2.19: [Turnabout]
I feel you
Your eyes staring from behind
I know you
Your type, playing with my mind
One more time
I don't think so
One more time, messed up
I don't think so
Once again,
I have to hold it back
Once again, passion
I have to hold it back
Hold back, don't let
Anybody near me
I want to forget, never relive
I push you back,
Sorry, but I can't
Before I engage, I want to revive
I feel you
Getting closer to my heart
When you leave -
I am letting down my guard
[…]
Psy'Aviah, 'Attract/Reject'
For those with attentive spirits, the events that unfolded over the next couple of days might not have come as a surprise – perhaps, the trajectories along which they had been flowing all along had been hidden in plain sight, silently proceeding along the same course they had always been meant to take, neither drawing much attention to them nor having been particularly concealed.
Even now, their gradual, steady progress was unchanged. The developments were simply approaching the point beyond which they would be impossible to ignore, even by those who would have believed their logical results to be preposterous impossibilities not too long ago.
"I don't need any parents, or friends, and most certainly no guys.
When it comes down to it, we're still all alone in the end."
I WANT TO DO TERRIBLE THINGS TO YOU
When Asuka first began to vye for the Third Child's attention, she though it would be a matter of a few minutes, an amusing, peripheral triffle to pass the time -
He was, after all a simple, hormone-addled creature and she could rightfully think herself far more attractive than any conquests a boy like him could reasonable expect to make.
The prize of his reciprocation would have been yet another competition to win, another pair of eyes to turn her way, another means to flatter herself simply to prove she could.
But ever since the recent series of events involving that bespectacled transferee, she could no longer look past the steady divergence between that theory and the practice of her life.
He should have been falling at her feet a long time ago, and longer since forgotten like all the other little boys who had long given up on stuffing letters into her shoe locker, but that wasn't what happened.
Instead, she was increasingly forced to consider the jarring possibility that he might refuse her in someone else's favor.
The little wallflower might be gone, but the First Child was all the more present in her thoughts, every reminder of her existence pricking her like a thorn in her side as she went about minding her own business, and there could be ony one answer to that:
This means war.
There wasn't a competition in this world that the Second Child would have allowed herself to love, wether it was the battle for the highest synch rate, the attentions of her classmates at this stupid school or even something as trivial as the affections of that idiotic Third Child.
She would show them all, and she would win, just as she always had.
WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME?
"Shikinami Asuka? That super-cool girl from class A? What would I give to be just like her!"
"They all either want to be with her or be her."
"Hands down one of the coolest people at our school. She's just one of those people who just have to be on the invitation list of any party worth it's salt. That is, if you want people to talk about it. "
"She's just got this exotic beauty. This cold sort of perfection that ordinary mortals like us can't really hope to aspire to. In brief, she's the kind of person you inevitably meet once you stop being a big fish in a small pond, the sort that everyone meets sooner or later, when you first realize the cold, hard truth that there's always someone better out there. Some people can't handle that sort of realization, and so they run themselves ragged, frantically searching for some sort of flaw to justify their jealousy.
But try as they might, they're never going to find one: Shikinami Asuka Langley is perfect."
"I tried confessing to her once, but I guess she values her freedom more than anything. She belongs to no one, and there's no one she could ever truly belong to."
"There are some rumors that she's going out with Ikari Shinji. The same Ikari Shinji who's probably stolen the hearts of half the seventh graders without ever noticing – Like I said, it's just a rumor and I don't doubt that the two of them would deny it straight away if you ever asked them, but it makes sense if you think about it... They're both EVA pilots after all. They even live together. If anyone else had taken Ikari, the other girls would probably have resent it, but since it's Asuka, it's not like any of us had a chance to begin with. None of us could possibly compete with someone as perfect as her, so it would be unreasonable to expect anything else. The two of them are in a league of their own."
"I don't know... I always saw Ikari-kun as a reasonable, gentle and sensitive person. He might be popular with the girls, but he's not your typical heartrob. I can't imagine that he would like someone like Shikinami-san. Everyone keeps going on about how she's so perfect, but I think she's just mean. She's always so quick to make fun of others..."
"Sounds to me like you're jealous that she gets to share a flat with Ikari-kun and you don't! Or do you honestly believe that crazy rumor that he's interested in Ayanami?"
"Ayanami? That Ayanami? Is that supposed to be some sort of april fools joke? Come on, who started this? Was it Aida or Suzuhara?"
"Yes. If I go on ahead, they'll probably laugh and snicker along with me, but none of them has the slightest clue. If they only knew, If they smelled the slightest whiff of weakness, they would rip me to shreds like a flock of vultures.I drive others into corners because I don't want to be cornered myself. That's just how the world works.
Big fish eat small fish.
I'm not stupid.
I know they're not really my friends.
I know that I'm still all alone, even as they crowd all around me to hear what I have to say. They're nothing but stupid, vapid geese, and they're only here to try and see if they can pick up some popularity by osmosis.
There is no such thing as friendship. It's just the simple monkey drive to climb up the social latter, to suck up to the alpha monkey to enjoy the privilege of high status – it's basically the same as lust, except that it's directed at a person of the same gender.
I'm not here to make friends. There's no point to it. There's no point to family, either – that's just the selfish desire to procreate, to make a smaller version of yourself that you can mold to your desires like a doll, only to be dissapointed when it grows up and talks back to you.
The truth is that people are essentially selfish beings, driven only to pursue their own survival. That might not agree with your sentimental little feelings, but we're talking about facts here. Being overly sentimental is just the same as being stupid.
You can shut your eyes and cover your ears, but the truth won't care. Nobody cares. Not about you, nor anyone else. The faster you accept that, the better.
You can only run as fast as who's in front of you, so you have to be in front of everyone, you have to be the fastest, or the big, bad wolf is going to take a bite out of your arse.
"Shikinami Asuka? She's probably the sort of person that is born to be something special, destined to suceed! She's smart, good-looking, and athletic, to boot. She does well at school, speaks four languages, and she is, without doubt, the most populra girl at our school!"
LIE
SILENCE
FACADE
FAKE
SUPERFICIAL
TRUE SELF
REJECTION
STEP-MOTHER
GUARDIAN
WEAKNESS
PRETENSE
EXTERIOR
WALL OF DEFENSIVE
MASK
(Again, and again, like an inssuferably skeaking broken record:)
"intelligent"
(Nights spent in front of those damned books, and those horrid equations that refused to make sense, dancing before her eyes)
"attractive"
("I'm so, so hungry. God, that steak looks tempting right now... I mustn't give in- ")
"athletic"
("I must. Not. Lose! Anything that can be won can be lost, and I can't take losing")
"good at school"
("Don't you dare act like I'm the same as you! We're not the same!")
"four languages"
("Why'd they make us learn French at that stupid Gramma School?!")
"And she's not just any ordinary girl genius, no, she managed to accomplish all this as a side gig to saving the Earth!"
LIAR
"She's an EVA pilot, too!"
LIAR
"Wow! So cool!"
LIAR
"To think that she's an actual Captain even though she's the same age as us. She must be a lot more mature than us..."
LIAR
"There can be no doubt that Asuka Shikinami is a very special young woman. A chosen being."
LIAR
"There can be no doubt that Asuka Shikinami is a lone warrior. Even when she is surrounded by other girls."
WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME?
"Only one thing."
…
"Now would you look at those foolish sheep, drooling over Shikinami like idiots!"
When Shikinami Asuka entered a room, she seemed to warp space like a black hole, leaving only one single direction for people to look in.
Unless some of the people in that room happened to be Suzuhara, and the rest of the little group that Hikari had unflatteringly termed the 'idiot quartett'.
In fact, the fours of them didn't appear particularly impressed and stuck to their corner of the rooms, not moving from the tables they were sitting on nor the walls they had been leaning against.
The taller, tan boy with the noticeable kansai-accent didn't hesitate to detail his precise opinion concerning the redhead. Aida's choice of vocabulary wasn't quite as coarse, but the opinion he expressed was not much better: "Those poor dupes don't know what they're dealing with. That woman is so two-faced, it's almost a bit terrifying."
VERDICT: TWO-FACED
Mitsurugi, ever the voice of reason, made some attempts to admonish the other two.
But let there be no confusion: Though he acted like a total square, was as much of a damned nerd as the rest of them – besides, his test score had outdone hers ever so slightly in last week's test,and ever since he had been giving Shinji supplementary lessons, Asuka felt increasingly deprived of the grounds to call him her favorite insult.
Besides, he was presently arguing that they, meaning Suzuhara and the others, shouldn't sink to her childish level.
Childish her ass! She hated that more than anything. The other two were just stupid little boys, but Mitsurugi could almost be taken for a serious threat.
VERDICT: CHILDISH
Pah! Who cares what those stupid little boys thought. And Mitsurugi really ought to get a life – no wonder he and ol' daddy's boy got along so swimmingly.
Ikari Shinji, Third Child, designated pilot of Evangelion unit 01 -
The greatest dunce of them all.
He just kept standing there, pretending to be lost in thought, observing her with his melancholy, midnight blue gaze as if she were a tower in the distance.
She knew he wanted her – he was quite obviously distracted, only muttering the occasional monosyllabic answer in response to his friends, neither agreeing nor denouncing them.
Idiot!
If he had a problem with her, he should be a man and say it to her face – and if he wanted her, he should leave his idiotic friends behind and come to her.
He could do so much better. He could be hanging out with the coolest people around if he spent his time with her instead, besides, she'd bet anything that she could probably tutor him a lot better than Mitsurugi, whose intelligence was at most slightly above average at most. He had no talent or anything, he was just a remarkably boring person whose uninteresting life left him with a lot of time for studying.
Even so, she had been surprised to learn that the two of them had been studying together – She always thought they spent all their little playdates reading depressing poetry or something.
Truth be told, she was rather offended that Shinji had not thought to ask her if they could do their schoolwork together when she was right there – and besides, she had a far deeper understanding about say, maths, than any simple schoolboy could possibly hope to have. She might almost say that she was a little bit hurt by it. Almost.
For once, she'd found herself feeling generous and condescended to congratulate him for his grade on a test that she could have aced in her sleep after beating up twenty angels, and what did he say in return? "Why, thank you, Shikinami-san! That's very nice of you. To be honest, I think I would have flunked it if it wasn't for Nagato's help..."
Pah! One think he would have appreciated her recent attempt to explain thermal expansion to him, fanservice included.
VERDICT: IGNORED
WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME?
"Only one thing-"
LIE
I HATE BEING IGNORED MORE THAN ANYTHING
This morning, Asuka Shikinami had been met with yet another source of great frustration.
Not too long ago, her classmates had been flocking to her seat to hear the tale of her battle against the Insubstantial Angel. The widespread devastation had still been visible right past the classroom's broken window, and everyone wanted to know how it happened.
But with the reconstruction efforts had been proceeding at an exemplary rate and a new window pane in place, the Second Child was forced to find that her epic struggle had become old news over the weekend.
And old news is old.
When she entered the schoolyard during lunch break to give her usual little speech, she was asked to wait a little bit, by a girl, whose name she had never though worth remembering – All because she and the other girls couldn't wait to "finish hearing Aya-chan's story".
This Aya, whom Asuka had never found particularly worthy of her attention, ha managed to catapult herself from that very position to the Second Child's alloted spot at the very center of this cluster of students, by virtue of accomplishing something which any idiot could have pulled off, but which in such a circle of teenaged girls made her akin to a venerable sage:
This Saturday, she had gone on her first date.
As the say: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
"What was it like?"
"How far did you go?"
"Is he like, our age, or older than us?"
"It is someone from our school?"
"I mean, there's a boy that I've wanted to ask out for ages, but I could never really work up the courage... Can you tell me how you did it? After all, things worked out for you!"
You'd almost think she had whored herself out for the sole purpose of getting to be the center of attention for one day.
This 'Aya' person must be very pleased with herself for managing to hog Asuka's rightfuly earned spotlight, but she shouldn't get too comfortable in it.
If she wanted to, she could have been going on dozens of dates this whole time.
The nerve!
This Aya person would have to pay.
Following her first impulse, Asuka balled her firsts and took a deep breath, readying herself for combat – but that very breath got stuck in her throat, along with all the words she was going to say.
She'd been thinking of shaming and reprimanding that girl, to pop her bubble on her happy day and get the others to turn against her, but that was before she had fully grasped where she was standing – Not in the center, nor even close to it, and not outside the crowd, either, just another face lost in a thickly-packed crowd.
If she were to say something against that girl, would the others even follow her? Or would she end up becoming the laughing stock herself, and be forced to admid that she'd never been on a date.
She was genuinely not sure, and that uncertainty sent chills down her back. Who was she even, without that crowd standing behind her?
It was cold, so cold, to be buried alongside all those ordinary little people.
"Don't you dare say that I'm the same as you! We're not the same! There's no way!"
I HATE BEING IGNORED MORE THAN ANYTHING
Trudging home at dusk, Asuka had to suppress the urge to punch the air in random intervalls.
Not yet.
Not yet, not while there were people around to notice. Soon, soon the concentration of pedestrians would thin out as she approached Misato's apparment in the peripheries of town, there would be aple opportunity to vent her rage.
"Asuka?"
Ugh. It was only Hikari.
Though she was anything but pleased to find the class representative eying her with that typical look of maternal concern that she'd only ever seen from afar.
It confused her, and she wasn't supposed to be confused while talking to her best friend.
I WONT LET ANYBODY TAKE YOUR PLACE
"Yeah? What's the matter?" she replied, nonchalantly.
"Uh, could it be that something's bothering you today?"
A forced smile. "Bothered? Who, me?"
[…]
"You're serious, aren't you? Well you can stop worrying, it's nothing. Where'd you even get the idea?"
"...let's just forget it."
She didn't look like she'd forgotten anything. It rather seemed like she had decided to switch tactics: "In any case... I just wanted you to know that I' very grateful to you."
"...grateful? I mean, I'm always glad when someone actually appreciates my hard work, but what for? Is this about last week's battle?"
"That, too, I guess, but... It's a little strange to bring it up now, but you must have noticed that I didn't use to be very popular in our class. It's only natural, after all, I'm in charge of keeping order – and I don't mind that. Someone has to think of everybody's future, even if they are a lot more interested in other stuff at the moment...
It's sort of the role I've always played, ever since I was small. Since I was the middle child, I was acting as a broker between my sisters, and since we don't have a mother and our father works long hours to support us by himself, I always ended up doing the chores and looking after everyone else. I'm not the oldest, but I suppose I'm the one who had the right personality for it. Whenever Nozomi had trouble with her homework, I'd be the one explaining it to her, and whenever Kodama would have a fight with our dad, I'd try to help them understand each other.
I guess I was just trying to keep our family together. Someone had to do it, and out of all of us, I was the most suited to it – and since I got used to acting serious and responsible all the time, it seemed natural that I should do the same at school – Besides, I wanted to. The other children were just like our family. We were all struggling to live in the world devastated by Second Impact. Nearly everyone was missing something or someone, and there weren't enough people to help.
I don't know how things were in Europe, after all, it's about as far from the south pole as it gets, but here in Japan, the area was already vulnerable to natural disasters, and most of the cities were built by the sea – So there was a lot of destruction.
I still remember the first nursery I went to – it was little more than a halfway dry spot in the ruins of a crumbling shopping center.
In a world like that, I wanted to do anything I could not to be another extra burden that people have to deal with – Not even for out caretakers and teachers, or my dad. After all, he didn't even have a wife to help him with raising three daughters on his own.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I ever regretted it or like I think that this wasn't an important thing for me to do, but as I got older, I kept noticing how the other girls my age were starting to put on makeup and do sort of frivolous things together. Sometimes they made rather unreasonable decisions, but even so, sometimes I can't help but envy them.
Even when they appreciate what I do, I feel like the others sometimes treat me like I'm almost one of the adults – I always end up being the chaperone or the mother hen, and sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out on my own youth. I've barely gotten around to just being a simple girl and just doing things for fun, or simply because I want to.
I certainly never thought that I'd ever get to be friends with someone like you.
But you just accepted me into your group like anyone else and showed me that being successful in life and having fun don't have to be opposites. Ever since we've been friends, I know what it's like to be 'one of the girls'.
I just wanted you to know how much this means to me. You're a very important friend to me, and so... I guess I want you can always come to me with your worries.
If you ever have a problem of your own, I'd do anything I can to help, so don't hesitate to tell me about it, okay?"
Asuka managed no response beyond a few confounded blinks.
"I don't really get half of that sentimental mush you just said, but you're welcome I guess? There's no need to read anything that complicated into it. I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't want you to be my friend. The more, the merrier, right?"
"Mh-hm!"
That seemed to have satisfied her concerns.
I could not say it. Maybe because it wasn't really clear to me back then...
I was, I think, a little overwhelmed by the difference that existed between myself and Hikari, even though we both lost our mothers...
At that time, my view of the world had no use, no space for the thought that I admired her just as much as she admired me, that she was even much more worthy of being admired than I ever had been.
It didn't, couldn't make sense to me then, not if I wanted to live up to my own standards - and maybe it was for the better, because if I had seen something in her that I didn't have, she would have had to become my rival – She, my only ally in this big, hostile world where the only law that could really be upheld was the law of the jungle.
Why I couldn't see how much easier things were because of the one time that I didn't automatically classify a person as an enemy, I can't say... But at the time, it prevented me from realizing her true value and trusting her exactly as she had trusted me.
Among all these piles of giggling hens, Hikari was my only real friend. In truth, she and this idiot Shinji were the only people in this whole place I ever really wanted to be with... and he of all people had to spurn me.
The way I was then, with all my peculiarities and limitations, I just couldn't understand it - Mitsurugi the uptight nerd. Suzuhara the perverted class clown. Aida the crazy nerd. Yamagishi, the anxious bookworm, and most of all, that antisocial doormat, the First Child! What could this whole bunch of losers possibly have that I didn't have?
What did Shinji see in them what he did not see in me?
I tried to convince myself that it was only natural for a loser like this idiotic Shinji to feel connected to his fellow human trash, but that wouldn't quiet this one, burning question that wouldn't stop bubbling out of some back corner of my brain and floating to the surface like a bubble in a drink of soda:
Could I be that in his view I was worth so little that even all these worthless people were preferable to me?
It was driving me mad!
I WANT YOU ALL TO MYSELF
"A date, eh?" she grumbled to herself, venting her rage by climbing all the stairs to the eleventh floor rather than riding the elevator up to her flat. When she reached the top of the staircase, she would have to conceal all weakness. "I'll need to get a date sometime soon. I can't let those little schoolgirls beat me to it! Where's Kaji-san when you need him? They always cram all our free time full of those stupid synch tests, but the one time I need a pretext to show up at headquarters, they miraculously choose to leave us in peace!"
THE MOST TRAGIC THING OF ALL WAS THAT SHE WASN'T EXACTLY LACKING THE CAPACITY FOR KINDNESS
THAT ONLY MAKES IT ALL WORSE
In his work as a bookseller, Tanemura Soichirou was not used to having to deal with any extraordinary events.
Though there were many such events to be found in the goods he sold, his work itself was a rather quiet affair - as a modest person who needed nothing more than a roof over his head to be happy, he had deliberately chosen it to be thit way.
The small shop, located at a lucrative spot near a school full of young people who were always at the very least in need of school books, was his pride and joy and the pot where much of his love wandered - And in these trying times, after the tragedy of the Second Impact and the certainty that downtown Tokyo 3 was and would remain a battlefield, his dedication was bitterly needed.
The population of the city dwindled by the day, and many of those who stayed lost all the money they could have invested in books – Those who couldn't evacuate often endeavored to at least get their children to safety, further shrinking Tanemura's main base of customers which had already been decimated by the declining birth rates: adolescent girls who never got tired of swallowing one big fantasy tome after another.
But Tanemura remained confident that he would succeed in getting his little shop through this war, until now he had always been able to pay his rent, and there were always rays of hope: Recently, for example, a commendable young man had come by here asking for a recommendable read for a friend - Tanemura only hoped that the congratulating girl would soon infect her boyfriend with her passion for reading...
And even if this very promising-looking bespectacled girl with the long, black hair hadn't come back, Tanemura's shop had gotten a new regular customer – an individual whom the elderly shop owner still didn't quite know what to make of.
Before she came into contact with him or even entered the store, he had seen her standing in front of it a few times, sometimes across the street, sometimes right in front of the shop windows through which he had spotted her - wearing the uniform of the nearby school mentioned earlier, a white shirt under a blue vest and matching miniskirt, but the first thing he noticed about her was her pale skin and the peculiar color of her hair - it was nothing new to see today's young people bleach their hair as a gesture of rebellion against the at times fairly conformist society of this chain of islands, but this was the first time he saw someone suceeding to this degree: Every trace of color seemed gone from it, and what little could be said to remain gave the impression of an outright blueish hue -besides, this girl did not at all look like a rebel or a delinquent.
Unlike many others in her age who tried to express their individuality through all sorts of accessories as much as the restrictive dress codes let them get away with it, this particular youth appeared completely unadorned, without jewelry, without make-up, even her socks were simple, her hairstyle short and functional.
Before he could begin to hope that she was considering to come in, he experienced something slightly eerie... despite all the distance and the pane of glass, the girl suddenly looked up and looked him straight in the eye.
Her gaze left no doubt that she had very much noticed him looking at her.
It was only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough for him to wonder if he had seriously seen those red eyes.
And finally she had disappeared without a trace in the time it had taken him to blink in surprise, as if she had never been there... no, rather it was this possibility that seemed most likely to him at first, that he must have imagined this ghostly appearance, that she must have been a concoction of the summer heat and all the agitation concerning the battle and his own, advancing age.
If that had been the end of it, he probably would have left it at that conclusion, if it hadn't been for one little inconsistency:
He would see her again, and the next time, that ghostly child showed no signs of disappearing.
Moments ago, she might have been looking at the special offers he had placed on a stand just outside the shop's display windows, but by the time Tanemura had become aware of her slight presence in the corner of his eyes, she was staring straight at him, and he was fixed in the cross-hairs of her crimson gaze, unable to shake off the feeling that there was something... missing, as if you were looking through the windows of the soul only to find a little post-it note announcing that the place was for sale.
He had to admit the irrationality of being terrified of a middle schooler, but even so, he had felt an undeniable shiver running down his wearied spine and a distinct lump forming in his throat, though he tried his best to swallow it, unwilling to turn his back on this...
presence, almost praying that she would finally move on and stop haunting him.
There was something... off about her. Something uncanny... Something inhuman...
Oh, please, please, let her go away!
But when he realized the folly of squeezing his eyes shut while he was faced with what some Stone Age instinct leftover in the crevices of his brain seemed to take for something higher up on the food chain, it was like waking up from a bad dream: He opened his eyes to find her gone.
But his peace was only short in nature.
The elusive phantom returned on the same day, this time not early in the morning, where one could forgive such lapses in attention, but in the broad daylight of the afternoon, and this time, she appeared just as suddenly as she used to vanish.
Tanemura had been rearranging some of his books (some of which he'd actually been fortunate enough to sell today) when he felt something warm brushing against his elbow and - to his later embarrassment - immediately flinched away when he realized who it was.
Looking back, Tanemura was positive that it must have been a mere oversight, but at the time, he was certain that she was
not there five seconds ago.
The proper response would have been an apology, but instead, he took a step back – Which simply caused her to turn her head in his direction.
Her facial expression revealed nothing but perhaps a faint curiosity.
He couldn't say why, but that moment filled him with a dread that didn't fit into the context of his relatively quiet, ordinary life, which had so far gone by without much drama or extraordinary events.
Fear like he'd never known before- all because of a little girl!
And yet, it felt a little like being trapped in that split-second of a car crash when you'd realize that there would be no way of escape, not the moment of impact itself, but those instants in which there is nothing left for you to do but to observe in reverence as your laughably certain doom draws ever nearer.
He couldn't shake this impression – some deep-seated, primal, instinctive knowing of something much bigger, much older, and much more significant than himself, a being at whose feet eons and millennia meant little more than a heartbeat, looking down at his tiny existence from lofty heights where even the rise and fall of empires passed by so quickly that it barely entered perception, let alone registered in its designs of meaning.
And if she were to do that feeling justice, she ought to have been an entity that had about as much to say to him as a plant could to a man, an existence # whose thoughts he could understand about as far as he could himself be understood by an ant.
What he felt in that instant was not the blind, frantic fear of a little animal struggling to hide away from a predator in order to protect its small, measly life, but the respect of a worm for its master, the awe before the creator impressed into all layers of the creature. Rather than being consumed with, absorbed into, reduced to, trapped within the fragile self, his mature human ego was extinguished all at once like a candle, like in the tale of the mountain humbling itself before Allah -
Which is to say that Tanemura took an immediate step back.
But then, the developmentally younger, fussier parts of his brain turned on him and insisted on rationalizing this raw reaction proceeding from his gut, exposing his astonishingly clear premonition as a vaguely justifiable hunch he was unable to explain.
What hat gotten into him, anyway?
All he saw before him was a simple schoolgirl who seemed to have fallen victim to some bizarre fashion trend, nothing more, nothing less. All she'd done so far was to look at a few books with the possible intent to buy them, which, according to all reason, ought to have been in his best interests.
Having considered himself a mature adult for a very long time, Tanemura felt quite ashamed of himself.
What was he even doing?
She was just a middle schooler, no matter
what she looked like.
"Are you looking for something in particular, young lady?"
Considering all the times he'd caught her lingering in front of the store as if she were pondering wether to buy anything at all, her request was unusually concrete and precise:
"I need scientific publications that are as relevant and up-to-date as possible, in the field of metaphysical biology, preferably on the topics of artificial evolution or guided apotheosis."
Tanemura looked at the peculiar girl visibly... flattened by this not exactly everyday demand - What could an 8
th grader possibly want with a proper scientific paper about... whatever that was she'd just spoken about.
"Well, I think you might be better off visiting the library of the closest university. We aren't really specialized in scientific literature, so I'd have to order it first... "
"Do that."
The store owner swallowed. Just when he was beginning to convince himself that this child couldn't possibly be anything other than an ordinary schoolgirl...
Somewhat upset by all this, Tanemura led the strange girl toward his counter, where he then used his computer - an antiquated model with a tube screen - to search for her order on a corresponding online portal.
"...What are you interested in again?"
"Metaphysical biology. Artificial evolution or apotheosis," she repeated, almost soundlessly.
Tanemura's confusion was even more nonplussed when he saw the results of the search displayed on his screen in black and white.
"Are you really sure about that?"
"Why?"
"Well, here it says that what you asked for is all highly classified government material that I'm not allowed to sell or even stock unless you show me a valid security ID, and that can't be what you meant... can it?"
"Yes, it can."
The girl pulled her satchel onto the counter where the computer was standing and quickly pulled out a small card.
NERV access class AAA.
The little picture on the other side of the NERV security card clearly showed her unmistakable blue hair, so she couldn't have stolen it from her parents like this freckled boy who had tried pulling that kind of stunt a few weeks ago.
The card was actually issued in her name and, as the owner of the store noted when he disbelieved the card, that name was "Ayanami Rei".
Ayanami Rei,
First Child, designated pilot of EVA Unit 00.
Some part of him still had to fight down the 'I knew it!' upon seeing some confirmation, something real and tangible that could explain his certainty that this girl couldn't really be just a normal child with a strange hairstyle – Even so, he couldn't escape further feelings of shame and doubting his adult rationality.
Ayanami Rei, First Child, designated pilot of EVA Unit 00.
This would imply that this girl had already saved his life several times over, along with the lives of every other creature on god's green earth.
"My, my, an EVA pilot!... What do I owe the honour to?"
She said nothing about that.
Tanemura hurriedly typed the combination of numbers on the ID into the confirmation form before turning the keyboard to the Evangelion pilot so she could type in her secret pin and select the publications she wanted to order.
"Well, as it stands you can certainly have it, as long as you can pay for it... It might take a few days to arrive, but I wouldn't be surprised if it got here tomorrow, since we are here in the future capital..."
The elderly shopkeeper had his troubles filling this unpleasant silence, especially since the First Child didn't make any effort to say anything and seemed content to stare quietly in his direction.
He didn't think he had said anything that could have insulted or unsettled her, apart from his unspoken thoughts, which he couldn't comprehend himself anymore - on the other hand, she was still somehow frightening with her rigid gaze, like something from these horror movies, something deceptively human-like that ought to be kicked until it didn't move any more – Of course, he pushed these thoughts back deep into the back corners of his consciousness.
Again the girl briefly opened her bag, this time, to produce a thick bundle of neatly stacked paper money.
"Is that enough?
The sight had its own somewhat stunning effect on the shopkeeper - he couldn't remember having held such a large amount in his hands before.
"Yes, of course..."
That was probably the understatement of the century. The bundle would have easily been enough to buy the whole shop - Had she not come in the late afternoon, the entire contents of his cash register would probably not have been enough to provide enough change for even one of these bills.
"But if you like, I can see if I still have a copy of "Nature" or "Science" lying around somewhere...-" Tanemura offered, half to soothe his conscience, half because he somehow felt as if he were about to be thrown into a volcanic crater if he did not succeed in appeasing the deity that dwelled therein.
"That will not be necessary."
And then she just turned around and walked away, without another word and without another look at Tanemura or anything else in his shop, making a beeline for the door in the manner of an automaton bound to its programming.
The shopkeeper no longer knew what to think or feel, and even less what he actually thought or felt.
He knew only that he felt disproportionately exhausted for this time of the day.
The return of the blue-haired girl was every bit as quiet as her last departure had been, without a word she came through the door the next day, this time without stopping or pausing. Purposefully, but not really hurried, she proceeded to the checkout where Tanemura had just unsuspectingly served his last customer – most of the other patrons turned to her in amazement and for the first time confirmed to the shopkeeper that he hadn't gone crazy, that this strange girl was indeed a part of a tangible reality, and not just an effusion from the webs of his brain.
Silent as a grave she stood in front of the cash register, silent as a grave she watched him, a little intimidated at the prospect ofhaving to turn his back on her blood-red gaze in order to produce the item she wanted, silent as a grave she took it, yes, almost tore it out of the elderly shopkeeper's hand, without speaking a single word, and just as silently, she also turned to leave as soon as she could have felt the envelope between her pale fingers, turning on the heel without saying a word.
Time seemed to stand still as she walked out of the shop, as if not only Tanemura himself, but every single person in this room was, without exeption, pinning their eyes on the back of this... this alien being there, (a notion he could not wholly fight for all he supposed that he must be imagining it) as if the constant clacking of her shoes was the only sound that still existed in this world... until that too fell silent when she stopped.
She wasn't so far away from Tanemura's cash register, though the seconds in which she covered that small distance had felt like they had been extended into eternity, like a thinly spun paste - in fact it was the stack of books on a nearby display case which had brought her to a standstill, as he would only find out after a few more viscous droplets of time had elapsed, silenced instants in which any crazy explanation could have seemed equally – To Tanemura, it had seemed just as probable that she was about to do a backflip and then plunge the universe into complete darkness, until she turned her head a little bit to the side to inspect the stacked books, or at least, that's what it looked like.
In order to prevent further, exhausting silence, Tanemura hurried to her side.
"Are you looking for something in particular, Miss Ayanami?"
At first she just stood there, like she wasn't going to react at all, but then all of a sudden, she raised her hand, and Tanemura could not have fathomed what for until she formed with her fingers a simple, pointing gesture with which she then directed to a random romance novel for reasons he did not hope to divine.
"That, please."
"Anything else?"
At this point he actually got the impression that she was pausing to think for a moment.
"I would like..." she then spoke monotonously, "...to acquire the entire published materials of the biologist Dr. Ikari Yui. "
"I'd have to... order that first..."
"That's not a problem."
And she was gone.
It didn't take Tanemura long to find the books and publications that were requested - this Ikari had apparently been a pioneer in her field at the time. But mixed in between the entries about her works were writings about her mysterious death, and the smell of conspiracy theories clinging to them, accounts of what seems to have been a huge scandal at his time, vague rumours about human experiments, and far more definite accounts of a trial, in which her co-worker and husband had been to answer for the whole thing as the person in charge of the experiment –
And even more rumours, diffuse whisperings according to which secret backers had bought the man's freedom in order to keep their machinations secret .
Reflecting back on it, Tanemura had indistinct memories of the event, or rather, it's coverage on the news, but at the time he had dismissed it as media sensationalism, because as a simple down-to-earth man, he had never been enthusiastic about such speculations -
But now, he was privy to one additional detail which, all by itself, led him to thoroughly revise his opinion about it.
Indeed, as of this instant, he would have been ready to believe that this long-dead woman had risen from the grave to take revenge on her husband, and the piece de resistance that so changed his mind was nothing but a single image of her.
The picture showed her smiling warmly into the camera with an adorable toddler on her arm, but above all it showed her face, a face that wasn't nearly as unfamiliar to Tanemura as it should have been...
He ordered the books, swallowed hard, and cursed his creator for making the human memory so much harder to erase than the files on a hard drive.
Even if Tanemura chose not to think these not quite explicable circumstances surrounding their first meeting and would never comfortable with the subject, the upshot was that he somehow managed to win over a new regular customer.
Between these few points of quasi-paranormal liminality, his life had gone on as usual, and nothing had truly disrupted his old, fafiliar paths, or his regular routine of getting up, making breakfast, going to work and going to bed, and thus, he had no grasp on whatever it was that had made him experience these horrible feelings, it just didn't make sense.
He couldn't name any concrete quality or feature about the encounter that could have made it so wrong or off-putting, and the consequence, the end result, had been normal after all:
This Ayanami girl regularly visited his store and washed money into his tills, nothing very unusual ended up happening, so it should be the most sensible thing to bury those initial impressions - It wasn't the last time, of course, he got the impression that this Ayanami Rei wasn't exactly...the most average girl on the planet, but why should he expect her to be?
She was the First Child, one of NERV's pilots.
That was as good an excuse as any – it wasn't even that he didn't like the girl - after dealing with her on a regular basis, he found reason enough to find her downright endearing, it wasn't hard to dismiss this... oddity as mere awkwardness yes, the longer he knew her, the more time went by, the easier it became to just imagine her as a somewhat withdrawn, shy, but basically nice schoolgirl...
Over time Tanemura also learned a few things about her, here and there, quite casually, for example that this boy, who had been asking for literature for a female acquaintance some time ago, had been none other than the Third Child (he had seemed so inconspicuous!) and that the girl's guardian, for whom the item she had first bought was intended to be a gift, was none other than the head of the nebulous organization that defended the city, but when Tanemura asked what he was like, the EVA pilot didn't know how to answer.
She bought a lot of different books, across all genres, from children's fable books to cult classics, ranging from selections which almost made one think that this girl had never read anything at all, to highly philosophical, renowned works of art and mountains of scientific literature, philosophical or religious writings.
The shopkeeper couldn't make heads or tails of her choices and finally gave up trying to learn anything about her, but found that she, for some reason he couldn't guess, had a predilection for stories, which dealt with artificial intelligences - clones, androids, cyborgs, golems, homunculi, living computer programs, and so on and so forth - which meant that she soon found herself at home in the dusty science fiction/fantasy corner (Would she turn out to be little more than a harmless nerd? The common prejudice that no women were hanging around on the Internet was long outdated after all)
Even so, she soon largely settled on critically acclaimed, high-brow choices, much more than one would expect of someone her age.
When Tanemura once recommended her a copy of 'Twillight' simply because many girls her age seemed to be crazy about it, she came back to return it on the same day.
One might wonder how she managed to finish each pile of books before coming to buy the next one, the sheer speed with which she conquered the mountains of literature, though it was only a little beyond what one would be used to after spending a lifetime dealing in hefty fantasy tomes.
Even so, it was apparent that she was a smart young lady – Just as that scientist must have been, before she was met with the mysterious circumstances of her death –
But as I said, that was an avenue of thought that he would rather not chose to explore.
In any case, it was not too uncommon for above-average intelligence to be dispensed without an appropriately-sized package of social skills. Really, the only thing that truly unusual about this girl were her eyes, and was it so far-reaching to suppose that they, too, could have its logical explanation somewhere?
The other day, the few shelves with the DVDs and BluRays had also attracted her interest. Once again, he had asked her if she was looking for something in particular when he had discovered her with one such disk in her hand, and she had only pointed at it with the other hand and asked: "...can you recommend a shop where I can acquire the necessary devices to play this?
After a short pause, he mumbled that there should be a small electric shop a little further along the street, but upon his comment that there would certainly be a larger selection in a larger shop in the center of town, she only said that this would not be necessary.
"Anything else?"
She took a book from one of the shelves and pointed at it with her free hand.
"Where can I get the appropriate furniture for storing those...?"
Did she really not have a single bookshelf anywhere in her home?
"No, I haven't had any use for it before."
Tanemura could never make sense of her...
And that made it hard ever to shake it off completely, that feeling that he had so casually touched something that was far beyond his understanding and would come back to haunt him one distant day, returned to break him apart like a wooden chopstick...
But it wasn't hard to ignore.
The box with the individual parts that would one day become a bookshelf stood unopened to her left, next to the low little refrigerator with the pills and the beaker on it.
The books would have to spend this last night in several piles on the floor, complex biology books next to Oscar Wilde's "Happy Prince", adjacent to a completely different prince from the pen Niccolò Machiavelli, Shakespeare's Othello next to Goethe's "Faust", the "Sorrows of the Young Werther" squeezed somewhere in between, over it a few more modern works like Behandt Schlink's "Reader" and Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Fontane's "Effi Briest" next to "The Little Prince" and the works by Michael Ende, flanked by currently fashionable and/or critically acclaimed books of which the most recent was only published in 2014, but some also dealt with the tragedy of the Second Impact, in several stacks, a few next to the bed, a few next to the drawers, a few on the wall next to the fridge, apart from the few books that had been left open on the page that the First Child had last read, which apparently lying around randomly in her vacuous flat - once assembled, the shelf would be well filled.
At the moment it wasn't the books that had attracted the attention of the owner of the appartment, which now seemed a little less bare, but another object that was relatively new here: She had put the small, old-fashioned tube TV with its ugly, grey plastic case together with the BluRay player in her already mostly unused closet, mostly because she could close the closet door and hide the compartment without disrupting the rest of the room and its own, cryptic order, which only its owner understood – Rei had bought the cheapest device from the store because she had seen no reason to buy a better one.
She was currently sitting in front of the flickering box, which enveloped her facial features in an almost demonic, bluish light that extended into the already ghostly apartment as the only source of brightness, and looked into it with apparent focus, without her facial features revealing any reaction, which - at best! - went beyond barely noticeable thoughtfulness.
It was up to the viewer's eye to ponder whether the many colorful, noisy scenes full of life, heartache, and emotion presented to her by the screen elicited any reaction at all.
A wild flood of images roared across the small screen, throwing dazzlingly vibrant lights into her colorless face.
"Then you're not afraid of death either?" the little boy asked disbelievingly, as he watched the imposingly-built man, if this literal fighting machine could even be described as such, whilst he searched the arsenal for something useful.
The Android made him wait for his next answer.
One could almost be tempted to think he was hesitating.
"I have to stay functional until our mission is accomplished."
The boy's reaction surprised Rei a little. Instead of somehow conmenting on how "robotic" that answer was, he just sighed and said, "I know. I have to stay functional too..."
"KANEDAAAAAAAA!"
"TESUOOOOOOO!"
"KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
As deficient as Rei's knowledge of pop culture was, she was pretty much blindsided when Anakin actually joined the Dark Side.
She had felt somehow connected with him and his origins as the "child of the force itself" or as an artificial being created by Dath Plagueis, and as a chosen one who didn't quite get along with his role, he reminded her of Ikari-kun.
Unknowing in many respects, she had actually watched the movie labeled "Part I", at first and continued from then on... Now she knew where this quote from Captain Katsuragi's quiz came from, though the whole thing left her with a bad taste in her mouth, though she couldn't quite say way...
Somehow she couldn't help but imagine Ikari-kun in Luke's clothes, herself as Leia and the Second Child as Han Solo, even though she felt inclined to revise this image in the light of later events and revelations.
"Edward..."
The moment he heard her voice, unusually familiar and steeped in the ghost of a strangely maternal tone that did not quite manage to penetrate her apathy, the blonde boy immediately understood whom he was facing.
The thought of this possibility had long stalked him like a stubborn specter, and with every new secret revealed to him and his brother, this little voice in the back of his head became louder, this inevitable certainty that the extent of his sin weighed even harder than he had dared to hope.
Confronted with what he had done, he was unable to move an inch, and anything within his skull that was not completely paralyzed by the shock had already accepted his fate.
This was no more and no less than the punishment he deserved.
"Edward, why couldn't you make me right...?"
"Minoru-sama... I'm sorry I worried you... Initializing self-diagnosis..."
"Mhm..."
"Minoru-sama... There was a slight loss of data... It is the data about your sister... I beg you, Minoru-sama... Give it back to me-"
"Anything else?"
"Uh...? The personal memory data is on my main hard drive, so it's still undamaged..."
"I understand... In this case... you don't need my sister's data."
"Hm?!"
"...my sister died... and I could not accept that. I just couldn't forget her, no, I didn't want to, and that's why I built you and made you look like her, as closely as I could remember her...
But despite everything... you are not my sister, and you never will be...!"
"...I'm sorry... If only I could be more useful to you-"
"No, that's not what I mean!
...Nobody could ever replace my sister, but I realized ... that you are just as irreplaceable for me, Yuzuki!"
"I... I am irreplaceable"?
"That's it!"
"But... I am only a Persocom..."
"Yes, but... for me there is no other Persocom like you, Yuzuki. Even if you're just following your programming... There is only one you. So you don't need my sister's data.
The time I spent with my sister is one of the most precious memories for me, but... The time I spend with you is just as valuable to me...! And that's why I want to cherish this time as it is from now on, instead of just seeing you as a substitute for my sister... Little by little, more and more..."
"...although I can't replace your sister... do you still want me at your side?"
"I want you with me, Yuzuki, and no one else."
"...Minoru-sama..."
[...]
"Hideki... Chii is a perscom."
"Yah..."
"There are things Chii can't do..."
"Yah..."
"But... Chii still wants to be with Hideki!"
"Yah..."
...what's her status?"
"She's somewhat compromised by the experiments right now, but we should still be able to use her."
"I understand..."
"...Papa!"
"Nana. I have a request for you."
"A request? What is it? What should Nana do? Nana will do everything Papa asks her to do!"
"... "Papa"? What does she mean by that? She's not really Director Kurama's biological daughter, is she?"
"Of course not.
But Number Seven has been imprisoned in this laboratory all her life and has been subjected to painful experiments all this time... If she hadn't found something to cling to, something to support her, her mind would have collapsed a long time ago..."
"And that support... Is Director Kurama?"
"He's her assigned caregiver. That he is her father is her own confabulation. He thinks that in time, she would be needing his company less and less, but I'm not sure... Probably, it was only her desire to please him that made her survive all these hardships... Number Seven is obedient to the point of self-sacrifice and her vectors have never been directed against a human being - at least not yet..."
(At the point where Nana asked her "Papa" for his tie, Rei felt compelled to place her hand on the old glasses she had laid next to her, without looking away from the screen - it wasn't that she was afraid in any way that the most bloodthirsty or scary movies would have had to make a lot of effort to surpass the real life of a real human guinea pig.
(Lucky for her, because the shop owner had preferred to just give her whatever she wanted, instead of pointing out that she was far too young for some of the things she had taken with her, lest he displease this uncanny entity in the shape of a girl)
Rather it was the simple fact that she had done something on her own initiative, that she had never done before, that for her equaled entering absolute new territory and thus aroused the need to take a piece of her familiar world with her, a kind of protection. If anyone had been in the room with her at that time, he would have noticed a thin smile on her lips.)
[...]
"Director Kurama... I never asked you... do you have a family?"
"My wife and daughter have passed away."
"I'm sorry, I-..."
"...I killed them with my own hands."
[...]
"Father... I wanted to meet you... all the time I spent alone in this dark room... I... I knew, always... that one day my real father and my real mother would come to get me, and that... that all three of us would be happy together forever...
I have waited... waited so long... and now you are finally here!
Father!"
"I have caused the death of so many people... because of my own daughter... because I let you live...
I am the only one who is to blame for this...
...and that is why I will end it right now."
"...But... if that is so... then why did I have to suffer all these terrible things in my life? Then what have I been waiting for all this time...?
Why?"
"She is dangerous...Papa...Papa, we have to run away! "
"...'Papa'? Why is this girl calling you 'Papa' when you've left me alone all this time?! Why?"
"When I was little, I always thought that my best feature was my long, black hair. But the people I trusted betrayed me and sold me to the organization, and that day I lost everything...
I could either die as a beggar or become a tool of the organization - I didn't have much choice.
I wasn't the only one, it was the same for all the others who joined.
Nobody ever knocks on the organization's doors of their own free will.
On that day, my body was cut wide open, I ceased to be human and became something else.
And my beloved black hair, my beloved black eyes... All colors were bleached out of my body, leaving behind only these shiny silver eyes...
I have no use for fancy food or a soft bed...
How pathetic..."
...and so now of all times they stood before the sight of the seemingly impossible:
The blonde, young woman, who had served the crew of this ship until now as a cool, controlled first officer, did not point her pistol against the enemy, but turned back, and directed its muzzle right into the speechless face of her superior.
Hadn't she been the captain's most loyal, fanatical follower, had she not been ready to throw away her life without batting an eyelash just minutes before, in order to finally complete the mission of revenge to which the crew had devoted itself long, long ago?
She might have been the last person they would have expected to turn traitor, but the straight, outstretched arm that held the revolver was a sign of her usual cool efficiency in trying in vain to restrain her trembling emotions from seeping through.
"...I didn't care that I was only a substitute for your real daughter, whom you had loved... It was enough for me just to be with you...
Yes, until your daughter, Nadia, miraculously appeared before our eyes!
At first I was terribly afraid that Nadia would drive me out of your heart... But you stayed away from her and didn't tell her that you were her father...
You continued to burn with the thirst to take revenge on New Atlantis...
You remained the man I loved...
But...
Why did you have to return to being an ordinary father?
Why didn't you remain the man I had loved?
One shot will be enough to kill you...
Tell me why you did not ignite the self-destruct, tell me why you did not drag Gargoyle to his death!"
"I couldn't make the same mistake again..."
"A mistake? So that's what you call the time when you slaughtered your people and devastated your kingdom?"
"...Yes. I must atone for what I have done, Iit is only for that that I have lived on..."
"Then why didn't you ignite the self-destruct?"
"...For thirteen years you fought at my side... I see you as my own daughter, and did not want you to atone for my sins...
The reason that I could not do it was you, Elektra!"
"...that is not fair... I cannot shoot you any more..."
[...]
"Exactly... let's go back to earth. To your home..."
"But what are you saying, Nadia? We go to our home. You were born and raised there, weren't you? So we both come from the earth.
"Oh Jean..."
"If you want to know what is inside an Egg, you need to break it."
"...have you been thinking about leaving Section Nine?"
"Tell me Batou, which parts of you are still for real?"
"Hey, are you drunk already?"
"Well, if we want, we can break down the alcohol in seconds thanks to an internal chemical control system. We don't get blackouts or hangover and can sober up at any time. This even gives us the opportunity to drink during work. People feel the urge to remedy everything they see as a limitation, all technical achievements follow this principle.
You and I represent the highest stage of this development. Our cyberbrains and cyborg bodies are characterized by sharper perception, increased stamina and responsiveness through faster and more comprehensive information processing, but we can no longer live without maintenance...
Well, I don't want to complain. You can get over that little bit of maintenance."
"The only thing we haven't sold section 9 yet are our Ghosts..."
"Yes, we could quit, but only if we gave the government back our cyborg bodies and cyberbrains and the secret information stored in them, there wouldn't be much left to resign...
The Human body and mind are composed of innumerable components that form a unique individual... My face and voice distinguish me from others, but my mind belongs to me. There are memories of the time when I was little and an inkling of the future. The huge amounts of information I process and the networks to which my cyber-brain has access, this is how I wonderfully create the consciousness of my personality... And at the same time I realize that I can only move within certain limits."
"And that's why you throw your cyborg body into the sea like a stone?"
"Tell me Light... have you ever told the truth in your life, even once?"
"After some time, I had only one thought... what if that which I thought until now as myself is in fact just a fake which I created through my efforts?
What if somewhere in me, there is another me? My true self?
I thought that and I thought that it was bad, that I thought it...
That it was something I should never have noticed...
You took off my masks one by one. You were like light to me... and the light drives away the darkness.
Only by the fact that it exists, it indicates that there is darkness...
...that there's darkness in my heart... To be honest, I despised you for it... and that's why I rejected you..."
"But why?! I helped you to see your true self, didn't I? So why don't you try to become more honest with yourself? Why are you still hiding your true self?"
"Well, what if he's the worst person imaginable?
What if I am like my parents? I am afraid of my own blood... I must not be a useless person – for the sake of father and mother!"
"You must love your adoptive parents very much, right Arima-kun?
But you know, Arima-kun, if you continue to put on a front like this, I don't think that you can ever become a real family... Real friends and a real family are people who love you as you are, even if they know your faults..."
And then, all of a sudden, her inconspicuous, dainty little body shook with a wave that tattled her clothes, splintered the hair ornaments that had accompanied her all the way here and held her braids in place, warping her appearance in the blink of an eye, and striking fear into the souls of her persecutors – suddenly, the soft, rose-colored hair of an artist had been replaced by a beastly mane, and in place of a detailed dress whose many gaps and incisions had formed only part of its complex structure, were a few shreds that barely covered anything more than a circus costume, and once soft, girlish skin seamlessly merged with dynamic whips and blades of crystal, which left behind severed cables and burst metal plates where it made contact with the enemy's war machines, stretching far beyond her distorted shape that, with all the rags and wild hair swirling around her, suddenly seemed to take up much more space.
There was a multitude of small, inexplicable signs of a physical metamorphosis, each of which would have told everything in a detailed photograph, reptilian pupils, pointed ears, fangs, and the ugly, crystalline marks that had cut their way out of their once tender cheeks, but it was the animal roar from the source of their otherwise so silent, high voice that made it more than sufficiently clear, that she had given up all attempts to fake a human figure, and neither did she stop long enough to let the sight be examined - Her blind, furious onslaught came with feathers, came with wings, and by no means of the kind one would associate with an angel - The crystal blades that moved her with simplicity, dynamism, and intuition, like her own limbs, stretched and bent, not bound by conservation of form and mass – they proceeded from her claws like the most natural protuberances, and their support allowed her this predatory agility, whose wild leaps would undoubtedly have broken all the bones of a human girl.
It was only when one of the Endlaves that she had shredded exploded behind her, and sent her flying alongside the heat and debris, that all those involved remembered her again and considered that she was still a physically tangible part of this world and critically outnumbered - but that alone did not prevent her from rising up again from the dirt and ashes, and like an aggressive animal, which understood nothing of strategy or chances of winning, forcing herself again and again up from the ground, in order to fling herself back at her opponents like a rabid harpy.
"I don't mind being a monster! I don't care that my feelings are just fake forgeries... I am still me, and therefore I will protect Shu...!
Even if I am only a fake... at least for myself I am... the only real one there is..."
"Lain! Why did you leave only me? Why did you leave only my memories alone? Why do I have to be the only one who remember all these terrible things? Do you hate me so much? I can't take it anymore!"
"No, that... you got that completely, Alice... I would never want to make you unhappy..."
"Liar! Look what you've done!"
"But you're all right now, aren't you Alice? You were my only real friend, even though we were never connected..."
"Where... what are you talking about?"
"You were my only real friend, only you... And without a connection, at that."
"C-connection? What kind of connection do you mean?"
"Well, the one to me and... everyone else..."
"Leave me..."
"I love you, Alice. Did you know that?"
"L-Lain, do you have any idea what you're saying?"
"Originally, all people used to be connected on an unconscious level... I just re-established that connection. Nothing more".
"L-Lain... you?"
"Hm... you could also say that I didn't actually do anything... Actually, it didn't matter what was real, this one or that one over there, I was always in both worlds. I'm a program designed to break the barrier between the wired and the real world."
"L-Lain you are a... program?"
"Actually, even you and the others are just applications. You don't really need a body, you know?"
"You're wrong."
"Huh?"
"I don't quite understand what you're talking about, but I think you're wrong... Your body may be cold, but you're alive... and I'm alive too, you see?
My heart beats... bum bum, bum bum..."
"Hihi, but why is it beating so fast?"
"I guess that's because I'm scared."
"But you are smiling, Alice."
"Yes, but in truth, I've always been a big scaredy-cat... I don't even know why..."
"I think it was around the end of May... it was the first time I visited a public library, and I didn't know what to do to get a library card... And on that day the librarians seemed so busy that I didn't dare to ask them...
Besides, I'm not good at talking to strangers... So when I was standing there wondering what to do, someone suddenly called me and took care of all the formalities to get me a card... I just took the card and left without saying anything... And that person who helped me... that was you, Kyon-kun.
I... always regretted not thanking you properly for that..."
In retrospect, Rei could not say when it had come to be so late.
Had she been careless?
It wasn't the first time this had happened to her during this activity, she might consider desisting from it on days before important experiments.
(The phenomenon that time often seemed to fly by if one was entertained was not so familiar to her yet.)
The impression all this had left her with was... hm.
The many images flickering across the screen had actually provoked a whole lot of coming and going reactions, few of which Rei knew how to label - almost like a distant observer in her own soul , she had simply watched these sensations germinate, blossom and then wither again, letting them drift away like ships on the horizon.
It had taken her quite a while to even realize that the adjective she was looking for to describe her experience was "intense", but with time she had become more and more certain of it... It was as if in these texts she had been granted access to the experience of some strangers far away, and found them filled with statements, questions and descriptions that she herself had always wanted to say in the same way, only that she had never found the words to do so – It was a confirmation that she was not the only one who asked herself such questions or pursued such thoughts... She had always thought that they were meaningless because they had nothing to do with her function, but here they were, long and wide and spread out on the canvas...
Maybe it was different when you had never been assigned a certain function – Though until now, she had always considered the others in her surroundings to be serving 'functions' of their own. The Second Child and Ikari-kun existed to control Evangelions, the Commander existed to guide NERV and to execute his plans, the class representative was there to keep the class in line...
It was only now that she was beginning to consciously appreciate the difference as well as the true depth of the gulf between them and her.
Many of these works portrayed the question of one's purpose as if it were one of the most important questions for a normal person to think about: Where they had they from and where were they going, and exactly what was the meaning of their existence supposed to be?
And if she kept in mind that he probably spent considerable time wondering about these questions, a lot of the things she had never understood about Ikari-kun made a lot more sense.
These past thinkers often dwelt on the question of where this meaning ought to come from... From God? From other people? Or was it something that people were supposed to give themselves?
Another point of contention concerned deliberations on the matter of how free one was to choose that meaning, how one could search for it or even change it.
Had the people around her given themselves their own meaning?
Rei had never paid any attention to such things and she did not believe that she would be able to say so right away...
She didn't know.
But that was probably not a problem. All these considerations were all very well, but ultimately, they were completely meaningless to Rei herself, weren't they?
None of it concerned her. She wasn't a human being, she stood outside this whole conundrum of meaning – She never had to look for her reason of being, since she had known it from the beginning, and she had known that it came from her creator, Commander Ikari. She'd never had to question if her creator really existed, for she saw him almost every other day, and when she did not see him, she would at least see his son, who was himself a proof of his existence.
She had always known where she had come from, and where she would be going when the endless circles of the human instrumentality project finally closed.
Instead of staring at the old familiar ceiling in his room, Shinji had made an exception and instead chosen to peruse the one in Misato's living room for very much the same purpose.
It hadn't been a conscious decision per se. Essentially, his return to the apartment had simply turned out in such a way that he had let himself sink into the wide open couch rather than locking himself away as he usually would.
After taking out the garbage and cleaning up the apartment, he'd felt a little bit tired, and since he'd dropped his walkman on the couch earlier, he saw no reason to go anywhere else, especially since he had the apartment to himself – Asuka was still out Misato would not be returning from NERV HQ before nightfall.
At first, the change in location didn't seem to make much of a difference. He lay there, staring ahead with his headphones plugged in, wracking his brains about the same worried that had occupied it the day before.
For a long time he chewed through numerous possibilities and implications in his thoughts, derived all possible conclusions from the given axioms, until he found himself going around them in circles as if they were blossoms of parallel universes springing up from the vacuum. To obtain further answers, to confirm or deny any of the theories he had spun into the air, he would need more information, new facts, better questions and most of all, experiments to test it- but he had neither the courage nor the opportunity to carry them out, especially since he had not seen the primary subject of his mental wanderings since the whole thing with Mayumi, and neither did he have the means to seek him out.
(Or perhaps, that's what he used it a pretext to avoid dealing with the possibility that his father would refuse to see him...)
Either way his thoughts just kept sloshing around in his head, trapped inside his skull, without anything of consequence coming in or out of it...
He might as well have been standing in the center of the busiest square in the center of town, enclosed in a box of glass that not even the most muffled sounds could escape, alone in silence and somehow lost, trapped inside himself...
Those thoughts kept making his emotions rise to a boil and he didn't think he had any way to let them out, to get to a catharsis or to talk to anyone about it... Asuka would just laugh at him, Touji, Kensuke and Nagato wouldn't understand, and Rei... Rei was very loyal to his father and he didn't want her to make her angry by questioning her esteemed superior in fron for her.. As for Misato... she would probably try hard to appear understanding and make all sorts of probing suggestions, and the last thing he needed was anyone's opinion on the futility of his concerns – he couldn't deny that there might be a point to it, but he just didn't want to hear it...
How stupid and naive could you be?
This one little comment by Rei about his father not having any problems with him and Rei spending time together... He must surely be reading too much into it. Maybe his father hadn't really thought about it and didn't particularly care who Rei hung out with as long as they weren't an ax murderer or a drug dealer...
And even if it did mean more than that, it would hardly be enough to erase ten year's worth of hatred, and the truth was that he could still feel it burning in the back compartment of his being, but he really, really wanted this sparkle of hope to real and true, against all reason, and just for that, he could have started to hate himself all over again... No wonder if Asuka thought him pathetic...
There ought to be a limit where a person with healthy amounts of self-respect should be willing to forgive, no matter what else the other person did afterward... or was this way of thinking resentful and childish...?
If only there was someone who could answer this question for him... or would this attitude only confirm that the things Asuka had said while waiting for the last angel to emerge from its cocoon had reflected the truth all too accurately...?
He could stand this uncertainty no more than he could endure the fear that he would not like the answers he so longed for, and so, it was no coincidence that he made very few attempts to seek them out, but instead tended to leave them undefined as long as they did not force themselves upon him, like a cat in a box.
"I guess I'm... pretty pathetic, huh...?"
And all of a sudden, without him really being able to explain it, he spontaneously had the dull feeling that Asuka was about to make trouble for him.
"Of course you are!
"Huh?"
His astonishment should have been directed at those sudden words, but what really startled him was that he somehow felt that he had known
exactly what Asuka was going to say next, even if only for a tiny moment...
It was as if he had seen the same scene thousands and thousands of times, with each repetition leaving little more than a quiet reverberation, every one of them no more than the breath of a whisper that nonetheless summed to a clearly audible chorus which seemed to predict the redhead's words down to the smallest detail in her accentuation of syllables, almost as if Asuka were simply repeating whatever this echo kept saying.
"Hey! Don't ignore me when I'm talking to you!"
Before Shinji really had a chance to rouse himself from his consternation, or even to get into a halfway upright position, he already noticed his faithful little cassette player being brusquely torn from his hand and yanked away from him with a swinging movement, so that the headphones were removed from his ears in a much harsher manner than the manufacturers had ever thought to account for.
For a short time, the sight of the cables following the motion of her arm appeared to be followed by a trail of countless afterimages. Ghostly echoes detached from her skin and disappeared into it again once her motion had ceased... and the same was true for her subsequent disparaging look, which she next directed at the antiquated device. It seemed strangely familiar to him, like a scene from some TV series he'd been forced to watch ad nauseam.
He could practically still see the apparition trailing before his eyes, as material and solid as the Second Child who was standing in front of him at ths very moment...
The way she had held his cassette player on its sides, between her right thumb and index finger, as if it were contaminated with some disease she didn't want to contract. One might almost think that she was wary of getting pregnant from it.
In any case, she lifted the device further into the air, with her arm outstretched and not without ever letting it out of the reach of her skeptical gaze, until she was able to classify the notes emanating from the severed connection between the device and Shinji's ears.
Her body was shaken by her typical condescending giggle, and as usual her gestures set her whole body in motion, and so, movements made the long wires to the headphones swing like pendulums and, in one case, slam against the couch, reminding him that his cherished little device was now pretty high above the floor.
It wasn't just the few fruits of his teacher's attempts to educate him that revolted against that idea (Electrical appliances were to be treated with care!) - It just so happened that this little humble Walkman, which he'd kept alive long past its expiration date though his loving care, was a lot more to him than just any old gadget-
"Nine Inch Nails? Really? Are you serious? I guess 'Linkin Park' wasn't quite emo enough for you anymore... Now I know you
really have problems!"
But... he liked this music...
"Th-That's mine, Shikinami-san... please give it back to me..."
It wasn't just the threat that she might destroy his prized position, but also the notion that it was none of her business what music he liked or didn't like to listen to. He felt exposed as if she'd just bared his very thoughts and feelings for everyone to see.
He just couldn't stand to have her making fun of it...
But what could he do?
He was completely at her mercy...
(Again, he felt the pull of these memories or whatever they were, but this time not quite so gentle-)
She kept mocking him with her laughter. "Alright, you can have I back, if you ask me very, very nicely!"
(...and the icy cold of her voice in the present reminded him of that one day, the only day he could possibly have meant...)
"...Please, Shikinami-san..."
(What was he doing here? So far, Asuka had been engraved into the loops and valleys of his brain as someone of whom he definitely knew: 'This person is much, much stronger than me'. But now that he considered it...)
And she laughed him down once again.
He simply did not understand... he had done what she told him to do, what else did she want?
(That's nonsense... He only needed to look at her once, her petite, slim body - she was built quite differently from him – with exercise, he could easily surpass her, and break her apart like a wooden stick...)
This helplessness...
(No, that's not it. He had done it before... once, far, far away, when she had spoken to him once too many in that same, cold voice, the straw that broke the camel's once and for all...)
"Are you listening to me, you idiot?"
"H-Huh...?"
"I asked you why you didn't throw this out old piece of thrash a long time ago! I mean, who still uses a cassette player these days? We live in the year 2015, if you haven't noticed it yet... Can't you use a normal MP3 player or at least a CD...?
Or do you know what?
I'll buy you an MP3 player! I recently found a great electronics store in the city while shopping with Hikari, where they have really great equipment... I saw a really cheap one that will fit several thousand songs instead of the twelve or so that fit on such a stupid cassette, and you won't even have to rewind it! They've even got a very nice ice cream parlour next door, if you're still up for a little refreshment afterwards..."
And so she threw the old cassette player into the domestic waste basket in a casual gesture of complete, callous unconcern.
...so come on, get off the couch, say goodbye to your inner pig! You don't need that old thing anymore!"
That's it.
She wouldn't go any further.
She wouldn't get any closer to saying anything that could be construed as inviting him on a date. A grown-up woman, like she was supposed to be, should never give in so easily. She was already being dangerously blatant as it it was, so he ought to get over himself and appreciate her generosity.
Could he not see that she had just offered to blow a considerable portion of her savings for him, could he really be so dense as not to realize that she had practically asked him sraight-up to go out for ice cream with her.
She wanted him to go to town with her, and she wanted it now.
Don't argue.
LOOK AT ME, PLEASE LOOK AT ME!
What's with that look he was giving her?
What was that about now, was she not good enough for him?
And now...
If she didn't know better, she would think that she must have consumed some psychoactive substances without realizing.
Or could it be that this foolish Third Child had just stormed right past her like a kicked dog, giving her a wide berth in defference to her clear status as the local Alpha Primate, and then made serious efforts to dig through the waste basket and all the crap it contained therein order to fish out his antiquated walkman?
...he had walked straight past her.
NOTICE ME! DON'T PRETEND I'M NOT THERE!
Not to mention that he hadn't even responded to her offer.
What was that supposed to be?
Who did he think he was?
Her approaching, angry steps came closer, and he certainly raised his pretty little head to stand up to her, but in the end he didn't have the guts to look her straight in the eye. He didn't say a word.
Typical.
"Calm down, it's not like I want to rip out your eyeballs and eat them for breakfast. ... Can't you really manage five minutes without that stupid thing? It's almost like an addiction to you, isn't it? You might think you'd forget to breathe without that thing, like the whole tape is just like 'inhale, exhale... inhale... exhale...'..."
She laughed at him.
"You know, I can do that, too!"
He looked at her only wordlessly, his lips sealed.
DON'T IGNORE ME. DON'T YOU SEE THAT I NEED YOU?
(She was screaming inside)
I HATE BEING IGNORED MORE THAN ANYTHING.
"No wonder you're such a useless whiny wimp with no friends! Not even your own dad likes to be around you!"
(Wasn't that a bit too much?)
"You're anti-social, through and through... always tucked away with your sweet little headphones in the corner... you probably think you're better than us because you could control an EVA without training... That we're beneath you.. but you know what?
In truth, you're nothing but a conceited bastard that nobody likes! Except maybe the other antisocial losers you like to hang out with, like Suzuhara or the First Child!"
(Oops?)
And then he suddenly stood upright to full size, even towering over her a bit, (Since when, actually? He was definitely shorter than her when she first arrived-) right in front of her, inches in front of her face, staring straight into her eyes.
(What the...?)
For a moment she could have sworn that she had seen all the way to the other end of infinity and back, a spark of something too strange to be found in the eyes of a 14-year-old boy...
Pah!
What... what was that about?
("Hey, Asuka..." she said to herself. "You're not seriously afraid of him are you?")
What a kind of nonsense... what in all...
"At least I don't always turn up the volume to full blast when I want to listen to something, forcing everyone else in the house and probably the rest of the neighborhood to shut up and bear it like a certain other person!"
(Now would you look at that! So you really do have it in you to get angry. For a moment I thought you were going to sock me in the face... But you don't have the guts for that, huh? No, you don't dare.)
The tension in her muscles that had balled her hands into fists eased up, and her clenched teeth loosened up and made way for a razor-thin grin.
(No, you wouldn't dare...)
She didn't even dignify him with a counterargument:
"Oh, shut your stupid mouth, Daddy's boy."
"But...that...-"
There you go! His feeble resistance had been so easy to break.
It was no different from usual.
"Oh... Just leave me alone!
The next thing she heard from him was how he slammed the door to his room, and then some undefined noises, presumably produced by his hiding under his covers.
She felt strangely hollowed out - She was supposed to be laughing in triumph, or at least demolishing something in frustration,, but somehow nothing happened.
The reaction wouldn't come – When she dared to look inside her chest, she found only a calm emptiness with a slightly sad undertone.
(What was that about?)
Her inner being was in an imbalance, but it gave her no indication of how she could gain satisfaction, how she could release that tension in any way.
Should she smash something?
Was there something she needed to get her hands on?
Should she get someone's attention...?
She didn't know it, she just felt worn out and didn't know what to do about it...
Somehow, she had not derived much pleasure from ruining the Third Child's day.
(And I didn't get my stupid date either... crap... )
Was it because nothing she could do outside of combat could undo his propensity for stealing her spotlight?
What else could be the reason for her disgruntlement?
(She almost felt a little tempted to press her ear to her roommate's room door and listen to see if he was crying his eyes out.
She wondered what the sounds of his suffering would do to her... Would they bring her satisfaction? Or...)
Angrily, she got her little handheld console, threw herself on the couch he'd been sitting on earlier (it hadn't yet lost all the warmth that his body had radiated into it), and vented her frustration on the A button.
Oh damn it, she simply couldn't stand to be in his debt, let alone that itchy feeling of having to apologize to anyone...
It was all because of that stupid Third Child!
None of this had turned out the way she wanted it to...
All of this had been easier once, or she had imagined it to be easier... She just had to be good with her EVA, and then she would get everything she wanted, wouldn't she?
It had always been that way and it should always have stayed that way.
She still had the best sync ratio out of anyone, didn't she?
She was the best at what she did, the best in the world, wasn't she?
So why?
Why didn't everything work out the way she wanted it to?
Why did she have to be rescued by this stupid idiot and not vice versa?
Why did he get to play the hero and not her?
He had done nothing to deserve it!
Those who tried hard and worked hard were rewarded and successful in the end, wasn't that how it was supposed to be?
Today's society was supposed to be based on merit – it was no longer enough to know a few influential people, right...? Right..?
Yes, yes, damn it, she was damn sure about it - but there was a time when she didn't have to be asking herself these questions at all... It used to be obvious.
When she opened her eyes in the morning, she would wake up in her room, almost bigger than Misato's whole apartment, and she would find it lined with indisputable evidence of her greatness, the most beautiful toys on the shelves, (even if she often politely refused them) the most expensive designer clothes in the cupboards, whatever it was, if she only implied that she wanted it, she would get it.
Because she was worth it.
Every morning she would get up from her king-sized bed, sit in front of her big, spacious dressing table and get to work until everything was perfect, nothing was out of line, and last but not least, there were always her interface clips, who had her very special place between all the cosmetics, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, with those fiery red corners sticking out of her fiery red hair like horns, with an expression of determination, she would know exactly who she was.
And every morning, she would indulge in anticipation of the day when she would prove to everyone why she deserved all this and much more.
Her arrival in Japan, when she would shatter the enemy on her first attempt, the countless voices cheering for her, the moment every single hour of training paid off, the crowd chanting her name, and the steamy affair with Kaji-san that would occupy her if the monsters were to take a day off...
With every day that passed, her expectation radiated more - she saw crowds throwing her into the air in admiration, a parade celebrating her arrival, and these images would keep the fire in her eyes burning after she left the room.
"Who's that kid there?"
"That's our Second Child! She is the pride and joy of the third branch, no,of Europe! Her synchronization and harmonix values have even surpassed the first test person in Japan as of this month!"
"What... this little girl? Impossible!"
When she saw other children, it would be completely by chance.
It was not something that would happen on a regular basis, and when it did, it was only now and then and in completely by chance.
Perhaps she'd see them as she drove past in an armored Mercedes Limousine, as they were romping around in a meadow engrossed in some sort of ball game, stupid cattle without any real meaning in their lives.
All they did took place in magnitudes of importance that could be measured in by a schoolboy's ruler, while the going-ons of her life called for the supernovas and lightyears with whom the dephts of the universe were mapped.
She was different from them.
That was actually the primary emotion encoded in her memory of those days.
There was nothing for her to discuss with these pointless peasants, any more than a human could have a meaningful conversation with a plant.
It never occurred to her that these playing children with their carefree summer joy could have anything she didn't have.
"But even prodigies like you have to play from time to time... what's your favorite game to play?"
"I have no time for something like games! After all, it's about the fate of humanity!"
"But isn't that very exhausting and stressful...? It must take a lot of work to do so well at school in spite of all the training..."
"Not really, no..."
"It's always said you become a genius with 1% talent and 99% hard work..."
"With me, it's the other way around. Mind you, one percent of saving the entire world is still a lot of hard work..."
In a pair of jeans, a tight top with the imprint of a broken heart and a pink hair tie, the red-haired girl sat discontentedly at the long dining table, full of expensive crockery, cutlery, decoratively lined up food and lovingly arranged table decorations, discontentedly poking around in her food with he fork.
"Oh, Asuka! You don't know how happy we are that you're finally coming to visit us... Your father and I have been meaning to have you over for a long time, but you always had your exercises when we wanted to visit you..."
What that stupid bitch didn't know was that it was all on purpose.
"Those aren't exercises. It's training." spat the girl.
"Uh... sure..." The woman seemed a little insecure for a moment but quickly restored her mask. "Anyway, how's your... training going?"
"I don't know how it's any of your business."
"Asuka! That's no way to talk to your mother," the man at the table finally interfered.
"Exactly, with my mother!"
She got up and didn't even bother to put place her fork on the proper spot.
"Where do you think you're going, young lady...?"
"I still have to study. And besides, I can't afford to eat this greasy stuff. God knows what it'll do to my condition."
"Hello, Asuka"
"What do you want?" The girl looked through the crack of the door with cold eyes.
The woman behind it pulled out a bag. "I wanted to ask you if you'd like to try on these new dresses I bought for you!"
"And why is that?
"Well, the other day you were talking about your test scores, and how you beat out that other girl in Japan... Consider it a reward."
"You can keep it!"
"Eh...?"
"Do you really think you can just
buy me with fancy clothes and toys? Don't think I didn't see right through you. You just want to suck up to daddy. You're nothing but an impudent whore who made a move on older man an so you could inherit his money when he dies... You may have fooled him, but I'm smart.
You must be very arrogant to think you can fool someone who has, like, twice your IQ! Leave me alone, I have to study!"
"Honey, can you please tell Asuka to go to bed?"
"Why, she's studying for school..."
Langley could not have missed the sudden drop in temperature in his wife's tone of voice.
"Did something happen, Cornelia...? Did you and Asuka have another Argument?"
He sighed.
"Anyway, it's almost midnight, she has to go to bed."
"But does she really, Sebastian? What makes you think we know more about that than she does? How can we be sure of what she needs at all? She might be a child, but she's so intelligent that normal people like us can hardly understand what she's thinking..."
"Isn't that pretty irresponsible for something coming out of a trained doctor's mouth?"
"That depends on how you see it... I may be a doctor, but even Doctors don't understand everything. That should be obvious from the very fact that we humans are still not immortal. I have my limits, both in my patience and in my ability, as well as in my knowledge... at the moment, for example, I often think about whether it is possible for a child's brain to be so developed that it has lost every need for human closeness... Maybe this is what humanity will be like in the distant future. ".
Either way, that night no one was there to put the little red-haired girl to bed after she had fallen asleep over her textbooks.
But the next morning she would look at herself in the mirror, her hair a mess from the turnings and tossings of her unquiet sleep, her cheeks marked with angry red where the edges of the book had been, with hair confused from sleep, and her little body packaged in a floral dress that she had rejected as childish and cheap the day before, and punched at her reflection in her desperation.
Like one possessed, she ran to the door of the small balcony that bordered this room that she would never dare call her own, turned the door handle back and forth until the door finally opened, stormed out into the dawn to its outermost edge, and seized the railing angrily between her rosy fingers, as if she wanted to crush it.
The whole stupid suburban settlement out there, the stupid tweeting birds, the little cars and baby carriages, the idyllic gardens, everything and everyone here... they drove her mad.
"...Insects..." Her voice was trembling, just like the rest of her, the rage was incredibly real and unspeakably violent that it almost suffocated her before finally finding its way out.
"YOU'RE ALL NOTHING BUT STUPID INSECTS!"
"This time we got away with a slap on the wrist, but... all three of our EVAs sustained non-trivial damage. If that happens more often, it could significantly affect our ability to withstand further attacks in the future." Hyuuga had just been summarizing his report when his hair, just like that of his superiors, was blown aside as the small vehicle they were sitting in racing through the large, white-lit EVA repair chamber where other technicians were constantly at work. Surreally enough, the "treatment" for the damaged fighting machine looked like lot an oversized bandage.
"It wasn't that long ago that we were forced to give EVA 00 a general overhaul, and now we've already used up half of our spare parts again... and compared to some of the previous fights, this could be considered relatively moderate damage... It's hard to believe that the higher-ups can be so stubborn about holding onto the Vatican treaty at a time like this...".
"Exactly" Misato fully agreed. After a grueling day of work, it didn't take very much to agitate her. "How very clever of them to limit the number of Evangelions any country can possess to three, even if they are damaged..."
"We are currently giving priority to EVA 01, but even if the spare parts are delivered quickly, EVA 00 will probably take several more days..." Maya agreed. "We could theoretically send EVA 00 into battle just as it is, but what if the next target arrives before we had time to repair everything or to patch up the pilots? In that regard, we've already had a pretty close call with the Sixth Angel..."
As usual, Dr. Akai's perspective on the matter was distinctly cynical: "This treaty is the product of the egos of the countries involved in it... If you tried to renegotiate it, it would only lead to endless quarrels... And besides, we're already dealing with constant demands from Russia and Europe since they lost Unit Five... Politics breeds nothing but trouble..."
Maya sighed, "And who knows what else it may take before humanity is finally safe..."
After a long, long day spent dealing with all the trouble the tenth angel had left behind in terms of cleanup, repair and whatnot, Misato finally found herself back in the comforts of her home, and when she did, her only concern was to head straight to her room, to strip off her clothes down to the underpants, to throw her bag into the next available corner (where it would typically stay until it was needed once more) and to slip into something more comfortable.
On her way, she retrieved a cool can og beer from the fridge and spent a few instants touching its cool metal surface to seek relief from the summer heat, all while vigorously complaining about those same brain-melting temperatures and decreeing that the angels ought to be destroyed for their effects on the weather alone.
It was only after she'd poured some booze down her throat that she even took note of Asuka, who was squatting on the sofa with a grim look on her face and a game controller in her hands. (her Gameboy had run out of juice and she had stuck it to the charger cable in her room)
Engrossed in venting her frustrations upon virtual creatures, the redhead did not dignify her guardian with as much as a greeting.
"Huh...?" Once Misato consciously noticed this odd state of affairs, she blinked curiously into Asuka's direction.
"What's the matter? Why the long face?"
"I don't know where you get the impression that anything's the matter at all," the Second Child spat back, more or less answering the question.
Misato performed an A-grade facepalm that would have made Captain Picard proud.
"Please tell me you haven't been arguing with Shinji-kun again... Where is he anyway?"
"Moping in his room of course, that's the only thing he ever does. Maybe he'll calm down again by morning."
"Did you have to pick on him?"
"As if he ever needed a reason to whine... I don't understand why everyone is making such a fuss about it when he has a bad day, there's really nothing special about it. He's such a wimp, he'll barricade himself in his hole if you as much as look at him."
This comment was amazingly effective at wiping all the forced, jovial annoyance from Misato's face.
Again, she doubted whether she had achieved anything lasting in the last three months.
The best she could say was that "depressed" was no longer the Third' Child's default state, but noticeable deviation from it... But that didn't really calm her sense of guilt.
As for the object of her worries, he was currently trying his best to block out all surrounding sounds by burying his ears under a pillow.
He had noticed her arrival, but that was precisely what prompted his retreat – He didn't want to know anything, nor hear anything he would be expected to react to at this moment. He was plainly exhausted.
The boy had surrendered himself into Morpheus' arms quite some time ago in the hope that this day would finally end, but instead, he returned from the other side drenched in sweat... It hadn't been a vision, but the certainty that it was just a product of his own crazy life made it no better.
He had dreamt of this thing, the creature he had encountered on his futile escape after his second battle, and he couldn't shake off the impression that he clearly recognized it.
He didn't want to have to think about the things he'd seen, or anything at all, all he wanted was a deep, dreamless sleep that would give him a break from his existence, but he had long since lost whatever naivety would have been necessary to believe that he should be granted such respite.
He was so exhausted, but he didn't dare to answer the question as to what exact kind of remedy he desired for this. .
In any case, he had little hope that the usual night's rest would bring him much relief.
He was so very, very tired of it all.
(1) If you recognized all of those Anime/ movie snippets, you win one virtual cookie. Yes, I am aware of the irony, my only defense is that meta allusions weren't quite as worn out back in the day.
(2) The bold caps text was meant to accomplish an effect comparable to the EOTV telops or the flashing titles used in the show, a 'narrator's voice' perhaps
(3) Around the time I was writing this I was reading a lot about the inner workings of reactive, narcissistic people with fragile egos – One could quantify this along the lines of self-awareness, freedom and soul being the things that come forth when we decide in the moment rather than being stuck in rigid patterns. But unlike the esoterics, I don't really think there is this metaphysical splinter that needs to liberate itself from the patters – fear of the future and pain from the past can distract us from the present, yet without an organizing principle to filter our perception and a conception of time, we'd just be reacting to our senses; We'd be just as mechanical as someone controlled by rigid ego patters. We ARE the pattern, what is essentially a lot like a machine learning alghorithm running on the computer of our brain – It's simply a stochastic Boltzmann machine rather than a highly deterministic Von Neumann Machine with clear divisions of processor, memory and program. But we're turing complete. We can program ourselves, to an extent.. We can make sure we're a flexible pattern conductive to the things we chose to do.
As an unenergetic introvert I suppose I (like Shinji, I presume) feel a bit stumped, even put into question by the existence of high-pressure, high-energy people who don't see to have that limitation – but then, even those people find a way to get themselves in mental twists so that all that energy winds up going nowhere- IT's
(4) So basically, this was meant to be an exploration, not any sort of infantile bashing, but at this point it's a few years old and I realize that it might be imperfect. I got a review to that effect on the German version. I like following things to their cathartic conclusion but any aim can be done wrong, one may get carried away and cross from what has impact precisely because its wilder parts flow from common principles to what seems too over the top to be of import to anyone.
But even aknowledging that I do think it's important to aknowledge that at times, Asuka does canonically act like a bully toward her fellow pilots and not to make light of it – of course a counterpoint or counter-thought to that is that Asuka's friendship with Hikari is actually pretty interesting, precisely because of the ordinariness that often gets it overlooked. Here's this character who's reactive to the point of seeming mechanical, who can't bond with anyone because she can't allow herself to want them and immediately sees them as rival, and she has this ordinary friendship where she'll at times even comfort or defend her just like anygirl would when it comes to their best friend (ep 17, 12 etc) -
It's something people don't bear in mind when they expect that someone, like for example Shinji, should have gone and solved all of Asuka's problems for her – this friend who wasn't a rival, had experience in taking care of others and showed great patience couldn't get through to her.
This isn't to say that it's "all her own fault" but, it's about the same level of responsibility as one might or might not assign to Shinji, anything else fails to treat her as a full human with a potential for both good and evil.
It's sure one of those moment that reminds you that people you see as twisted or disagree with can still have 'soul' and act out of common humanity. It reminds me of a story I read about this very suspicious, antagonistic man whose only friend was the janitor at the school he went to because he didn't see him as threatening. It shows the extent of his problems but then again, it WAS a friendship, a glimmer of light in a dark world. One dimensionality is boring, because it makes it insultingly obvious what needs to be done, which isn't always so clear-cut IRL
(5) Another goal was to play around with perspective in the way the anime "His and Her Circumstances" does pretty well. Similar things could be said about the segments with Rei – It's not so much about portraying her character a certain way as to explore what it might look like from various possible perspectives
(6) A thing with Rei is that a lot of characters have a lot of different, at times contradictory readings of her Gendo, Fuyutsuki, Ritsuko, Asuka...) which, more than anything, seem to be projections of their own hopes and fears on not quite an empty slate but certainly an ambiguos one – all the while she is painfully aware that others only see whatever meaning they've made her the symbol of and wouldn't notice if she, the person, is there or not. The most unbiased readings probably come from Touji and Kensuke, not the ones from ep 5 when they dismiss her as "that one weird classmate" but the more nuanced povs we see in eps 14 and 17/18 after they've gotten a bit more of an impression just by virtue of her being the friend of a friend.
Shinji's certainly ostensibly the first person to actively make a point of giving a fuck, but his attempts are feeble, inconstant and possibly tied up with the mysteries surrounding his parents and thinking that she may be a key or an obstacle to that, which she also knows (ep 15 etc. )
It is sure worth contemplating what it was about him that, though he' not above being creeped out by the legitimately creepy aspects of it all, led him to at least as much interest as repulsion – maybe the part of him that's already understatedly drawn to the grostesque, the silent and the "empty unchaging void of space"
Unlike some people, I do not think that it in any way negates the very genuine care he has and the real warmth exchanged; It is simply a complication, as they exist between all the characters.
(7) Yes. He is beginning to realize. CotP will continue in 2.20: [At The Heart Of The World], in which being the chosen one continues to suck, as poor Shinji can't even take a nap in peace without some sort of metaphysical interruption.
(8) I remember having been quite proud of this chapter at the time, but it may have been overly ambitious – I'm uncertain if it aged well.