A Glass of Wine (Chapter 15)
"Synaptic network is offline. Unit 00 is cold."
"Target is on the move again, headed south."
"Projection indicates the target will intercept with Unit 01 in sixty seconds."
The sun was low over the mountains, its rays kissing the flat bottom valley which rested at the base of Mt. Matsushiro's southern slope and washing the shuttered windows of the houses with amber light. The streets were vacant, cicadas buzzed, and a rhythmic thud shook the ground—the tread of an oncoming giant. With each step, its shadow grew across pavement and power lines, parked cars and playgrounds. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Shinji gripped his control yokes. His feed to Unit 00 was static. The voices over his communications link were calm, detached, as if everything was fine. Unit 00 was cold, that's all. No word on Rei. Nothing to worry about, no pilot injured or possibly dead. No devastation of the surrounding buildings, no death toll of bystanders. Just Unit 00—which was cold.
His view of the oncoming target was clear. A blackened silhouette before the setting sun. A mirrored shadow of his own Unit.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"The pilot is still inside, isn't he?" he said, not caring if it was aloud or not. He blink-clicked the image, magnifying it till all he saw was the target's face—heavy black armor around white-hot eyes.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"Another kid," he said, "just like me."
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The pallet rifle was firm in his grip. He positioned the targeting reticule in the center, directly over Unit 03's head. His finger hovered over the switch, and with a wash of cold like ice in his veins, he realized he couldn't bring himself to pull it.
With a roar from a nightmare, the target leapt forward.
((()))
Six days earlier, the suffusion of Tokyo 3's massed streetlights reached through the bedroom window, a blue midnight glow that kept voices to whispers and made one lean in to speak. On the bedside table, the alarm clock blinked from 12:59 to 1:00. Shinji sat on top of the covers, cross legged. Asuka sat in front of him, one arm resting around her raised leg, her chin on her knee.
"Your mother," he said.
She didn't look at him. "Yes."
He thought about the last time her mother had been brought up, when he had thrown it in her face. A fight had followed, then a kiss. He didn't want either right now, so he stayed quiet.
"What do you remember about your mother?" she asked.
Shinji remembered the last time he had heard that question, spoken by his father in the moment he had decided to remove him from the Katsuragi residence. Now that he had managed to get away from that and return, the question had resurfaced.
He shook his head. "Not much. I can't even really remember her face. She died when I was four, so…"
"No memories at all?"
"No." He frowned. "I remember her voice. No words, just the sound of it."
Asuka stared at the blanket in front of her. Her arm flexed, pulling her leg in closer to her chest. Shinji wanted to reach out and hold her hand, but the want refused to become action. He had felt so close to her just hours before, when he stood in the doorway and told her he loved her, but now he did not know what to do.
"How about you?" he said.
She shook her head. "Nothing, really," she lied.
"Except for just now," he said.
She took a deep breath. "I was asleep, or getting close. You know that thing where you're close and then you feel like you drop suddenly, and then you're wide awake again?"
"Sure."
"That happened, only when I dropped, I could swear I heard…"
As her words trailed off, Shinji reached out to her, his fingertips brushing through her hair as he made for her shoulder. "Asuka—"
She twisted away, out of his reach, and planted her feet on the floor so that she sat on the edge of the bed. She ran her hands up her arms, hugging herself. Shinji dropped his hand to the covers. He searched for something to say.
"My first sortie," he said, at last, "Unit 01 lost control. I couldn't remember any of it at first. It took till a few days later, after I got out of the hospital and moved in here, for it to come back to me. It hit all at once. I remembered it as if I had been the one doing it, not the Eva."
He watched her back, finding no sign of whether or not his words had hit home, or even been relevant at all.
"If something like that happens to you," he said, respecting her enough to not guess that she had just experienced it, "I want you to know that I get it. You can talk to me about it."
She looked at him, sideways. He hoped that she would admit it, or tell him something new that he could help with, or just give him some response that would let him orient himself in this chaotic new development.
"I want to be alone," she said instead.
The words hit like ice, but he recovered quickly enough. "Alright," he said, and stood and left, closing the door behind him. He made his way to the living room and laid down, sprawling on the carpet. He watched the ceiling overhead and tried to figure out what had just happened.
((()))
The weekend passed. Shinji did not leave the Katsuragi residence, hoping that Asuka would emerge from her room for more than a bathroom break, meal, or an hour or so of silent TV watching. Though he was happy to be back here, he assumed it was a temporary arrangement. They would not let him live here, after all. So when the doorbell rang on Sunday afternoon, he fully expected to open it and find a wall of black suits and sunglasses, ready to rip him away from his reclaimed life.
Instead, he found his belongings, dumped unceremoniously on the stoop, repacked into their moving boxes. His bed was there, too, its frame disassembled, the mattress propped agains the wall. A pair of moving men were already walking away to the elevators.
"Uh, thank you!" he said.
"Make up your damn mind!" one of them shouted over his shoulder.
"Sorry," he said.
Shinji brought the boxes and bedframe inside, storing them in his room once more. He wrestled the mattress in last, grunting and heaving it through the apartment.
Misato found him as he was finishing up. She leaned on the door frame, a beer held at her side. "These just arrive?" she said.
"Yeah," Shinji replied.
"Guess you're back full time now," she said.
Shinji looked down at the boxes. Seeing them there, taped up and worn from two moves in as many weeks, he wondered if this delivery was as close to an apology as his father would ever get.
"Guess so," he said.
((()))
"I feel like this whole thing is a trap," Misato said, later that evening. She looked at the drink in front of her, at the finished meal, the plates set at the edge of the table to be taken away. "Like any moment I'm going to get the call and he'll be whisked away again, back to whatever crappy hole the Commander forced him into."
"Interesting."
"'Interesting' like 'Interesting, Misato. You might be right.'?"
"'Interesting' like 'Interesting, but you're probably wrong.'"
"You're sure?"
Kaji shrugged and sipped his drink. The restaurant had a thin crowd tonight, and the background conversation was a quiet murmur—couples leaning to speak over tables cloistered in private booths, co-workers drinking to recover from the work week, and old friends catching up. Misato thought of herself and Kaji, and wondered which archetype they fit best in.
Probably a blend of the three, honestly.
"I don't know anything for sure…" he began.
"Best guess will do."
He smiled, but it was tired. "I think Commander Ikari hasn't been himself lately."
"You think?" she scoffed. "The guy barely cares about his kid for months and then suddenly he's in my apartment telling the kid what to do, where to live, who to be friends with. Since when does he care about his son's welfare?"
"I don't think he does," Kaji said. Misato moved to speak, and he stopped her with a wave of the hand. "Let me explain. He cares about what his son can do. Shinji the teenaged boy isn't important to him whatsoever, but Shinji the Evangelion pilot matters more than he would let on."
"Shinji the Evangelion pilot disobeyed a direct order and got swallowed by an Angel along with Asuka," Misato countered.
"True. But he got in the seat."
Misato laughed. "The kid has done nothing but what we ask him to do for months. We haven't had a problem motivating him to 'get in the seat' since, what, July?"
"In that time, has there been much to challenge him?"
"You mean beyond the giant monsters?"
"I'm not saying that the battles haven't been stressful. They are. But he has triumphed. We have won every single time, and no one he knows has died. His life is incredibly stable."
"Yeah, because I'm good at my job."
"Oh, you're a model homemaker."
"Damn right." Misato grinned, wondering if this evening might lean a little more in the 'couples' direction than she initially thought. Then she sobered. "So what are you saying? The Commander threw a curveball at Shinji to test him? See if he could deal with adversity?"
"It's a possibility."
"And if that's true? Did he pass the test?"
Kaji shrugged. "He's living with you, isn't he?"
"Yeah, I suppose so," she said.
"Besides," he continued, "I think you'd know more than me. I wasn't the one who got questioned by the committee today."
Misato raised an eyebrow. "See, it's things like that that make me wonder what your job actually entails."
"I'm a jack of all trades. Come on. What'd they ask you?"
"The same old question that comes up every time we discussed Unit 01's incident. 'Does the pilot remember anything?' Only this time they wondered if the Angel had tried to make contact with Unit 02 or Asuka."
"Interesting. What did you tell them?"
"I told them that I'm not certain, on either count. But to my best knowledge, no, Asuka remembers nothing."
"Do you believe that?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. She looked at her drink. "I want to believe it."
There was a pause between them, as each tried to make sense of where to take the evening from there. She looked at him, he looked at her. The moment came to an end when she grabbed one of the folders from the table between them.
"Tell me about this again," she said. "What'd you call it, the Dummy Plug?"
Kaji gave a smile that went unnoticed. "Yeah," he said, reaching out to elaborate.
((()))
Monday morning, Shinji returned to school. Misato offered to drive him but he declined, saying he would rather walk. He found Asuka before he left. She was sitting in the living room. The TV was on, some commercial playing. He looked in on her, trying to find any words that didn't sound idiotic. I'm going to school was by far the worst option—she knew that already. Then what? I'll see you later? Have a good day? Hope you figure out whatever it is that's wrong with you?
Each time he came close to saying one, it turned to ash on his tongue. There was no point, he realize. He rested his hand on the doorframe. She switched channels on the TV, not looking at him.
I love you, he thought. He imagined saying it aloud and immediately felt stupid for it. He'd said the words once, and she had embraced him, but in the light of day after a weekend of distance from her, he didn't know if he'd ever be able to say them again. He was certain he believed them, but Asuka's scorn had a way of turning even his most fervent beliefs into childish, nonsensical thought putty. Just the thought of that kind of rejection from her was enough to stay his words.
He turned and left for school. The front door swished shut behind him.
Asuka set the remote down and turned to look at where he had stood.
Misato stepped out of her bedroom, pulling on her jacket. "Shinji leave yet?"
"Just did." Asuka turned back to the TV.
Misato watched her as she zipped her jacket. She grabbed her keys from her dresser and pocketed them. "Y'know," she said, "I've got a lot of work today, but if you want, you can come with me. We can check on the repairs. See if we can't figure out when the world's top pilot will be ready for her triumphant return."
"Sure," Asuka said.
((()))
He found Kensuke at the corner of Ozawa and Prefect, just as he always used to. Kensuke saw him and waved. "Shinji! What are you doing here?"
"I'm living back home again," he said.
"That's awesome. Think you'll be back in our class?"
"I don't really know."
"You should try. Ask Ms. Misato to pull some strings, y'know?"
"I don't know if she can do that, Kensuke."
"Sure she can. Have her institute martial law."
"I don't think she can do that, either."
Kensuke grinned. "I'm really glad you're here. Rei's been missing you, too."
Shinji frowned. "What?"
Before he could ask anything else, he heard a loud "Shinji!" from behind him, and received a clubbing blow to the back from Toji Suzuhara, and any questions he had were gone.
"What are you doing here?" Toji said.
Kensuke answered for him. "He's back with Misato."
"Ah, no way! Back in the babe zone!" Toji said, slamming a fist into Shinji's shoulder.
"Guys," Shinji said, "you've gotta stop it with that."
"Yeah, Toji," Kensuke said. "Stop with the babes talk."
Toji frowned. "Oh, okay. I see it. Can't talk about babes anymore. Can't talk about naughty bits."
"I just don't want to be rude," Kensuke said.
"Whatever, man. You're a traitor to your own sex." Toji jerked a thumb at Kensuke. "See this guy, Shinji? He passed up a trip to New Yokosuka to see a battleship, all on account of a girl."
"Oh, whatever." Kensuke started walking. "I'm not going to stand here and be late."
Shinji walked with Kensuke. Toji followed, bouncing his basketball. Shinji wondered what this talk of a girl was about. Being away from the class for a week had pretty much wiped any up-to-date knowledge he had on his friend group. He couldn't mean Rei, right?
Before he could follow up on it, Kensuke looked at him. "Have you heard about the third branch?"
"What third branch?"
"Of Nerv. The American facility."
"There's an American Nerv?"
"Not anymore there isn't," Kensuke said. He leaned in. "From what I can tell from my dad's email, it's totally gone. An explosion or something. You didn't hear?"
Shinji shook his head. "Misato didn't say anything about it."
"Yeah. Apparently, it had something to do with Unit 04, and now the Americans want to get rid of Unit 03 and transfer it here."
Shinji frowned, trying to make sense of all this. Kensuke had been wrong about things before—dragging information illegally off his dad's work computer often caused him to get a less-than-complete picture of what was going on at Nerv—but he just as often knew more than Shinji did. Despite being a pilot, no one told him much of anything.
"Do you think they'll send a pilot along with it?" Kensuke said. "Like Asuka?"
Toji spoke up. "That's just what I need in my life—another weirdo."
Kensuke looked over his shoulder. "Just keep dribbling."
"Your mom dribbles real good," Toji said. He kept dribbling.
They were coming up on the intersection of Watanabe and Inoki. The traffic was thinning as they neared the school.
"I don't know," Shinji said. "When is it supposed to arrive? Do you know—"
Kensuke caught sight of something ahead and stopped him. "Oh, crap. I forgot. I don't want to talk military stuff around her anymore." He looked Shinji in the eyes. "Sorry. We'll catch up on it later."
"Around who?" Shinji said, then stopped as he caught sight of her.
((()))
Rei Ayanami saw Kensuke, her co-pilot, and their friend. She said hello to each of them.
"Kensuke. Pilot Ikari. Mr. Suzuhara." She looked at Kensuke, and asked him the question she did every morning before school. "Do you want to walk with me again?"
"Definitely," he said, like always.
As they walked, Rei stayed close to Kensuke. She kept her eyes ahead, and fell into the comfortable silence she normally had around Kensuke. She listened, though, as he talked with Ikari, about grades and the differences between their classes.
She looked over periodically and caught Ikari looking back at her. He would always glance away in those moments. It was the same look he had any time she made him uncomfortable. In her life, Rei had learned what it looked like when someone was uncomfortable around her.
But what was there to be uncomfortable about? She remembered walking with him and Pilot Soryu, weeks ago, to the GeoFront after school. The two had been close then, and Rei found none of it uncomfortable. She had told Soryu, in that moment, that Ikari was her boyfriend. She had been right, even though Soryu screamed and tried to deny it.
Was Ikari worried about her? About Kensuke? Or was he just surprised?
She kept quiet the rest of the way to school. Behind her, she heard Suzuhara's basketball striking the pavement, keeping time with their footfalls. Thud. Thud. Thud.
((()))
Misato had been kept in meetings all morning—something to do with the Second Branch in the US—and Asuka had been left to her own devices. However, Misato had promised they would discuss Unit 02 today, and she kept her promise. The first moment she had free, Misato brought them down to the cage, where Dr. Akagi was working.
The conversation did not go well.
"What the hell do you mean it'll be 'kept in stasis'?" Asuka said. "I'm perfectly fine!"
Doctor Akagi did not look up from her datapad. "No one is questioning your health, Pilot. It's your Evangelion we are worried about."
They were sitting in the observation box overlooking Unit 02's cage. Below them, technicians in orange jumpsuits covered the head and shoulders of Unit 02, prying up the crimson plating and sinking heavy data uplink cables into its superstructure. If it weren't for the humans around it to provide scale, it would have looked like a costumed person undergoing brain surgery.
Misato touched Asuka's shoulder. "Unit 02 needs to go in stasis. You've got to trust us on this."
"Why?" she said. "Unit 01 went nuts, right? In his first mission."
She caught a surprised look shared between Misato and Doctor Akagi. She wasn't supposed to know about that, huh? Well, good.
"Yeah," she said. "He told me about it. So what gives? He was never taken off the combat roster."
"At that time, Unit 01 was our only functioning Evangelion. Unit 00 hadn't been cleared yet, and we needed a response force for the early attacks," Misato said. "Now that we have a fleet of three, we can afford to be more cautious with yours."
Asuka shrugged her shoulder away from Misato's hand. "The other two aren't even Evas. They're a prototype and a test type. They're different."
Doctor Akagi spoke up. "Actually, that's one of my worries. We expect 00 and 01 to act up from time to time. They have glitches."
"Yeah, because they aren't Evas. Duh."
"They're Evas, just not production models," Akagi continued. "And I know them well enough to know their shortcomings. But Unit 02 should not have any of the same issues. The fact that it did is a problem, and one that I want to investigate. If I had more firsthand experience with it, my assessment might be different."
"So I'm off the roster because my Eva is sprained?" Asuka smirked. "How is that my problem?"
"It's not," Misato said. "We're trying to get through this the best we can. We just want you to be safe."
"I can handle risk," Asuka said. She pointed at Akagi. "It's not my fault that this lady can't do her job properly."
That got Akagi's attention. She set down her datapad.
"Asuka—" Misato started, but stopped when Akagi held up a hand.
"This lady," the doctor said, "is thinking about a lot more than your safety. Do you know what all this is?"
Around them, display screens flickered and buzzed with the constant stream of data from her Evangelion's sensor arrays. Some of it was raw binary code, some of it was from radar and LIDAR bounce-back, and some of it was a riot of infrared blooms. Several screens even showed decompressed audio files.
"Unit 02's data inload," Asuka said.
"Correct," Akagi said. "Despite the plug's mission recorder having blanked, there were still a number of passive sensors that were active during the Unit's time submerged in the Angel's inner dimension, and every bit of that data is here being downloaded, copied, and catalogued."
"Why?" Asuka said.
"Because the first step to beating something is understanding how it works, and right now we have a very incomplete picture of how that Angel did what it did. Of course, you don't remember anything. Shinji didn't, either, after his Unit experienced the same glitch."
Misato crossed her arms and looked down at the cage. Asuka frowned. What was she nervous about?
"I need to know everything that happened during that missing time, including what happened outside the Eva and what happened inside. And since you can't tell me, I have to comb through all of this, which takes time, and for that time you will be off the combat roster." Akagi slowly took off her glasses as she spoke, folded them, and placed them in her labcoat pocket. She looked at Asuka. "Unless, of course, you have something you've remembered that makes me doing all this work unnecessary. Do you?"
A door swinging wide, the light beyond doused red in the haze of her memory. A rope creaking in the stillborn air. Asuka, my darling.
Asuka narrowed her eyes. "No," she said, "I don't. And I don't have to stand here and take this crap from some dyed blonde bitch!"
"Asuka!" Misato said, but it was too late. The Second Child had already turned and stormed out of the room. The door slid closed behind her.
Misato looked at Ritsuko. "That was a little much."
"I agree. She insulted a superior."
"I meant a little much on your end. You didn't have to call her out like that."
"It was entirely appropriate. Unit 03 will be here by the end of the week. You will have enough Evangelions to defend this city without Unit 02, and I have more than enough work to do in the meantime. I can't spend time coddling a child."
"I'm not asking you to coddle her. I'm asking you to be a human being. She's just a kid."
"The fact that you're comfortable being lied to is your own failing," the doctor replied, turning back to her work.
((()))
Shinji returned home that evening to find an apartment of closed doors and a note on the refrigerator.
Working late. We already had dinner. Please feed Pen-Pen. –Your Brave Commander
He did as he was told. Fish came out of a can, went into a bowl, and were promptly devoured. He compacted the can and placed it in the recycling, then stood in the kitchen for a moment. He had gone for a walk after school, trying to clear his head and make some sense of his situation. But a day away had not solved his problem. Despite spending most of every lesson thinking through possible words, he didn't have a solution. Nothing he had thought of on his walk sounded anything but stupid, either, and he had imagined her rolling her eyes or turning away from every one of them.
He moved to the hallway, and stood in front of Asuka's door. He thought about knocking, but wasn't sure how she would take it. He thought about opening it, but that had the same problem. Maybe it would be allowed if he was trying to comfort her—and he desperately wanted to. But every plan he had completely sucked.
Maybe a plan wasn't what he needed. Maybe what he needed was action.
Before he could second-guess himself, he raised his fist and knocked on the door.
"Go away," came the muffled voice.
His fist hovered over the wood, hesitating. His bold action wilted and died. Eventually he dropped it and went to his room.
In her room, Asuka heard him walk away. She rolled onto her side, looked out the window, and wished he had just opened the door.
Author's Note: Nothing like a global pandemic to get me writing again.
The bad news is that in writing this chapter, I originally had it expanded to twice its length. I realized that it would be north of 10,000 words by the time I finished it if I didn't cut it in half. The good news is that after chopping it in half, I've already got most of the next chapter finished. I can say with confidence that you'll get another chapter sometime next week. I can also say with confidence that it absolutely rocks and I can't wait to post it.
I don't want to make any big timeline promises beyond that, but I will say that the rest of the story is already outlined, and that I will be working on it more. Thanks for reading.