A Crown of Stars

.

.

Part 79
In Blood And Screaming...

.

.
The bed shook and rattled. He hurt. The pillow was cold, metallic, and smelled like mud and wet garbage. The vibration and engine noise were uncomfortable too.

Shinji didn't like this.

He hurt. A lot. Why?

There was blood in his mouth. He felt cold, and incredibly, terribly thirsty. Water?

His attempt at vocalizing this was a rusty croak too soft for even his own ears to pick up. No one listened.

He rolled onto his back and managed to pry his eyelids open a slit. The sky slid past sideways and grey, too fast.

Someone mumbled something above him. It sounded like a question. It wasn't Japanese or English.

Another voice answered it. Someone painfully grabbed his wrists behind him and tied them together hard and tight.

Asuka. The thought struck him slowly, muddily. Nothing was clear. But this felt... important. Urgent. Where was Asuka?

He tried to roll onto his side and look around. But the motion was met with a boot to his side and a new flare of pain across his whole torso, so he flopped back awkwardly back the way he was.

The sky flashed away and turned into concrete as the bed dipped downward. They dropped down, down, down into the concrete tunnel. The ceiling was cracked and chipped, with the occasional bullet mark or blast burn. It was unfamiliar... wasn't it? Wait, no... he'd been here before. The last time he'd seen it, Asuka had been bleeding. That was bad.

This was NERV-Berlin.

The bed stopped moving and the engine stopped rumbling. Rough hands yanked him up and mostly upright. He was surrounded by large, angry-looking men in tactical gear. They dragged him out of the back of the rusty gun-truck that apparently wasn't a bed after all, and hustled him out of the vehicle bay and up a flight of stairs.

"Asuka?" he managed to barely croak. his throat felt drier than sand, and he was so, so tired. Just keeping his thoughts in a line for more than ten sec-

One of the men dragging him along punched him in the face and shouted at him in... wait, that was German. He knew German, right?

"Stop babbling, you stupid shit!" the guard shouted at him. That wasn't very nice. Wait, what was going on?

"You punched me," Shinji slurred.

The guard punched him again before the two men dragging him shoved open the double doors at the end of the corridor they'd been taking and ushered him out into a huge, familiar room.

NERV-Berlin's Operations Center.

Jinnai was waiting for them in the center of the ops floor, the glow of the huge screens making his elaborately trimmed uniform look rather rumpled. It matched the snarling fury disturbing his face. "You," he snarled at Shinji. "Good. Covered in blood and beaten. That's a fine start."

Shinji looked down at himself. Blood? Oh... right. He was covered in blood, large patches of his skin visible through the tattered remnants of his pilot's suit. Whatever was left of his MOSPEDA armor was long gone. He couldn't tell where the blood was coming from, though. He hurt all over.

Jinnai waved his hand at a rickety wooden chair behind him, oddly out of place in the slightly-run-down techno look of the Ops Center. "Put him next to her."

Asuka!

She was slumped over in the next chair, her face hidden by her hair, which was also thickly matted with blood and dirt. She wasn't moving.

"Asuka?" he croaked as the guards shoved him into the slightly dilapidated folding chair next to Asuka and roughly tied his bound wrists to the back. He was barely audible. His throat was so dry, and he couldn't think!

A slap from Jinnai wrenched his focus back to the furious UN Secretary-General. "And since this bitch isn't answering questions very well right now, you get to supply some answers in her place. Start talking, you sniveling little shit! Where did you get that giant fucking robot?! That thing is twice the size of an Evangelion, and can fly? At multi-Mach speeds? Where did they build it? How did you make contact with them? How long has this plot been going on?"

Each question was punctuated with another smack to Shinji's face. It was not helping him think straight. Thirst was driving him crazy, and all he could think about in between slaps was Asuka. She wasn't moving! "Asuka? 'Z she okay?" he got out.

Jinnai grabbed his hair and yanked Shinji's head back from its slump so his eye were aimed right at Jinnai's face. "Listen to me, Ikari. Have I got your attention? Your little whore is right here, and unless you start talking, I'm going to cut bits off her while you watch."

Shinji croaked something that might have been words at him. The only one that came close to coherent was "Water."

Jinnai snarled at him and said something to one of the guards. Shinji felt himself being tipped forward.

"You want water, Ikari? Fine. Have some!"

Shinji peeled his eyes back open just in time to see his face being lowered into a bucket of water. It washed over him as his head was stuffed in chin-deep.

He could practically feel his skin drinking it in. It invaded his mouth, his nose, his throat, his lungs. He could feel the tissues soaking it up, practically gulping it down as fast as it poured in.

His head started to clear, like magic. It began to occur to him he should probably be panicking or struggling from the firm hand holding his head under water, but instead he just swallowed, swallowed, swallowed. The water level in the bucket dropped farther and farther, until he couldn't reach any more with his mouth. He settled down to labored breathing, the water that had flowed into his lungs somehow trickling away.

"Uh….sir?" the guard holding his head down finally said. "He… drank it?"

"What?!"

Shinji felt his head being yanked out of the bucket. Jinnai seemed even more irritated than before. No, wait, not irritated. Homicidal.

His brain finally in gear again somehow, Shinji felt his fear swiftly rising. Terrifying awareness that he and Asuka were in the hands of a man who personally hated them and was barely able to restrain a vicious temper at the best of times, and that these were far from such, pressed in. And he was wounded, bleeding, tied to a chair, and surrounded by armed guards. Not good.

Jinnai took the bucket from the guard and hit Shinji in the side of the head with it, the remaining water splashing onto the floor. "You think you're being funny, Ikari? I'm not laughing. I told you: Talk, or the little slut here is going to be next." He handed the bucket to the guard again. "Fill it higher. We're going to hold her head under next, and see if the comedian here likes that better."

"Don't hurt her!" Shinji burst out.

Jinnai stabbed a finger in his face. "You'd better start talking, then! Who is behind all this, Ikari?! You two shits don't have the brains or skills to put this together, and I'd have known about it long before this if you were anyone important in this plot! So who is this? Some NERV or SEELE faction in Argentina?! You two sure as Hell didn't build that giant robot yourselves!"

"I….we…" Shinji halted. 'We got it as a present from a space-god-emperor who appeared in our tent two months ago' did not sound like something Jinnai would accept as the truth.

Jinnai waited a moment, but took Shinji's confused pause as defiance. "No? Fine. Rostov? Dunk her. And don't let her up until I say so."

Shinji's heart seized in his chest as the black-clad guard put the tall bucket on a crate in front of Asuka, grabbed her unconscious form, and stuffed her head into the water, holding her down with one large hand on the back of her head, one on her body.

The immersion seemed to awaken Asuka from her state. Just a few seconds after she went under, she began to thrash and twist against her bound hands and the guard's restraining her. Jinnai's sneer was coldly amused.

"Well, well, look who's up! Maybe she'll feel like talking," he said cheerily. "Then again, maybe I'll just leave her like that until you feel like being more forthcoming, mmm?" He looked at Shinji, waiting.

"P-pull her out! I'll tell you! You… you just won't believe me!" Shinji pleaded.

Jinnai's sneer vanished, and look he gave Shinji was as cold and composed as the day they'd met. "Try me. Quickly. I'm a little low on patience today, Mister Ikari." He raised his arm again, this time aimed at Asuka. The gun in his hand glittered coldly in the still flashing warning graphics on the big screen. "You might say I'm on a hair trigger."

Shinji felt his throat tighten. "Let her breathe! I'll tell you!"

Jinnai just stared at him for another moment before irritably flicking his gun aside and nodding to the guard. The expressionless grunt released Asuka's head, and she reared up and back, gasping.

Mud and blood ran down her face as she coughed hard enough to turn her face red. She managed to turn her head before she vomited all over the floor next to her.

Shinji didn't care. She was alive, and therefore beautiful.

"A… a man appeared in our tent just before we sailed from Marseilles," Shinji said slowly. "A portal to… He said he was from another world; the Empire of Avalon. He offered us help in rebuilding this one. He gave us that mecha, a couple others, and some soldiers to handle South America. We knocked out the warlords in Buenos Aires and the area over the last two months so we'd have a base to stop your fleet, then… I don't know, negotiate something to stop the fighting. We were kind of improvising. Using the mecha to neutralize your fleet was supposed to… to take away your strike arm." He lifted his head to see what his surrender had gained.

Jinnai stared at him. "You… you expect me to believe a magic man appeared to you out of a portal and just gave you that thing?" He raised the gun again. "More of them? Soldiers? What kind of idiot do you think I am, Ikari?"

"Told you he'd never believe it, Shinji. Should have tried bullshitting about a secret NERV base on the moon or something," a new voice said hoarsely.

Both of them snapped their faces to the side. Asuka gave Shinji a haggard smile through the filthy curtain of her hair. "By the way, I'm really glad you're not dead, Shinji. I was…" She faltered, her voice rough. "Kind of… worried for a bit. You promised not to, you know."
She tilted her head to glare painfully at Jinnai "And he's not going to listen. We crashed eighty meters of screaming red evidence on him and he still can't accept what's happened."

Jinnai narrowed his eyes at her. "Oh, I'm sorry, Miss 'I'm so fucking smart'. You're right. I should just accept any line of bullshit this moron tries to sell me about people who come from other worlds to randomly hand out flying mecha to idiots like him and sluts like you. You want to sell me a bridge next?"

"He's telling the truth, you jackass. You think we imagined up that mecha? Hell, we're sitting right here! You sent us to Buenos Aires on a ship! We didn't fly back on the wings of imagination!" Asuka shot back.

"I can see that, you stupid whore! I blew you two out of the air with nukes and a positron cannon we took from a dead Mass Production Eva. So I think a secret NERV base or SEELE hideaway project or even some American black program is a little more likely than this fairytale!" Jinnai snapped back. "So start telling me who was behind this! Buenos Aires is a molten crater by now!"

Shinji felt his blood run cold. 'That...that can't be true. We got most of the missiles, and TJ and… and Unit-01 will have stopped the rest, right? Wait… how long were we out? TJ's limit has got to be… can Unit-01 still run without him helping?'

"You little shits may have cost me nearly all of my ready ICBMs, but more than enough got through to guarantee it's a smoking hole in the ground." Jinnai's sneer returned. "So whatever you think you're protecting there, it's gone. What I want to know it who was behind this, and if there's any more giant flying robots about to appear out of nowhere."

"Oh, two or three," Asuka said sarcastically. Shinji could read the same sort of fear for the fate of their friends behind her words, though. "And we shot down most of those missiles on the way here."

"And we kept shooting well after you two idiots were down and done." Jinnai shot right back. "It's been more than half an hour since the last launch, so even that one has impacted by now. And that's not even counting the warheads my sub put on target as well."

"Betcha that sub's gone awful quiet since you last talked," Asuka snarled. She rocked the creaky wooden chair side to side with her struggles against her own tied hands.

Jinnai's practiced poker face betrayed nothing. One of the guards behind him was not as good, darting a worried look at the main screens behind Shinji and Asuka.

"I'd bet you're wrong. And I'm the house," Jinna replied without missing a beat. He leveled his gun at Shinji, but kept his stare on Asuka. "I always win. Now, since you're feeling talkative, you get to tell me what I want to know, or I start shooting bits off your little boyfriend here." His snarl of the last label was vicious.

"Bigger bits than yours," Asuka muttered, glaring.

Shinji's blanched. "Asuka, don't-"

Jinnai's fist was faster. Asuka's head snapped back and her chair rocked.

Asuka spat some blood on the floor. "And your left is still weak," she croaked.

"You want some of my right?!" Jinnai shouted at her, pressing the barrel of his pistol to her forehead.

"Don't!" Shinji cried.

Jinnai's furious stare snapped to him. "Then you'd better start telling me what I want to know, Ikari! I wiped out Buenos Aires and the entire fleet you seized already today. I'm not going to blink at adding two more to the pile. I only need one of you to talk. Where the Hell did you get that giant red thing?!"

"I already told you!" Shinji protested. "He just appeared and offered to help us! He gave us everything!"

"Where's his base, Ikari?" Jinnai pressed. "If you say 'Buenos Aires', I'm going to do something violent, since I don't believe in such easy coincidences."

Shinji threw a desperate look at Asuka.

She shrugged. "He's not going to believe the truth, Shinji. We need to come up with some nice story that he'll accept."

Shinji's left foot exploded in pain. He didn't even hear the shot. He did hear Asuka's angry screaming at Jinnai, once his ears stopped ringing.

"-ou son of a bitch! Hey! HEY! Look at me! Look at me you asshole! Don't you dare touch him again or-" she was raging.

"Or what, Soryu? What are you going to do?" Jinnai sneered. "You and your pathetic boytoy are prisoners. Your mecha is a crashed wreck that my men are about to seize, your base is a glowing crater, and there is no one coming to save you! I don't want 'stories'! I want to know where you got that thing! So talk!"

"I will find a way, you dickless asshole!" Asuka snapped back at him. "You have no idea what you're screwing with!"

His pistol swung right back to center on her face. "So enlighten me, whore. I know you two degenerates were aboard that ship for the last two months. You were seen daily. So precisely when did you two morons find the time to pick up that giant red thing? By the way, my men are taking possession of it right now."

"Good luck getting in, jackass," Asuka shot back. "You're not getting inside my Red Whirlwind with anything short of the Positron Cannon, and I bet you don't have that on a trailer!"

Jinnai moved forward, pressing the muzzle of the pistol against Asuka's forehead. "Guess I'll just have to persuade you to give me the keys, then." Asuka gave a tiny hiss as the cold metal of the gun barrel dug against her skin, but merely glared back at him.

'He's pointing a gun at Asuka. He's going to hurt Asuka.' Shinji's awareness snapped back into focus, sudden urgency overriding the pain from the bullet hole in his foot. 'I was a coward last time. No more. I promised. No more being small. I have to stop him.'

He staggered to his feet. His hands were bound to the chair back, but his legs were free. If he crouched forward, he could sort of stand and move. The pain in his foot was meaningless. He shuffled forward and shoved a surprised Jinnai out of the way, putting himself between Asuka and the gun. "Get… get away from her." His head was pounding again.

"Shinji! Don't-" Asuka began to shout at him.

"Oh, sit down, you idiot!" Jinnai snarled. He shoved the staggering young man to the side, but Shinji held on somehow to wobble his way back, putting himself between Jinnai and Asuka.

"She... don't you hurt her..." Shinji gasped against the waves of pain coming up his leg. The gun pressed against his chest hardly registered. "You need to shoot someone, you shoot me."

"Shinji, you idiot! Sit down!" Asuka shouted at his back. "You've already been shot, you lunatic!"

"Better me than you!" Shinji rebutted. "I promised you a life! My life!"

"Aww, aren't you two sweet," Jinnai mocked. He shoved Shinji out of the way again, harder, and forced him back down to sit next to Asuka. "I've got plenty more bullets, Mister Ikari," he said coldly. "More than enough for you both. But since she's apparently more talkative when I put a hole in you, perhaps I'll continue that method." He nudged the pistol against Shinji's forehead this time.

"No, you won't, you ass!" Asuka growled. "You won't lay another finger on him! He's ten times the man you are, and our friends are coming! We've got more mecha, and they're coming right behind us!"

"Do tell?" Jinnai said silkily. "And you wouldn't know 'ten times the man' if it bit you, bitch. You were always a dead lay. That's why I finally got sick of your whining and kicked you out to your own place, just so I wouldn't have to listen to you anymore."

"Ten times a night with him, Katsuhiko. Not even once in two years with you. You feel like a man yet?" Asuka sneered back.

"And my Red Whirlwind may have gotten here three times as fast as the others because we're the best, but the others are coming, don't you doubt it. We've got two more coming to help us, and oh yes, a little surprise for you, too. The return of a very special guest star!"

Shinji's new position was slightly angled, partially facing him towards the huge main screen the Operations floor was built around, but he could still see Asuka and Jinnai, and watch the UN Chairman's hand tighten its grip on the pistol until it shook, and his face go terrifyingly blank with fury.

"Shut your whorish mouth, slut. You begged to be allowed into my bed. And I magnanimously let you, for two years! And this is how you repay me? Lies, betrayal, and more lies?" Jinnai's voice was disturbingly flat, but his eyes were twitching. "Describe these alleged 'two more', and your 'surprise'."

"Get your gun off him and we'll talk," Asuka said with just a hint of mockery in her voice. "You'll like it. The other two are not quite as big and awesome as mine, but oh, our surprise is going to knock your pants off, and when it stomps in this shitty little imitation-Geofront of yours, its going to feel so familiar. I can't wait for our rescue. Tell you what, Jinnai... you surrender right now, and I'll see if I can't talk the leadership of our little army into not doing to you what we did to the last wanna-be dictator we took down in one afternoon."

His gun swiveled away from Shinji and locked back on her. "Leadership," Jinnai echoed flatly. "Who?"

"Oh..." Asuka paused, flicking her eyes to meet Shinji's for a moment, a small smile appearing on her lips. "Us."

Her head snapped back as Jinnai abruptly whipped the pistol across her face. "I said stop lying to me, bitch," he said, eerily calm.

Asuka slowly turned her face back to him, spitting a gobbet of blood at his shoes. "I'm not, asshole! They put us in command because we had the big mecha, and were the experienced Pilots! The Emperor and Empress personally put us in charge! And in a little bit, our friends and our surprise are going to show up and smash the rest of your forces, so you better give up now!"

"I don't think so," Jinnai said, his voice still worryingly flat. "You are useless if all you're going to tell me are stupid lies and insults. You are prisoners, not commanders, and no one is coming to save-"

"Sir?" one of the techs at the ranks of consoles nervously interrupted. "We've got something on radar. High altitude, approaching fast. It's... very big, sir."

Jinnai shot a glance at Asuka, who smirked back at him. He turned back to the tech. "Target it with the Positron Cannon and destroy it."

"We're trying, sir. It... it dodged the first blast, and it's moving fast enough we're only going to get one more shot before it reaches...here."

Shinji and Asuka shared a relieved look. Their message of warning had apparently made it through. Shinji allowed himself a tiny spark of hope.

"So... Jock-Stooge, you think? Or did Geek-Stooge reappear and come screaming after us?" Asuka said quietly.

"I'll take either," Shinji replied just as low, "But I hope they don't get fried like we did. If that thing can cook Red Whirlwind in a couple shots, I don't want to see one of their Black Knights try to take it."

"Why haven't you destroyed it yet?" Jinnai said icily to his men.

"Firing systems still dealing with overcharge damage from downing the last target, sir," the tech replied. "The overheats and blowouts were melting the transmission lines from the S2 Core! They're almost done recycling... 25 seconds!"

Shinji craned his neck a little and could see the radar display on the big screen. The red blip of the approaching target, presumably one of their friends' mecha, was coming in fast. In fact, it looked like it was going to beat that countdown...

"Three seconds... two, one... firing now!"

Or not.

The screen flickered and the lights dimmed for a moment as the bottomless output of the S2 Engine was fully diverted to the Positron Cannon's demand.

"Direct hit on target!" the tech reported. "Secondary blast effects are blocking view! There's some kind of... some kind of field took the hit, but the target is... falling..."

"Good," Jinnai said, turning away from the main screen. "Now, you two idiots can-"

"Sir!" the tech interrupted again.

Jinnai wheeled back. "What?" he snarled.

"...it's falling straight down."

"Everything falls straight down, you moron!"

"It's overhead," the tech finished.

The entire base shook like an earthquake. A tremendous boom thundered through the Operations Center as dust and grit pattered down from the ceiling.

"Did we kill it?" Jinnai asked. "I want eyes on it immediately!"

"Camera tower #9 online... now!" the tech said.

The main screen flickered, switching to a wall of orange and red flames that lit the entire Operations Center will the color of blood. Wherever the falling target had landed was burning.

A huge, hunched form strode slowly out of the flames.

"Mother of God..." one of Jinnai's guards said in shock.

"It's... It's a demon!" another yelled.

Shinji's jaw dropped.

Asuka strained her neck, trying to see. She was still facing mostly away from the screen. "What is going on? What is it? Shinji, I can't-"

It was the most horrible, demonic, familiar beast possible, surrounded by a sea of flame and destruction. Its natural habitat. Shinji's lips peeled back in a shocked smile. "It's Eva Unit-01."

"That's... that's impossible," Jinnai said, stunned.

"Surprise, motherfucker~," Asuka sang, not at all quietly. "Told you so!"

"Fire on it immediately!" Jinnai screamed.

"Trying, sir! I... Positron Cannon no longer reporting!"

"Why not?!"

"It... Eva Unit-01... landed on it, sir!"

"Aww..." Asuka mocked, "Did someone break your toy, Katsy-watsy? Now you've got nothing that can even scratch an AT-Field. You're fucked. I told you, our friends are coming. Surrender now, and my boyfriend and I will-"

"BITCH!" Jinnai screamed at her. His pistol snapped up and he fired once, right into the center of her chest.

The world went into slow motion.

Asuka's eyes widened in shock as her chair tipped over backwards, a splatter of blood from the exit wound outracing the chair's slow, slow fall to the ground. The rickety chair collapsed into broken pieces as Asuka's bodyweight landed.

She thrashed once, her right arm flopping free from where the exiting bullet had snapped her bonds. Her hand was covered in her own blood.

She met Shinji's eyes with one wide-eyed, panicked look.

Then her eyes went dark.

She stopped moving.

Her chest fell one last time as her breath rattled out of her in a bubbling sigh.

The pool of blood underneath her kept spreading.

Shinji's world went white.

.

.

Author's Note, 04APR21: Yeah, I'm betting you'll want that next update real soon.