I updated two chapters at once. If you opened directly to this, you're in the wrong place.
A Glass of Wine (Chapter 28)
Months hence, when the terror and stress of battle had long since faded from her mind, Misato Katsuragi would sit in a court room in Switzerland, a translation headset held to her ear, while the United Nations' prosecution team referred to what happened next as an "anti-AT field explosion". The description would make her laugh aloud, and draw the ire of the assembled dignitaries and the glares of her own defense team, but she would not be able to help herself. With all cameras from the incident blanked, and all audio-visual record of the incident expunged with the destruction of the original Magi system, she would suppose that the prosecution's description was fair enough for someone who had not been there, and had not seen the event with her own eyes.
The moment it happened, she was standing at Ibuki's shoulder, watching as every lock-out command for both units was denied—a byproduct of the deflagration effect. She pounded her fists on the lieutenant's headrest, futilely. She heard Hyuga's voice cut through the din, saying something about "critical AT field collapse", and turned to look at the main screen.
Clinically, that future court session described the process by which the last Angel was defeated. First, Unit 00 inverted its AT field. Whether or not this was a byproduct of obeying the self-destruct command or done by the will of the Evangelion's pilot would forever be unclear. Mathematicians, Misato would be told, believed this inversion put metaphysical strain on the Angel's body, the inversion of an AT field allowing for forces of purely theoretical might to directly affect corporeal reality.
In the moment, she saw Unit 00, its hands gripping the Angel's body where it connected with her faceplate. She saw the Evangelion rear backwards, pulling the Angel. She heard Commander Ikari exclaim from his tower, actual worry evident in his voice for the first time.
Then, the prosecution would continue, Unit 02's AT field underwent the same inversion. The metaphysical forces at play on the Angel doubled, pulling it taut between the two Evas. The exact details of it would be debated for decades, the Dirac mathematics of imaginary forces bearing into reality forming a point of contention in the field which would never truly be settled.
In the moment, Misato saw Unit 02 double over, like a mother cradling its baby against danger. The Angel nearly flattened, its body pulled in two directions as each Eva tried to absorb it. Misato shouted out to Asuka, though she would never remember the exact words, just the fear she felt as cold needles in her gut.
Then, the prosecution would say, came the explosion.
Only it was not an explosion. The Angel seemed to warble in and out of the visual spectrum for an instant, teetering. The luminosity of its form accelerated, blowing out the white balance of every visual feed and kicking in automatic image distillation, so that Misato could only see it as an image of almost complete darkness, with the Angel a white line across the middle.
Then the white line broke.
A thunderclap shriek, like the sky tearing, like reality breaking. An outpouring of energy which swept inward, sucking debris toward the epicenter. A scream in her mind, in everyone's mind.
And then silence.
In the aftermath, Misato found the overhead lights and desk consoles dark. The command center was silent. She stood, listening, waiting for the surface detonation—the thermonuclear death of her pilots. None came.
"Can we reboot?" she said, eventually.
As if on cue, the secondary generators banged on. The overhead lights flickered on, half-lit. Boot screens ticked on every console, and the main screen blued to life.
Misato tried to keep herself calm as she issued orders. "Prioritize the Evas," she said. "Figure out what happened."
What happened, as it turned out, was a mystery. The official line would be that the Angel's disincorporation—the "explosion"—caused an EM wave which hard rebooted the city's power grid, the headquarters, and both of the Evangelions. While a core collapse did not require power, the stimulus for it was a mundane electrical charge, which the Angel's death short circuited.
With video restored, the city looked much the same as it had been. There was no wind in the trees of the parks, nor waves in the bay. The Angel was gone, and the two Evangelions rested on their sides, inactive.
"Recovery teams. Now." Misato let out a shuddering breath. "And tell Nagisa to stand down. Won't need him now."
((()))
She was not dead.
It was strange to expect death and see it pass her by; stranger still to be herself again. She felt the cold LCL around her, and sat and waited for the recovery team, feeling the place on her chest that should have been bubbling with corruption but which was now smooth once more. But while the surface was healed, something beneath the surface was not—a hole where before there had been nothing but solid certainty.
She sat in that sudden, still loneliness, and listened to the afterimage of memories that were not her own as they poured out of that fresh hole in her heart. Memories of a childhood she never had and of cold bodies drifting, unmade, in a tank beyond her sight.
She hoped they would go away once she was out of the plug, but she was wrong. The memories followed her out of the Evangelion. They rode with her in the recovery vehicle, and walked alongside her as she went through post-battle decontamination, while a squad of orange-suited goons scrubbed her down and scanned her. She thought of them while she lied her way through the psych-evaluation, and felt them with her as she was pronounced clean. They swirled in her mind as Misato spoke with her on the command bridge, her own personal debrief.
She thought to tell Misato of what she had experienced, but found she did not have the words. Eventually, she was dismissed to the locker room to change out.
Rei was there already. Her plugsuit rested on a bench. One shower was running. Asuka sat while her co-pilot showered. She hoped that seeing Rei would somehow absolve her of the memories. On some level, she assumed that Rei would be different now, a new Rei who looked more like her. A sister of sorts.
But when the shower curtain pulled back, the girl that stepped out was still just Rei Ayanami. The closeness she had experienced with her co-pilot just an hour previous was fading rapidly, driven apart by the unyielding wedge of corporeal reality. They were no longer within one another, and as separate people, Asuka found the task of relating to Rei nearly as insurmountable as it had ever been.
She stood by while Rei dried herself and dressed, waiting for any words to come, any at all, but she found she had none that were adequate to the task. She watched Rei fasten the straps of her dress and remembered a blip of childhood—glasses looking down at her while she sat on the floor, teaching herself to tie her own shoes. Always distant, always cold.
Rei looked at her. "What's wrong?" she said.
Asuka realized she was crying and wiped the tears away. She wanted very much to hug Rei in that moment, but the distance was too great, the physicality too real. "Nothing," she lied.
Rei stared at her. Whether there was understanding or confusion in her eyes, Asuka was not certain. After a time, Rei turned and walked away. The door closed behind her.
When she was gone, Asuka took off her plugsuit and showered and tried to think about nothing at all. Afterwards, she stepped out and dried off, then sat down on the bench, a towel around her shoulders. She stared at her duffel bag, slumped in the open mouth of her locker, her sweatshirt half-in, half-out of its top flap.
The door slid open and suddenly he was there. She could tell it was him by the hum in his voice and the lightness in his step. Kaworu. He stood next to her, not bothering to kneel down or face her directly. "Are you okay?" he said.
"Did I do great up there?" she said, echoing his words from what felt like a lifetime ago.
"I couldn't see," he said. "Unit 03 would not activate. But you won."
"I won," she said, rolling the word around in her mouth. "I won. I won. And what's the point of that, anyway? Me winning?"
"You love winning," he said.
Asuka looked at him. His face was calm, inscrutable. He might have known the answers to all her questions. It felt like he could do anything she wanted, be anything she needed, to get back on track, and yet she wasn't. She had seen or spoken with him every day for weeks, and yet nothing was better. The wound was masked, but it wasn't healing.
She decided that what she needed most was to throw her towel at his calm, inscrutable face until it wasn't so damn calm and inscrutable anymore, so she did. She didn't care that it left her naked in front of him. "I was up there dying!" she said.
He did not catch the towel. It hit his face and fell to the tile floor. "I could not get to you," he said, "but I wanted to."
"'Wanted to'? Since when do you want anything of your own?"
"I don't understand," he said.
"You don't want anything!"
"I want you to be happy," he said.
"Why?"
"Because I love you," he said.
"Why do you love me?"
Kaworu shook his head. "I don't understand."
The flat of her fist found the door of her locker, denting the flimsy metal. She did not look at him. "Get out of here," she said.
Kaworu looked at her a moment longer. Then he, too, left her alone.
((()))
Misato stayed at work for another eight hours. Asuka would find her own way home, that much was clear; judging by the look on her face after the battle, she could use the alone time. Misato felt bad about her words in the immediate aftermath, trying to tell the kid about what it had been like for her. Asuka didn't need that right now. She needed distance and time.
The rest of the recovery operation was simple enough. The Evangelions were returned to their cages, the city's core block was restored above ground, and civilians returned to their homes and places of work as the shelters opened back up. Defensive structures retracted.
The bulk of the work was spent overseeing efforts to re-establish power through every section of headquarters. Most of the ground work for such a reboot had been laid during the blackout months prior, but there were still glitches in the system—little logistical snags that someone in her position could help alleviate.
It was late by the time she returned to her office. She had just grabbed her purse and prepared to leave when she caught sight of a blinking notification on her desktop. She leaned over and tapped the space bar, awakening the machine.
The screen blanked immediately, turning black. Misato pulled her hand back, wondering what she had done wrong. Text resolved on the black screen, encoded there over the inter-organizational network. A remote message left for her eyes only.
White text on black: Need to talk. Midnight. Top drawer. –RA.
Ritsuko, she realized. The top drawer of her desk slid open at her touch. Nothing inside but office supplies. She felt under it and found a slip of paper, taped to the underside.
Misato opened the note and read the directions it contained. She checked her watch. 11:30.
It could be a trap. The thought went through her mind before she could stop it—too many years of tactical training and the recent weeks of paranoia. But she had not seen Ritsuko since the clean-up began, and if her friend was going to finally come clean about everything she knew, it would have to be clandestine.
Either way, this was a point of no return.
"Okay, Rits." She put her purse back down, checked her shoulder holster for the gun she wasn't supposed to have, and headed for the door. "Let's do this."
((()))
The kitchen was silent. The takeout dishes from lunch still sat on the table, now cold. She was the only one home, save for the penguin sleeping soundly in his fridge. She stood in the middle of the kitchen for a moment. A cavalcade of past mistakes, wrought by her own stupid brain, marched through her mind. All the ways she pushed people away and made enemies of friends.
Why couldn't she do the right thing just this once? She almost died with Rei and then couldn't even give her a hug? Couldn't even tell her she was sorry? Nothing? Was that all her life would amount to? Brief moments of lucidity, of seeing all that she had done wrong, but with no solution to make her way forward?
And then there was Kaworu. He'd done nothing wrong to her, and she had snapped at him, too.
She shook her head to clear the thoughts. When that didn't work, she grabbed the back of the nearest chair and lifted it into the air. Releasing it, the chair flew across the room and rebounded from the countertop with a bang. She wrapped her fingers under the lip of the table and pushed, knocking the entire thing over. The takeout splashed across the floor, cold curry seeping into the grout lines between the tiles.
Heavy steps carried her into the living room. The dance equipment was still up. She tipped the scoreboards over, throwing them to the carpet. Cabling whipped. She screamed something wholly inarticulate, in none of the languages she knew, and punched the sliding glass door to the veranda. It did not yield, but it hurt enough to distract her—enough to drain the outburst and send her to the ground.
She landed in the middle of the carpet and pulled her legs to her, burying her face behind a wall made of forearms and knees. She squinted, trying to force Ayanami's truths from her brain and Kaworu's gaze from her heart, but none would leave. She saw no way out and no way forward.
Just what the hell was wrong with her?
After a time, she heard the squeak of a door in the hallway open. She knew the sound immediately and froze, listening.
The sound of feet on carpet, then on tile. The rip of a paper towel, as if to clean up spilled curry; the trashcan lid opening as he threw away the debris of lunch; the faint scrape of the table legs as he righted it; the chair settling back into its place. She listened to all of it but did not dare lift her eyes to look, fearful that it might not be true.
Rustling clothes as he moved into the living room, right past her, and righted the scoreboards on their poles. The click of an outlet accepting the equipment plug and the lightbulb-hum of its activation.
Pen-Pen squawked. Footsteps returned to the kitchen. The rip of a tuna can lid followed by pleased munching.
A moment later, and she heard him sit down in front of her. She peaked one eye and saw his black trousers and socks and his hands, fingers laced together in front of his legs. He waited patiently. Eventually, she relented, and looked up over her forearms, out from under her bangs.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," he said.
"When did you get here?"
"During the attack," he said. "No one was looking so I just left."
"Is that allowed?"
Shinji shrugged, but said nothing.
She thought about the damage to the kitchen and to the equipment behind her and felt incredibly stupid and childish. "You didn't have to clean up after me," she said.
"I know," he said. He took a breath. "I heard you, by the way."
"When?"
"When I was in there, with the Angel in my head. When I was stuck," he said. "I can't remember all of it. It keeps slipping from my mind when I try to focus on it. Nothing that I can describe. Just a lot of light and memory, and someplace cool."
His eyes were distant, focused on something only he could see. She watched him and waited for something new.
"But the one thing I do remember was you." His eyes suddenly found her again, anchoring on her face. "Everything in that place was old and gone, or was never real to begin with. Except your voice. Your voice found me."
"I didn't know that," she said.
"I heard everything you told me. I wanted to tell you before, but not in the hospital. Not through glass. It didn't feel right." His lips twitched in a slight smile. "I'm sorry about that."
"You're sorry?"
"Yeah, for that."
She looked at his patient, calm expression for as long as she could. When she couldn't take it anymore, she tucked her head back down. "How much more do I have to do?" she whispered.
"What do you mean?"
"I'm being horrible to you," she said, "and you won't leave me alone! How much more do I have to do to you? I don't deserve you staying here, but you just won't go! Stop being here! Stop acting like this is okay!"
"It isn't okay," Shinji said.
She glared up at him again, eyes red. "Then why are you here? What the hell am I even worth?"
He shrugged again, even more frustratingly than before. "I've spent most of my life running from things," he said. "But when I think about it, I think that anything good that's ever come to me came from staying put. So I'm not going anywhere. I never got anything out of running away."
"But I keep hurting you."
"Everything hurts, Asuka. Most things that hurt me don't give anything back."
She felt the blistering pain in her knuckles where she had punched the door and the phantom hole in her chest where the Angel had penetrated her, like a yawning chasm. "What can I possibly give you?" she said.
He sat there, silent a moment. Then he stood up and grabbed one of the two headsets off the floor, dropped where the Fifth Child had left it during their last dance session, and fit it over his head. He stepped to one of the two empty dance pads and dropped into a runner's crouch.
Asuka blinked at him. He did not encourage her to follow him, but she did so anyway, grabbing her own headset. She clipped the tape deck to her waist and slid the headset on. She flicked the switch, and the tape deck clicked on in synch with Shinji's own.
The dance began. The piano kicked in first, echoing from ear to ear, and then the strings swept up, seemingly from behind her, and she was moving. Left foot to back middle, right foot to back middle, right hand to mid outside, then the first big sweep from right to left, her feet crossing each other and spinning, so that she was facing the scoreboards. As she turned, her peripheral vision caught Shinji, his movements in time with her own.
The percussion hit—once, twice, three times—and she spun again, raising one hand up, towards the TV. She leapt back, feet landing at the low-outside positions, then made a crossing advance up to the high-inside.
For weeks, she had wanted to enjoy this, but never could. The flawless, machine-like precision of the Fifth Child had made it impossible. But now, as she spun back down the mat, rushing through the next six movements, she felt the joy of it again.
On the third quarter-turn, she was quick by a microsecond, so Shinji double-timed and let her catch him on the next step-back. When she was a beat slow, he eased off to catch her. Shinji kept right with her, the lights snapping off almost as soon as they appeared, confirming his steps, leading where he could and backing up when she needed it.
It was not a flawless performance to the beat, but it did not need to be. Instead, it was flawless between them. And for that, it was fun again.
She spun back for the finish, throwing her hand toward the TV for the last move, and for a moment, only part of her was in the living room. The rest of her soared high on a vertical plane, a progressive glaive slipping free from her grasp; to her right, a violet Evangelion and a brown-haired boy, simultaneously.
And there, in that hanging moment of frozen memory, she found him again—the boy who didn't need to ask a million questions, or wear connectors in his hair, or wait to be told when to call her what. The boy who knew her better than anyone, who would challenge and push, frustrate and love, and never leave her behind. Her best friend.
The song ended. The tape deck clicked at the end of its cycle and rewound automatically. The children lowered their hands to their sides, then removed their headsets in tandem.
Shinji looked at her. "That," he said, in answer.
She held the headset in her hands. "Is that enough?" she said.
"Always has been," he said.
Asuka looked at his face, so open and honest, and began to cry. She thought about hiding her face but forced herself not to. She owed him that much.
"Shinji," she began.
"I know, Asuka," he said, and moved toward her.
She placed a hand on his chest to stop him. "No," she said, "I need to do this. It won't count if I don't do it."
Shinji relented, hands with palms open toward her.
"I've been a complete idiot. I shouldn't have lied, and I should have been honest when you came home the first time from Kensuke's. I should've eaten that lunch you made for me and I shouldn't have pushed you down and called you an idiot and I should've said this a long time ago." Asuka ran a bruised knuckle under her runny nose. Her vision was blurry, but she didn't blink, and she didn't look away. "I'm sorry."
"Thank you," Shinji said.
There was a moment of quiet between them. Then Asuka gestured rapidly with her hands. "Now come hug me and stuff," she said.
He did. She could feel his arms around her back. His cheek pressed her cheek. She felt the touch of his breath on the hairs of her neck, and for the first time in hours, that hole in her chest did not feel so wide.
"You're not a complete idiot, by the way," he said.
"I appreciate that," she said.
His voice touched her ear, shadow-soft. "You're only, like, half an idiot."
Asuka snorted through the remnants of her tears. "Shut up."
((()))
The elevator accepted the priority access code she had been given, and as it clicked its way lower, Misato watched the floor counter mark her progress. She was calm, her breathing regulated. It was only when the floor counter ticked into red, unmarked floors that she felt worries flutter in her chest. She was now in Terminal Dogma, the lowest reaches of the geo-front, farther down than she had ever been before. She reached inside her jacket, feeling the reassuring weight of her hold-out.
When the elevator stopped and the doors parted, she stepped out into a darkened corridor. Low lights glowed to life at ankle height as she walked, slowly illuminating her path. She stepped carefully, the tick-tick of her heels the only accompaniment to her journey.
A door presented itself. 'DUMMY SYSTEM PRODUCTION FACILITY', it read, in stenciled letters. A keypad glowed next to the door.
Misato fished out the code paper and entered it as instructed. The keypad blinked green, and the door parted.
Inside, Ritsuko turned to face her. She stood on a floor stitched with arcane symbols, flanking a cylinder beneath a mass of technology. Ritsuko had one hand in the pocket of her labcoat. The other held a cigarette. At the sight of her old friend, she tossed the cigarette to the floor and stamped it out. "Okay," she said, "so you've found it. What do you want to know?"
"Excuse me?" Misato said.
"This place. The dummy system." Ritsuko's face was pale in the low orange light from the empty cylinder. Misato had never seen her so nervous. "You clearly went out of your way to find it. So what do you want to know?"
Misato frowned. "What are you talking about? You asked me down here."
"No," Ritsuko said, "you left a message on my PC. It had instructions to—"
"—head down here at midnight, and meet you," Misato said.
The two women looked at each other. Ritsuko's hand flashed out of her pocket, holding a compact revolver, and swept the darkened edges of the room. Misato did the same, pulling her holdout and backing up to the center of the room, barrel trained on the entryway.
"Who do you think?" she said. "Ikari?"
"If it was Ikari, we would be dead already," Ritsuko said, almost keeping the fear from her voice.
"Then who?" Misato said.
"I don't know. We need to get out of here." Ritsuko glanced at her. "I thought they confiscated your gun."
"Not the time," Misato said. She was about to tell her friend to follow her out when the door opened. She sighted down, waiting for the sight of an armed assassin on the other side, but when the door opened, there was nothing but darkness.
"Who is it?" she shouted.
A pause. "Katsuragi," said a familiar voice, "I'm going to need you to not shoot me."
Misato let out a breath. "Kaji?" she said.
He popped his head around the door frame. His head was wearing an orange hat to match his orange jumpsuit—a cage technician's jumpsuit. He held his hands up in surrender, but let one of the hands give a little wave, his cocksure grin never leaving his face.
"Point that thing somewhere else?" he said.
Misato lowered her sidearm. "What are you doing here?" she said.
He strode into the chamber. "Oh, this and that," he said. He looked at Ritsuko. "Doctor, please."
Misato followed his gaze. Ritsuko had yet to lower her weapon. It was trained directly on Kaji's chest.
"Put it down, Rits," Misato said, calmly.
"He could be working for him," Ritsuko said.
"He's not," Misato said.
"You don't know that." Ritsuko's words came fast and low, spoken out of the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were wide. "We can't trust him."
"It's Kaji," Misato said. "He's on our side."
"I don't know who is on what side anymore," Ritsuko said.
"He's been in hiding for weeks. We haven't heard anything from him," Misato said. "What else does he need to do to prove it to you?"
Ritsuko shook her head. The barrel didn't waver. "I don't know. I don't know anymore. Something."
"I think I have more than something." Kaji's hands stayed up but he moved slowly, looking over his shoulder. "You can come out now," he said, raising his voice.
For a brief moment, Misato wondered if Ritsuko had been right. She half-expected a double-cross to come walking through the door. Her mind envisaged a number of horrible possibilities, most of them involving a hit squad sent by either the committee, the Japanese government, or Commander Ikari himself.
What she didn't expect was one man, unarmed, wearing the same orange fatigues as Kaji. He stepped into the low light at the center of the chamber, took off his hat, and ran a hand through his silvered hair. At the sight of him, Ritsuko lowered her pistol.
"Thank you, Doctor," said Professor Fuyutsuki. "It's good to see you again."
Author's Note: Hope you enjoyed this two-chapter update. There will be a longer than normal break before the next update, but for a good reason: I'm going to write the rest of the fic at once. When I do post next, it will be for four weeks in a row until the story is complete. We're very close.
Thanks for reading.