So, this is a new chapter, it's been a while huh.

I'm not dead, i promise!


I sipped from the sweating water glass; I felt like ripping my hair out. It had been almost three weeks since Jun had gone into the wind and I hadn't been able to even confirm that he was still alive, let alone still in Japan. This made my life interesting in that the only other person inside the organization I could count on was Richards and he was under cover as a maintenance tech so his utility was limited.

That wasn't the source of my current frustration, that honor belonged solely to Asuka Langley Shikinami, who was proclaiming loudly and to whoever would listen just how awesome she was. As I remembered it, she was going to be torn to ribbons and eaten alive by monstrous parodies of her own evangelion. So it goes.

I rolled my eyes to the side, there was a bird sitting on the window ledge pecking at a crack in the weather stripping. It seemed to notice me looking at it, locked eyes with me for a moment and just as quickly took to the air and flew out of sight.

I envied that bird.

'Screw it' I thought to myself. I grabbed my bag and exited the classroom via the back door, engaging in the time honored tradition of ditching class. The sensei was too distracted, splitting his attention between teaching class and dealing with the disruption caused by five feet of red headed arrogance to notice my own departure, not that it would have stopped me anyway. I'd long since given up caring.

Though that may have just been the sleep deprivation talking, something I'd planned to rectify forthwith; I stalked down the hallway to the staircase and casually sauntered up the two flights to the roof. I pushed open the thin metal door and was met with a less than oppresive rush of warm air and a completely deserted rooftop, an ideal napping place; I picked a shady spot next to an inactive condensing unit and propped my head up on my bag, I was out the second my eyes shut.

Sleep was dreamless, rejuvinating, and calm. I wasn't sure what time it was when I finally woke up, though I quickly determined two things, the first was that the sun was still up, the second that I wasn't alone.

"Hello." I stated simply to the boy standing above me.

"You missed class." He said simply.

"I did." I agreed, blinking the sleep out of my eyes. He sat down next to me as I sat up, he looked bothered. "So, do you come up here often or were you looking for me, Ikari?"

"Shinji."

"Right." I remembered the agreement we'd made. "So, were you looking for me, Shinji?" I asked.

He relaxed against the condenser unit. "I guess I was" he admitted. "I… don't know if I can keep doing this, I'm not like you, you seem so sure of yourself and I… I'm scared Rei, every time I get in that thing… I'm terrified." He sighed and looked down into his lap "I'm just a coward, always running away."

I put my hand on his, he flinched; I wasn't surprised. "Shinji, you didn't run away, you saved me. You're not a coward, you're the bravest of all of us." I encouraged. "Courage is pushing on even when you're scared, when you're terrified but you keep going for the people who count on you."

"You… really think so?"

"Shinji, you climbed into a machine you'd never seen before, to save a girl you'd never met before, you knew it was suicide but you wouldn't let me go through that. There are grown men who would have fled; I think you're the bravest person I know." I finished, my hand firmly wrapped around his. It was warm, slightly moist, he was nervous.

He squeezed back, he lifted his head and smiled.

Then the siren went off and ruined the moment.

XXX

I sat in the control saddle rolling over in my head again how I'd gotten to where I was, standing, waiting for a signal to catch a living bomb, an Angel, that was going to kill itself to kill us… unless we stopped it. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back in the seat… and remembered.

"We're catching it, with our hands." Asuka asked incredulously.

"Well, Eva's hands." I corrected under my breath.

"Yes, you're going to catch it, and kill it, or it's going to kill, us to put it simply." Katsuragi stated. "I'm not going to force you to do it, you can run away, we can all run away."

"What are our chances?" Shinji asked finally.

"Not very good, the numbers are pretty depressing." She admitted.

My fellow pilots looked unsure, I was unsure, but, there was something bigger than us, something we had to fight for. I looked at the palm of my hand and worked my fingers back and forth, flexing my hand, something I'd seen somebody else do long ago…

"This is a fighting hand." I said to myself, quietly.

Everybody looked at me.

So maybe it wasn't that quiet. They looked for some kind of explanation or clarification. I held out my hands in front of me and flexed them, looking into my palms and then back up to everybody else, "My hands... they are fighting hands, that's what I'm good at, that's what I'm here for, that's what we are here for, that's what every soldier since the beginning of time has been for. We're fighting to keep others from having to fight." I said, turning my glance towards Shinji.

"Or fighting for others who can't fight on their own," I continued, "to protect those who need protecting, and right now there's a lot of people out there who need us; so that's what we do, what we're meant to do, and that's what I'm going to do, so count me in." I concluded, surprised at my own intensity, surprised that I'd even spoken up.

Katsuragi had been surprised, Shinji and Asuka didn't know me well enough before I changed to know any better.

It was going to be really interesting to see how everything turned out after all this, especially considering how I'd pretty much confessed to the commander that I wasn't who I appeared to be…

But even so, there was a job to do, we were going to save the world, at least one more time.

My leg felt tight, the bone still wasn't healed fully and the throbbing ache was never far from my mind, I just hoped that the sympathetic link didn't work both ways, it wouldn't do for my Eva to cramp up and trip on this sprint we were about to attempt.

There was a countdown timer ticking by on the heads up display, less than a minute left. I pulled a switch on the right control stick and a link opened to the other two Eva units, Shinji and Asuka were both concentrating on their own countdown timers. They saw my window open and each nodded. I smiled, we could do this, I was sure of it.

"Get ready. You're going to have to rely on your own best judgement, visual data is not reliable, good luck." I heard Katsuragi say over the radio.

I dropped my unit into a crouch, ready to launch at a moment's notice. My muscles, the Eva's muscles tensed up, ready to spring in an instant.

"Launch!" She yelled, and I sprung. I could see the rainbow colored ball falling towards the earth and I pushed with everything I had, dirt, gravel, and pavement were flung from the earth in my wake as I tore through the country side.

I tried to ignore the pain in my leg as I focused on the path being superimposed on my heads up display, a faint red track to be followed based on Katsuragi's best guess. My eyes flicked up to check the position of the Angel, it was changing, it's shape opening up, it's course was shifting. I looked ahead again, power lines, I kicked free from the earth and hurdled the high tension cables like an olympic athlete, crashing back into the earth with the force of a locomotive and pushing even harder.

I checked again and the Angel seemed to be dropping faster, I wasn't going to make it there on time, that was for sure. The course shifted again, the line moved, I turned to follow it as best I could, the huge size and inertia of the Eva did not lend itself to rapid course correction but I did my damnedest.

The Angel was low, so very very low, and then the shockwave and the flash of light, and I could see Shinji's unit in the distance, ready to catch the Angel all by himself, and I knew he could do it…and yet still…

I shoved the control sticks forward into their locks and the Eva gained a burst of speed. I could see Asuka's unit pushing towards the Angel ahead of me, she'd get there first, but just barely. They disappeared behind the last hill as I closed in, the Angel was still above, they still hadn't killed it, and then I cleared the hill and knew why.

Unit-02 was holding a knife, ready to strike the core, but the core was spinning around in its race like a ball bearing, she was frozen; I wasn't. I planted my feet and slid the last hundred meters to the Angel and latched onto the core with my hands, locking it into place. I felt the burning through the neural feedback almost instantly, and Unit-02 still wasn't moving. "Asuka, do it now!" I screamed over the com link.

"Just what the hell do you think I'm doing!" she screamed back through the radio and a second later both knives were slammed into the Angel's core, followed by a bright red knee. The red sphere split like a glass bead, the Angel went limp, the world turned red in a shower of blood.

I had just sarted to relax in my seat when a warning tone filled the plug, my eyes snapped to the display, radar lock. I saw the trail, a rocket was headed straight for me. 'No, missile' I thought, correcting my first assessment, 'MANPAD?'

I threw my hand up to deploy an AT field and in that moment all power died, the battery timer clicked to zero. A moment later I heard the dull thud of the warhead exploding against the Eva's armor. A second explosion followed and I felt my teeth rattle as the shockwave shook the plug. The Eva was still shutdown, but if there was enough power for the radio…

I pulled the activation switch on the control yoke and heard the radio crackle, there was enough power for that, "This is Unit zero, I'm under attack!" I yelled into the radio. Static answered me, and I had a feeling deep in my gut that the rocket must have taken out the radio arial. I felt the plug lurch backwards, it was being extracted and I hadn't even tried, knew there probably wasn't the power for it.

A moment later gravity seemed to disappear and then I felt the plug hit the ground, I scrambled out of the control chair as the LCL drained out of the plug. I grabbed at the seam of the seat pad and pulled it up, the Jun had given me was hidden under it, even though I never imagined I would need it.

'Preparation has it's benefits' I thought as the hatch cracked and the light poured in, I could hear a helicopter and I heard yelling, yelling in english.

"Come out with your hands in the air and you won't be harmed!" The accent screamed Brooklyn. Brooklyn was under water. I racked the action on the colt and fired it out the door, I heard cursing and then a metal cylinder bounced in through the open hatch and started spewing smoke.

My gun clicked empty and I threw it to the end of the plug. The smoke started irritating my lungs, I couldn't breathe, I edged towards the fresh air coming in through the hatch when the hands reached in and dragged me out.

An object flashed across my vision, I recognized it as an M4 Carbine immediately before it collided with my head and I stopped seeing entirely.


Oh sh-