At the End of the World Chapter 12: At the End of the World (11), an evangelion fanfic

Risa shared a room with me; made sense, Tashi had said. After all, why clear out another room when there was plenty of room in mine?

I didn't know how to react to this. I wasn't sure that I wanted Risa in my room, for various reasons. The first of which was that I had always had to share my sleeping space with something, and for the past few months, this room had been mine and mine alone. The second was that I still didn't know how I felt about Risa.

She seemed nice enough, very quiet and not talking much, and when she did say something, it was always worth listening to. Now that she was walking around, she was a little bit taller than me, and I was again struck with the slenderness of her body and figure. A small part of my mind criticized me for being too short and nothing but skin and bones.

"So what do you do?" I asked, sitting rigidly on my bed, my knees drawn up to my chest.

Risa looked up at me, confused. "Hmm? Oh, nothing special. I just did whatever they told me to do." She gave a little laugh, sounding like the one bird I remembered from my childhood: happy and uncaring. "My mama..." Here she paused, her face clouding over with grief. "My mama was a doctor, and I wanted to be just like her."

"Where did you live?" I asked, wondering briefly -- and too late -- if I was being rude.

"In a city. South of here, I think." She smiled. "I was studying to be a doctor. It was hard. All the spots in schools were given mostly to boys. The odd girl who could make it in often dropped out because of what they did." Her eyes flashed angrily. "I wouldn't let them get to me -- "

"How old are you?" I interupted.

She stared at me for a moment. "Fourteen," she replied.

"And you made it to school? Now aren't you lucky." I was being just a touch sarcastic, but then I got up from the bed and left the room without waiting for her to reply.

That night, for the first time, I had The Dream.

It was short, almost beyond recollection, but I remembered the face. I woke up suddenly, sitting up straight in my bed with the blankets clutched to my chest. My hair felt sticky with sweat, and a drop of it ran down my cheek to land on my hand.

I stared at it in the semi-darkness caused by the one emergency light in the corner, weak as it was. That was when I remembered the face. It was huge; a sickly-coloured pink, oddly shaped, with a bulging eye socket. The socket bubbled in several different places and then a green eye rolled out of the folds between the bubbles, the triple-iris swinging around and focusing. And that was when I woke up.

I shuddered, pulling the blankets evern closer. On the other side of the room, Risa was sleeping soundly, her mouth open slightly, probably in response to the moist air here. Her hair was loose; it was spread across her pillow and over her shoulders in soft waves.

I turned away from her. I couldn't bring myself to lay back down and close my eyes. If I can see that face with so much clarity when my eyes are open, I reasoned, how much more clear will it be when it is ALL that fills my sight?

The next day, I was exhausted. I had gone to sleep after the dream, but it was a fitful, restless sleep. I thought that maybe I would have felt more rested if I hadn't slept at all. So I sat there as Tashi brought out breakfast, staring into my mug full of water sightlessly.

"Mei!" Tashi finally had to almost shout before I heard him.

"Hmm?" I murmured, turning to him, startled. I got the impression that he'd already tried getting my attention several times.

His face transformed in less than a second from annoyance to worry. "Are you alright?" he asked, his brow creasing. "You look like you haven't slept...It's not because of Risa, is it?"

For a brief moment, I was tempted to say that it was. But I didn't; whether it was because I was just too tired to lie, or some deeper sense of morality, I couldn't say. I yawned and shook my head instead. "I just didn't sleep well last night, is all," I said, managing a weak smile.

He didn't believe me; I could see it in his face and eyes. "Well, alright," he allowed. "But if you're having problems, come and see me. No matter what it is, okay?" His eyes urged me to believe him.

I nodded, holding his gaze until I yawned hugely, nearly dropping my mug.

"Good morning," Risa said quietly from the doorway. "I'm not interupting anything, am I?"

Tashi and I both looked over at her. She was dressed in Unit-00's plug suit, just as I was dressed in Unit-01's. Her hair had been done up in the two buns again.

Tashi smiled at her; I just yawned and turned back to my food. "No, not at all," he assured her. "Come, sit and have a bit to eat."

With a timid smile, Risa sat down across from me. I tried not to stare at her, but I was too tired to really care. I thought again how the suit accented her slender figure...bolstering her where she needed to be held up and flattening out areas that needed to be...I dragged my eyes back to my mug.

"So today," Tashi said towards the end of our tiny meal, "we should continue fixing the entry plug and then do sync tests. And if we have the time, try to fix the power supply or at least find out what's wrong."

I yawned hugely at the end of his day's plan. "Sorry," I muttered as Tashi fixed me with an odd gaze. This is going to be a long day, I thought

It was all I could do to stay awake during the fixing of Unit-00's entry plug.

I didn't need to be in Unit-01 to help with the repairs of the plug, though I would be when we could get around to fixing Unit-00 itself. The people who stole it had almost destroyed it again; I got really mad that they would be so careless with such a lovely piece of equipment every time I looked at it, leaning against one wall in it's cage like the broken doll I'd had as a child, so I tried to keep my back to it whenever I could.

Most of the damage to the plug was not the damage I inflicted. The only thing I had done, it seemed, was leave finger dents where I had picked it up, and even that was not directly my fault. The material was so weakened -- by what we couldn't tell, though Risa said they had submerged the plug in several different solutions to discover what it used as an oxygen suppliant; that made me even more mad -- that if I had tightened my fingers even the tiniest bit more, I just might well have shattered it.

So now we worked inside the plug and out to strengthen it up. Tashi said it was a near miracle that Risa had been able to operate Unit-00 with it at all, it was that bad.

Our entire day was dedicated to the plug. We had it ready to test the next day by the time we went to bed. I fell asleep easily and didn't dream.

We got the power fixed first thing the next morning. More acurately, Tashi and Risa did. I slept late, something I had never done before.

It felt so wierd, I thought, sitting in my bed and looking around in a confused, half-asleep state. The area was silent, the only sound a tiny dripdrip of water on the far side of the hallway.

Water, I thought, trying to clear my mind of sleep-fog. I need a bath.

I took one, still puzzling over the absence of sound. The water was cool against my skin, and I felt greatly refreshed after my bath. After I dressed in my plug suit, I pulled my wet hair up in a tail against the back of my head. Then I went to find Tashi and Risa.

They found me. I was just entering C&C when they came down the hallway behind me. Tashi called my name as they both ran to meet me. Both wore excited grins.

"We fixed the power," Tashi explained breathlessly. He must have been running for more than just down this hallway "And we also found something."

"It's another entry plug," Risa burst out. "It's markings have been erased by time, but I think it used to be the plug for one of the white ones. The first number is almost guaranteed a '1'."

I just stared at the two of them, wondering absently what kind of picture we made, standing in a triangle in plug suits. All of a sudden, I felt so useless. I had been sleeping while they had been hard at work.

"That...that's great!" I exclaimed, trying to put on a cheerful front. "You didn't bring it back, did you?"

Tashi shook his head. "It's half buried in rubble, and we couldn't have done it anyway. You know how big they are. We wanted to ask if you'd mind helping us get it out."

"Of course not," I replied, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"It's in a place where the Unit can't go," he continued, smiling gratefully at me. "So Risa and I were going to go in and attach a bunch of cables or ropes or whatever and then you can just pull it out. Sound good?"

So that's how it is, I thought in despair, though I nodded and refused to let my inner feelings show. I'm just the muscle, rather than the brain. Later I thought that that theory was unreasonable; Tashi hadn't yet found an EVA that would accept him and Risa's was in such bad shape that I wouldn't have let her take it out if she'd wanted to.

Tashi showed me where the plug was on a map and directed me to the nearest large space near it. He said that he and Risa would go around through NERV to get to it and that one of them would meet me there to make sure I didn't get lost. The space I was supposed to go was a place I hadn't been yet, so I thought that it was kinda nice of them to make sure, though at the time I was insulted that they would think I could get lost.

They took off in one direction while I went to the Unit. With the power working now, it was very nice to sit in the plug, feel it twist into place, activate it and have the LCL fill the plug up. I wondered, as I tried to force my mind to accept the idea of breathing liquid, where so much LCL came from. Tashi and I had found a tank of it nearby, but it was hardly enough to keep the plug filled as many times as I used it, and now it would go doubly fast with Risa around.

It was nice to walk down a hallway without wondering if I was going to have to blow the cable off and switch to internal power. I experienced again -- as I did everytime -- the feeling of power that came of sitting inside the Unit and controlling it's every move.

Risa met me at the appointed spot. She waved and indicated that she wished to say something to me, so I turned on my speakers and told her to go ahead, adjusting the volume appropriately.

"Tashi says that it might be a tight squeeze, but the cords only go to here," she said, pointing inside the hole in the wall. "So he asked me to tell you that you'll have to squeeze partly into here to get them out." She disappeared back into the hole, waving me to follow.

I stared at the hole for a moment, wanting to just laugh. I would have to get my head and at least one shoulder in, and it looked as though I could only get an arm in, much less the shoulder or head. The shoulder had a huge blade on it, and my nose had a similar, thinner one. I shrugged and laid on my side, determined to do the best I could.

I hated sticking my arm, palm up, into a hole when I couldn't see what I was doing. I had no idea if I was going to knock out a support pole or something.

I lucked out. I was laying down for what seemed like forever. Then I heard Tashi shout, "Now, Mei!!"

Bracing my free hand against a solid wall, I grabbed the cord that was looped around my fingers and yanked. The plug came free easily and I even swung a bit on my hip as I exerted too much force than the situation required.

Amid the cloud of dust and grime, the plug was beat up. But the most important parts of it were salvageable.

Tashi actually cheered. "Good job, Mei!!" he yelled, his voice echoing in the huge, empty room. The walls and ceiling shook, showering plaster and cement down on us.

"Oops," he said, almost sheepishly.

"Get into the plug," I ordered through the speakers, lying on my stomach and ejecting the plug. LCL poured out of the open door as they clambered up the Unit's side. They crawled into the plug; I shut the door as soon as I could and reactivated it. "Think like me, or don't think at all," I told them, getting to my feet. Grabbing the other plug and clutching it to my chest, I ran as fast as I could with two extra thought patterns disrupting the performance of the EVA.

Once back in the EVA bay, I stopped, set the plug on the floor and locked the Unit into place. Before disengaging my own plug, I heard the Unit angrily say, Get them out of me! Surprised at the vehemence of the Unit, I wasn't allowed to dwell on it long as Tashi broke the seal of the door.

He stepped out first, gallantly offering his hand to first Risa and then me as we exited the pod. I ignored the gesture; I was still kinda mad at him, and I was perfectly capable of getting out on my own.

"So now what do we do?" I asked, leaning over the safety railing of the walkway around the EVA, looking down at the plug lying on the floor far below.

"Well, since the plug for Unit-00 is finished, we should either start the sync tests or see what we can do about fixing Unit-00 itself. I was thinking that pieces of one of the white Units would work," Tashi said casually. "Almost all of them are so badly damaged that I don't think they will be usable. Maybe we can salvage the outer casing."

"Sounds like a plan," I replied, starting to the stairs that would take me down to the bay floor.

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