Three hours after the A-17 operation capture a pupating angel under Mount Asama:
A feeling like molten lead filled the command center as they oversaw what had started as the first offensive against the angels, and had now become a desperate rescue operation. The realization of what had happened was oppressive, yet underlined with an awful tension.
Every eye, every mind, was on the Commander. The technicians toiling away on the tower's lower levels snuck glances up and away from their screens at the presence high above them. When he spoke, everything stopped. Gendo Ikari was a charismatic man, but this was more than just that. It was the fascination of watching someone venture further and further out onto brittle ice, wondering if each moment would be the one to bring the first sounds of snapping and breaking. The command center's staff waited for the first cracks to show in the rigid composure of a man who had become famous for never showing anything but.
After all, no matter how estranged they might have been, it wasn't every day you watched someone oversee the death of their only child.
One of the room's many screens showed a feed of Unit 02 slowly making its way home, trudging alongside the eighteen-wheeled form of the mobile generator supplying it with power. Cradled in the Eva's arms was the limp form of Unit 01, it's armor twisted and warped beneath a thin layer of cooled magma. In places the coating of rock had cracked and flaked away, revealing metal and space-age composite that had melted and run like wax. An ejected entry plug jutted from the back of its neck like a spear.
The command center's central display, however, showed a network of glowing lines representing the roads between Mount Asama and Tokyo Three. Along them slid a single red dot, showing an ambulance carrying the dying Third Child and NERV's Director of Tactical Operations. If anyone had bothered to compare the dot's progress to the distance markers along the display's left side, they'd see that the vehicle was committing several traffic speed violations. Not that it mattered. The roads had all been cleared under NERV's authority.
The red dot gradually approached a symbol labeled 'Entry Point P612' on the map. When it was about a handspan away Misato's voice filled the command center, fuzzy with radio static. "We're almost there. Shinji's…" a moment of hesitation "alive." She sounded exhausted.
"Good. There's an autodoc waiting for you in the vehicle bay." Gendo's mouth was invisible behind the gloved hands folded in front of his face, but his voice was even and unmistakable, devoid of emotion. "Switch to internal cameras."
The road map disappeared, replaced by a view from the ceiling of what looked like an underground parking garage. After a few moments of stillness, the ambulance skidded into a parking space, leaving tire marks on the pavement. Immediately a waiting team of NERV technicians swarmed forwards, busying themselves with the task of transferring the Third Child into the waiting coffin-like medical device. For a moment all present watched as a slim plugsuited form was wheeled across the intervening space on a stretcher. Then the commander stood.
"This operation is now over. Dr. Akagi, see me in my office."
"Yes, sir."
Ritsuko hated herself for the way hope welled up inside her chest as she followed Gendo to the elevator. She'd seen the Third Child's vital signs. She didn't need a medical degree to read the writing on the wall, but the fact that she had one only made the reality more stark. Shinji Ikari was dying. Humanity was losing one third of its defenses, with the dummy plug project still in its infancy. The commander was losing a son. And yet, even as she should be mourning, she couldn't stop herself from feeling a rush of selfish joy. Joy that Gendo was allowing her to comfort him in this moment, hope that he might finally be about to show her the part of himself he hid from everyone else. To let her into his heart.
I really am a horrible person. It wasn't a new thought, especially where the commander was involved. Soft words weren't her specialty, or his, but she would do her best if he let her. They rode the elevator in silence as Ritsuko tried to figure out what she could say.
When they reached his office, however, instead of taking his usual spot at his desk Gendo turned to stare out the window, arms folded behind him. Ritsuko waited awkwardly behind him, not sure if she should break the silence. The longer it stretched on, the less certain she became of what was going on in his head, and the more convinced she needed to say something. She just had no idea what. Finally she took a deep breath, just to say anything at all. "Sir, I–"
"Does the salvage equipment still exist?"
"...What?"
"The equipment from the Salvage Experiment eleven years ago, does it still exist?" The commander repeated.
Ritsuko stared for a moment, answering almost automatically as she tried to gather the pieces of her wrecked rain of thought. "I believe it's in storage in Terminal Dogma. But, why–"
The commander interrupted her again. "How long would it take to restore it to functionality?"
"It's still mostly intact. But to rebuild the power supplies, plus moving it up to the Eva cages..." She ran some calculations in her head. "...Maybe a month?"
"Assume it can stay where it is, and it only needs to be brought up to minimum operating voltage."
"That could be done in hours." She just had no idea why anyone would want to. "But even with the full output of NERV's reactors, the Salvage Experiment never succeeded. Minimum voltage isn't enough to do anything meaningful to an Evangelion."
"Would it be enough to transfer the Third Child's soul to a dummy core?"
Ritsuko's eyes widened, going silent for a moment as the full implications of what the commander was suggesting hit her. Then, very slowly, her lips began to stretch into a smile. "Yes. Yes, it would."
For a moment, she found herself reminded of why she had fallen for Gendo Ikari in the first place. The man was a bastard in every possible sense of the word, but there was always a sense that for him nothing was truly insurmountable. He saw possibilities where no one else could. Of course he wasn't mourning Shinji. He'd never accepted that his son couldn't be saved.
The idea that the technologies developed by GEHIRN could be used to cheat death had been water cooler discussion among the select few with both the security clearance and the expertise to understand them since long before Ritsuko had joined the organization. Her mother's crowning achievement, the Personality Transfer OS, could be used to duplicate a subject's memories and knowledge. However, the end result always lacked a true sense of self. The Magi could plan and make decisions, but never act under their own initiative.
The principles of salvage that were used to animate the Evangelions could also be used to transfer an AT field, a person's 'soul', to a new body, not just to an Eva. All indications were that on it's own the soul would carry with it only the strongest emotional impressions and characteristics, but combined the two procedures could completely transfer someone into a new body. Or so the argument went. Both had never been attempted together.
Until now.
Ritsuko's lips moved unconsciously as she began to plan. She'd need to check her memory of Terminal Dogma's layout was correct, ask the Magi to run a couple simulations, check Shinji's vitals, but gradually the outline of a scenario took shape in her mind.
"If we begin a neural scan immediately and have it running while the Salvage Equipment is prepped" she said, "we should be able to collect nearly all of Pilot Ikari's personality data by the time the transfer is ready." It was a race against time, everything depended on how long the Third Child could be kept alive. "Permission to start?"
"No. There will be no neural scan."
For the second time Ritsuko felt the flow of the conversion shift around her, misunderstood currents pulling her off her feet. "But your son's memories–!"
Gendo Ikari turned around to face her, the ceiling light flaring off the oval lenses of his glasses. "We need a viable pilot."
It had been a mistake to say 'your son.' Ritsuko had known that the moment it left her lips. No one talked to Commander Ikari about family. The Third Child was a very different subject than Shinji Ikari.
"The Third Child burned to death. Even assuming he consented to return to the Eva, we would need to explain why he found himself in a new body. Modify the Rei template instead."
"Yes, sir."
Ritsuko inclined her head slightly, her hair shielding her eyes from the light above. It was hardly the first order she'd taken that would result in death. Whatever this salvage produced, it wouldn't be Shinji Ikari anymore.
❀—❀—❀
Misato put her hand on the side of the automedical capsule, feeling the vibrations and clunks as the machinery inside worked to keep Shinji alive. She knew it was some of the best medical technology NERV, the world really, had to offer. She knew it was Shinji's best hope of making it through this. And yet, just for a moment, she would have happily traded it away for an ordinary hospital bed that would have let her see the patient, let her hold Shinji's hand.
She'd lost soldiers in combat before. Taking command meant accepting that, steeling yourself and never getting too close because you might have to order those faces to their deaths some day. She'd thought she had known that already.
None of the soldiers she'd lost had been fourteen. None of them had made snarky comments at her over breakfast. None of them had set food out for Pen-pen every day. None of them had been Shinji. Her hand on the side of the capsule clenched into a fist. A moment later, a drop of moisture landed next to it on the painted metal. Then another and another.
"Hang in there, Shinji." She whispered. "You did good. Just rest, we'll take care of everything else." Her only response was whirring machinery.
"Captain Katsuragi," said a voice behind her.
Misato spun around, trying to scrape together any semblance of professionalism. She wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve. It took a moment to make sure her voice wouldn't shake before replying. "Commander."
Gendo Ikari stood in the doorway, hands crammed deep into his pockets. "The damage to Unit 01 has created a great deal of paperwork. Go deal with it."
Several reactions flashed through Misato in quick succession. First confusion, then shock. Then fury. Her eyes narrowed. If he thought he could just order her away from Shinji he was about to be very surprised. As she opened her mouth to tell the commander exactly where he could stuff his paperwork, though, some part of Misato that was more observant than the rest nudged her urgently. Something was wrong. The commander's voice had an edge in it she'd never heard from him before. Gendo Ikari was a lot of things, but he'd never been petty. Why would he want her to leave, unless…
Without actually changing, the situation shifted into a new perspective. The commander of NERV, a man famous for never letting any emotion, any crack in his composure show, was asking to be left at the bedside of his dying son. Alone. It didn't take a genius to read between the lines. Afterall, didn't he have more right to grieve than her? She wasn't actually Shinji's family. Just a woman too stupid to remember the difference between 'parent' and 'commanding officer.' She'd given the orders that had made Shinji this way.
The two stood facing each other in silence, Misato's fists clenched. Finally, Misato looked away. "Yes. Sir." She pushed past him and out into the hallway before he could respond. Better that he didn't see her face.
Gendo stood motionless in the doorway after she'd left. When the Operations Director's footsteps had vanished into the distance, he pulled a two-way radio from the depths of his pocket. "Ready for transfer. She's gone."
Orange-suited NERV technicians swarmed past him into the room, parting around Gendo like water around a rock. They set to work. It was only once they had disconnected the automedical capsule from the surrounding machinery and hoisted it onto their shoulders that NERV's commander spoke. "Take it directly to Terminal Dogma," he said. "Be careful. It's very heavy."
❀—❀—❀
"Legacy coolant pump holding at 54% efficiency."
"All tertiary power connections are green."
"Test field within 0.4% of projections."
Ritsuko in her white lab coat moved like a ghost among the employees of the NERV's technical division as they worked feverishly to restore the decade old technology of the Salvage Experiment to life. Sometimes she gave orders, but more often she simply listened, watching the project take shape. Over the past four hours, a web of spliced cables had spread across the floor of the room, reconnecting the equipment to NERV's main power network. Thousands of individual components and connections had been checked, and those lost to time replaced. Ropes and pulleys had hoisted into place rings of emitters designed to affix to a frame that no longer existed.
Almost forgotten in the corner of the room, the Third Child's automedical capsule sat quietly beeping away, marking time. A handful of readouts showed his vital signs as they gradually, haltingly slipped towards zero. For just a moment, before her attention returned to supervising, Ritsuko wondered if any of the lower clearance technicians thought they were working to save his life.
They heard Commander Ikari approaching long before they saw him. The whine of a cable elevator descending echoed up and down the immense vertical shaft that connected Terminal Dogma the rest of NERV far, far above. In her mind's eye, Ritsuko could see a ring of light passing over the concrete walls of the shaft as the open cage descended, imagine the grated door sliding open as the distant motor sounds cut out. She'd made the same trip herself countless times.
As Gendo entered the room Ritsuko tried to give him a searching look, to silently ask if he was sure about this. She failed. Behind his orange glasses he might as well have been a million miles away. If he noticed her attention, he gave no sign.
"Is everything ready?" He asked.
"As much as it can be." A project like this should have taken days or weeks, but there was no time. The Third Child's life was a ticking countdown, and all they could do was patch something together and hope. "The Magi report a 53% chance of success."
"It will have to be enough."
Together they walked to the automedical capsule. Ritsuko's fingers danced over a keypad, and a moment later the machine's front panel slid back with a hiss to reveal its patient. Ritsuko briefly found herself glad that Lieutenant Ibuki's clearance was too low to be here with her. The younger woman wouldn't have handled the sight well. The Third Child's skin was yellow-white and covered in blisters. In a few places it had started to slough off entirely. His plugsuit had melted and fused to his skin, impossible to remove.
Almost reflexively, Ritsuko found herself cataloging his injuries. Second and third degree burns across the entire body. Further scalding to the lining of the respiratory tract and lungs. Organ damage due to extreme hyperthermia. It was easier looking down at a collection of diagnoses and not a still living person.
At first, Ritsuko had thought the injuries were somehow only synchronisation feedback. They should have been. The pilot sat deep within an Evangelion's chest cavity, insulated behind layers of muscle, bone, and ceramic. Enough heat to cause this much damage shouldn't have penetrated so deep so fast.
It was only later, reviewing telemetry from the battle, that she'd pieced together what went wrong. The front of an entry plug where the pilot sat was hidden deep inside the Eva's chest, yes. The rear of the plug, however, lay directly under the back of the unit's neck, covered by a single armor plate.
The Eva's armor had been designed with insulating layers to protect against extreme heat. The entry plug hadn't. When that single protective plate had melted, it exposed the entry plug to the magma outside. When that had happened, the plug's metal hull had conducted the full incandescent fury of the molten rock directly down to the pilot.
He'd boiled alive in the LCL.
A new louder beeping drew Ritsuko's attention. The Third Child's head shifted, dragging an oxygen mask with it. Blistered eyelids parted. As she watched, Shinji's right arm trembled, trying to rise. Millimeter by millimeter it lifted, shaking, up from the lining of the capsule. Then it fell. If she hadn't been standing over him, Ristuko never would have heard the emaciated voice.
"Fa… ther…?"
Not a muscle moved in Gendo Ikari's face. He might have been a statue for all he stirred as he stood over his son. He barely seemed to breathe. The silence stretched, waiting for him to speak, drawing out thinner and thinner.
Finally, he looked away. "Increase sedation," he said. "He shouldn't be awake for this."
She did. The front panel of the capsule slid back into place, hiding the Third Child again. If he said anything else, she didn't let herself hear it.
All around her, the huddled effort of preparation gradually wrapped up. NERV personnel took their final positions at improvised terminals. The salvage operation would be conducted from portable monitors, personal computers, anything that could be wheeled in and linked to the Magi to act as a console.
The final stages of setup began under Ritsuko's supervision. The capsule slowly lifted into the air, trailing cables, hoisted up to rest at the focal point of the salvage equipment's fields. The coffin-shaped metal box looked tiny and out of place next to rings of machinery designed to wrap around a prototype entry plug. Fragile.
Ritsuko took a deep breath. "Begin salvage," she ordered.
A sudden steady wind blew her hair back and made the edges of her lab coat flutter as the machinery powered up. It carried the reek of ozone and burning dust. A deep throbbing hum, more felt than heard, came up through the concrete floor and into her legs.
Around her, technicians called out numbers and readings as they fed the equipment parameters the Magi had prepared for them. Ritsuko listened carefully for any sign of problems, but her eyes remained fixed on one particular number glowing on the portable monitor in front of her. A percentage. It started at one hundred, but soon began to slip lower and lower. Slowly at first, then faster, the number fell. As it sunk to the single digits, the hum of the salvage equipment grew louder. The orange number seemed to catch itself at four, clinging on for a moment, soon it lost its grip. It trembled between two and one, flickering back and forth. Then it hit zero.
There was a sort of tearing pop, like the sound of a joint coming free of its socket amplified a hundred times. It echoed off the concrete walls. Even twenty feet from the machine Ritsuko felt an instant of sickening vertigo, something grasping at her, trying to pull her in. Though she knew it wouldn't be visible to the naked eye, she couldn't help looking up, trying to spot something pulling free of the automedical capsule and flying down the center of the rings of machinery.
A dozen different alarms began to scream from the automedical capsule as all of the Third Child's vital signs cut off at once. Ritsuko shut her eyes. She didn't need to see the medical readings to know what was happening. Deep inside Shinji's cells, protein chains were beginning to uncoil and break apart. It was the first stage of a process that would reduce his body to LCL over the course of about an hour. The Third Child as he was known to the world was dead. All according to Commander Ikari's scenario. The part that still existed was her responsibility now.
At her instruction technicians scurried about, lowering the capsule and beginning the long process of storing the machinery again. The alarms shut off. Ritsuko walked over to a particular piece of machinery at the back of the salvage equipment, opposite the capsule. It was a metal cylinder a little taller than a person, rounded at one end with a complicated set of plugs and attachments at the other. Despite being a decade newer than the equipment it was attached to, no jury rigging had been necessary here. The original socket had been designed for it.
To most of the technicians working around her it was a black box, something they simply didn't have the clearance to know about. A few would have recognised it as the central component of a dummy plug. Only she and the commander knew it contained a perfect copy of the First Child, identical to her in every respect but one. It lacked a soul. Or, it had lacked one.
Ritsuko's fingers found a keypad on the side of the device and entered a code. A small panel opened, revealing a bank of readouts. She ignored most, there would be time for them later. Instead she focused on one particular display. An electrocardiogram. She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
From inside the device came a slow, steady heartbeat.
❀—❀—❀
Misato sat alone at her kitchen table. It was night by now, a few moths buzzed and fluttered against the window screens trying to get in. A magazine was laid out in front of her. She wasn't reading it. Her eyes traced the same lines of text over and over again, not registering what it said, returning to the top when they'd finished. On standby. She refused to take her eyes away from the page. If she glanced up, she'd see the phone sitting at the corner of the table. Somehow, as long as she didn't look at the phone it wouldn't ring. Wouldn't give her the news that made this real.
She'd given the commander an hour before coming back to the room where Shinji was being kept, but when she returned all anyone could tell her was he had been taken away for more intensive care. No-one seemed to know where.
Get an A-17 from Commander Ikari as soon as possible.
Past safe operating depth.
I'm in command of this operation. Continue the descent.
It had been her idea. Commander Ikari had approved the operation and Ritsuko had worked out the technical details, but she had been the one to push for it. She could have done things differently. Made other choices. Even if she'd just decided to pull back and engage the Angel on the surface this never would have happened.
She wouldn't cry, couldn't. Not with Asuka there. Not doing so seemed to make an empty place in her chest that sucked everything else in. She felt numb.
Misato looked up. Not at the phone, carefully not there, but over to the living room where the Second Child sat. Asuka was in front of the TV playing a video game. The dings and beeps coming from the speakers were the only sounds in the apartment besides the buzzing of the moths and the whoosh of a ceiling fan.
Asuka kept dying, over and over again. Sometimes early in the level and sometimes late, but never quite making it to the end. She kept trying. That wasn't normal, usually after three or four failed tries in a row she'd fling the controller down with a flurry of german curses. Now she just kept repeating the same actions over and over again.
Misato rested her forehead against her hands, closing her eyes. Were they both really trying to pretend this was an ordinary evening? How ridiculous. At least Asuka had done her best through all of this. Not like her.
The phone rang. Misato answered it.
After a while she said, "I understand. Thank you."
She put the phone back.
Asuka dropped into a chair. She'd abandoned her game as soon as the phone rang. "So? How is he?"
Misato looked at her. Her hair was still stringy and clumped together from dried LCL. For a moment, Misato wondered what would happen if she just refused to speak. There ought to be something she could say. Some way she could break the news to make it hurt less. If there was, Misato couldn't think of it. "Shinji's dead."
Asuka's expression froze, eyes wide. "But… you got him home to NERV. They were going to save him.
"He was too badly burned," Misato said. She couldn't bear to meet Asuka's eyes. "They said they did everything they could."
There was a long silence. Asuka's hands gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white. Her head tilted forwards, bangs falling in front of her eyes. "That… idiot." She whispered. "What was he thinking trying to save me? I could have gotten out of there without his help! I didn't need him to go and kill himself! I WAS FINE!"
That last sentence had been practically a shout. Asuka lapsed into silence, breathing heavily. Hesitantly, Misato reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.
"It wasn't your—"
Asuka flinched back as if burnt. For a moment, Misato saw two blue eyes shiny with unfallen tears stare at her in horror. Then the Second Child turned and fled, leaping out of her chair and sprinting back to her room. A few moments later, Misato heard what sounded like a scream of rage and something being thrown against the wall.
Gradually Misato's hand sank back to the table. Her eyes pricked with the beginning of tears. She'd gotten Shinji killed. She couldn't comfort Asuka. Of course.
From the other room came the sound of something else breaking. Why had she thought she could do something like this? She'd never been able to help. Not back when her mother had cried, and she'd—
No. Misato gritted her teeth and forced herself to her feet. She was an adult now. She stood and made her way to a cupboard. Shinji was dead. It hurt. It would probably hurt a lot more soon. Misato reached back past the ranks of beer and her hand closed on something larger. She didn't want to be here, didn't want to be living through this. She pulled out a tall bottle of something clear and set it on the table in front of her. Misato placed a glass next to it with almost military precision. She couldn't change what had happened, but she could make sure she didn't remember tonight.
As she poured, Misato thought of Asuka in the next room. Her hand shook. Someone better than her would have gone after Asuka. Someone who knew what to say, how to help. She would only make things worse.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. She lifted her glass.
❀—❀—❀
The smoke from Ritsuko's cigarette twined above her head, rising up to the ceiling of the darkened command center far above. The small circle of light from an electric lantern only covered a tiny portion of the immense room: a coffee maker, the corner of Melchior, and Ritsuko herself in a folding chair with her laptop. The Magi could be accessed from anywhere in Tokyo Three, but for security reasons some things required a physical connection. Her task tonight was something could only be accomplished here.
She bent, retrieving a thick data cable from her bag. One end plugged into her laptop, the other she inserted into a port on Melchior's side. An icon flashed on her screen, and a few moments later a Personality OS file sat in front of her: AyanamiPersonalityConstruct/ATH. She made a copy and opened it.
It had been a long time. Ritsuko looked over the project that had been her first work as NERV's Director of Technical Operations. Before taking over Project E, before integrating the Magi with the rest of what would eventually be named Tokyo Three, making this file had been her first task stepping into her mother's shoes.
Five years ago, the First Child had... died. Her soul had been recoverable, and her body could be replaced, but her mind had been lost irretrievably. Ikari had come to her to fix it.
Starting from scratch hadn't been an option. A new body could be made at any biological age, but the five years left before the projected return of the angels simply wasn't long enough for a new Rei Ayanami to grow up all over again. Rei had needed a new mind, new memories.
Ritsuko's solution had been a bastardisation of her mother's techniques. Over months, she had stitched together partial neural imprints taken from hundreds of NERV employees into a single composite psyche to replace what had been lost. The project had been a success, in a way. The result could walk and talk and pilot. In fact, she knew more about the construction and operation of evangelion units than most of Project E.
She just didn't know what a smile meant, or what was happening to her the first time she cried. In the end Ritsuko and her team simply hadn't anticipated how many tiny, unspoken details of existence and social interaction human beings learned without realizing they knew them. Details they had left out.
Commander Ikari had deemed the new Rei a success and terminated the project. Even now, Ritsuko wasn't sure how he'd felt about the girl he'd raised being replaced by the patchwork she'd made. If he'd been disappointed he never showed it. But then, the commander rarely showed much at all.
Working in the darkened empty command center was strange. Every tiny sound she made echoed back to her: the clicking of fingers on keyboard, the tiny squeak of adjusting her chair, taking a sip of coffee, all returning quieter and quieter until they passed the limit of hearing. Ritsuko imagined she could almost hear echoes of past battles reverberating back and forth, never completely dying out.
And older things. The command center had been built up around the Magi, years before the angels had returned. This was the room where Ritsuko and her mother had worked together for two years. It was the room where the First Child had had her accident. The room where her mother had...
Ritsuko's eyes widened as she realized she'd stopped typing. She shook her head. She needed to take fewer all-nighters, it was affecting her focus. This wasn't a time to be dwelling on the past.
Looking over the network of personality files, Ritsuko itched to make improvements. She'd had five years to improve her understanding of the fundamentals of Personality OS, five years to observe what had gone wrong with her first attempt. She knew she could do it better now, put the Third Child back together better than she had the First. Without the premortem neural scan scan he would never be the same person, but he… she could have a life outside of piloting.
But there was no time. There never was anymore. The angels were here, and NERV couldn't wait the months it would take her to collect and integrate new neural scans to have Unit 01 operational. So Ritsuko pushed aside her plans and started searching through the files. It would have to be a hack job, cutting out whichever of Rei's memories a pilot for Unit 01 wouldn't need.
There was something surgical about removing the extraneous memory files. There was no blood, no mess, just bright letters on a screen. And yet, she couldn't shake the awareness that every module she deleted was a piece of a person's mind, an amputation that someone would have to live with. Chunks carved out of a personality that was already far too tenuous. All references to the First Child's origins, to her medical needs, to Terminal Dogma. Some ultra-high-clearance sections that even she didn't know the contents of, neural imprints donated by Dr. Fuyutsuki.
When she finished the modifications, Ritsuko lingered for a while over the name of the new file. AyanamiPersonalityConstruct(Modified) seemed wrong. So did IkariPersonalityConstruct. Eventually, she saved it as FourthChildTemplate/ATH. This wasn't a resurrection, not without Shinji's memories. It was something new.
Ritsuko shut her laptop and started getting ready to go. It wasn't the first time she'd created life for NERV. It might have been the first time she'd wondered if that life would one day hate her for it.
❀—❀—❀
Asuka lay in the dark, a pillow held to her chest. She hadn't cried. Her throat ached from the effort, but she'd managed it. Above her, an elderly air conditioner wheezed and rattled in the window. It wasn't hot enough to need it, but she just wanted the noise. To drown things out.
She could still see that look of pity on Misato's face whenever she closed her eyes. The Operations Director had looked at her like she was something so delicate it needed to be hidden away or else she would shatter. Like she couldn't be trusted to deal with this on her own.
She was fine on her own. She'd been fine when it happened and she was fine now. That idiot Shinji had gotten himself killed and it had NOTHING to do with her. If he hadn't jumped in she would have figured out a way to escape in a few more seconds. She hadn't been rescued. That was important. Because…
Because if she had...
Shinji should have been the one to come back from that volcano, not you. Asuka clamped her hands over her ears, but it didn't help. She couldn't block out her own thoughts. Misato looked at you like that because she knows it should've been you that died. They all know it.
"Shut up…!" She whispered, clutching the sides of her head. NERV needed her more than Shinji. She was an ace pilot, he was an untrained amature. Had been an amature. Before he… He died trying to save you. What have you done next to that? What could you ever do?
Asuka gritted her teeth, her breath hissing in and out between them. It was NERV's fault for sending someone like Shinji out in the first place. Shinji's fault for jumping in and trying to steal her glory. Not hers. Never hers. She wouldn't let herself cry, not from this. Her eyes burned. You should have died there today. You should have died a long time ago.
"SHUT UP!" Asuka flung the pillow away from her, wrenching herself over onto her back. She wasn't a child who needed pity. She was Asuka Langley Soryu. An Eva Pilot, humanity's last and best defense against the angels. There was no reason for her to be feeling like this.
If she kept telling herself that maybe she'd believe it.
High above Asuka, through the window over her bed, the moon hung over the city of Tokyo Three. It was half moon. The semicircle shone down uncaring through a gap in the clouds, unconcerned with it's missing half.