PSA: due to recent public concerns that FFN is basically on its last legs in terms of staff attention (fears that have been allayed for the moment since), I would like to point out that this story is also posted and up-to-date on Sufficient Velocity, Spacebattles, Archive Of Our Own and the Alternate History forums. I will continue to post new chapters on FFN while physically possible, I just wanted to make it clear that there are alternatives available should the worst happen. Thank you for your attention.
Tokyo-2, Outer District 6
January 28, 2042
1709 hours
"Going out for food."
"Suit yourself." – Asuka murmured without looking up from the couch as Kaworu went for the apartment's entrance door.
At least she didn't insult his coat this time. She was doing that practically every single morning when they left for school. Kaworu just couldn't understand what was so important about wasting money buying another while this one was still perfectly functional, if starting to become a little tight lately. He's been stared at enough times in his life to not really care what other people thought about his appearance anymore.
Not that anyone stared on his way to the convenience store near his home. As if trying to make up for the reprieve during his temperamental colleague's recent altercation with the two Angels, winter had let loose again. He couldn't see more than a block ahead, with the -18°C on the digital display of an advertisement column in the middle of the intersection he passed a few minutes ago being only barely legible in the thick snowfall thrown into his face by the wind. In fact, the very same sidewalk he was treading clearly just yesterday was more than ankle-deep now and it was looking as if another unscheduled school break in the near future, like the one just before his disastrous last fight in Siberia, wasn't out of the question.
He did not blame Asuka for not joining him this time at all. Kaworu himself was no fan of snow, even if it was the earliest thing he could remember. But Asuka, who spent most of her life on other planets, really didn't like winter to the point where he frequently heard her swearing like a sailor under her breath that she had to bear it with 'only' casual clothing instead of the environmentally sealed EVA suit she recently discovered to have outgrown, much to her dismay.
Just walking into the convenience store felt less like relief and more like getting dunked in the face by a blast of warm water.
As he was perusing his options for tomorrow's breakfast on the shelf at the very rear of the store, however, the teen's weather-related thoughts were derailed by his ears picking up angry rapid-fire Japanese from the direction of the cash register, followed by an anxious response from the owner. Peeking out from behind the shelf, he spotted a young man, about in his early twenties, leaning on the counter and looking decidedly unfriendly towards the visibly unnerved owner.
Kaworu genuinely couldn't remember ever seeing that guy around here before – but then again, he didn't exactly know the owner on a personal level either, so he couldn't tell whether this was a regular argument or just a disgruntled customer.
Nor did he have any more time to make such an assessment before the man noticed him and his expression turned even sourer. – "出て行け, ガキ!"
"Sorry, I don't speak Japanese." – Kaworu replied calmly as he stepped out into view.
"I said get lost, you stupid gaijin!" – the man snapped in what Kaworu was fairly sure was the heaviest Japanese accent he had heard so far.
"Hey, I was just shopping."
If anything, that seemed to piss him off even more. – "Then shop elsewhere!"
A second later, Kaworu found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol that didn't quite look like it was just a toy.
...okay, not a regular argument then. Come to think of it, he never actually had one of those things pointed at him before, other than that one time by Rei. Nor did he ever point one at anyone other than an Angel, for that matter; every time he took Kaworu and Rei to the AEL security personnel's shooting range, Shephard was insistent that Kaworu absolutely do not point a gun anywhere near the general direction of anyone he did not intend to kill, even with the safety on and especially if he thought it wasn't loaded.
Seemed like this guy was either never told that or, unlike Rei, was intent on hurting him for real.
And Kaworu not immediately flinching back upon realizing that fact didn't seem to calm the guy down either. – "Are you fucking deaf?! I said get lost!"
In the confines of the small convenience store, the sound of even a mere pistol discharging was deafening and made Kaworu's ears ring.
Nothing moved.
Then Kaworu slowly turned his head to glance at the bullet hole in the wall next to his head.
Then slowly looked back at the man.
"Do we really have to do this?" – he asked calmly, a small part of his mind idly noting that now he understood why Shephard insisted on him wearing earmuffs on the range.
That was very much not the response both other people in the store were expecting. If anything, the thug suddenly looked a lot less confident, not even noticing when Kaworu's eyes briefly glanced towards the shelves.
"L-look, there's really no need to hurt him." – the owner offered, evidently trying to deescalate. – "I-I'll pay up, just don't hurt him."
"だまれ!" – the thug snapped, briefly glaring at the owner. – "Listen, kid, I-"
That was about all he managed to get out before his brain registered Kaworu's sudden absence from where he was standing a few seconds ago.
An instant later, Kaworu emerged from behind the other side of the store's front shelf, moving like lightning. A single shot ran out before the teen slapped the gun aside with his left hand and drove his right fist into the man's temple, dazzling him for a moment before grabbing him by the hair and smashing his head into the counter for good measure.
The result was akin to a marionette having its strings cut.
Kaworu exhaled and idly flexed his fingers as he looked down on the out-cold adult at his feet. Violence was definitely not what he expected when he woke up that morning, but at least nobody got hurt. It wasn't the first time he had to manhandle a grown man in self-defense but thankfully enough, any who found themselves being physically overpowered head-on by a scrawny teen boy seemed to get the message that looks were deceiving and never tried again.
So much for the other guy being armed, he figured.
"Well... that's that." – He looked at the disbelieving owner. – "I figure you want to call the police now, so... can you bring something so we can tie this guy up until they get here?"
"Oh, um... y-yeah..." – the man trailed off, eyes looking at something below Kaworu's eye level.
"What?"
"You're bleeding!"
...now that he thought of it, his left arm was indeed starting to hurt. And sure enough, there was blood dripping off the tip of his pinky finger.
He's been shot.
"...huh."
There was just no end to new things this day, was it?
Five minutes later, between his right hand and teeth, Kaworu finally managed to awkwardly pull his shirt tight around his arm while it was propped up onto the cash register's counter. Getting it off in the first place was not easy to begin with, even though he could still move his arm and had feeling in it, so the damage couldn't have been that bad. Honestly, he expected much worse.
"You Lilim have a saying: do not tempt fate." – Tabris grumbled. – "What made you think that was a good idea?"
'I didn't hear you stop me.'
"A distraction at the wrong time can be fatal. Do you not think I haven't been in a battle before?"
'I wouldn't know. You never talk about it.'
The Angel didn't even deign that with a response.
Not that it made the thought feel any less surreal. He was in actual danger of ending up on the receiving end of lethal force – not that the switchblades he occasionally came face to face with in his old place were harmless, but those weren't wielded by adults. This was different and by all rights he should've been frozen up just like with Zeruel, especially since this time he didn't even have the protection of Unit-01.
Yet it was as if a switch had been flipped in his head and he found himself thinking... what would Rei do?
What would Asuka do?
Gun or not, in the end the guy was nothing more than just another bully. And a bully he could handle.
...maybe Asuka was right after all. He had been getting too comfortable being naturally stronger than everyone who tried to pick a fight with him.
"Look, I'm... I'm sorry you got involved." – the owner mumbled next to Kaworu's leg as he finished tying together the thug's wrists.
"Don't sweat it. Local tough guy?"
"...yeah."
"It happens." – Such types were everywhere, it seemed. – "You're going to be alright?"
"I don't know. His father is... connected. I already paid up earlier this month, so I have no idea why he was even here. Maybe figured he can line his own pockets on the side, I don't know." – The man finally stood up with a sigh, his eyes taking in Kaworu's bloody arm with visible unease. – "Are you... sure you don't want me to call you an ambulance...?"
"No, I'll be fine." – Kaworu glanced at the counter, noting in dismay the not-inconsiderably sized smear of his blood it now sported. – "Sorry about the mess, I'll clean it up before I go. Do you have a wet rag or somethi-?"
"Are you kidding me?!" – the owner interrupted him with near-hysterical incredulity. – "Just go!"
Kyoto PTG Node Facility
January 28, 2042
1138 hours
Stepping off the teleport platform, Yui walked out of the reception area and into the facility's arrivals annex, her business suit as impeccable as it can be with a coat under her arm. Teleportation or not, it was still the middle of winter and the Geofront didn't have its own teleporter for security and cost reasons, so going outside between the car and the local PTG node was inevitable.
She was still less than happy she even had to be here. Having to travel around the world, primarily to Europe and China, for business reasons was nothing unusual; she had done it plenty of times in the past. But this particular time it was not by choice. As proud as she was of how the Artificial Evolution Laboratory grew in both capabilities and service portfolio over the years of her leadership, Yui was no fool and knew very well that snubbing the President of the Confederacy of Man out of pique at him having pulled rank would quickly get her booted from her position by the executive board and likely blacklisted from her entire field in order to not antagonize the government.
A spectacularly bad move if she hoped for the military to actually buy Evangelions from her.
She wasn't blind. People might have enjoyed far better welfare and civic rights under the Confederacy than they ever did under the Combine, but it didn't even come close to whatever her mother told her in her youth about the democratic systems before Second Impact, including the one in her own homeland. The regional government positions were elected, true, but Keel himself had been in charge for more than twenty years now with no term limits on either his own office or on the high-level government positions only he had the authority to appoint and dismiss. Despite his advanced age, he appeared to have every intent on staying in office for life and most of his cabinet had similarly stayed unchanged practically since the nation's foundation in 2020.
Then there was the impossible to miss fact that the Minister of Defense was all-but-openly just an administrative figurehead of a position, what with the entire military answering only to the commander-in-chief who, in turn, answered directly and solely to the president. The fact that the seat of commander-in-chief was held by someone the history books truthfully state to have the moral integrity to have actually infiltrated Civil Protection during the Occupation to feed intelligence to the Resistance did well to hide the fact that with humanity having experienced subjugation within living memory and lived underneath the shadow of their alien conquerors' possible return every waking day of their lives since, the Confederate military never actually relinquished its influence and soft political power even after the situation on Earth consolidated to the point where they spent more time clearing out xenofauna from the vicinity of densely-populated areas than policing the civilian population.
Not that the common folk on the street cared as much. It didn't even take bread and circuses for the regime to maintain popular support: most of the Confederacy's population, Yui herself included, was born before Second Impact and for that generation, Confederate rule was positively luxurious. Little things like food, running water, working sanitation, heating, education, culture, and actually being able to choose their jobs, in contrast to the Combine who only ever saw Earth's sentient population as a batch of newly procured resources awaiting processing and as such, only expended the bare minimum required to keep the population from prematurely dying off before mass assimilation could commence. The choice was simply a no-contest and even though outliers like the Nestor incident did happen, most people just shrugged and went back to living their lives rather than take to the streets against a government that didn't do door-to-door mass arrests of entire blocks whenever someone from another block visited without letting the authorities know in advance. That and the Confederate leadership were fully aware that resorting to such measures in the name of absolute power would put them on the chopping block next, as they of all people knew very well that the power of an angry mob sick and tired of being stomped down on was not to be underestimated.
Even then, Yui had no illusions that providing the Confederacy of Man with the most destructive ground-based weapon system ever created by human hands could in no way result in said weapon system being pointed at the Middle East and Africa in the momentary absence of the Combine. Welfare or not, the locals never saw the Confederacy as anything more than just another batch of foreign invaders out to take their lands and made that opinion known with blood, tying down a substantial portion of the Confederate Army in permanent counter-insurgency operations.
Even after the world nearly ended, humanity still couldn't stop hating its own kind. And here she was, about to pour gasoline onto that simmering hatred in the name of preserving the fragile illusion of normalcy for Rei's generation.
She didn't have to go far in the annex before she saw her name held up on a table by a suited figure her eye immediately identified as a plainclothes bodyguard the likes of which Yui herself was being accompanied by.
Walking up to the man, Yui went straight to business. – "Good day. I'm here to meet with the Gehirn representative."
"He's upstairs. Follow me."
It was evident that the facility staff had been informed of the arrival of a VIP, for there seemed to be no objections to another pair of bodyguards closing off the upper floor corridor she was being led to. On the other end she could already see a lone figure silhouetted against the glare of a large window pane overlooking outside.
Gesturing at her own bodyguards to stay outside, Yui moved forward. Even with her mind already switching to "business mode" formulating scenarios for how this was going to go, she was still momentarily caught off-guard upon noticing that the representative was in a motorized wheelchair. It wasn't unheard of for people to need a day or two adjusting to Earth's gravity after arriving from low-gravity worlds or long-distance FTL travel, but Yui was aware the representative had arrived from Polygonus whose gravity was actually slightly higher than Earth's, so it likely wasn't that.
What she also didn't expect was for the representative to visibly fidget. Seemed like she wasn't the only one who didn't want to come here – but what kind of representative give themselves away so easily before any kind of negotiations have even begun...? – "Good day. I'm Dr. Yui Ikari, representing the Artificial Evolution Laboratory. I trust your trip here wasn't too uncomfortable?"
"I-it was fine, really." – The stammer raised even more question marks in Yui's head. Why on earth did they send this guy? – "And I don't mind being informal, if it's okay."
Then the representative turned his wheelchair around and Yui's world ground to a complete halt.
"...Shinji?"
Chapter completed on 22/09/27 with a cliffhanger I doubt many people have seen coming.
Private ownership of small arms is permitted in the Confederacy; in fact, after everything that went down before the pilots' generation was born, it's not uncommon at all to find families with MP7s, SPAS-12s and even the occasional Combine pulse rifle hanging on the living room wall as trophies, mementos, heirlooms, or all three. Pulse rifles in particular fit into a somewhat unusual legal niche: while the weapon itself is legal to own by a civilian, its ammunition is anything but. In the post-Combine world, dark energy plasma is treated akin to weapons-grade plutonium due to its potential to be used for messing with the fabric of spacetime. Accordingly, unlicensed possession of it, even one only partially depleted magazine, is a guaranteed prison sentence should the authorities find out. As you can probably imagine, the Evas' backpack reactors that allow them to operate without an umbilical cable contain quite a bit more than that – enough that under normal circumstances, Yui would be facing the Confederate army kicking down the Geofront's airlocks for it, EoE-style.
To preempt giving impressions to the contrary, the exposition in the second half of this chapter is not meant to indicate I'm an advocate of authoritarianism; far from it. The post-Combine world merely has a different perspective on things. Do remember, after all, that Yui's entire generation grew up under what was basically a planet-wide North Korea administered by the Borg. Compared to that, even the likes of Nazi Germany with all its human rights violations and death camps would positively come across as paradise to those who never wanted to rock the boat to begin with. Stating that the Confederacy is benevolent in comparison to the Combine is faint praise by our real-world standards, to put it mildly, but that's the point: the world of SCE is NOT a nice place to live in, even if the Eva kids' generation don't quite see it yet at their current age.