Evangelion: Rebuild a Legend - Chapter 12

Memento Mari.

1998 A.D., Kyoto University

Mari Makinami, age 16, stepped into Metaphysical Biology Lab 1 and quietly closed the door behind her. Yui Ikari, campus prodigy and Mari's assigned mentor, was splayed across a desk with her head lolling atop an open notebook as a rivulet of drool made its way onto her short hair, slowly seeping towards the inked letters on the crisp paper.

The soft squeaks of laboratory test rats in their containers, combined with the forced air cooling venting into the room, provided a sort of white noise that had no doubt lulled her irresponsible mentor to sleep - either that or just another late night with Rokubungi.

Mari didn't set down her own bag for a moment, entranced by the older woman's sleeping beauty, before she finally stepped closer, her long sheet of hair swishing behind her. Yui's mouth, despite being slightly open, had an upturned smile on it. She looked happy.

How annoying.

Mari reached over and pinched Ikari's cheek, checking to see just how asleep she really was. Besides a minor twitch and sleepy grumble she received no further reaction. Letting her hand trace downwards her fingers fell on the small, thin-framed glasses Yui had left on the desk next to her, and silently she snatched them away. Before Mari was even conscious of what she had done she had zipped her bag closed again, having stealthily stolen away Yui's glasses in what she was now realizing was a fit of impetuous pique.

Before she could reconsider her actions the door opened and the blonde-haired visage of her co-researcher stepped in. She was a foreign student who had placed into top honors just like she and Yui had, but was the proper age for a college student compared to Mari, who had skipped several grades.

"Mari, hey, the President's office is calling for you," she said.

Mari nodded, "Oh, okay. Thanks Alice." She walked out of the room behind the blonde, wondering what the President of the university could possibly want with her that was so important it hadn't passed through Professor Fuyutsuki first.

Yui, for her part, woke up a few moments later, and yawned loudly in a bit of a daze.

A moment passed as she stretched out her fingers blindly, then she sat up in her chair, scrambling.

"Wha… where did I… put my glasses?"

A few hours later Mari considered the events of the day as she sat on a bench with her fellow research students. The wooden slats were warming the bottom of her legs thanks to her jean shorts, and she idly wondered how the other two girls could possibly enjoy wearing lab coats outdoors in the summer heat.

"Oh, darn it! I wanted the orange juice!" Yui exclaimed directly after the clink of a can hitting the bottom of a vending machine tray could be heard. She had obviously pressed the wrong button.

Alice looked exasperated. "Are you still looking for your glasses?"

Mari's gaze shifted to the side. The President had offered her a position with an overseas research team working on a merger of classical biology and metabiological physics. Saint Ford University in England: far from home, but incredibly prestigious.

She had questioned why Yui Ikari, the more obvious choice given her incredible potential, had not been offered the chance first. The President had simply shrugged and explained the Japanese government had already snapped her up for their own special project.

Of course they had.

"Hey, you guys, you haven't seen them anywhere?" Yui's question pierced Mari's thoughts.

"How would I know?" she responded with audible annoyance, "You should get contacts already. Like me. You're wasting your good looks wearing those things."

Before Yui could make a decent comeback Alice changed the topic of discussion: "Yeah... anyways, did you know half the guys around here are acting all let down?" She took a drag of her cigarette and made eye contact with Yui, "All 'cause the great Yui Ikari decided on dating Gendo Rokubungi instead of the far more eligible bachelors?"

Yui's face turned into one giant, wistful smile, "But... Gendo is just, so cool."

Alice avoided facepalming herself with her cigarette while Mari's expression went from annoyed neutrality to visible disgust.

"...not really. You're the only one who thinks that," Alice rejoined, being used to Yui's eccentricities, not that it stopped the blonde student from waving her cigarette around while she kept on listing the faults of Yui's new boyfriend.

"I mean, you have to admit he's out there. And gloomy. You can never tell what he's actually thinking. Shifty! That's the word. He's shifty."

Mari's eyes narrowed as she listened, but Yui only turned thoughtful.

"Yeah, everyone says that… but he's not, he's not like that at all."

Mari kept listening, glad that Alice had taken the lead on this. Maybe she could unravel the enigma of Yui Ikari just a bit more than she'd managed to - anything to give Mari an advantage.

"Like the first time we met," Yui began a story, "It was in the cafeteria and he was in front of me in line. He said, 'I'll take the B meal', and you guys know I love the B meal on Tuesdays, so I said I'd have that too! But the cafeteria server told me that Gendo had gotten the last one and I was like, 'Oh no!'"

She laughed to herself, remembering the exchange. "I stared at him with this hopeful look on my face and he just… turned around and started to walk away. I was still holding the A meal they'd given me and was all disappointed when suddenly he turned around, set down his tray, and offered to trade."

Yui was lost in her story as Alice feigned interest in Gendo Rokubungi's unexpected show of chivalry.

"So then I said we should eat together, and he said 'No, I prefer to eat by myself,' but I wasn't having any of that. So yeah, we sat together and talked, and talked, and he smiled for me - it was so cute!" She was gushing now.

"Ughhh, I don't want to hear all these sappy details," Mari said, standing up suddenly, "I'm going to class." She gave them a huff and a wave, then set off down the walkway.

"Whoa," Alice said, looking over at the retreating figure, "That was harsh. God she needs to get laid. Hey, Yui?" she changed the topic again, keenly aware of why Mari might have reacted the way she did.

"Yeah?"

"You did way better than Mari and I did on that last project for Fuyutsuki. Doesn't it get frustrating? Always being the one at the top?"

Yui hmmed to herself, "I suppose sometimes you just can't complete, no matter how hard you try. You know?" She laughed playfully.

Neither Yui or Alice would know that Yui's words had coincided in timing with Mari, having made her way indoors, walking right by Gendo Rokubungi as they passed in the hall.

Irony is strange like that.

"Crap!" Mari said to herself, standing in front of Professor Fuyutsuki's lab. She was mentally berating herself for spending the last week slacking off too much and forgetting to hand in the report that was due the day before.

She knocked on the door and heard a muffled response when suddenly a loud crash sounded from the other side, followed by a bunch of clattering sounds and a burst of high-pitched squeaks. Mari rushed through the door to come upon the scene of Yui Ikari, bent over on her knees with her derriere in the air, surrounded by a litter of running rats, strewn about straw, and tipped over containers.

"Oh my god! Yui, what'd you do?!" she exclaimed, still standing there in shock as Yui turned her head around, pushing herself from her prone position and onto her legs.

"I was trying…" she sounded completely embarassed, "To get some documents off the shelf, and I couldn't reach, so I got on a chair, but the chair had wheels, and I slipped and fell right onto the cages and," but Yui's stream of conscious retelling was interrupted by the determined Mari.

"Fine, all right already, just come on and help me catch them!"

What ensued was a fifteen minute chase around the room culminating in the last rodent escapee making a valiant leap for freedom from the top of Yui's head and directly onto Mari's face. But Mari needn't have worried, as Yui immediately slammed a shopping bag down over her head, catching the poor thing at last.

The only side effect, of course, being that Mari was sent sprawling onto the ground, knocking her bag open.

"Oh thank god, we got them all back in their cages," Yui said, ignoring the undignified position she had left Mari in, as she finished shutting the last cage.

"Ow, ow, my contact slipped," Mari said, trying to find the errant thing sliding across her eyeball, and there it went, falling out as she involuntarily blinked, flitting to the dirty floor. "Ow, no, dammit!"

Yui turned around, only to see Mari's bag splayed open on the ground, its contents spilling onto the floor.

Mari followed her line of sight, dreading the next few seconds in growing horror as both of the women stared at Yui's glasses, half-fallen out of Mari's bag. The glasses Yui had been hunting for for weeks, thinking she had just lost them.

"Wha… Mari, are those, those are my glasses!" she said in shock, staring at the proof of Mari's weeks old act of theft. "I had so much trouble without them, why, why did you…?"

"Because you're… so annoying!" Mari said sharply, staring right into her mentor's eyes, those beautiful eyes, "Everything you do is perfect. You're the best - at everything! And you're pretty, and cute, and brilliant, and sweet, and you're so impossible and it's just too much!"

Yui slumped forward, having realized this had probably been a long time coming.

"And even though you knew how I felt," Mari accused her, "You didn't return any of it! You know I have feelings for you and you've never even said a word to me about it."

Yui shifted uncomfortably, unsure of what to say to the younger girl, who was looking up at her with undisguised jealousy and need.

"I just wanted…" Mari said, sending two hands up into her long unkempt hair, now completely tangled by Yui's rodent chasing antics, "I, you…"

This time it was Yui who interrupted calmly. "Mari," she said in a soothing voice, "Here, sit. I'll fix… your hair." Mari couldn't do anything but nod, letting Yui take the lead as she fetched a comb from her desk drawer.

It was quiet, all of sudden, less the background noise of air conditioning and small animals scurrying within their small plastic homes.

Mari sat like that, losing track of time, as Yui combed out the tangles in her long, lustrous hair. Not talking. Just feeling. Finally Mari gathered up her courage again.

"I'm sorry for saying… that stuff," Mari offered quietly. "I'm leaving next month, to England, I'll be studying there."

"I know." Yui stopped combing and slid her hand around the long, flowing hair at the nape of Mari's neck, considering whether to make a ponytail out of it. "If you want my glasses - I'll give them to you, Mari."

She let go of her hair and took up the rounded frames, placing them over Mari's eyes. "Although, I don't think they're the right strength for you."

It was true, one of Mari's eyes now had an intense blur caused by double prescription where the one contact hadn't fallen out, and her other eye, not having the contact that had eventually fallen out after the scuffle, wasn't quite right either.

But it felt… nice. That Yui would do something like that for her.

Yui's hands had moved back to Mari's hair and were pulling two long bundles apart. The older woman dipped down back towards her bag and came back up with something in her hand, rubber bands, it turned out, and was happily tying Mari's hair into long twintails arrayed behind her head.

Abruptly the hairstyling ceased and Yui bent down to fetch one last thing: a hand-mirror. She placed it directly in front of Mari's face so she could evaluate the handiwork.

Yui giggled softly, "All done. You look so cute! Like a school girl."

Mari sighed, "Of course I do… I'm 16." She stared forward at the powered-off computer monitor in front of her, barely able to catch Yui's smiling face in the reflection of the black screen.

"Yui… I'll... I hope you and Gendo will be happy."

Then Yui's cheery smile deepened to something more real.

"Thank you, Ms. Makinami. I'm sure we will be."

2000 A.D., AEL Adjunct Facility - London, U.K.

Mari Makinami at age 18 was now a leading authority on adaptational genetics and human cloning. Having arrived in the United Kingdom only two years ago she had been surprised to discover that her so-called study-abroad program had, in fact, been a front for the Artificial Evolution Laboratory and Gehirn, a shadowy government-backed organization tasked with cloning human tissue.

And other things.

Her exposure to the quantum-DNA scavenged from some unknown - alien - source had at once shaken her worldview and affirmed it: all those years spent in metabiology had paid off, and how.

She had spent her first year working in the academic lab with her colleagues: a fellow Japanese, some British, and one American. Together they had created a plethora of new methods for the decomposition and analysis of what they were calling "qDNA" in the literature - not that their findings were being published to the general academic community.

No, the heavily armed men and women that shadowed the scientists' every movement made sure of that. So much for peer review, she thought darkly.

Mari was just finishing her latest report on the successful cloning of baseline human neurons, including enhanced myelin sheaths, for the new Project-E initiative. And who else was reading and approving her reports, but Yui Ikari, her erstwhile crush and now happily married chief scientist at Gehirn's secretive administration branch back at Matsushiro.

Mari, on the other hand, had taken strongly to her fresh new start overseas, having switched to glasses (with the correct prescription) from her old contacts and wearing her hair in the twintail style Yui had tried out on her. She couldn't have her old mentor, but she accepted the marks that Yui had left on her.

So distracted was she by her interactions with her old mentor that it had taken some time for Mari to realize that she was, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner. Sure, she could "resign" from her position, but considering that the last member of the team who had submitted a letter of departure had conveniently been found dead in their garage with the car running the next morning, well, it didn't take much to put two and two together when all traces of their resignation letter disappeared from the computer systems.

And, true to form, Yui hadn't been bothered by this in the least, even when Mari had brought it up the 'unfortunate suicide' in a circumspect way over an encrypted voice-chat. "Our work is very important, Mari."

"The fate of the world is at stake."

Just as Mari was about to hit the submit key and send off her summary email to the private distribution list (all under Heavy Top Secret classification), a pinging sound erupted from her speaker and a small red badge popped up.

Fucking Naoko Akagi, again.

Every single week the inane woman sent out a completely useless "progress update" about her designs and theoretical work on the MAGI supercomputer system. The small, barely-there updates were all a gamesmanship move meant to demonstrate to those in charge how important she and her work were.

And she always timed them somehow right before Mari submitted her own genetics reports.

"That bitch!" she huffed, quite out loud. Akagi was constantly stealing her thunder.

Thankfully the office was mostly dark: it was 11:00 PM, no one was there. So why the hell was Akagi typing up emails so early in the Japanese morning, nine hours ahead? This had to be purposeful.

Mari twisted open her thermos and poured a steaming cup of tea into her cup, swirling it around as she breathed on it to cool it off a bit. Her annoyance had turned to a minor sort of cold anger, and as she sipped her Earl Grey she had an idea.

Setting down the cup her fingers began flying over the keys, years of misspent youth coming to the fore as she crafted a special message to Akagi congratulating her on her latest "breakthroughs."

And Naoko, god bless her withered soul, fell for it hook, line, and sinker. She opened up the cutesy attachment that Mari had just sent her, an e-card hiding a custom little phishing attack vector, and now Mari had unfettered remote access to the computer scientist's desktop from an entire continent away.

Take that! Mari triumphantly hummed to herself as she spun victoriously in her chair. With a few keystrokes she began downloading, in careful chunks, compressed and encrypted text data from core administration staff at headquarters.

As long as she kept the datastream small enough and didn't try to download any larger binaries or videos, the watchdog ICE programs shouldn't catch on to what she was up to. After all, they were actually on the same virtual private network; the intrusion countermeasure routines were designed to handle external threats.

Mari gave it about ten minutes before she slowed down the request rate and then started staggering it into chunks, hoping to emulate the normal ebb and flo of TCP/IP packets to mask her activities.

Finally done, she began reading the mess of emails, notes, and project plans that she had illicitly acquired, careful to copy them over by serial cable to her own air-gapped laptop first. No network card, no problems, she assured herself.

The hour stretched on to 11 PM, then midnight, then 2 AM, then 6.

The tea was long gone by the time a visibly shaking Mari pushed her laptop off of now crumbled pants and onto the concrete floor, still mindful to set the disk encryption back on before shutting the lid and letting it power down.

And she sat there, huddled in the corner of the room, just as the early morning light of dawn began to break through the windows and illuminate the fog outside, trying to come to grips with everything she had discovered.

It was there, on that unremarkable day just a few scant weeks before Second Impact, that Mari Makinami decided that Yui Ikari needed to die.

She had some calls to make.

2015 A.D., +2 Days After Sachiel

Gendo Ikari's Apartment, 7:00 A.M.

Gendo Ikari was staring at himself in his bathroom mirror, sans his trademark orange-tinted glasses, while holding a very neglected razor in his hand. Ritsuko was showering in the stall next to him, the steam fogging up the top of the mirror.

No matter how hungover the two of them might've been they couldn't escape the expectations put upon NERV command staff, particularly for Ritsuko, who had direct reports like Maya Ibuki to deal with in Central Dogma.

In other words, no amount of alcohol was going to keep them from doing their jobs. How had Ritsuko put it? If Misato can do it, you bet your ass we can! Gendo thought that Ritsuko might be underestimating Captain Katsuragi's tolerance for alcohol, but it didn't matter. They had work to do.

The sound of water abruptly cut off.

"Towel?" Ritsuko called out, poking her head out from behind a shower curtain. She was being curiously modest after the previous night's festivities, but Gendo had always felt that women were an absolute enigma anyways and he had best not comment. During his time in Instrumentality he had tried to pay some amount of attention to the differences between the fairer sex and his own, after all.

Besides, the last thing Gendo needed was for the ghost of a post-Third Impact Mari Makinami Illustrious to come and haunt him, because that would be something she would do. Even if it were impossible. "Impossible" was her favorite.

He put down the razor, having thought better of de-bearding himself, and handed Ritsuko a towel. The mass of dripping blonde-hair whisked back into the shower stall as she began toweling herself off.

Gendo, meanwhile, began making a checklist in his head of all the things he needed to address before the main timeline asserted itself and Shamshel appeared.

Talk to Rei.

Talk with Shinji.

Engage with Soryu.

Deal with Kaji.

Get Mari.

Get Adam.

Contact Nagisa?

On the counter the phone buzzed, a small text message scrolling over a tiny screen like an old pager.

"What's that?" Ritsuko asked, stepping out of the stall.

Gendo turned towards her, holding up the phone: "Rei is awake."