Author's Note: this story features characters from the 2015 animated short "Neon Genesis IMPACTS". It is a side-story set in Tokyo-3 both immediately before and during the conclusion of Evangelion 2.0. Watching this is not required to enjoy the story, but may add something to the reading. "Neon Genesis IMPACTS" is available to view on YouTube and probably other community-contribution video hosting sites.
The Final Impact
Izumi's day started at 7:13 AM, the moment sunlight angled through the drawn shades in an attempt to burn her eyes right out of her head. She had let out an annoyed, bratty whine and rolled her face and upper body away from the light and looped an arm protectively around her head. Her legs were tangled with the bedsheets and one another, forming an awkward plane that kept her hips flat against the bed. Her upper body contorted in an improbable and uncomfortable way, but she still managed to doze for a few minutes more before the pain in the small of her back forced her onto it, which carried her face back into the beam of sunlight, which sent her rotating away in the other direction. Only now she was awake enough to get frustrated with the immobility of the lower half of her body, and set about working her legs free of the sheets. By the time this is accomplished, Izumi was entirely, frustratingly awake.
As mornings go, this was good so far. She felt horrible, but that's just the routine trauma of relentless continuity. She sat upright on her bed, trying to will sleep out of her arms and legs, a sizzling hated of everything roaring in the back of her mind as she tried to shake off the night. Her alarm, belatedly, went off.
She stood, another milestone. She bent backward, arms stretching up, weight sliding down to the balls of her feet as they arch off the floor. She hopped up and down on tiptoes, getting the blood pumping. Because school. It was a school day.
The routine followed: pull on bra and pajama top, exit bedroom, ignore parents, brush teeth on toilet, back to bedroom, sit at desk and brush hair, use webcam to apply foundation to conceal the dark circles forming around eyes, spend two minutes performing careful bang maintenance, pull on school uniform, hitch up skirt an extra two inches, carefully calibrates absolute territory to B rank, grab bookbag, grab toast from kitchen, ignore parents (again), leave house.
The moment she opened the front door, everything went sour. The reality of Tokyo 3 flooded in and wrapped itself around her on all sides, tugging at memory, teasing her fragile composure with nostalgia that she could not dare to indulge.
Tokyo 3 was insistent, a swampy, sweltering, stinging malaise. She was barely down the three cement steps and it was already choking her, deafening her, blinding her.
Overhead, partially obstructed by the wall of densely packed two-story residential units that lined the narrow street, the skyline throbbed. Reality pulsed around the big chrome pillars up there, bending light so that each building was outlined in a chaotic afterimage of itself. There was hope in that.
Izumi remembered a tree behind her old school that had grown around the chain link fence that had been pressed against it. She liked to think that distant sky-shuddering could be reality trying to overwhelm the place she had reluctantly come to accept as her home.
Perhaps one day the city would simply be pushed free of reality, pulling its history after it in one long, if staggered, motion, the way a surface root might be extracted only after all the rootlets anchoring it in place have likewise been ripped free. In the gap where Tokyo 3 had been, the fate of its former residents could spring anew, free of the uncertainty that had clouded their minds with fear, free of the pain and loss that this place seemed designed to cause. Freedom from the mysterious death that took lives and shattered buildings violently, and at random.
Izumi did not actually believe that the history of Tokyo 3 could be undone. This was not an earnest or informed belief, just brain chatter that seemed to have a positive effect on her, and so she did not examine it too closely. Call it a known delusion. The city overhead refused to come into focus, no one else seemed to notice that, and Izumi had no idea why that might be, but the notion that it was the result of energy gathering for a rewrite of history was enough to quiet some of the despair that had done a modest job pickling her brain over the last several weeks. It was an unhealthy belief, to be certain, but it allowed Izumi function.
And seeing those buildings dance meant she didn't have to see the thing pinned to the sky above what had once been downtown Tokyo 3.
She walked up the street, wincing at the strobing chrome overhead. Many of the residences she passed by had their front doors locked open, barren interiors lit only by light bouncing in from outside.
Before Izumi had come to Tokyo 3, she had already had an idea that graves could take different forms: backalley shrines, fields of printed onyx, the distant broken skylines of abandoned cities sometimes visible from the road the further you got from Tokyo 3. That the house next door, simply by dint of its front door being locked open, could be a grave had been a fatal realization for Izumi, because, suddenly, anything could be a grave. Death could sanctify anything, make it an untouchable horror. And the world seemed organized around the mass and quick production of graves. It seemed inevitable that everything would eventually be ossified into one continuous reverent emptiness.
This too was an unhealthy belief, and one Izumi could do little about. The most she could hope for was to forget it during sleep, and unconsciously suppress remembering it upon waking.
But today, there was no repressing the certainty that the whole world would soon be a grave, with the moon and sun as gravestones. And it wasn't just the insistent trauma of living in Tokyo 3 that triggered this. The day was wrong. Izumi simply knew this, and was long past the point of curiosity or skepticism about her intuition. Each sheet of concrete sidewalk was a pressure plate for a hidden explosive. The blue hanging overhead, past shuddering chrome, was an ocean, crashing down upon her. The air was laced with nerve gas. The sun was rotten and curdling. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Even for Tokyo 3.
At the end of the street, Izumi paused to lean tiredly against the metal pole that supported the crossways traffic signal. She was supposed to go to school, and she already felt awful. Two people were talking up the street, approaching her. She looked up, realizing the contours of her mistake even while in motion, and what she saw unlocked a part of her mind that had been twisted free of her personal history and marked for deletion. There were two girls approaching, talking about nothing Izumi could understand. They both wore the same uniform as her. The one closest to the street had chocolate brown hair, a bit long, and her face was a bit narrow, but.
Haruka. Not just the person, but a scene, a memory, a dream. Haruka walking down the middle of the access road lining the field that abutted the school. Haruka, moving backwards, so far away and speaking in a whisper that Izumi heard as though the other girl were leaning in behind her. Sharp hushed words, unintelligible, the only sound Izumi could hear.
And then Haruka's body had fallen forward, and her head was no longer attached to it, but remained in place, then began to rise, and Izumi understood the trick in perspective. Haruka had risen up, dwarfing the hills that had framed her small, headless body. She was naked, and beautiful, and awful. The giant Haruka had been taking a careful step over the lip of the barrier hill when Izumi had woken up.
The two girls passed by, and Izumi felt them glance her way. She did not know them. They were new, their parents swept up in the latest round of NERV hires. There was a lightness to them you did not find in anyone that had spent any amount of time in the shelters, feeling a thousand tonnes of cement and steel shudder around you like a flag flapping in the wind.
School was filled with people like those two. Izumi could not face that. Everyone, all the girls would be Haruka. Only, they'd be an Haruka that did not know Izumi, one that did not care whether or not Izumi existed. On her better days this was not a problem, but today, yeah, today was still wrong, and Izumi was not going to school.
Instead of going left and following the two new girls up the street, Izumi turned right, toward Ease 23. An 'Ease', in case you didn't know, is the title given to recreational areas within Tokyo 3. Ease 23 was a public park, equipped with benches, a public toilet, a small fountain, and some actual plant life. Lately, it had been outfitted with food stalls and a series of open tents to accommodate people like Izumi, people that needed some time to get around their problems.
She walked up the path, into the heart of the park, and sat down near some other middle school students, an even mix of boys and girls, who acknowledged her vaguely, accepting her into their group.
Having found a place to sit and protection, Izumi spaced out and let Tokyo 3 happen to her.
Thoughts bounced between once-sweet, now-poisoned memories. The only respite from this place was emotional exhaustion, but Izumi had exceptional reserves; she was designed from the ground-up to emote. Exhaustion would take some time to set in. She sat in the grass, keeping her legs carefully pressed together, hands resting on the ground, fingertips jammed under her thighs, and behind her eyes sparked and flickered all of the hopes and dreams she had had once, long ago, when she had been young.
One of the other students, a girl, turned toward her, speaking. Izumi did not know what she was saying. Izumi had no idea how much time had passed since she had first set down. The pain of her position had come, a welcome distraction, and then faded into a chilly absence of sensation.
"...1-D, right?" the girl was saying. "Hey, you're one of the Third Impacts, aren't you?" The girl's expression was complicated. It looked like she was trying to smile, but that a horrible weight was flattening out the upward curve of her lips. "Guys, hey. Hey, guys," the girl gathered attention in a half-committed way, waving vaguely to the other kids in the group. "This is one of the Third Impacts. Remember the talent show?"
"Budding breasts," one of the boys muttered, without looking up from his crossed legs.
"Don't be a creep," said the girl sitting next to the speaking boy, without much concern.
"Yeah!" the first girl was warming up. "Eternal Summer, right?"
Izumi nodded. Haruka had leaned in conspiratorially and said: "If we work hard, we'll be super famous! Everyone will know all about the Third Impacts!"
That last part had been a joke, of course. Everyone knew about Third Impact, an inevitable sequel to the event that had half-killed the world. The band name, and the name of the band's song, Eternal Summer, had been the product of Haruka. Dear, soft, sweet Haruka, trying to normalize the constant pall of death and destruction that hovered over Tokyo 3, and everywhere else, too.
No one got the joke. Everyone had heard Eternal Summer, and had complimented the band, because it sounded like a fully-funded production, straight from a Kyoto studio. They heard the lyrics, but did not string them together, only taking in individual sentences, and not Haruka's paragraph-long statement of purpose.
They saw the video, the snippets of girls being cute in an endless summer, and the diegetic shots of the girls playing the song inside the school shelter, and they just didn't get it.
The girl that had first spoken was looking around unnecessarily. Stupidly. She opened her mouth, but Izumi cut in: "They're gone."
"...I'm sorry," the girl said, the smile draining out of her expression, which settled back into half-absent, half-gaping shellshock. "I'm, my big brother, he…"
"I'm sorry," Izumi intoned, again cutting her off. Another grave. This one was in the shape of a person.
One of the boys, sitting up against a tree, switched off his Wonderswan and asked: "Dead, or gone?"
"Shut the fuck up, man," said the boy that had mentioned budding breasts. He didn't look up from his hands.
Yes, Izumi thought, heat flooding through her now, her legs screaming back to life. Shut the fuck up, what do you know about it?
The boy with the Wonderswan pulled a folded piece of paper out of his chest pocket. "Do you know for sure?"
Izumi was on her feet, awkwardly pigeon-toe upright on numb legs. She wanted to run, but wasn't sure in what direction. Either toward the boy, to catch him under the chin with the soft rubber toe of her tennis shoe, or away. Her indecision served her well, because Infinity was barreling toward her, and either choice would have, in short order, seen her swollen and obscene and deathless and forever alone.
"What do you mean," she said stiffly. But she was crying, couldn't hold that back.
The boy unfolded the paper, and tilted it in her direction. It was a rough map of the city. Areas were crossed out in red and green.
"Evacuation orders came in at 1552 hours, exactly," the boy said, rising to his feet.
As he made his way towards Izumi, she wanted to scream. Here came more Death. Here came Ruin. Here came Certainty.
She had been to Haruka's house. The door had been locked open. The family nameplate had been removed. The place had been stripped down and empty. Almost empty. She had approached the house, seen it locked open, and felt the roaring screaming terror. When she found everything missing, the terror receded into conversational murmur. But then she had pried apart the modular walling in Haruka's former room, and found the other girl's lyric journal resting in the insulation gap.
She could have left it, intentionally, or by mistake. Maybe.
But no word. Not over phone, or Nico Nico Douga. Not to Ayako, either. But all of this was easy to understand. Izumi could see it clearly, the sudden relocation showing Haruka a path beyond that park space by the vending machines, and the feel of Izumi's hands on her shoulders, and…
…and everything else.
Yes, Haruka lived someplace, far away from the shrieking chrome skyline. Some place where it wasn't always summer. And she did not think of Izumi. Not at all.
"Most students were on their way home," the boy was saying. "Who's missing? Where did she live?"
The world swam. The girl that had first spoken up was sobbing. Everyone else, except for map-boy, was looking away. The map leered huge before Izumi, warping, stinging, filling her head with a dozen voices screaming, shrieking, shouting almost-coherent words of warning or wordless exclamations of alarm.
"She," Izumi began. "The train. She would have taken the..."
The map fluttered, parts of it scattering into the air. Map-boy let out a surprised grunt and toppled backward.
Izumi instinctively grabbed for the map, but stopped mid-motion. Because the map was not a map anymore. It was falling around and hanging above map-boy. Izumi's salvation and Haruka's grave, in so many many pieces.
Map-boy was staring down at himself, mouth twitching, eyebrows kissing in confusion. His arms and shirt were soaked with something Izumi instantly recognized was blood, even though it wasn't the right color.
There was a lot of noise, just then.
The purple-red hue caught in the sunlight and burned bright. Izumi backed away, hands up. She shouldn't have tried for certainty. She was a freak, she didn't deserve certainty. She'd never deserved Haruka, and Haruka certainly didn't deserve Izumi being inflicted upon her.
A sticky mass of the gore dropped from map-boy's shirt onto one bent knee, and limply unfolded to reveal the shredded remains of half a human face: eyelids and brow without an eye behind them, the stretched and pockmarked pores of an acne sufferer, the mangled remains of an upper lip and nose.
"Cold," map-boy gasped, making a weak motion with one arm that did not quite manage to remove the scrap of human face resting on the top of his thigh.
"C-cold," he repeated. "So... hurrrrts."
Purple-red was spreading down his pants, not darkening the fabric but making it brighter and glossy. The speckles of not-blood on his arms were expanding, growing together.
The scream rose, in voices beyond counting, the howl of wind whistling between uneven rows of slanted tombstones, the sound of all of history's accumulated dead gasping as reality shifted, and the paradigm of life and death was cast aside in favor of something far more simple.
Welcome to Infinity.