The Reality I Make For Myself: New Genesis ch. 2
Asuka and Shinji adapted well to living alone by themselves. Shinji was the cook, more often than not, and Asuka fell into a societally ingrained habit of keeping the house clean. To be fair, however, each did their share of everything, and managed not to kill each other out of sheer boredom. Not having television had taught them the true meaning of "quality time," that being usually spent alone in the tub, at least for Asuka. Shinji still had unpleasant bouts of tub-induced memories, and so chose to lay in bed listening to his SDAT.
The morning after they awoke from Instrumentality, they had tried to make it into NERV headquarters. First thing that they discovered, and much to their mutual surprise, was that most of the interior structure of the Geofront was intact and undamaged. Indeed, the greenery around the lake looked better than ever, perhaps owing to the new crater that was providing sunlight for them. At the far end, near the mountain ranges, a huge LCL-fall streamed constantly, draining into who-knew-where. It was, in its way, quite beautiful, even if the air for a mile around smelled like there had been a massacre.
Getting into Headquarters was a little trickier, as the halls were flooded with Bakelite. It was, however, the work of a minute or so of determined effort to get into an air duct and belly-crawl their way into Central Dogma. What they found there was almost devastating. Until now, the clothes that lay soaking in LCL were faceless, nameless uniforms, either JSSDF or NERV personnel. Central Dogma had grue of a different hue. In each of the expected and familiar places around the console and towers lay the clothes and puddles that had been Aoba, Ibuki and Hyuuga. The Subcommanders's puddle was where he had always been, at the right hand of Gendo Ikari's desk.
Shinji swallowed hard, fighting tears. He had to be a man, now, and act like it. Asuka was having similar issues, a sob escaping from her when she read the last line input on Maya's laptop, the legend "I NEED YOU" in English letters.
"Oh, Shinji... They're gone. They're all gone."
"I know. There's nothing we can do right now, though. If you're right, and this works, we can get them all back. For now, try and be strong again."
Asuka nodded, her face hardening into a mask, her mouth a grim line. She WOULD be strong, this idiot couldn't be trusted to be the man she needed him to be. Why the hell did I just think that?
"Hey, Asuka! Look at this. The MAGI are all still up, and they are apparently working fine."
"Really? Let me see!"
She got up from staring at Maya's laptop and walked over to Aoba's console. True to what Shinji said, the MAGI all read functional, although they were currently offline of any network, anywhere.
"Huh... What do you suppose disconnected them from the other MAGI, the other branches of NERV?"
"I don't know. Maybe SEELE sent troops to attack the other branches? Wait, what's this? Type 666 firewall? What the hell?"
"Why would they need a firewall that strong? Unless... SEELE or someone must have tried to hack into the MAGI system using the other branches of NERV, the other MAGI systems. This is going to be a problem."
"You're not kidding. I remember Ritsuko mentioning the data from the extraction experiment was all sent to Germany. Now we don't have what we need to pull Kaji back!"
Frowning, Shinji went through the rest of the MAGI systems, checking their connectivity to the city itself, running diagnostics on the rest of Headquarters. He felt almost like invisible hands were guiding his, and once he tried to flip his long hair back out of his face, before he remembered that he didn't HAVE long hair, Aoba had. How weird.
"Well, according to this, about 40% of the city above is left intact. The Geofront interior is almost completely obliterated in the middle, and Headquarters has a few gaping holes in it. The MAGI give us a 75.005% survival rate at our current capacity."
"Only 75%? That's not good."
"No, it's not, but it could be worse."
"True. It's not a zero or a minus."
The signifigance of that statement eluded both children, although Asuka thought that it had sounded pretty silly coming out of her mouth. She supposed she must have been having a blonde moment.
"There's very little else we can accomplish here, Asuka. I think we ought to get whatever parts of the Central Block still work up to the surface, and try to get the Bakelite cleared out of the corridors. I don't feel much like going duct-crawling every day."
"I agree. Let's see what the armory has left that could punch through that plastic crap."
Moving into the hallways that WEREN'T full of the plastic molasses, they found several JSSDF uniforms apparently armed with flamethrowers. By the look of things, they had been doing a pretty good job of melting the Bakelite with them, a tunnel blasted through part of a wall of it.
"Guess we found what we needed. D'you know how to shoot one of these things, Shinji?"
"Um. I didn't know it, but yeah."
He pulled one free of the sleeves of the uniform, strapping himself in and tightening the fittings like he'd done this a thousand times. Asuka watched him, and followed suit, although she wasn't quite as surefingered as Shinji, her hands trembling a bit as she tightened up.
"This is morbid. I feel like a ghoul."
"A what?"
"Ghoul. Wicked spirit or ghost that haunts graveyards and eats the dead."
"Gross. At least both our tanks are full."
"How can you tell?"
"Your indicator is near the top, and I can just...feel it...somehow...in the weight."
Shinji paused as he realized he had no idea how he knew this. Another Instrumentality memory, apparently. Is it ALWAYS going to be this way? Just knowing whatever we need when we need it? Right now I wish I knew how to make it stop...
Hefting the weapon and nodding, Shinji pointed the nozzle of the flamethrower at the corridor that had already been started on. Asuka smiled grimly, loving the chance to work out her frustrations so dynamically. Looking more closely at the corridor they'd been blasting, she laughed out loud.
"What idiots! They were blasting OUT, this corridor leads to the main gate! Did they get turned around or what?"
"That's good. Now we won't have to clear so much out to get in and out of here. I hope the escalators and lifts are still working out here. I didn't bother to check and see which functional ones were where."
"Shut up and start burning, baka!"
With that, she turned on her heel and cut loose with a wide swath of flame across the bottom, napalm splashing up in orange and yellow flashes against the deep red of the Bakelite. She laughed maniacally, enjoying the feel of the power of the weapon under her command, and the strength of the flame it produced. Shinji just shrugged and shot a concentrated blast into the hole that had been started, trying to deepen it as Asuka widened what was there already.
"I wish we had our Evas, then we could just get one of them to stick their arm in and wiggle it a little. Unit-01 never did care too much about Bakelite. Went through it like styrofoam."
"Heh. You and your freak machine, eh? Both of you defying the rules and expectations. Don't you know you should have died at least three times now, baka Shinji?"
"So should you. What was the story with those bandages when you and I woke up?"
Asuka frowned for a moment, unconsciously tightening her grip on the trigger, sending a longer jet of flame than she meant to, splashing up the side of one wall.
"Oops. Um, it was, I don't know. Last thing that I remember was being ripped apart by the Eva series. A lance went through my Unit-02's eye when it ran out of power, and it took mine with it. I was bleeding all over the place. Damn near killed me. I tried to fight back even without power, and I could feel Mama working with me. Then a lance split my arm in half, and I felt like I'd been run through a dozen times. I blacked out after that."
"So... You should have needed those bandages when you came out, but never had the need. You came out whole." Shinji brightened at something. "Hey! When we start pulling people from the LCL, they'll be okay. Misato won't be shot, Toji won't be hurt, and neither will his little sister!"
"Hey, all right! Now shut up and blast things!"
Eventually, after having to go back and pick up spare cannisters of fuel a couple of times, they punched through to the main gate. Apparently they HAD gotten turned around, because the JSSDF had been trying to crack the Bakelite wall from that side, too. There was an APC outside, and it had the keys in the ignition.
"Well, that was thoughtful of them to leave a car for us, wasn't it, Shinji?"
Shinji smiled, glad to be done with the flamethrower. After the second hour, the novelty had about worn out. Shucking the now uncomfortably heavy gear, he nodded. "I trust you know how to drive, Asuka? Surely you took driver's ed in college."
"Um, yeah. I just hope that it works the same as a regular car..."
It did. After dragging all the heavy weapons out of the back, she haltingly backed them out and through the streets of Tokyo-3, bound for home and, since they'd been down in NERV headquarters for almost six hours, a late lunch. Shinji stayed mouse-quiet in the shotgun seat. This was not just popular slang, but fact, a fact Shinji discovered when he tried to roll down the window and ended up pulling the trigger to the side-mounted shotgun in the door. Asuka screamed and veered nearly off the road, and only avoided a wreck by virtue of no other traffic on the street.
"ANTA BAKA!? What's wrong with you? You trying to kill us!?"
"I'm SORRY! I was just trying to open the damn window! WATCH OUT!"
Asuka swerved again, barely missing a phonepole that had sprouted up before her, as phonepoles are wont to do when driving erratically. Straightening out the car, she slowed down and glared at him. "Don't touch that one again. I thought yo-, I thought we'd been shot!" I almost said I though HE'D been shot. Not again! Why can't I keep on despising him?! ARGH! What is WRONG with me, Mama?
The rest of the ride home was blessedly uneventful, as was lunch. A simple affair, if only because they were both too worn out to cook something. They just threw some instant ramen cups into the microwave and collapsed around the table, eating in silence before laying out on the floor and catnapping. Apparently the voices were either quiet, or had just faded into background noise that was no longer noticed.
Asuka woke first, groaning as she cracked her neck, gone stiff from laying funny on one of the pillows. Ach... that hurts... Shaking her head to clear it, she looked over at Shinji, sprawled over two pillows, snoring lightly. This may have been the first time she ever saw him sleep without his music on. He really does look cute in his sleep. Peaceful, like he never is when he's awake. Poor guy.
She furrowed her eyebrows, this niceness thing was bugging her, as was her apparent inability to make it stop. Still, it wasn't like she was in love with him or anything. Just... Okay, so maybe I could like him, but he can't know it, he'd just take advantage of me!
Realizing she was bored again, and that watching Shinji sleeping was by way of being slightly less entertaining than watching the linoleum in the kitchen warp, she nudged him gently.
"Hey, Shinji. Wake up, I'm bored again."
Groaning and yawning, he opened his eyes and fought the urge to scream. Asuka was RIGHT OVER him! He couldn't possibly dodge at this distance! Dodge what, though? She said she was bored, not angry. "Wha... Asuka... Why did you wake me?"
"I said I'm bored, baka. Wake up and take me for a walk. It's lovely out tonight, the moon is full, and the air is cool. Get UP!"
With this she chucked the pillow at him, hitting him square in the face, though softly. Grunting, he pushed the pillow out of his face and tried to smooth his hair, with limited success. "Okay, okay... What did you say you wanted to do?"
"Take me for a moonlight walk along the beach. I always wanted to do that with Kaji, but I'll settle for you."
"Gee, I'm honored."
She chose, rather generously, she thought, to ignore that comment from him and wait for him to get sufficiently conscious to not walk into walls on the way to his shoes. Finally, they stepped out the door, Shinji wondering what in the WORLD possessed Asuka to become so nice recently, and moreover, to get such a weird romantic streak. It was a considerable improvement on her usual zero-to-bitch-in-no-time-flat demeanor, even if she did still call him an idiot every other sentence.
As they made their way down to the edge of the lake, Shinji looked up at the sky, the blood-red ring surrounding the world, and the dusting of red and green stars along with the familiar starscape that he'd known since he'd been a child. As he watched, a red star, one of the new ones, flared brightly then streaked across the sky, before disappearing over the horizon.
"I wonder..."
"What is it, Shinji?"
"For a couple of nights, now, we've been seeing shooting stars, right? Red ones."
"Yeah, so?"
"Have you noticed how every time we see one, your awareness of Instrumentality slips just a little bit?"
"Mein Gott, you're right! Does this mean that people are starting to come back?"
"I think so... We'll have to find a way to get the MAGI working again while we still can, so that anyone in the other branches of NERV will know we're out here."
As they spoke, a green flare lit up the sky, and a glowing green cross arced across the vault of heaven, describing a perfect halving of the sky with its trail.
"Yeah... What was that!?"
"Was that...a green cross that just fell?"
"Yeah... What could it mean?"
"I have no...idea..."
Shinji drifted into silence as a sound reached his ears. Without realizing it, they'd walked along the same stretch of beach he stood on when his life was upended for the last time, when he met Kaoru. He thought back, hearing that humming in his head, Kaoru humming "Ode to Joy," perched out on that rock...there... Looking at said rock, Shinji thought he must have been losing his mind, because there he was, just as he had been, slouched comfortably on the rock jutting out of the surf. Suddenly he realized that this was not a memory, not a flashback, Kaoru was THERE, and he was humming that same song.
"Ka...Kaoru?"
"Hmm? What was that, Shinji?"
He looked at Asuka, looked back at the rock, and Kaoru was gone, along with that humming. "It's...nothing."
"Oh, come on, I HATE it when people do that!"
"It's just...I thought I saw someone, someone I used to know." No sooner did he close his mouth, than a gentle, precisely clipped, slightly lisping voice sounded behind him, and close.
"That is because you did, Ikari Shinji-kun."
Shinji spun like a cat, and there he stood, smiling like he did, but a few details were different. Instead of his usual shirt-and-slacks uniform, he wore a white robe, luminous in the moonlight, although it possibly was not reflecting the moon. Behind him was the faintest outline of wings, like a heat mirage. Under his arm was a leather-bound tome with writing on it the likes of which neither child had ever seen.
"Kaoru, is it really you?"
"Yes, and no."
"Who the hell is this fruitcake?" Mein Gott, his eyes! Like Wondergirl's! Who IS this guy!?
"Kaoru..."
Shinji was on the verge of tears at this point, seeing again the one person who told him he was loved, who later begged Shinji to destroy him, for Shinji's own sake and survival. Asuka, for her part, was trying to decide whether to hit and run. She didn't appreciate the spooky appearing trick.
"Again, yes and no. I am also Adam, your First Angel, and I have come because you need me, both of you." The absurdity of this statement made Asuka almost bark with laughter, a harsh, cold sound born out of irritation and a lifetime of self-sufficiency.
"Like Hell! Asuka Langley Sohryu doesn't need ANYBODY!"
"You know that is not true, Second Child. You know it well."
Staring at her with those crimson eyes, it was hard to argue with him. She felt her iron mask flaking away, rusting from all the blood spilt on the battlefield and the tears shed on her pillow. A change was coming over Asuka Langley Sohryu, the effort to be the best finally breaking her, but she'd be damned if she'd break down in front of a stranger, much less this pasty-faced fruit in his bathrobe. The fact that he'd said he was an Angel didn't even register with Asuka, and Shinji had already come to terms with that fact once before.
"Kaoru... You said you were here to help us? Help us with what?"
"This is going to be very complicated to explain, but it is important that you understand. When Lilith awoke, and the Third Impact began, it triggered a chain of events that no Lilim, not SEELE, not even your father could have predicted. Lilith plays a dual role in destiny, both as your Second Angel, and also as the tenth of the Unholy Sephiroth, the emanations from the left hand of God. Only seven of these were allowed to endure, and she was the first to awake. There will be others. Very soon, you will have to fight again, both of you. The Adversary is coming, trying to take over the earth in his bid to rule Heaven. He will control the weapons of Man, as well as the remaining unholy Sephiroth. As you can guess, this cannot be allowed to happen."
Shinji looked totally lost, and Asuka was just barely hanging onto his explanation. At the mention of having to fight again, though, her look grew hard again, pissed off at the presumption of this kid.
"Great, just great. So what the hell are we supposed to do? Our Evas are either destroyed or hanging out in orbit, and what the hell are you doing here, and how the hell do you know all this!?"
"Calm yourself, Second Child. I am here because Shinji is here, and because you are here. Before, I was the Seventeenth Angel, born of the First Angel. Now, I am the Chronicler, and the Herald. This is a job usually assigned to my brother, but it was felt best you were given someone familiar."
"Familiar? I've never seen you before in my life! Shinji, do you know this fruitcake?"
"Yes...Yes I do. His name is Kaoru Nagisa, the Fifth Child...And he loved me."
