Author's Notes: Some of you will notice a continuity error here. I am aware of it and will re-organize the chapters so the bit at the high-school comes later.
The Weaver
Seven
Ritsuko Akagi knew something was wrong the moment she stepped into Sector 32. The hallway that connected the various rooms was unlit, and the instrumental music that was playing over the PA system was skipping. She took a hesitant step forward, then two back.
She swiped her access card through the reader beside the exterior door again, then tapped a code into the numeric pad that appeared on the small screen built into the wall. The doctor attempted to access the sector's security systems, but was blocked, a red screen warning her that her clearance was not high enough. Ritsuko laughed and had the MAGI tear the sector's system apart and rebuild it in their own systems. Then she cycled through several camera feeds, all of which showed nothing but static.
Next she checked the lighting and partitioning system. Sector 32 was nominally a completely open room, the mechanical subsystems of which used panels built into the floor and ceiling to create smaller compartments. The narrow hallway layout with many segregated rooms appeared on the screen. The schematic appeared in two colors - red and blue. According to the onscreen legend the MAGI had compiled for her, the red areas indicated partition paneling that was no longer responding to the sector's subsystem.
Bad. The sector had been damaged. By an explosion, perhaps? She was never certain what Ikari was working on in there, but he had mentioned tinkering with his son's genetic structure. Not a science that lent itself to explosions.
The lighting system had shorted out - Ritsuko got a device error when she tried to access it. First she checked to make sure the MAGI had aligned ports properly when it had recreated the room's OS. Finding no flaw there, she tried accessing the emergency lighting, which was on a contained circuit and was battery-powered. Most of those systems responded. Ritsuko had the MAGI start examining these emergency lighting systems, which were based off passive wireless tech, and found only a binary switch within them. Apparently the emergency lighting was not a primary security concern.
Ritsuko turned on the emergency lights, and the hallway through the door beside her was illuminated in red. She brought up a keyboard applet and typed out a quick message to Maya, telling her where she was and when to come looking for her. Then she locked the door open and passed through.
For a hundred feet, things appeared to be normal, though most of the light fixtures where black stains on the wall. The hallway itself was intact, and there was no damage to any of the equipment in any of the rooms that branched off it. The red glow was creepy though, even to someone as thoroughly secular as Ritsuko. Distance was uncertain, the hallway dissolving into a dim black mass - normally she would have been able to see from one side of the sector to the other the moment she entered it.
She was approaching the area where the partition subsystem had reported errors. Ritsuko stopped looking at passing rooms and focused on simply going forward. The red-black dim sucked her in, and she did not notice it grow larger and larger, until she smacked right into a wall of debris. A sharp point caught her in the stomach, she cried out and backed away, one hand bracing against the wall, the other reaching forward to the place where the hallway should be. The emergency lighting here was active, but only barely. Her adjusting eyes picked out bits of wall and scientific equipment. It was packed loosely, but she could not push it away. In the spaces between the broken equipment, she could detect no light.
I should go and get security down here, she thought. There has been an explosion and Gendo is hurt, maybe dead.
She started to walk back, but entered one of the branching rooms instead. First going to the left, she found an intact room that functioned as a kitchenette. The room across from that one, however, was missing a wall. The doctor picked her way over the debris and continued past the point where the hallway had been blocked.
The rest of the sector had been flattened. The partitioning had been ripped away, in some places apparently torn from its mooring. Steel panels three inches thick were scattered everywhere, along with various shattered equipment. The emergency lights mostly worked here, and everything was again cast in crimson that faded to black.
As the doctor took in the devastation, she walked into something. One moment testing an area of floor to make sure it was stable, the next she felt a slight pressure on her arm, and it exploded with pain. She fell back, and found a fine pattern of cuts running up her arm. The cloth of her lab coat had been segmented in exactly the same manner.
The doctor stood, and scrutinized the area of space that had just damaged her. It took half a minute for her eyes to properly adjust and see that there was something distorting the image of the larger room. She picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it to a relatively undamaged portion of floor beyond the area where she had been hurt. The item did not appear to encounter resistance as it passed through the air, but when it hit the floor, it did so in pieces. Ritsuko would have thought it had shattered, if steel lent itself to that sort of thing.
She picked up a longer piece of partitioning and poked it forward, watching as the tip was simply whittled away. She sweeped the metal in front of her, and slowly felt her way deeper into the room. The barrier appeared to be in a line perpendicular to the walls, and Ritsuko almost walked face-first into the second barrier, which ran parallel. It was then that she figured out the trick, and would have thought herself stupid had the whole situation been absolutely unfathomable. The barriers were mimicking the original configuration of the partitions in Sector 32. She waved the metal rod around the barrier running the length of the Sector, and found an area of space that didn't seem to want to shred her - the doorway. She made her way out into the hallway and proceeded forward carefully, the other end of the laboratory finally in sight.
"Built it. Gift," the voice almost made Ritsuko scream, coming out of nowhere.
"Nanowire," the voice continued. "Web. Was sorry it had to destroy my arcanum, so it tried to repair. Got bored, went away."
A pile of rubble rose some distance away, and resolved itself into a human form. Ritsuko approached, still waving her now-short piece of metal in front of her. It took her a minute or so to get close enough to recognize the Commander.
"Gendo?" the woman continued a guarded approach. "What happened here?"
"Sorry, I can't do it," the Commander stated, now kneeling on the ground and sifting through the wreckage. "I had it though, I had his neural connections encoded right into the DNA. That kind of resolution... a breakthrough. Then it came, and said I was wrong. It told me that our son's pattern can't exist, would crowd out what is coming."
Ritsuko finally determined that there was no barrier between herself and Ikari, and knelt down next to him as he sifted through the wreckage.
"What do you mean, our son Gendo?" Ritsuko used his first name again, she knew it irritated him when she did that.
The man looked up at her, and Ritsuko saw something haunted, something lost.
"Shinji. Our son, Yui," the man said. Then he kissed her. Ritsuko fell back, Ikari bearing down on her. By some miracle her back found an area clear of debris.
"Ikari, you're... something is...!" the doctor said, trying to push him off. Then he kissed her again and reached under her skirt.
"I can't believe you are here," he muttered as his lips left hers and he grabbed one of her breasts with his free hand. "But I knew, I knew I'd see you again."
The doctor's objections faded as the Commander went to work, and soon an entirely different sound filled the dark, strange space.
Asuka was riding in a train car. Colored amber with a setting sun, she regarded the thing sitting opposite her.
"Sorry, intent, just that," the indistinct person across from her said. "Sentient? Far from it. Found this place in the deeper structures, a memory that is also a place. I die? Become a thing like your mother? This would be my trainyard."
Asuka remembered this entity, the thing that danced and flickered from place to place in that misty trainyard. With slowly dawning horror, Asuka realized that she was completely aware. This was not the half-stupid delusion of a lucid dream, It was like being awake.
She tried to stand, but could not. She wanted to scream, but could not. Awake and immobile in a dream.
"Can hear you, can feel you," the intruder murmured, standing. "Sorry sorry sorry, but best way, only way. Need to remember what you saw in the monster, who you met there. Just bridging, performing a bit of neuromancy. Impressing all of this into actual memory, 'stead of the evanescent that just slides off after you wake up."
It reached out and touched her, and she was able to stand. She tried to back away, but every time she broke contact with the intruder, she froze.
"Intent, all I am. Purpose served now. Somewhere, someone knew you. Somewhere, someone heard you whisper for your mother in the warm-dark. Protect, see? Give you what you want, see? Did that. Animated intent, like I said."
Asuka was now against the side of the carriage, the intruder left her frozen, and went to the side opposite.
"This thing I am, will cease to exist three hours ago. Nice job with the Web, allows a bit of leeway with such things."
And then the indistinct person was gone, and Asuka woke up.
Misato was halfway through Kaji's notes, still in an intense state of concentration, when Asuka woke up screaming at the top of her lungs. The school laptop Misato had been using made a graceful arc through the air as the Major dove to the floor and started fumbling with her shoulder holster.
Asuka was out of the bed and on top of Misato before the older woman could draw her gun. The red-head smacked the older woman across the face and then tried to choke her.
"I am not a fucking doll!" the girl screeched. "You think you can..."
Misato, finally recognizing that her assailant was the Second Child, rather then a giant spider or something equally unsavory, stopped fumbling with her shoulder holster. She yanked Asuka's hands from her neck and pushed the girl off her, confused and entirely not prepared to deal with any more shit.
The girl was trying to find her feet when Misato grabbed her by the hospital gown and threw her back onto the bed. There, the Second Child curled into a ball and started to cry, drawing the twisted covers over her entire body.
"Mama," the girl screamed. "What did they do to you, mama?"
Misato stood at the foot of the bed, shaking and trying very hard not to. She pulled out her cell phone, dialed Kaji's number, then snapped the phone shut without sending the call. He would probably just... complicate things.
The Major went to the private washroom and got a glass of water, drank it, then refilled it and took it over to the bed. She sat next to the quivering figure and slowly pulled the covers away. The red-head stared at her wildly, but didn't try to attack her again. Misato gestured with the glass of water, and the girl slowly rose to a sitting position, sniffling quietly. The Major handed over the glass of water, and watched as the young girl downed it.
"Okay now?" the Major asked.
The girl nodded. "I need to use the bathroom though."
The Major walked over and casually blocked the external door while the Second Child used the washroom.
"W-would you mind telling me what that was all about?" Misato asked through the door.
There was a barely audible response.
"What?"
"I said, I thought you were somebody else, dammit!" the red-head yelled in the washroom. "And why does everything smell like cheap perfume!"
The Major sighed and looked at her watch. It had been almost an hour since Kaji had given her that god-damn...
"Oh... shit," she walked over to the school laptop, which had landed on the protruding portion of the memory drive Kaji had given her. The peripheral was now jutting through the keyboard and digging in the half-folded laptop's screen.
Misato tried to tug the drive out, and it fragmented in her hands. She sighed and tossed the expensive paperweight to one side, hearing it crack against the floor and not really caring.
Hey, Asuka, congratulations on your first solo kill. By the way...
The Second Child emerged from the washroom, looked first at Misato, then at her broken laptop.
"What the fuck Katsu-!"
"Shinji's dead." Oh fuck.
Asuka was looking at the laptop again. She held this position for nearly a minute.
"You broke my laptop," the girl murmured. "And... huh."
The girl walked over to the low set of drawers and pulled out the clothing Misato had brought for her. She untied her hospital gown and let it drop. Clad only in white panties, she stared out the room's windows. It was night, and there were only streetlights and illuminated buildings to be seen. Finally reaching some sort of impass, she started to pull her clothing on.
"What. Happened?" the girl spat out each word.
Misato came up beside her, glancing out the window to see whatever the Second Child had seen and finding nothing.
He had a heart attack. There was a docking accident with Unit One and the rail system, he was electrocuted. He died instantly.
"It looks like suicide." I'm a total joke.
The red-head smiled at that. "That... you're joking." She watched the older woman shake her head in the window's reflection, then look to one side. There was a hopeless quality to her movements that conveyed something words could not.
Asuka finished dressing, then started pushing Misato towards the door.
"Home. Now. Please," she said.
The Major didn't protest.
The drive back to the apartment was quiet, save for the cursing from Asuka every time Misato hit a curb or narrowly avoided a guard-rail. When they finally arrived and parked, Asuka pushed the door open and slammed it.
"When the fuck are you going to learn to drive, you ditzy bitch?" the girl screamed.
Misato, halfway out of the car herself, almost stumbled. The Second Child's voice echoed in the emptiness of the parking lot. Then Misato was rounding the car...
"You're what, thirty-five? You give us orders in battle and you can't even 'pilot' this rice-burning piece of..."
Misato smacked the girl, much harder then she probably should have.
"I am very tired," the Major said in a distant voice, hauling the Second Child off the ground and pressing her against the car. "I have put up with a lot of shit today, and I have had enough, thank you."
The thing in the hospital basement, the knowledge Kaji had given her... and then...
of course...
Shinji was dead...
Hot tears ran down Misato's face. The Second Child saw this, braced against the car, and sent the Major staggering back. Then the girl darted forward and grabbed the car keys Misato had loosely grasped in her hand.
The Second Child opened the passenger side door, closed it, and locked it. She scrambled over the gear-shift and closed the driver side door, which Misato had left ajar. Then she started the car up, screamed something at Misato the older woman couldn't hear, pulled out of the parking spot and shot out into the street.
Misato Katsuragi barely saw any of this. She just stood in the parking lot and sobbed into her hands.
The Weaver hurt Shinji. Took his hand. Such defilement.
Shinji is thirty years old. Looks like his father. Still doesn't have his right hand. Shinji, quiet. Shinji, maimed. Her charge, her brother, her son. Shinji broken, brain leaking, bones protruding like - the thing in the basement, where he...
She didn't even have a body to bury.
Kaji was trying to coax Keiko Futanabe to talk about something other then the low, low prices at this one shop she had visited twice in Tokyo when his cell phone rang.
"I lost Asuka," Misato's voice sounded strange.
"Lost... how?" Kaji glanced at the female Section 2 agent, and went over to the exterior side of the room for better reception. Behind him, Keiko expanded that the store was mainly for cats. Very hard to enter and leave. Everything was cat-sized, including the entrance.
"We, uh, had a little fight," the Major sniffed into the phone. "She... kinda took my car."
Oh... oh, wonderful. "Well, I know she can drive. They let her in Germany." Kaji waved to Keiko, who was now taking off her shirt.
"I can't... do this. No more," there was a sound in the background, a passing car.
"Where are you, exactly?"
Hands on her bra-covered chest, Keiko wondered aloud why her right breast was the exact same size as the left one, but the left one was heavier.
"I can't... parking lot. I don't want to go up there," the Major sighed. "I haven't been since... you know... and I just need to... a minute to gather myself."
"Hungry?" Kaji was watching the young Section 2 psychologist reach to unhook her bra.
"...yeah."
"So am I, so here is what we should..." the bra was off, "should... how about you go upstairs and make something, and I come over in maybe twenty..." Keiko squeezed one firm, brown-tipped breast, and Kaji made a little noise in the back of his throat, "...make that thirty minutes. I'll bring something potent, huh?"
Easier to sing, in balance, Keiko was saying.
"...is there someone there, with you?" Misato's voice lost its strange detachment.
"Yeah, I'm trying to interview one of the... someone. She is... talkative."
Keiko grabbed the pen Kaji had been using to take noted, and flicked it against her left nipple, which was erect.
"Come now. I'll go up and make something, but if you are going to come over, leave right now," Misato's tone was familiar. It had a quality Kaji hadn't heard for several years.
Then Keiko stabbed the pen into her breast, just above the areola. Kaji yelled a curse and dropped the cell phone. He rushed over, grabbing the crazed woman's arm just as she was bringing the pen down a second time.
"Easier, see? Now I'm balanced!" the woman happily bounced to her feet, her hands crossed in front of her so her breasts were squeezed together, jutting out, bouncing along with her. Her left breast was bloody, the red stain extending down below her belly and onto her uniform pants.
Kaji glanced around the room, making sure there weren't any sharp objects handy, then left the woman and knocked three times on the outer door, knowing that this wasn't going to look good no matter how he spun it. Bloody topless woman, not in her right mind. He should have had someone in the room to witness. The guards outside took one look at Keiko and yelled down the hallway for a doctor. Kaji backed back into the room and picked up the cell phone.
"Still there?" he spoke into it.
"What was..."
"I'll wrap things up here, then come over. Something potent, right," he snapped the phone shut.
It took thirty minutes for Kaji to get out of the hospital. Five minutes of nasty stares from guards and the doctor that attended Keiko, ten minutes physically restraining Keiko after she broke her aluminum folding chair on the doctor's face and tried to pry out the female physician's teeth. They had had to tie her to a gurney, and then weigh down the gurney frame with cinderblocks someone had found in a maintenance closet, because she kept tipping it over. Why a state-of-the-art hospital had not one straight-jacket, Kaji could not fathom.
After they had her squared away, other hospital staff took over, and Kaji, the guards, and the doctor all went outside and smoked a few cigarettes. Looking into the darkness and the park that bordered that side of the hospital, it was quietly concluded that Kaji had gone for help after the patient had stabbed herself, and her shirt and bra had been removed in order to treat the wound, in the presence of witnesses.
The doctor, a woman in her mid-thirties, slipped Kaji her phone number when the two guards weren't looking. Kaji pocketed it, but didn't have the force of will to so much as wink at her.
After smoking two cigarettes, Kaji begged off and walked around the exterior of the hospital to the parking lot. At his car, he called up Section 2 and let them know that Asuka was loose, and that they needed to find her. He told them she was in Major Katsuragi's car. Then he hung up and turned off his phone. Enough of this.
Ryogi Kaji stared at the thing in front of Katsuragi's apartment door. Hefting the shopping bag over one shoulder, he climbed onto it and wedged himself onto its back, tapped the buzzer with his foot, and rested both feet against the doorframe. He waited, heard things moving inside, and then the door hissed open.
Misato was wearing cropped jean-shorts and a sleeveless yellow t-shirt. Kaji had a good view of her cleavage, being higher off the ground then normal. Katsuragi leaned forward against the frame, giving him an even better view.
"I see you met chubby," she said, her voice still flat.
Kaji kicked the enormous Buddha's back with the heel of his shoe, then jumped down, pressing against Misato.
"Brought the booze," he said.
The door closed behind them.
Dinner was a bowl into which Misato had dumped several instant meals. It reminded Kaji of the potluck meals they had eaten with Akagi and their other friends in college. He mentioned this to Misato, who barely acknowledged it. She sat across from him, not looking at him, a hand covering a glass of the sake he had brought. She picked a string bean out of the large bowl, sniffed it, and popped it into her mouth.
Kaji sipped his own glass of sake. He had never seen Katsuragi like this before. She was simply... numb.
He considered leaving. Misato obviously needed time to sort this shit out, to grieve. She didn't need him here, and he had a come-hither phone number burning a hole in his pocket. He had come to comfort her, yes, but he also wanted to get in her pants. There seemed little chance of that, right now.
So, why not leave?
He picked a bit of gray meat out of the bowl, sniffed as Misato had, and put it on the plate in front of him. It had gone bad, in the peculiar way freeze-dried foodstuffs can.
Why not leave this woman to her quiet misery, call up that doctor, and have some fun?
The noodles were still good, he twirled his chopsticks around and brought them to his lips.
Would she even notice if I left?
A sip of sake went down smokey, smooth.
Does it matter to her?
A radish, still good. He crunched it thoughtfully.
Why am I still here?
