Chapter 3
A squabbling sound suddenly alerted Hikari, who had been leaning against the wall, absorbed in her own thoughts. She quickly looked up and heard Toji next to her.
"What's up with the penguin?" he mumbled. Hikari looked down at Pen Pen. He was looking down at Asuka quizzically. Then, he looked up at Hikari and gave an expectant blink.
"What's the matter, Pen Pen?" she asked. Then, she noticed Asuka stir slightly as she slowly opened her right eye.
"Asuka!" she exclaimed as she rushed over and knelt down on the blanket. Toji and Kensuke, who had also been leaning wearily against the wall, turned and looked. Asuka blinked for a moment as she stared up at the flickering fluorescent light. Then, she slowly turned her head to the side and saw Hikari crouching over her.
"Hi...kari?" she said quietly.
"Asuka...you're really all right," Hikari replied, the first hint of happiness in her voice since she had entered the shelter. Asuka looked up at her for a moment. Then, a small smile began to spread across her face.
"...never thought...I'd see you again..." she said.
"Hey, we're here, too," Toji announced as he and Kensuke came up next to Hikari. Asuka took a quick glance at them.
"...and I was hoping I wouldn't see you two again," she said tauntingly as she pulled herself into a sitting position. Toji scowled. Pen Pen waddled over to her and gently nudged her shoulder.
"Even Pen Pen's here?" she said as she scratched the penguin under his beak. Then, she noticed the bandages that ran up her right arm.
"Hikari...did you do this?" she asked as she stretched her arm out and looked at the bandages.
"Well...I couldn't just let you bleed to death," Hikari replied.
"So...this is the second time you've saved me," Asuka said placidly as she looked at Hikari. Hikari got to her feet and stood next to Toji(who was still scowling a bit).
"Guess so," she replied. Then, she turned serious. "What happened to you, Asuka? Those other Evas...why did they destroy your Eva? What's going on?"
"Is it some kind of 'war of the Evas' or something?" Kensuke inquired.
"It's a long story. Even I don't know all that's going on," Asuka said. "But I don't know what to do...now that my Eva's...destroyed."
Hikari slowly stood up. "I was worried about you, Asuka, after you...well, you know I told you that you could come back to my house after they called you back to NERV to fight that one Shito. Where did you go after that?"
Asuka's right eye narrowed slightly as she straightened up a bit. "Back then, I couldn't even...get my Eva to move. My Sync Ratio... was 0%. I didn't want to free load on you anymore, Hikari, so I just wandered around for days. I can't even remember how long. I didn't eat. I didn't sleep. I just walked. I finally found this broken down, abandoned house. At that point, I was so weak and depressed, I just wanted to be left alone to die. I took off my clothes and...got into the dirty bathtub. Then, these men came in looking for me. They wanted to take me back to NERV. I remember them pulling me out of the tub...a doctor telling them to take me to the hospital ward. After that I...don't remember anything until I woke up inside my Eva..."
After she had finished, Asuka slowly turned around, grasped the edge of the sink, and tried to pull herself to her feet.
Hikari came up behind her and held her up. "Try not to move too much, Asuka..."
"I'm okay," Asuka said as she stood up, holding both hands on the edge of the sink for support.
"It's strange..." she mumbled as she watched the endless drips of water fall down from the rusty faucet. "...I can't remember anything when I was at the hospital ward...I must've been in some kind of coma or something but, at one time, I thought I heard Shinji calling for me, begging for me to 'help' him. I don't know why but that's the only thing I can remember..."
She stared at the drips for several moments while the others watched her expectantly. Suddenly, she turned her head away brashly.
"Ano baka!" she exclaimed. Then, she began to speak with not the slightest hint of ambivalence in her tone. "First he's pleading for me to help him, then, when I could really use some help fighting those other Evas, he's nowhere to be found! Typical of that baka..."
"Hey, lay offa Shinji, will ya?" Toji growled. "I'm sure he's havin' a hard time, too. Wherever he is..."
Asuka looked back at the sink and noticed another drip fall from the faucet. It plopped into a drip that was sitting on the rim of the drain, causing them both to roll down it.
"Ano...baka," she muttered quietly. Then, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror and noticed the gauze patch over her left eye.
"Sorry, I...couldn't do anything to help your eye, Asuka. All I could do was cover it..." Hikari said.
"It doesn't matter," Asuka replied. "Even with both eyes I was unable see all that was before me, anyway."
"Huh?" Toji and Kensuke murmured together, with perplexed looks.
"You've...changed, Asuka," Hikari said. Asuka turned to face her.
"Have I now?" she asked.
"You sound like..." Hikari began, "...you know yourself better, I guess."
Asuka gave a quick smile to Hikari before gazing back into the mirror. She looked deep into her sapphire eye, searching.
'Maybe it's true,' she thought to herself. 'Maybe all the hell that I've been through really has changed me...for the better. Maybe now that I've changed, I can change my future...so that I can find...a real purpose for life. It's not over yet...' She hesitated for a moment before moving towards the door.
"Asuka, where are you going?" Hikari asked anxiously as she stepped near the door.
"Back to...Mama," Asuka whispered.
"What?" Hikari asked. "You mean your real okaa-san? I thought you said...she died."
"Her soul still lives inside Eva. Heh, I know it sounds crazy but the reason Eva has an AT Field is because there's a human soul inside of it. That's probably how it can 'sychronize' with its pilots."
She turned to Hikari and noticed that she still looked confused. "Don't worry about. It's something that just concerns me..."
"Human souls are in Evangelions? I never knew that!" Kensuke proclaimed in awe.
"Does that mean that...my Eva had a soul, too?" Toji inquired, dumbfounded. Pen Pen glanced at each of them and blinked inquisitively.
Asuka griped the doorknob. "Even though the outer shell of my Eva is destroyed, Mama's soul must still be there..." She pulled open the door.
"Wait a minute," Toji said as he walked over to Asuka on his crutches and stopped in front of her. "I used to think you were nothin' but an arrogant bitch, but maybe you're not that bad...maybe you're just arrogant and not a..." She stepped on his foot as she went out the door.
"Ow! Hey, I was tryin' to be nice," he grumbled as he stumbled back.
"You want me to break your other leg?" Asuka asked teasingly. Toji turned away angrily. Hikari giggled at them.
"Grr...if you weren't a girl, man I'd really let ya have one..." he mumbled irately to himself. "...so much about her changin' for the better."
Asuka paused as she stood in the small doorway. "Hikari?" she said.
"Y-yeah," Hikari replied.
"...thank you...for everything," Asuka said without turning around. "You were my 'mikomi no hikari.'" And with that, she ran up the hallway towards the exit door.
"Asuka!" Hikari shouted as she stepped out of the restroom and watched Asuka pull open the exit door and run outside.
As Asuka stood for a moment outside the shelter, she thought about what she had just said. "'...thank you.' Words of gratitude. Words I've...never used..." An image of Kaji suddenly brushed through her mind. "...not even...with him."
Back inside the shelter, a massive jolt from somewhere unknown shook the earth and made Hikari fall back into the restroom. She grabbed hold of the edge of the doorway to keep her balance.
"What was that?!" Kensuke exclaimed as the shaking slowly calmed.
"Man, that can't be good," Toji said disdainfully as he looked around. "If she's not careful out there, she might really end up with her Mama-san!"
Back inside the main room of the shelter, the woman with the baby cowered against the wall, peering nervously out the window. The jolt had awoken her baby, causing her to start crying. The woman tried desperately to quiet her by rocking her gently, but to no avail. Suddenly, she sensed a presence near her and she quickly spun around. The phantom apparition of Rei Ayanami, the 'messenger of salvation,' floated without wings before her. The souless spirit giggled an empty giggle and drifted towards her. The woman backed away staring, terrified, as the ghostlike being before her advanced. She closed her eyes tightly and looked away in a panic. Suddenly, she heard her baby's cries cease abruptly and looked up. To her surprise, the apparition was now an image of the very man she had been waiting for ever since she was thrust into the shelter with only her baby and her heavy heart. She stared at him, too shocked to move, as her baby looked up and blinked in great curiosity. He smiled vacantly as he floated right up to her so that they were face to face. He cupped his translucent hands around her cheeks. She shivered as he pulled her into him. Before she could cry out in either happiness or horror, she felt the baby in her arms erupt into some kind of liquid that felt like unnatural soup. But before this could even fully register in her mind, she lost all sense of being as her body, too, became the liquid which cleansed troubled souls of their worries and sins, 'the original soup of life,' LCL. Her clothes and purse seeped into the LCL puddle, along with her dress and pacifier of her baby.
Outside and within the demolished city, the citizens who had fled the shelter scurried around in fright and uncertainty as the phantom Rei-tachi rained down like a storm of angels from heaven. They sailed over to each of the unsettled souls, became the image of the one which that person wished to see the most, and then brought them completeness in a quick and painless burst of LCL. Those who did not wish for salvation hid behind trees and broken down houses, and refused to see a loved one within the spirit of Rei. But even they could not escape the massive change that their world was undertaking. All throughout what remained of Neo Tokyo-3, Rei came to the people and left LCL in place of their bodies as their clothes fell uselessly away and their souls drifted up into the single, perfect entity, with skin of pure white and wings like a giant angel, that towered over the dead city and fused the light of all seperate beings into total oneness.
Back inside the shelter restroom, Toji, Kensuke, and Hikari were backed against the wall as the savior Rei-tachi floated around them, smiling serenly.
"Ayanami!? Jeez, I always knew there was somethin' weird about that girl!" Toji exclaimed as the trio huddled together and Rei-tachi began to close in.
"Let's get out of here!" Hikari shouted, scooping up a startled Pen Pen into her arms as Rei-tachi were practically on top of them. She and Toji made a break for the door. Kensuke tried to run after them, but Rei hovered right in front of him and gently grabbed his face. He screamed and winced as he tried to back away, but in what seemed like less than a moment, his being was turned to LCL which splattered on the wall and oozed in a puddle underneath his clothes and glasses.
Meanwhile, Toji and Hikari were running down the hallway as the hollow gigles of Rei-tachi echoed against the walls.
"What happened to Aida-kun?" Hikari asked as she glanced behind them. "I thought he was right behind us..." Before Toji could reply, he stopped short as Rei drifted right in front of him. She came closer as two more came out from either wall. Toji hastily shoved Hikari the other way as they completely coverd him.
"Suzuhara-kun!" Hikari cried, but she couldn't see him through Rei-tachi. She tried to step over to them but Rei began to come after her, smiling emptily. She backed away as Pen Pen squawked in alarm.
Toji pushed blindly through Rei-tachi when suddenly, he felt something touch his waist and he looked down. His sister gazed back up at him, beaming, unrealistically.
"...Kumiko? What are you doin' here?" Toji murmered in disbelief. Kumiko narrowed her eyes. Then, she jumped up and threw here arms around his neck. He slowly hugged her back. But the shower of happiness that he was feeling at that moment, ended in a flash, and he no longer felt anything at all as his body turned to LCL and oozed into a puddle where he had been standing. His clothes wallowed aimlessly in the puddle and his crutches splashed down on top of them.
"Suzuhara-kun! Where are you?!" Hikari hollered hysterically as she tried to see any sign of Toji through the swarm of Rei-tachi. But they had completely filled the small hallyway, preventing her from seeing anything but them. She continued to back away from them, but Rei suddenly came up right behind her. She gasped and moved away, but when she looked back, Toji was drifting before her, grinning passively yet unnaturally, with his left leg no longer in a cast.
"S-Suzuhara...kun?" Hikari stammered as he floated in front of her and gently ran his hands along her short brown pigtails. She felt her face flush rapidly and her heart began to pound in her ears. Pen Pen glared up at him, squealing in protest and madly flapping about in Hikari's arms but she didn't notice.
"Are you...a ghost...now?" she muttered as he pressed his face closer to hers. Then, he placed his hands behind her head and pushed her lips into his. She faintly heard Pen Pen before his squabbling suddenly stopped and in his place, she felt something wet and slimy. But an instant afterwards, she became nothing more than that same wetness and slime. The LCL splattered against the wall and fell back into a still puddle. Her dress plopped down into the puddle along with Pen Pen's cooler unit.
Outside the now silent shelter, Asuka walked along the barren field back to the remains of Unit 02. As she trudged onward, she thought to herself. 'Where is that baka-Shinji?! Even after all that's happened, he's still not around! Ano baka! I'll get him for this! I swear!' She shuddered slightly. '...if I...ever see him again...If he's...still alive...'
A strange, ominous wind was blowing harshly and the cloudless sky was a bizzare burnt orange. Not a single person, house, or tree was in sight. All around her, countless numbers of souls awaiting entire completness floated up from all around the planet in the shapes of shining white crucifixes. But Asuka ignored them and kept her vision and mind focused on what was ahead of her; being reunited with the one who was with her from the very begining, and stayed there without revealing herself until the time was right - her mother. As she approached the ghastly head of the giant robot, she gently placed her hand on what remained of its armor plating.
"Mama...I'm sorry...this happened..." she said, running her hand along the plating as the entire earth shook all around her. "...but I...understand now. When I lost hold of myself, you hid youself as well. And when I finally realized that you'd always been there, you protected me once again. Even if Eva is gone, I know you're still here!" She laid both hands on the plating and rested her head on them. She heard the monotonous giggles of Rei-tachi closing in behind her, but she disregarded them and kept her eye closed tightly in concentration as the air howled and the earth trembled.
"Mama! I've finally decided! I finally know!" she cried out to the Eva's soul. "I don't want to die! I want to keep on existing because...I'm alive and as long as I am, I can change myself and my future as long as I have the will to make it change!"
Through her closed eye she could make out the light around her growing brighter and brighter, and she could scarcely feel a mysterious, yet strangely familiar warmness around her. "Mama...my purpose...my purpose is to develop myself, through existence!"
The bright light exploded into a blinding brilliance, and Asuka felt the warmness engulf her entire being.
A drop of water. As Asuka slowly opened her eye she saw her mother, Kyoko before her, smiling serenly, and she felt Kyoko's hand gently caress her cheek. Their spirits appeared to be floating in space, above the empty, cleansed earth, as the single perfect entity below began to collapse into the giant sea of LCL and the seperate, crusifixed souls within flew out like billions of redeemed angels. As Kyoko ran her hand down Asuka's cheek, she spoke softly.
"Will you be all right now...Asuka-chan?"
Asuka hesitated. "I still don't know...where my happiness is. But I'll continue to think about...whether it's good to be here. Whether it was good that I was born. But in the end, it's just realizing the obvious again and again...because I am myself."
On the earth below, the head of the giant angel of oneness split. Asuka paused as she looked passionately into Kyoko's eyes. "But Mama...what will you do?"
"Humans can only live on this planet. But Evangelion can live forever, along with the human soul that dwells within." Kyoko's voice seemed to fill the space all around her as the mangled and dismantled pieces of Evangelion Unit 02 float away from earth and into space. "Even after 5 billion years, when the earth, the moon, and even the sun have vanished, Eva will still exist as long as even one person still lives. It will be very lonely. But as long as that one person still lives, it will the eternal proof that mankind has ever existed."
At that moment, Asuka felt herself being pulled or perhaps, beckoned, back to Earth. As she drifted down, and Kyoko floated away, she uttered her final words of self-redemption with renewed vibrancy flowing through her voice.
"Good-bye, Mama."
Though Asuka's "mind-trip" in my fic may not be as detailed and thorough as Shinji's is in the movie, I wanted the two of them to reach their conclusion in a similar way; seeing and having a similar conversation with their mothers before going back to Earth. The end of my fic leads right to the final scene of "The End of Evangelion," which is probably one of the most controversial of all. I'm sure many think that the reason that Shinji strangles Asuka in the end is because he's upset with her and wanted to finish what he started(when he strangled her before, in Misato's apartment). I used to beileve that, too, until I really examined certain scenes in the movie and realized that the first occurence of Shinji strangling Asuka did not happen in reality, but was a figment of Shinji's mind created out of his frustration and incomplete relationship with her. I found that this was so because before we see that scene, we see the part from episode 15, where Asuka walks over to Shinji to kiss him. In reality, she ends up kissing him(and then regretting it afterwards). But in this particular flashback that Shinji has, instead of kissing him, she yells at him and kicks him. Shinji's mind changed the reality of that memory because of the raging negative feeling inside of him at that time. Similarly, in the director's cut scene of episode 22(and in Death & Rebirth), we see a spilled coffee pot as Shinji is telling Asuka that Kaji is dead. So we know that that's where the spilled coffee pot really comes from. But once again, Shinji's tormented mind twists the truth in the movie, and we see the coffee pot spill when Asuka pushes Shinji and he falls, knocking the pot of coffee down in the process, before he starts to strangle her. Immediately after this scene, Shinji's mind begins to depict a bunch of random images of death. So as far as I can see, Shinji's mind at that time was rewriting his memories, making them seem more horrendous than they really were(and I highly doubt that in reality, Asuka would just stand there and let him strangle her). Also, what Shinji imagines Asuka saying to him in that scene("You're afraid of Misato and the First!"), is exactly what he said about himself at the very beginning of the movie. This further emphasizes the fact that the whole scene was wroughted from Shinji's frustration with Asuka and his guilt about raping her.
The reason that Shinji strangles Asuka at the very end of the movie is because he wanted to make sure that he was back in the real world...back in a world where pain once again existed and he was able to feel the presence of another again. This is the abosolute answer given from an official Evanglion trading card. But that still leaves an even greater question..what are they going to do? And, what about eveyone else? Well, Yui states that "...anyone can return to human form, as long as they can imagine themselves within their own heart." Since Shinji rejected the world in which all seperate souls are one, the peoples' souls come back to Earth. So perhaps if they(the souls) are able to imagine themselves within themselves, they can become humans once again. As for what Shinji and Asuka are going to do is entirely open to debate. But I guess the real conclusion to "Neon Genesis Evangelion" is of the mind. It doesn't matter what's going to happen...all that matters is that they are alive. Two people who felt deeply for each other yet constantly hurt and rejected one another time and time again were brought together in a cleansed world and finally came to some kind of acceptance of one another. I think with a brilliant ending such as that, the details become meaningless :)