV) What? I didn't do it.
Next Episode: Who is the mystery killer that disembowels Akagi Ritsuko? What about the one trying to do put a bullet in Ibuki Maya? And who is the mysterious woman holding Commander Ikari at gunpoint? And why are the MAGI acting so weird? See NERV try to survive as Tokyo-3 and the GeoFront come under siege by the Japanese Strategic Self Defense Forces... while another battle for survival rages within its corridors.
Also, see Asuka on her way to recovery from the horror she lived through. See Misato try her best to help her. See Shinji... well, he should be happy to have Asuka back, but he'll have to remind himself of that... a lot. All in the next episode of Evangelion: The Apotheosis!