Chapter 10

Shinji set the phone receiver down before it finished dialing. He looked around for a moment, settling himself, then sat down cross-legged to wait for Misato. Things were more fluid than he had thought. So, probably if anything killed him, or even if anything or anyone initiated Third Impact, he'd be given a chance to return to this point. He smiled briefly, thinking about how boring things could get if this kept up. Still, he'd have a chance unique (he supposed) to human history. He could perfectly fine-tune his life. Of course, he'd have to befriend Misato again, and… Something tugged at the back of his mind.

He closed his eyes in thought, feeling the rhythmic thump from the pavement up through his body. That would be the Angel, running... His eyes snapped open. The Angel had never run. It had only walked. He got up and was just turning to face the mountain around which the Angel would emerge when he heard a massive thud behind him. He whirled around to see the Angel lying on its back several dozen blocks away. He stood frozen, trying to figure out what was going on. He heard the running again. The Angel was just beginning to raise itself when a massive form slammed its foot into the Angel's chest.

"Unit-00," Shinji breathed. How was this possible? Rei should be in the hospital right now, recuperating from injuries sustained from her failed activation attempt. He hoped she had not somehow insisted on reactivating her Eva just to see if she could do it… He wouldn't put it past her. The girl was driven, that was for sure.

The Eva expertly flipped its prog-knife so that the blade now extended out the bottom of its fist as it knelt, and in one motion slammed the knife into the Angel's heart. She didn't move her Eva like someone who was injured. She moved better than he did, in fact. He had a higher synch ratio, but he well knew her physical stamina and grace. She practiced gymnastics and who knew what else. And she was, atleast technically, an Angel herself. He grinned, remembering the AT-field she'd used on Asuka. But of course he'd seen the clues that she was an Angel even back during Third Impact, when she'd appeared to him as a giant white figure and given him… control? The memories were still slightly confusing, but he was beginning to make sense of them.

Then it hit him. She didn't know he was here. And she was about to kill this Angel just a few blocks away. "Rei?..." Shinji had time to say, before the blast-wave washed over him.

The cross-studded earth turned below him.

"Wh-what happened?" he didn't really expect an answer, still being slightly mentally addled from the death he'd just gone through. Atleast it had been relatively painless. If having the skin torn from your bones and then having your whole body flash-incinerated could be considered painless… It could, he decided. He had felt a heat, and then…

"Your Eva initiated Third Impact." Rei told him.

His Eva? "When I died..." When he had died, his Eva had activated, and initiated Third Impact. He didn't know what to make of that. Well, atleast that answered that question for sure. If he died, things would reset, even if he was not in his Eva.

"When did you die?" Rei asked. She feared she already knew the answer, but had to ask anyway. She thought back on the recent events. She had repeated back further than normal, going back to her abortive activation experiment. This time, for some strange reason, she had synched with Unit-00 with no problem. She had spent the next few weeks training, and had then been sent out to battle the Third Angel. She was happy to do it, knowing that Shinji, atleast on some level, preferred not to pilot his Eva. She remembered her previous conversation with him in the original time-line in which he had mentioned that piloting it caused him pain.

"When you killed the Angel a dozen blocks from where I stood." he said, half-smiling. Then he frowned. "But that means that Unit-00 didn't reject you. But that was in... the past. Before these loops started." He stopped, unable to come to any logical conclusion on the limited information available.

"When events restarted this time, I found myself at that first activation test where my unit rejected me." Rei told him. "This time it did not."

"But how..." he closed his eyes, concentrating. Before resetting things this time, he had been thinking about how difficult it must be for Rei to have to go through the physical injuries resulting from the rejection every reset. Had he somehow sent her back further using his mental intention? That… that was insane. Was he supposed to control his thoughts at all times when he was in that strange world? "No... It's too much power," he murmured.

"What do you mean, Pilot Ikari?"

"Rei, I think I somehow sent you further back to... give you another chance. To keep you from getting hurt every time the loop restarted. But this isn't right; one person shouldn't have this kind of power." His eyes were still shut, his teeth gritted. "What harm could I do? I don't even know..."

Despite how far she had come, Rei didn't know what to say in this case. But she did know that this wasn't the time to ask, as she had asked before.

They woke up on the beach. She sat up. Shinji was staring out over the water. She just sat there, wishing she knew what to say to him.

He had no idea what to do. Or what he was capable of. What if he did something that he couldn't reverse? The entire world was in his hands. More importantly, Rei's life was in his hands as well. Eva spread its wings, sending the two of them on their way.

He hung up the phone, and slumped to the ground, wondering what to do. His eyes were glazed, he didn't pay attention to the battle going on several blocks away. The Angel slammed to the ground with a bright flash of light, he slowly raised his head, and saw Misato's car door open.

"Am I real late?" She asked, cheerfully.

What now? he thought, as he got in. With a slight fluttering sensation in his stomach, he realized that he had once again done… something. It remained to be seen what it was. Ayanami wasn't in her Eva, so he assumed she was once again laid up in a NERV hospital.

Things had proceeded much the same as they had in the original time-line. He was lost in thought, which caused Misato to behave as she had originally, when he had also been quiet, but for different reasons. He had immediately agreed to fight the Angel, and had been loaded up into the Eva, and now found himself facing the same monster he had faced several times already.

He ducked as the Angel slashed at him with its energy lance. Unconsciously modulating his own field, he reached out, ripped a hole in the Angel's AT field, drew his prog-knife, and slammed it into the Angel's heart. As the Angel lost cohesion, he felt its field waver beneath his own, and tried to shape his own field to contain the explosion. Might as well use the time to try out a few ideas I had about AT-field shaping, he thought. The energy plume boiled upward, found the flaws in his field, and again washed over the landscape.

Damn... better luck next time, I guess.

Ritsuko approached him as he was on his way to the shower, his hair still dripping LCL. He turned as he saw her.

"Shinji, what was that you were trying to do at the end? I could tell that you were attempting to manipulate your AT field..."

"I was trying to contain the explosion as the Angel died." He shrugged, "I guess I was just experimenting. The Angels use their AT fields in so many ways, I was thinking..." he paused, remembering that Ritsuko would have only seen this one Angel, and perhaps the data on the first two. She wouldn't know what he was talking about.

She nodded, lost in thought. The boy was obviously a prodigy. His extremely high synch ratio, along with the fact that he had maintained the mental acuity to experiment with things even though it was his first time in the massive machine showed how talented he was.

"You know, we could conduct tests." She said slowly. "I never considered something like this." She turned to leave, then stopped, turning her head to Shinji with a smile, "...good job on the Angel, by the way." She turned and walked away. Shinji stood there, feeling the glow. Praise still felt good, even under these circumstances.

"Are you going to take a shower, or are you just going to stand there dripping all over the hall?" He turned to see Misato's smiling face. "Great job out there!"

"Thanks." He turned to go, then paused. "Could you tell me where they're keeping... the other injured pilot? I wanted to see how she was doing..."

"That's very thoughtful..." she looked closer. "Are you blushing?"

"Uhhh..."

Misato laughed, seeing his discomfort, "I'm just teasing. Go take a shower; I'll find out for you."

He stood in front of the door, the long hallway stretching to either side. He looked up. That's the number Misato gave me… He knocked on the door. There was no answer. He opened it slowly.

"Ayanami?" She lay bandaged, her one visible eye closed. He closed the door, and went over to the chair by the side of the bed. He stared at her for several long moments, then put his head down on his arms, on the edge of the bed. He was mentally tired. Physically, it was near the beginning of the day, but that didn't matter. He briefly wondered what would happen if he somehow kept resetting a day over and over again. Physically he wouldn't need sleep. It made for an interesting mental exercise to think of all the weird possibilities the resets brought.

I wish I knew what I was doing...

He awoke with a jerk, and lifted his head. She was awake and staring at him. "Why are you here?" she asked.

"Oh... I guess I somehow changed things back to the way they were. It looks like Unit-00 rejected you again."

"What are you talking about?" she closed her good eye. "Please leave."

He looked at her in confusion. "When things restarted the last time... don't you remember?" Panic gripped him. He had to know, but couldn't bring himself to kiss her on the lips. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. "I'm sorry you have to go through... this pain every time things restart."

She looked at him. "Why did you do that?"

She… she didn't remember him. He came to the cold realization that he had somehow erased her memories. It… it must've been when I was thinking about if I could return things to the way they were… She didn't know him any more. All the things they'd done together, the time they'd spent. He blindly ran from the room. He couldn't bear to think about what he'd done to her. She'd been so happy, and now he'd stripped that away from her by accident.

She closed her eyes. Something within her throbbed. A tear slowly leaked out and ran down the side of her face. Why am I crying? Why had the boy, the Eva pilot, run from the room? She did seem to have previous memories as the boy had implied. She would have to somehow overcome her conditioning and in order to get close to him and find out what he knew. She drifted into unconsciousness.

Asuka knew things were wrong when everything reset for the second time. Kaji hadn't been much help. What little came out of NERV, he wouldn't tell her, always redirecting the conversation in that maddeningly smooth way of his. She sighed, looking out the window of her apartment. It would be some time before she would know what...

The sky suddenly darkened, then she found herself drifting over earth again. Maybe I'll find out sooner rather than later. She turned, and saw Shinji. His back was to her, his shoulders shaking slightly. Someone was holding him. Comforting him. she corrected herself. Is that... Rei?

No, it couldn't be her. The hair was a different color, and she was... older. She shivered slightly. The woman seemed to look straight through her. She was slightly surprised to find that she couldn't bring herself to be disgusted with him for this show of emotion. Am I actually... feeling sorry for him?

She picked her head up from the sand. Shinji lay still beside her, the orange light playing over his white shirt. Hesitantly, she put a hand on his shoulder, "Shinji, what's wrong?..."

A minute passed. She was about to give up, when he spoke, "I... erased Ayanami."

She had to force herself not to cringe away from him. "Y-you mean completely?"

"No." His voice shook. "Just her memories of the last few resets."

She didn't know what to say. It had been obvious that they had built up a pretty meaningful relationship.

He looked up at her, tears in his eyes. "Aren't you going to make fun of me for being weak?"

"I guess not." she said after a short pause. For some reason, she just couldn't bring herself to do it. Maybe it was the strangeness of it all, or the fact that there was nobody here but the two of them.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Don't you change on me too, Asuka!"

She jumped slightly at that. Slowly she reached out and pulled him to her shoulder. "Everybody changes, Third Child." She flinched as she felt his tears in her hair, then laughed to herself. What happened to her hair here didn't matter. She became more somber, as she let him cry. Shinji literally had the world in the palm of his hand. It was more surprising, she supposed, that there hadn't been more casualties. Or maybe there had been, and none of them even knew it.

I don't think you're weak at all, Shinji.