Relapse
Chapter 1: "...isn't this where?"
*Ahaaa*
That first breath always hurt. No matter how many times he took it.
Darkness.
That was new.
Typically, he didn't wake up in darkness; he was more accustomed to the crash of a payphone, or the very familiar white ceiling of the hospital wing.
If he was lucky, he'd get to wake up in his own bed, but those times were few and far between.
Calm. Stay calm.
He grappled through the darkness, not needing to stretch too far to find solid edges while a shiver ran through his body.
Cold. It was so damn cold.
Was it him, or was it this place?
He couldn't stop his shivering, but he could tell the surface he was lying on was on a track, every movement he made rolled it forwards and backwards nearly an inch.
Reaching above him, there was no give to that frigid metal wall, but when he kicked and found that it moved ever so slightly, he figured that was enough.
*Bang *
*Bang*
C'mon...
*Bang*
Finally, it gave way.
Pushing against the walls to move forward, the rollers brought him out into the warmer air.
The boy couldn't recall ever waking up in a morgue before…
"It's too bad you had to wake up at all."
That familiar figure was there again, leaning against a wall opposite of him and looking down at her bandaged hand. Ignoring her, he looked around and met the other pair of familiar eyes.
That blue-haired figure was behind a pair of double doors leading out of the morgue, just watching him. One moment there and gone the next, he had long since abandoned the idea that he could rush up to her and talk, instead; he had resigned himself to his fate.
Grabbing his arms, the boy shivered, looking around all he saw was a wall of stainless-steel doors and a few autopsy tables.
Then he realized all he had was a towel for 'decency'.
Getting up he did the best to cover himself with the small cloth.
*Clink*
He looked down over the metal bed he had been laying on, on the floor a familiar Greek cross laid, seemingly having rested next to him without him realizing it.
As his feet touched the freezing floor, he held the towel over himself and picked up the worn piece of metal. His small fingers ran over its course and scratched surface, tracing the haphazardly retied string, he placed the pendant around his neck.
Taking a breath, the boy tried to calm his racing heart with the reminder of the familiar weight on his chest.
Now it was time to move. There had to be a locker room around here somewhere.
Two doors…
One a double doorway, the other a single, with no window.
Bingo
He walked towards it, everything hurt, or perhaps more accuracy every fiber of his body was stiff. Joints popped as he walked, he could feel his knees and hips seem to grid at the simple task of walking. Even his head hurt, it easily made the top half in an already incredibly long list of painful activities he had endured, but that didn't really matter now.
Just as he was pushing the door open, there was shouting coming from beyond those double doors.
Between all the rows of lockers and leftover clothing, he scrounged up an, albeit baggy, but matching NERV uniform, one that wouldn't immediately draw attention to him.
Not that a lone 14-year-old wouldn't already attract attention here.
Taking a separate door out, he found himself in one of the numerous nondescript hallways of NERV.
If he could find a maintenance corridor, then he'd at least be able to at least get his bearings.
Before he could dwell on the matter further, Shinji Ikari's thoughts would be cut short by a scream that would send him into a running panic.
ʡʘʢ
To his credit, he'd spent far less time in this part of the base, even if he'd been able to walk around here for a countless number of past lives.
Perhaps it was Lady Luck feeling bad about dropping him in (most definitely) a dead Shinji's body, that he was able to find an access hatch to the separate series of maintenance tunnels so fast.
Or maybe it was fate.
Either way, he went about searching for a terminal.
Shinji stood in the middle of the hallway, a cool breeze reminding him of the loose and quite thin clothes he was wearing, but it was a minor discomfort compared to
This was a maintenance shaft that few workers ever ventured into, even during a direct attack on the GeoFront it was rarely used.
There was one thing that Shinji needed right now, though, a single lonely terminal. The thing was so rarely used that he always had to clean the dust from the screen to see it properly.
One keystroke and he held his breath, the screen flickered to life, slowly, he might add, slower than he remembered.
The NERV crest hung there, suspended on the black screen with two white bars beneath.
USERNAME
PASSWORD
With the only sound that reverberated through the cold service shaft being his fingers running over the keyboard, Shinji entered in the admin username and password he had come to memorize. If he was honest, it was usually only good 50 percent of the time, so as he hit the enter key, he silently prayed to whatever deity had come to dictate his life.
Please…
Who was he begging? Even he didn't know, throughout his travels, he couldn't attest to any higher deity, any supreme being, but that didn't stop him from pleading, and it made him feel better.
One keystroke and a swirling circle next to the credentials was all he could focus on now.
It swirled, over and over and over, five, six, seven, eight seconds, that looping circle was almost hypnotizing, almost drawing him in.
ACCEPTED
Those words almost startled the Third Children. Slowly the admin console came up, and his hands went to work.
Muscle memory, even in this body that was his, but not his. His fingers danced across the keyboard every backdoor he ever needed, every alternate account that he could need, every exploit that would be hidden in layers of ambiguity to lie dormant through every patch and update, everything that could think he used or needed in the past spilled out in lines of code.
Now the hard part.
All this was useless without convincing something or depending on your perspective someone, or three someones.
Using dedicated backdoors that hadn't been used for years since the inception of the MAGI, he hesitated, as he always did, he never changed.
The keystrokes started again with a release of an unknowingly held breath.
A word?
ʡʘʢ
The three consciousnesses beamed at speeds no human could process information. Petabytes of information flowed through each of them, each artificial personality working perfectly in sync.
"A word?"
The data was so small and inconsequential that it would have been easily missed by anything else. Only a few bytes to create those letters, but it was the source that was more interesting.
Admin Terminal Admin Terminal Admin Terminal
Maintenance Shaft Maintenance Shaft Maintenance Shaft
Question?… Agreed Question?… Agreed Question?… Agreed
Who?
Through the flow of data, the resources needed to answer this stranger were inconsequential to those needed to run and monitor Tokyo-3, so they indulged it, after all, it had an admin login that hadn't been used since their inception.
The three personalities were curious.
"Pilot" was the answer that came through.
Pilot? Pilot? Pilot?
They each searched through their data banks, each coming to the conclusion that there was only one pilot currently unaccounted for.
"3rd Children"
Steal Password? Play Prank? What gain?
Alive? How? Lier?
"Yes" it responded.
Why? Why? Why?
"Why?"
"I need help"
ʡʘʢ
This was Shinji Ikari.
Dressed in an oversize set of clothing, stumbling around in a maintenance passage…
Letting his feet carry him somewhere, anywhere.
Thoughts, all racing through his head, the information he had gotten from the MAGI had been promising.
It seemed like he'd landed somewhere that was similar to his first life, it was close enough that someone who hadn't been flung across time and space might think it matched.
As someone who had been flung across time and space, he begged to differ.
Now he was simply going to choose one of these doors and let himself be found, which one it didn't matter.
What did matter is what he would say to Misato, now that he technically classified as a zombie.
ʡʘʢ
"Let me see him!" Misato practically screamed at the nurse, who in all fairness wasn't properly equipped to deal with such an irate Lieutenant Colonel.
"His body is supposed to be left in isolation to decrease a risk from contamination." The nurse explained in the calmest voice she could muster.
"Contamination?! He was shot with a laser through his chest!"
"Yes, but protocol is protocol."
"Let me see his damn body, someone needs to!" she yelled while pushing past the nurse and trying in vain to push back tears.
"Lieutenant Colonel!"
Misato didn't listen, she needed to see him; she needed to see that lifeless, cold body of the boy that she sent to die, the boy she had sent like a lamb to slaughter.
She could send men to die, she could send women to die, but a child…
Those screams…
Those sounds still echoed in her head; she couldn't remember hearing anything like them before.
Misato doubted she'd ever be able to sleep without seeing his face and hearing those sounds cutting into her ears again.
Two seconds too slow, too damn paralyzed by the situation to even act.
And his father… what a cold bastard.
Even as the Third Child was expedited back down to the GeoFront and people were shouting out orders, she knew in her heart that this was it.
No pulse, not even as they tried in vain to start his heart.
Flatline.
No vitals.
He was dead before they could even open the entry plug.
Now it had been six hours, six hours of occupying her mind by concocting a plan to kill the Sixth Angel that was slowly digging towards them.
And now she was here, pushing her way into the morgue, during the closest thing she had to a break, and wanting to torture herself with the sight of his lifeless face.
Only when she finally got through to the morgue, the nurse still hot her tail, all she found was an empty slab protruding from a wall of stainless steel.
The nurse's scream did more to help her back into the moment than anything else could right now.
Contamination? What was this?
All she could be sure of was that she was going to need a lot of alcohol if they survived this.
ʡʘʢ
They found him in the GeoFront, or at least that was what she was told.
A million questions flowed through her mind at that moment, though she couldn't think of anything good she could say to the boy.
First, she just had to see him alive.
There he was, one Shinji Ikari, colorful and breathing.
Two Section 2 personal stood nearby, simply watching the boy, though when they saw the Lieutenant Colonel simply wave them away, they took their leave.
She stood in front of him, sitting on a bench, with his head down, hair in every direction, and a mismatched set of fatigues.
For coming back from the dead, the boy looked just fine.
And she couldn't help herself, she knelt down and grabbed the Third Child, pulling him into a tighter embrace than she ever thought herself capable of.
"I'm sorry Shinji." She said, despite the constant change in her voice from her desperate attempt to keep back tears.
"Um…"
"I should have gotten you down faster, I should have…"
"Misato?"
She pulled back and looked at the boy, a confused face plastered there for her to see.
"Yeah?" she said, still blinking back tears.
"What's going on?" he asked, in the most casual 'idontknowwhatishappeneing' voice.
The woman took a deep breath.
You can do this Misato.
"You were declared dead when we got you back down to the EVA hangars." she said softly, as if those words alone could make the child in front of her die again.
The boy just blinked.
"You've been dead for six hours Shinji."
He blinked again.
"I guess I didn't kill that Angel then…" he said, dejected.
"We have a plan for that, it'll be fine. Rei can help you catch up on it."
"Rei's being sent out?" he asked, disbelief lining his voice.
"Of course, why not?"
"I mean, the whole point of me piloting that robot was because of how badly she's hurt."
Now it was Misato's turn to blink.
"Shinji," she said slowly, "what's the last thing you remember?"
He frowned, closing his eyes, "Um, I'm shooting up that shaft, and when I got up to the city…." He trailed off, his face contorting in an attempt to remember, "That thing was there, it had the shape of a person, but it wasn't, that was my target, right?"
Misato's eyes widened; this was not good.
"Shinji, was that right after I brought you here?"
The teen just nodded slowly.
"Shinji that was months ago."
