Chapter Two: Old Wounds
Much about NERV - this one, anyway - was unfamiliar. Hallways, doors, people; one thing, though, was constant: the ceiling tiles of the hospital. How many times had he woken up, expecting to be somewhere he was not, only to stare up at the dimpled tiles of the ceiling he so readily loathed in his youth?
It was a rhetorical question. One he never dared think about too deeply.
The shakes started almost immediately.
Within a minute he was trembling so violently that the handcuffs securing him to the bed frame were ringing like bells. He clenched his jaw so he wouldn't bite off his tongue, an instinctual reaction that had been drilled into him thousands of times over thousands of hours. A machine by his head began beeping, its digital brain alarmed by the rapid rise it detected with its monitored leads glued to its patient's head and chest. Pondering this sudden change, the machine considered for a nanosecond the programmed choices set within its parameters. In the next nanosecond it executed three functions.
The first was to administer a muscle relaxant. The second was to top its first dose with a powerful seditave. The third was to alert the nurses.
It beat the three-man security detail stationed in the room by an eternity of three seconds.
People flooded into the room with a bewildering array of machines, syringes, and medications. They peered kindly into their patient's eye, asked him questions he could not begin to answer, and subjected him to a battery of the most useless physiological tests. Had he been able to crack his jaw and answer them, he would have told them to get away. There was nothing they could do to help him. Nothing at all.
Suddenly he couldn't breath.
A doctor looking at his face in that same instant saw his right eye widen in alarm, heard him struggle for air and spotted the rapid flare of his nostrils.
"His lung collapsed again!" the doctor shouted.
The nurses jerked a stainless steel cart over to the bedside. Gloves and sterile plastic bags went flying everywhere. A long, glistening needle attatched to an empty syringe appeared.
"Hold him down!"
The needle sank into his chest, between two ribs halfway up his chest. The plunger was extracted.
Shinji Ikari could breath once again.
The drugs started working. His body unclenched, his limbs slowly wound down into stillness, and the bright colour of his right eye faded, then it closed. He went back to sleep, wondering if he would wake up in the hospital again - or if he would find himself somewhere else.
Misato Katsuragi watched the small drama play out behind a glass window. "Does he usually shake like that?"
Standing next to her, flipping idly through a hospital chart, Ritsuko Akagi adjusted her glasses and said, "Every time he regains consciousness. I'm starting to think it's a psychosomatic disorder."
"Psycho-whatsits?"
"A physical reaction buried in his subconscious fears. Like a child who was burned by a hot stove who then wets himself whenever he sees fire."
Misato looked at her friend, "He hasn't, has he?"
"What?"
"...Pissed himself."
"No." Ritsuko pulled out a pen and checked something off on one of the charts. "Not yet, anyway."
Misato nodded. "So, is he human?"
"He appears to be."
"Appearances can be deceiving."
"DNA testing takes time."
"How much time? It's been two days already."
Ritsuko snorted, "You want quick results? Watch an American television program."
Misato rolled her eyes. "Like I've had time to watch any T.V." She hesitated, then said softly, "I do see some similarities, you know?"
"I do too," agreed Ritsuko. "So did the Commander and the Sub-Commander." She let the chart flip shut and put away her pen. "Might mean something, but it might not, too. One thing is certain, though: that can't be Shinji Ikari."
"I know," said Misato, unconvincingly.
Ritsuko gave her a serious look. "I'm in all earnestness. Shinji Ikari is twenty years old, stands 171 centimeters tall, and has two scars on the entirety of his body. That person," she indicated the man handcuffed to the hospital bed, "is fifteen centimeters taller, looks like he's forty-five, and is so badly cut up and in so many ways that it is a miracle he's still alive."
"Is it really that bad?" asked Misato. "Most of the scars I see look superficial. Flesh wounds and muscle tissue and the like."
"It's more than that," Ritsuko said grimly. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, ignoring the many multilingual signs nearby telling her that she was expressly forbidden to do so. "A lot of it is what you think. Flesh wounds, missing muscle mass. But some of it runs pretty deep. Those scars on the abdomen, for instance. The pattern they make indicates that something...or someone, had ripped that man's stomach open. With their teeth."
Misato's face twisted with revulsion. "Someone was eating him?"
Ritsuko nodded, "There are corresponding damages to his abdominal muscles and the small and large intestinal tracts. A piece of his liver was torn out at one point and then grew back. A chunk of his stomach is gone - though, someone with very clever hands went in there and stitched it back together. There's also a very long scar running all the way up his right arm. It starts at the join in his hand between the middle and ring fingers and runs all the way up to his bicep. Technically, he shouldn't even be able to move the damn thing. The damages to his left eye are even more serious. There's scar tissue showing up in the x-ray all the way back through his brain and out the other side of his skull."
Misato mouthed a silent obscenity.
Ritsuko chucked, "That's not the weird part, though. Weird part is: somehow, his left eyeball is still intact." She let out a long streamer of blue-grey smoke. "Whoever this guy is, he's been through Hell and back and somehow survived.
"Quite a mystery."
They'd given her an unflattering pair of olive-drab pants, an oversized shirt, and heavy boots to wear. This in accompaniment with the heavy, three-ringed handcuffs that they'd slapped across her wrists from the start. It was better than nothing, she supposed, and it was cold in this place.
Her interrogator was the same person it had been the previous four times. A tall, middle-aged woman in a uniform with long dark hair streaked with purple dye. She looked ridiculous, though, quite attractive.
She'd given her name to be Katsuragi. A Major.
The first question was the same as well. "What is your name?"
"Haruka Tenoh."
"And where were you born?"
"Nagano Prefecture. Little place called Iijima, in the Kamiina District."
As usual, there was a pause here, where the woman would lean back in her chair across the table and stare at her for a long, long time.
"Where do you live?" the woman would finally ask.
"The Minato Ward in Tokyo, near Juuban."
Again, there would be a pause.
"...How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
Misato glared at her coffee cup, nursing a headache and wishing she was a home right now instead of in her office at four in the morning. The door behind her opened, and she perked up as a delicious scent of food came drifting her way. She turned around, then slumped when she spotted the tall, long-haired, unshaven vagabond who stood leaning against the entrance.
"Oh, you."
"Hey, hey! Is that anyway to greet a man who brings you breakfast?"
"Stuff it Kaji. I'm in no mood for you and your mind-games. Now go away."
Ryoji Kaji did no such thing. Instead, he came up to the vacant desk next to her own and put down a greasy-looking bag of fast-food next to her elbow, then took a seat and kicked up his heels. "Rough going with the interrogations?"
Misato thought about kicking him out. But the food smelled good, and she was hungry, and tired. 'I'll kick his ass later,' she promised herself, snatching up the bag and diving in. "Yeah," she mumbled around her first bite of bread. "Four times now with the two girls. Neither one of them is changing their story at all."
"Which is?"
"Impossible," said Misato flatly. "And that's all I'm gonna say."
Kaji hummed to himself, then dropped his feet down and leaned forward. "Let me guess. Both girls claim to be teenagers, under the age of twenty. Which means they were born after Second Impact; yet, both girls also claim to have been born in places that ceased to exist after the Impact, and claim to currently live in a ward of Tokyo that is now about thirty meters under the ocean." He looked at her with big, innocent eyes. "Did I get it right?"
Misato snarled at him, "How did you know that?"
Kaji made a flippant gesture. "I come in here when you're in the bathroom and take super-spy photographs with my super-spy camera I keep tied up in my super-spy ponytail."
"Kaji-"
"Ritsuko told me."
Misato slumped. "She shouldn't be doing that. You're being watched, you know?"
"I know. And, for the record, I didn't ask. She was the one who gave me the transcripts."
Misato squeezed the bridge of her nose. "They're lying, of course."
"Hmm...I don't know about that."
"What?"
"They're very consistent with their claims."
Misato made a face, "But it's impossible. We even sent out a team to study the areas they claim to have come from. No one is there! No one has been there for nearly twenty years now!"
"According to what we know," Kaji countered. "And we've been wrong before, haven't we?"
"That isn't the point!" Misato protested. "This isn't just NERV. This is the Ministry of Population, the United Nations Census Bureau, and testimony from over seventy survivors of Second Impact that we've managed to track down. No one lives there anymore!"
Kaji looked away and held up his hands, giving up the argument. Misato fumed at him for a while longer, then buried herself in the food. After a while, Kaji asked another question.
"How are the kids?"
Misato smiled unlovingly. "Bitching at each other, same ol' same ol'."
Shinji entered the hanger bay of NERV's 3rd Aerial Defense Battalion with a great deal of trepidation. It was late, or early, depending on how you looked at it, and he knew that this was where he'd find Asuka.
Oh, joy.
Ever since the Accident she'd spent a great deal of her time wandering from place-to-place within the legion that called itself NERV. She'd spent time serving in the 9th UN Regiment as a logistics officer, transferred to a mechanic's battalion servicing the motor pool of the 5th Mechanized Division, did field training with the Section-2 Emergency Reaction Forces, a stint with NERV's Intelligence Analysts, then finally wound up here, with the 3rd A.D.B.
Watching her bounce back-and-forth over the course of five years, Shinji sometimes wondered why she hadn't come here in the first place. It was here, almost naturally it seemed, that Asuka had finally found the spiritual home she'd been so desperately lacking in the aftermath of the Accident.
It was here that she could be a pilot again.
Her words.
He slipped into the hanger bay, padding quietly through the parked rows of F-308B "Kingfisher" fighter-bombers, gingerly threading his way to the section of the bay where he knew she would be hiding. In time, he heard a loud metallic ringing echo through the air, followed by a string of profanities in a variety of languages.
He felt like leaving right then and there.
Around the last Kingfisher he came upon her, sitting underneath a partially dismantled fighter, wearing a mechanic's coveralls and a good deal of dirt, grease and grime. She had her hair tied back, and was sitting down just ahead of the fighter's fuselage sucking on an injured knuckle. A large wrench lay on the ground just behind her, along with various intimidating pipes and pieces that Shinji couldn't begin to fathom the purpose of.
She spotted him.
"What do you want?" she asked quietly, trying to avoid a confrontation.
Shinji started to lift his hands, let them fall, then clasped them together and started fiddling. "You weren't at home last night."
She grunted, "I didn't feel like it, so I stayed in one of the bunks here."
"Oh." He fidgeted.
"What?" Asuka finally snapped.
Shinji started. "It...It's just that - I'd made you dinner. And you didn't show up. I was worried."
"I'll be fine," she commented dryly, lying down on her back and reaching up into an open plate on the underbelly of the fighter.
"I was just worried," said Shinji. "Misato hasn't been home either."
Asuka cursed and yanked a tangle of wires free from the fighter. "Haven't seen her."
Shinji felt his patience slipping. "Asuka? Asuka, will you look at me?"
She hesitated, then thrust the wires aside and slid back out from underneath the fighter and glared at him. "What?"
"I just want to know if you are all right."
"I'm just peachy." She glared at him, asking silently if he really wanted to do this now.
A part of him said it was a good time to leave now. Instead, he listened to the other half of himself, the one that had grown up in the last five years. The one that said, no matter what she does or what she says, she was still his...friend.
"Asuka, I'm sorr-"
"Shut up. I don't need your apology or care to hear it. You had a job to do, Ikari. And you fucked that up."
Shinji felt his body tense. "If I had done my job," he caustically replied, "you would be dead right now."
Asuka shrugged, as if they were talking about somebody else. "What of it?"
"Damn it, Asuka! Why are you being so pigheaded stubborn about this?" He gave her a piteous look. "Are you really going to sit there, look me in the eye - Look me in the eye!" She lifted her gaze, stared back at him steadily. He went on with a calmer tone. "Are you really going to tell me that you would have been all right with me blowing you apart with my Evangelion? Really?"
She held his gaze for a minute, then looked away. "No one asked you to save me," was her best mumbled excuse.
Shinji sighed, "No one ever asked me to. Not two days ago, not five years ago. Not once. Not ever."
"So you think that just because two and two makes five for you that it's just fine to keep doing things you're not supposed to do?" Asuka scoffed. "How the hell did you survive all these years?"
"By doing what I thought was necessary," Shinji answered gently. "Not what other people told me to do."
Asuka sneered at him. "That will catch you up one day, you know? And then you'll be just like me: a pilot without a purpose. Pathetic, pitied, shoved aside." She shook her head. "I hope I'll be there to see it. I most surely do."
She laid back down, stared uncomprehendingly at the pile of junk hanging centimeters over her face, waiting for Shinji to leave her alone and in peace. She knew her words were wounding, and not only for him. She wanted to cry right then and there, feeling the deep agony of the old scars tearing back open and flooding her with a misery so deep and impenetrable that she could scarce see any light of hope in the waters.
'Go away,' she begged silent. 'Just please...go away.'
She saw Shinji come closer. Heard him sit down next to her legs. When she felt his hand touch her own she couldn't help herself anymore. The tears just wouldn't keep.
Softly, she heard him say, "Father has put me on the standby roster, Asuka." He held her hand gently, unmindful of the grease and oil and the rough callouses.
She sobbed silently.
Her wish had been granted.
Gendo stared at the machine, wondering who built it, and why.
And how.
The machine stared back at him unresponsively, but it was definitely aware of his presence. How he knew this was uncertain. A gut instinct in a man who trusted such feelings implicitly. It knew he was there. It knew who he was. And, Gendo felt certain, that if it wanted to, it could kill him.
"Terrifying."
"It is."
He turned his head and watched Dr. Akagi walking through the on-again off-again lighting of the Tertiary Storage Facility, the closest thing to a secure place to house this machine and keep it from prying eyes.
"What have we learned?" he demanded.
"Not much," Ritsuko admitted. She indicated the machine, "It sealed itself up when...the prisoner collapsed. We know it weighs about 300kg, that it can hold one human of up to 186 centimeters, and that it opens and closes, moves, can operate weaponry, and that there are external speakers. Presumably there are devices that allow it to see and hear as well, but we've yet to see any indication of such devices.
"And that's about all of it," she sighed. "Everything else is a blank slate."
Gendo nodded once. Then looked at the strange machine from the corner of his eyes. He had a feeling - a hunch. "Have you tried asking it?"
Ritsuko blinked rapidly. "I beg pardon?"
"Asking it," said Gendo in all seriousness. "Directly."
Ritsuko looked at him. Looked at the machine. Looked at him. "You mean...ask that-?"
"Yes, Doctor."
Ritsuko looked bewildered. After a moment and a few covert glances to ensure they were alone, she leaned forward and asked in a whisper, "Sir? Have you been drinking again?"
Gendo frowned. "Not funny."
"Well..."
"I'm serious about this."
"Of course."
"...So?"
Ritsuko looked around again, "You really want me to?"
"Yes!" he snapped, his temper running dangerously short.
"Okay, okay!" Ritsuko capitulated, her hands up to ward him off. She walked up to the machine, fiddled with her lab coat. Looked at it. Fiddled with her coat again. "This feels ridiculous."
"Get on with it, woman."
Ritsuko looked over at him, "For the record, I want you to know I think this is ridiculous and won't work."
"Never know until you try," Gendo replied sanguinely. "Now, if you don't mind?"
"Fine! Fine. Okay...Uh, hello? Anyone there?" She waited. "Hellooo?" She waited some more. "Could you tell us what you are?"
Nothing.
Ritsuko stepped back, a tiny smug smile on her lips. "Told you it wouldn't work."
Gendo thought for a moment. "Try addressing it directly."
"You really want to keep doing this?"
"Try it."
"Okay...uh, hello - white-and-grey machine with lots of scars on it. Do you hear me? Can you tell me what you are?"
Nothing.
"No," said Gendo, feeling an insight. "Not like that. Use it's designation."
"Designation? The one the prisoner used?" Gendo nodded. "All right. E.V.A. Unit 257-?"
The machine straightened. Ritsuko stumbled back, almost falling over. "It moved! It just moved!"
"Yes," Gendo mumbled, stepping forward in her place. "E.V.A. Unit 257?" The machine's head turned to look at him. "Is that your designation?" The machine made no move. Gendo watched it suspiciously, wondering if he had asked the wrong question. "Unit 257, could you tell me what you are and who made you?"
The machine made no move or response. Then, just as Gendo was preparing to ask it a different question, a tiny holographic screen appeared over the right breast of the machine. Gendo looked at it warily, he would have to come very, very close to the thing if he wanted to read it.
He took the step forward.
:/Command Identification required to access Memory Logs.
:/Please speak loudly and with a clear voice your Command Identification.
Gendo read the lines twice. "Well," he said slowly. "We appear to have something here."
The First-Tier command crew of the Bridge were on their fourth shift and fifth round of a series of stale coffee. None had had much sleep in the last two days, having spent nearly every waking hour in the aftermath of what was officially recorded as Event 12720 pouring over base-line algorithms and command prompt function source code for the MAGI system in what was apparently a futile attempt to discern exactly how, why, and where the supercomputer system had, as Shigeru Aoba so eloquently put it, "Crapped out on them."
Aoba, and the other two halves of the command crew, Maya Ibuki and Makoto Hyuuga, all had splitting headaches.
"I just don't see it," Hyuuga quietly complained. "If the MAGI was hacked we would have known. There are safeguards in place to tell us."
Maya was shaking her head, "It was much too fast to be a slice-job. We would have seen anomalies pop up weeks in advance of this, malfunctions from source code being changed and interfering with the normal routines of the system."
"Did we?" Hyuuga asked, lifting his head slightly to look at her.
"Not a thing. I went over the maintenance logs, checking for any peculiarities. Everything they had listed was checked out as wear-and-tear on parts, not problems with electrical commands."
"So," Aoba moaned, "We're still sitting on square one. Dumb, deaf, and dark."
"Not exactly," Maya corrected. "I think we can safely rule out a hacker."
"We could," Hyuuga mused. "But only if we want Dr. Akagi to ream us a new one for ignoring the possibility."
Aoba trembled with exaggeration. "No thanks."
"So what then?" Maya asked indignantly. "We keep looking for a dead end we've already found?"
"I'm waiting for a suggestion," Hyuuga said patiently.
Maya sighed and pulled up a log from her terminal, "The time line of cascade indicates that seven minutes after the Major ordered the alarms sounded and the blast doors sealed was when the first anomalous event took place - the overrides."
Hyuuga was sitting up, nodded. "Yeah, okay?"
"Then the security cameras started blacking out. But they weren't destroyed, they weren't even turned off. The live feed was simply blocked off from reaching the Bridge."
Now Aoba was sitting up. A cynical man, always reading the darkness in the light, he jumped to the conclusion before Hyuuga did. "You think someone was helping them from the inside?"
Maya shrugged helplessly, "It's a thought, isn't it? If the source code wasn't hacked, then we're left with someone who had access to the MAGI."
"Yeah," Hyuuga was thinking hard, "but then we've got some problems with that theory."
"Such as?"
"Well, overriding the blast doors is a command-level prompt. Restricted to essential personnel only; but still, more than a few people are on that list. Same with blocking the security feeds. The access to those commands are...what, Aoba?"
Aoba thought for a second, shrugged whimsically, "Probably a coupla' hundred officers."
"And a great many of them were plugged in to the MAGI and issuing override orders during the alert," Hyuuga pointed out. "Unlocking arms lockers, opening blast doors to move their units, accessing updated intel from the Bridge..."
"It still gives us a better starting point than trying to run down a hack that probably doesn't exist," Maya insisted stubbornly.
Hyuuga sighed, then gave in. "All right. Let's try it."
Shinji walked into the ready room a little after seven in the morning. After yesterday's frenzied scramble he didn't expect anybody to be in here, and he was wrong. Sitting at a desk shoved unceremoniously into a dusty corner, grinding his way through a stack of paperwork, was his old friend, Kensuke Aida.
He never seemed to age. Still looked like the same kid with light hair and tiny freckles and huge glasses that he'd first met the day after he arrived at NERV. Only, the deep lines cutting down around the corners of his mouth were new. The gave him a bleak, serious look in the darkness of the room.
Kensuke looked up from his paperwork, "Oh, Shinji. What are you doing here?"
Shinji gave him a wan smile, then straightened up and snapped off a salute. "Captain."
Kensuke gave him a sloppy salute in return. "Knock it off already and come have a seat," he said, pointing to the plush briefing chairs facing a podium and a display screen. Shinji acquiesced, and, with some difficulty and the help of a cane, Kensuke followed him over.
Shinji knew better than to help his friend sit down. Kensuke would only snap at him. As he liked to say, "They got my knee but not my youth! I ain't that old, yet."
Kensuke settled down with a groan and put his cane aside. The free hand went to his stiff knee and massaged it gently. "Oh, that smarts."
"Heard you go back in for surgery in a month."
"Ack. Don't remind me."
"Well, I'll bring some flowers by."
Kensuke grunted, letting a comfortable silence descend over them both as neither one wanted particularly to bring up the conversation they knew must be had. Finally, after a time, Kensuke broke the silence.
"The orders came down, about an hour ago." Shinji nodded. "Suspension, three months in the reserves. Loss of pay. And a pretty big fine to be the cherry on top of that shit sandwich."
"I know." He'd heard it all the day before, directly, too.
Kensuke sighed, "Well, at least you'll get to spend some time with Asuka." He chuckled unkindly. "May a kind fate preserve you."
"It won't be that bad," Shinji protested.
"Oh?" Kensuke wore a mischievous grin. "If I recall correctly, the last time you two were together for more than a few hours she ended up giving you an impressive shiner-"
"That was an accident!"
Kensuke ignored him, "And she ended up with a swollen lip!" He pursed his lips and tried (not very hard) not to laugh. "Ahhh! The painful throes of love."
"Shut up," Shinji pouted. Kensuke had a good laugh.
Then he steadied off and became deadly serious. "Thing is, this suspension...fine and well if we were still rotting away peacefully; but, if the Angels are really starting to come again..." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm gonna need every pilot I've got, and that includes you, Captain Ikari."
"And Asuka," Shinji added quietly.
Kensuke hesitated. "...And her."
"Will you lobby the Commander again?"
"I will, but I don't think it will do any good. You know the story. It was damn near all I could do to keep her from catching a court martial and get run up in front of the firing squad. You got the lucky break out of that whole tangled mess!"
"For which I thank you," said Shinji.
Kensuke shrugged, feeling uncomfortable with himself. Just about every conversation he and Shinji had together in these last five years ended up with a thank you put in there, somewhere. Honestly, in reflection, Kensuke wondered if there had been something more he could have done to help his friend and the woman he loved. Or, worse yet, if he had know there had been something more to be done, and didn't do it anyway.
He was not...fond, of Asuka.
Kensuke grunted. "Anyway. I'll see what I can do. And you - keep healthy. Don't let that German beat you up too badly this time. We might need you, and the last thing I want to hear is that you wound up in hospital because of her. Understand?"
Shinji nodded, a tiny smile on his face. "Yes, sir."
"Alright, get out of here. You're officially on probation, and shouldn't be here."
Kensuke remained sitting as Shinji left the ready room. When his friend was gone he struggled to his feet and limped back to his desk and the monolithic paperwork waiting for him there. The majority of it was requests for maintenance checks and ordinance off-loads, an inevitability with the surprising action they'd run out to two days before.
But a few of the papers were reports from his pilots themselves. Kensuke read these after-action reports very carefully, absorbing and digesting the brief bits of information. There were dissimilarities, true, but nearly all of the AARs held a single consistency that gnawed worrisomely at the back of his mind.
'...this Angel was over a hundred meters tall.'
Awake again.
The shakes weren't long in coming.
He was strapped and cuffed to a gurney, with people all around him. Nurses and doctors, but five heavily armed security types as well. Two of them had their weapons trained and leveled at his head the moment they realized he was conscious.
A kindly face haloed with grey hair appeared overhead.
"I'm Doctor Areshii, you are being taken to a surgical ward to have an operation to repair the damage to your right lung and shoulder. Now, please listen carefully and answer as best you can. Do you have any allergies to medication?"
He gave him a negative answer.
"Do you suffer any conditions with your heart or blood pressure?"
Another negative.
The doctor frowned, seeing the trembling get worse and more erratic. "Are you taking any medications?"
Another negative. He could barely see the man's face he was shaking so bad.
The doctor looked up at a nurse, she had a syringe. He waved her off. "Not now! We'll do it in surgery, I don't want him going too loose or too deep on us before we can control it."
Then the face disappeared, leaving him alone.
By the time they wheeled him into the surgical room, the nurses were having difficulties keeping the gurney upright.
Needles and tubes. A mask over his face. People in gowns. Gloved hands. Something cold against his face.
He went back to sleep.
AN: Your comments are always appreciated and welcomed. My thanks to all those who've read my work before and who have come to see this new story. I hope it will both beguile and entertain, in the true fashion of my confused, maddening style.
For those who've never read any of my works before, strap in. The roller coaster is about to start.