(Surprise)

Soon they had me ready, at least in the manner of a haphazard duct-taped contraption whose holes had been provisionally plugged.

I wouldn't have to go much further, anyways. At least once I was in the LCL, I wouldn't have to feel my own weight.

So they pushed me into the cage, down the umbilical bridge, complete with the IV still stuck in my arm.

Up from on high, the Commander must be looking down at me from the control room.

Dr. Akagi and Captain Katsuragi were present, as was a lone figure – The spare, I presume.

The graveyard boy. Though it no longer mattered if they were truly the same since I would never find out what rhyme or reason there might have been.

My nonsense dreams of electric sheep would fade with me.

For whatever reasons he had been deemed unsuitable, I did not know, but it was not really of any concern to me.

I paid no heed to any of them.

Nothing in this world still held any significance for me now, nothing but the orders to take the angel down with me.

If I used the self-destruct, it may well level the city, but that was better than letting Sachiel make xier way down the main shaft.

Holding off the next angel would be a problem for the next 'Rei Ayanami'.

Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing at all.

I had expected that I would feel relieved when that day came, but I was merely resigned to my fate…

I did not spare much of a glance for anyone in the room – it took all of my strength and attention just to try and lift myself out of bed.

With grit teeth, I forced myself to roll onto my side, to lift my torso off the plane off the bed.

Immediately, I found my fingers tightly gripping the sheets.

The pain in my chest burned now with all the brightness of a white-hot magnesium flame; Every inch of me was trembling, every hard, labored breath a torture.

I could feel beads of sweat dripping down my face and shoulders.

It took all I had just to not come crashing right back onto the bed.

And yet I must keep moving – so, trying as best as I might to keep my torso in place, I tried now to pull forth one of my legs, to make it slide to the edge of the bed...

Just a little more, I thought, just a little longer, and then everything would be over, and I would have release from the labor of living.

That thought alone kept me moving.

Except, that something unexpected happened.

It wasn't the sudden rumbling of the earth that was unexpected -

Sachiel would, of course, have spent the time since my defeat looking to make xir way down here.

"It found us.", as the Commander grimly concluded.

It was no less unexpected that this was just the warning shot – I had seen for myself that Sachiel had xeir own cunning, animal intelligence.

The second shot shook the structure of headquarters thoroughly; I would later learn that one of its energy beams had penetrated all the way down to the geofront.

Structures came loose from the ceiling of the great hollow, falling down on the pyramid below.

Even all the way down here, some of the lights came loose from the ceiling, tumbling downward – I was knocked off the bed and sent sprawling to the ground.

All the progress I'd made, every inch that I'd painstakingly raised myself up through, was lost in an instant, and here I was, come down hard on the floor's metal plating, the grating patterns etched into its surface to make the catwalk-like bridge less slippery.

Here I was, strewn onto the floor in some odd twisted position, powerless to lift myself up any longer.

I think the Nurses who'd been pushing me were knocked clean into the coolant below and would have been trying their best to swim to the edges of the cage, But I can't really say where they went. I wasn't paying attention, or noticing much of anything anymore – it was too unbearable now, to do anything but breathe.

I didn't even notice the sound of steps that came running toward me, unexpected, unlooked for, and altogether inexplicable.

It was just about the first time in my life that the flow of events deviated so strongly from what I had come to expect, be it from books, the plan, or what I had pieced together by observation.

I could not place the voice at first because it was so new to me:

"Look out!" he said, "Hang in there!"

It was the spare pilot.

Somehow, for some reason, he had come running to me.

He knelt down beside me as I struggled to balance on the floor. I felt the hot touch of his hands – he lifted me up, away from the cold hard floor. He cradled me, carefully.

I did not really attach to this any feeling about him because I was just so shocked that it was happening at all. I was more confounded than anything, but most of all, I was well-nigh out of it from the pain.

"Hey- Miss- are you okay?"

Between the shock, and the pain, there was no room for me to think of an answer.

And even if I could have begun, it would have made no difference, for it was in that exact same moment that another shockwave hit, and one last cord that must have been just barely anchoring one of the remaining lights ripped through, so that they too came loose, falling straight towards us this time.

There was no way that I could have moved out of the way in my present state.

Was I doomed to fade away before I could even make one last meaningful stand?

I expected, logically, that the boy would have jumped and run away, but he didn't.

It can't have been a conscious decision, not in that brief split-second moment; It's rather that the thought never entered his mind.

He held onto me tighter and braced; Powerless to do anything myself, I felt his hands tightening, his knee trembling beneath me -

There came to be a great clamor indeed, and deafening noise, but the impact I expected to smite us never arrived at all.

The next thing that any of us knew, we sat covered in the great shadow of EVA 01's hand, which had somehow come to rest between us and the ceiling.

Drops of coolant came down all around us.

Enormous cables still hung off the dripping arm of Unit One.

Alarms blared alerting the crew that the EVA had broken out of her restraints.

Called for by no power but her own, the cold actinuous glow of her eyes came alive of its own accord, transfixing itself on us… or rather, on him.

It was tantamount to the heavens opening up and anointing him as the chosen one.

I understood now, why the Commander had been so confident, why Captain Katsuragi had been told to fetch him as the highest priority – I knew what I'd been told of the scrolls. The long-awaited Third child has finally been found – or rather, he must have been found already. As expected of the Commander – he must have found out about this boy years ago and kept him hidden as an ace up his sleeve, right under the watchful eyes of SEELE.

That he had not told me did not, at first, concern me, since it wasn't something that I needed to know.

Dr. Akagi and Captain Katsuragi, of course, were not privy to a lot of that classified information, so they stood now in awe of that which they did not understand:

"Is it reacting to him without the interface… or did it just try to protect him?"

"The boy… can do it!"

It should have been seen as indicative of the severity of the situation: By all means, they had just witnessed something impossible insofar as they knew – their dangerous experimental weapon acting all on her own. But since nothing in their own power could save them, they were willing to accept any miracle, to believe in any god, to even sacrifice this boy to its capricious appetites.

There was no room to process all the noise, or the conversations taking place all around me.

I could barely wonder why this was happening while resenting every single, painful breath.

Only briefly did I even manage to crack open my eyes, to see the one who had picked me up for no reason up close -

And that would be the first image of him that really stuck in my memory.

Of his tear-stained face, his trembling arms that were holding me in place, and what he ended up declaring despite it all:

"I'll do it! I'm going to climb into that thing!"

Such confidence did the Commander have in Unit One that he did not tell his underlings to keep me on standby – as the spare was being led away to board the entry plug, I was carted to the next room and at once dosed with a strong and potent painkiller.

Within just a few moments, I had been released into a blissful and dim unconsciousness, before EVA 01 had even been launched.

I did not wake again until well into the next day.

The light was still falling in from the windows and there were still people who could have brought me up here, so I would assume that the Third Impact must have been averted.

It all must have gone exactly as Commander Ikari had planned it – so, despite what I had thought, I had somehow lived to see another day, still breathing with these same, damaged lungs -

Though most of the pain was now thankfully tuned out by the painkillers.

I was clearly not required to be on standby anymore, so it was absolutely acceptable to medicate me into a floaty haze, for which I was rather grateful.

The less consciousness that is required of me, the better.

Though the pain was dimmed for now, I did not doubt that it would return with a vengeance if I dared to do anything too taxing.

I would probably find myself confined to bed for another week or so, so I was glad to stay under the artificial lull of the drugs for so long as it would last me.

I was not required to do anything, anyways, until it would be time for my debriefing.

It was the sensation of motion that alerted me back to wakefulness.

Was I to receive some surgical procedure? Or had the Commander called for me at last?

The first thing I saw was the corridor of NERV's hospital ward.

I was being transported down its length.

But, unlike other times, there was something present that I hadn't seen here before.

Or rather someone: A small, slight figure, pale in the saturated light, standing by one of the windows. A child – a youth at most.

I recognized him finally when he turned – it was the spare pilot, the Third Child (this, I doubted not), clad now in a set of standard-issue NERV hospital pajamas.

This time, unlike before, I locked my gaze on him.

Had he gotten injured as well?

I saw no evidence of wounds on him. So far as I could tell, it seems to have been a clean victory.

As expected, the Commander had been quite right in his judgment.

But that is not why I was looking.

I was looking because, if it had not been for him, I would most certainly have been destroyed right now.

Of course, there is no way of knowing whether that was his primary aim or even part of his intention at all – but either way, it still holds true.

He was looking at me as well.

There is no way of knowing what he was thinking.

As I passed him, I wondered, briefly, if he was going to say something, but at last, he backed away, averting his gaze.

Not long after, there was a sound – the clack of boots. It was indeed the Commander, come to debrief me himself, and he walked in from across a turn in the hallway, hurrying at once to my side – but when his gaze fell just coincidentally on the boy that stood further back, all his motions stopped in his tracks, in a way that was rather unlike him.

Commander Ikari looked at the boy.

The boy looked at Commander Ikari.

Not a word was spoken.

The nurses that had been pushing my bed awkwardly stood by.

...were those two acquainted, somehow? Beyond just their interactions as part of NERV?

If they were strangers, it figured that they would simply have passed each other with perhaps but a simple, courteous greeting.

But if they knew each other, would they not speak?

It appeared to me as a paradox.

Though now that I was for the first time seeing both clearly at relatively close range, I could not help but note the common threads in their appearance – of course the boy was small compared to the Commander's towering broad form, but in the shape of their facial structures and the colorations of their hair and eyes, or even the texture of hair, there appeared to be some tinge of resemblance – a relation, perhaps?

But if so, then what a coincidence… and from all, I had heard, human families were typically close and eager to communicate, even if there are exceptions.

There were no words exchanged at all – at some point, the boy simply averted his gaze and left with Captain Katsuragi who had presumably come looking for him.

I would surmise that she had been assigned to be his handler.

...

"The angel has been destroyed by Unit One."

This outcome, I had expected.

"And it was the spare who won the battle?"

"In a sense – EVA 01 went out of control while he was in the driver's seat – or rather, the will and soul of the EVA awakened, and took care of that little problem."

"...so EVA has chosen him. That boy."

"The Third Child."

"I see… may I ask what his name is?"

I would have found out soon enough, anyway. In the beginning, I asked only because he was the one who saved my life. I wished to know what his name is.

But when posed that question, Commander Ikari… wavered, and looked pensive, as if he was inwardly debating what to say.

I wondered what about that one boy's identity could be so complicated.

Finally, he spoke: "That boy… is my only son. His name is Shinji."

His… his son?

Commander Ikari had a child?

But- but how?

In all the brief years of my life, he had never once mentioned anything about his personal life.

He had never once mentioned a family.

There were no pictures of any family in his office, nor in his personal quarters, where he had at times invited me for lunch.

It was a small, cramped room where every available surface was filled with stacks of books and scientific papers, with the sole exception of the grand piano in one of the corners.

He owned not even a kitchen, not the slightest hint of domesticity.

I could have sworn, by all that I knew, that this was a sphere of life that he did simply not partake in.

But why would I assume that I would know anything about him at all?

Why would he tell me?

Why would he even mention anything personal to me, when I was simply part of his work?

The truth was, that no matter what I hoped to tell myself, I didn't really know anything about him.

Here I'd been starting to think of myself as the daughter that he never had, or his closest thing to this, and now it turns out that all along, he already had a child.

A real child, of his actual flesh and blood.

"If you have a son, do you have a wife as well?"

He flinched at this, a little, though he never does, and regarded me intently with a look in his eyes that was almost pained, almost bursting with longing.

"Yes- Yes, I am married. And I always will be – Even if it has been many years now since my wife has been taken from my side."

(Unbidden, the image of a grave marker popped into my mind.)

"May I ask what her name was?"

"Her name was Yui."