Beneath


Chapter Two


"This was right before the 28th showed up... do I have to talk about this? It just seems like he should... Anyway, this was right before the 28th appeared. We'd just finished our final tests of the year. And even though Shinji and I got top marks, they still stuck us with the rest of the idiots...

Right, we were... celebrating and... No, we weren't drunk! Just because we live under Misato's roof doesn't mean we care for her... predilections. We were just eating something that idiot had cooked and, he grabbed my hand.

What? No, he wasn't being violent. No! Not...sexual. What do I think he meant by it? How should I know wha... maybe. I don't know. That's what... that idiot has just been tormenting me! Someone should beat some sense into him! If you'd let me see him... the story?

After that... moment, he just cleaned up, fed that penguin, and went to bed. Pen Pen? You know he's a rock-hopper... oh. ...That's stupid! The last zoological disease epidemic... of course I'm right. That idiot didn't catch a virus from the bird... or prionic, I know what I'm talking about, stop trying to make me look like a child!

Yes, six hours later the 28th came. Shinji and I were rushed to NERV by Section Two, and engaged the enemy.

It was pyramidal, with a ribbon-like protrusion coming out of it's apex. It was... transparent, and there was a... an amorphous shape, I guess that's the best was to describe it, inside. Shifting in shape and color, all the time. We tried to engage it at range with no luck. It could move to any point on that tentacle-thing. Application of macro-scalar quantum mechanics, or something.

We exhausted ranged options, so moved in for melee. I had that chainsaw thing R&D came up with, probably the last time we used it. Anyway, the idea was to occupy all possible areas of emergence on the ribbon, which wasn't much of a threat by itself. Wonderg... The pilot of the prototype took point, grabbed the part of the ribbon nearest the Angel, and forced it down and... stood on it.

It seemed like the Angel couldn't materialize where there was a good deal of solid matter, so burying it seemed like a good idea. Then we could blast the uncovered end and hope that the Angel had to exist on that particular stretch at all times. If this had been another Dirac-Angel, we'd probably have to destroy the entire ribbon to get rid of it.

Shinji came after... I know what her name is, okay? He came next, and tried to do the same. I went after, and the three of us had most of the ribbon buried. We looked like fools, standing on a line like that. The pyramid hadn't moved during this time, seemed to be a Reactionary type... but then it took Shinji.

That... fool had left some slack in his line. The ribbon came out of the ground and the pyramid materialized, upside down, and trapped the upper portion of Unit One. Radio contact with Pilot Ikari was severed, and the Angel began to draw the lower portion of Unit One into itself... in such a way that made it appear that... it looked like the legs were being eaten... just forced straight up.

Unit One vanished, and Ayanami and I attacked the target. It rotated out of the way, and the First Child almost impaled me with that huge red fork she's been carrying around since the 17th. Similar attempts to damage the Angel were met with equal success. The thing's movement seemed fragmented at that point, but it was moving so fast, there was really no way to tell.

Eventually it just stopped. I went at it with the chainsaw, and Ayanami tried chipping at it... why? Because we didn't want to accidently hit Shinji, of course! Well... yes, that had occurred to me. But I'm a professional.

The chain on my weapon broke. Ayanami's weapon was having no luck. It wasn't a matter of the thing's AT Field, we were neutralizing that. The outer layer of the thing was just incredibly dense. They later found the part of it I went after... diamond-edged two-story chainsaw, and it only gave the stupid thing a 'brushed metal' look.

At this point, the Commander asked the First Children to "use" the lance. I'd already seen her poke the damn thing, I didn't see what point there was to trying again. Rei seemed to think differently. She said she would not do something that might kill Ikari.

I don't think I'd ever heard her challenge an order like that before. I am still impressed, even though the First and I... are very different people.

The Commander was repeating his order when Shinji killed the Angel

I beat that thing with my fists.. had to wear a cast on my hands for a few days after... I couldn't make that thing move at all. It was an unmovable object, and I couldn't... we didn't have an irresistible force handy. Perhaps if I hadn't been focusing my AT Field on neutralizing the Angel's...

Shinji nearly cleaved the Angel apart latitudinally with what looked like one sweep of Unit One's arm. Something was screaming, Unit One I think, and fingers appeared in the opening he had made in the Angel, and forced the top of it right off.

It happened quickly, and I still don't like thinking about it... Unit One's legs were limp in horrible and anatomically inconsistent ways. They curled in on themselves. The armor was white with distention, where it wasn't covered in gore.

Unit One's eyes were red. It's "forward restraint", as you called it at the time, was broken, and I saw teeth. White teeth. Eva aren't supposed to have teeth. ...because I've seen my Eva's face. I've seen video records of the construction of the other two units. Evangelions have featureless gray faces. Eyes eventually appear, since the optic nerves are still intact... but the mouth, teeth... to have that grow after full-term incubation... it should be freakish, it should be misshapen and crude and cancerous...

These teeth looked human.

The Angel wasn't dead. It's core was wedged under the apex, and had been protected within and without by an interior column of it's body. That had been torn away. The Angel had been upside down when Shinji had torn it apart, so the Eva had no problem reaching through the gore from it's own injuries, and...

It ate the Angel's core. It ate the weird, muscular growth that was at the top of the apex, wedged between core and Angelic shell. I know all of this because one of you bastards got into my system and used it to record all of that. Having a view screen full of that... no, it didn't upset me! Unit One had clearly gone berserker, like the battle with the 3rd Angel.

...I don't care what my biometrics say. It was just... jarring, having control of my video systems taken.

...fuck you, Akagi!

...it's almost done anyway. Unit One ate all the meaty parts of the Angel, and then it started to shudder. The shoulder harness and abdominal armors shattered open. At the torso, the empty hip sockets began to... well, it looked like the remains of the Angel, and the broken parts of the Eva's legs were just drawn in, armor and all. There was... I suppose that's what rapid regeneration looks like... A controlled, mass cellular genesis would probably look like a constantly blossoming, tumorous growth. This guy named Yanick did some interesting stuff with that back in 2007...

...right. The legs, sans the armor, grew back. Like the teeth, they looked human. I can't believe the bones weren't shattered, for the weight of the musculature. I thought the armor supported the Eva's gigantic structure. I guess... I was mislead.

And that's it. The Angel was declared dead, a bunch of people threw up in the control room, and you quarantined Unit One and it's pilot for three days.

Four days. Whatever.

Yes, it started then. Even when he was trapped in that hospital bed, legs cast up from residual psychosomatic response, he seemed to... ignore everyone. This was especially irritating, since Misato practically dragged me down there every day.

He answered questions, but wouldn't invite them. Just responses, usually short. You couldn't really talk to him. Some things he wouldn't respond to at all.

Like what? None of your business.

Confidential.

No it won't. It won't help one bit. Misato just wanted you to ask that.

Of course it got worse. Why am I here? He was a fucking zombie at home. He did chores, he fed the bird and made meals, but other then that he just sat in front of the television, not watching much of anything, or was asleep. School... didn't much change. We don't talk much in school...

...because we live under the same roof, much as I detest it. I wouldn't be able to stand him whining at me all the time. Always apologizing... well... not after the 28th, but before...

He stopped making me lunch too. Started following that ass Suzahara around like a puppy. The sad thing is, I think it took his friends a while to notice. I figured it out all at once, but they accepted that this... malaise, was normal. Those idiots.

This went on for about two months. Up to the 29th.

If he hadn't acted when he did, I think Wondergirl would be dead now. I still don't understand why he did it... he didn't say anything over the comm, didn't give any indication he was coming. But just when Unit Zero was passing the threshold for bio-contamination, he showed up and... well... absently killed the Angel.

I saw it happen. I saw him rise from the shaft, walk, not run, over, and put his arm through the Angel. He shattered it's core. It was nothing to him. Then he just deactivated, and wouldn't open his comm channel. They had to haul Unit One back to it's cage... or a spare, I guess, on the rail system.

The debriefing was unreal. Everyone was looking at the Commander, even as one of the techs reviewed the data collected from the Angel, and the battle. Disobeying orders... soldiers have to be given certain privileges. Snap judgement is better made in the heat of combat then staring at a tactical display. That's why Misato and the Commander had put up with all of the Third's failures. I thought that at the time, anyway.

But this had to be too much.

The Commander waited until the meeting was almost over, then directly addressed his son, telling him to, in the future, follow orders. Not doing so may put others at risk. In the future. He said that a second time.

And that was it.

Shinji took it the way he'd taken everything the last weeks. His eyes were focusing, but always somewhere behind whatever he appeared to be looking at. Made you feel transparent, trying to talk to him. Idiot.

...no, nothing until last night. Last night... he collapsed.

We had just finished eating... yes, like I said, cooking was the only thing he seemed to do on his own... and he cleaned his plate, and started to his room, and just... he fell over. No, he didn't trip, he just collapsed. Yes, I saw it.

I called Misato, and some people took him to the hospital. I tried to go with them, but they wouldn't let me. Today I went to the hospital, and they say Shinji was never admitted. You know where he is, right? Misato wants me to...

...what?

...brain dead?