Chapter 2
There. It was the darkness of that night, she thought, that brought it on so strongly—the sensation that she was back there, that her city was still in danger, that she and all her friends might be sitting placidly at home when the alarms rang out and suddenly all of them could die in an instant.
Horaki Hikari had not known what to make of it at first. She did not know what strange creatures were ravaging her place of life, like demons freed from hell. Even now she questioned what she knew, asked herself if there was any chance that the official reports contained the slightest grain of truth. Perhaps—but unlikely.
Then there had been that time. She remembered the day, clearly, and at one time and another it would spring to horrible life in front of her eyes as though time had been rewound and she was living it all again.
"What did they ask you to do?" she had said.
"Just some stuff…I'm not allowed to say…classified information and all that." His smile had been strained. "I'll be fine." But she knew it was a lie.
Then that night. There had been another Angel attack, again the city was razed to the ground and raised up again to the sky. This Angel had looked different, mirroring the creatures—the robots—which fought it.
But then she had not known. It was only when he did not come to school the next day, or the next, or the next, and she realized he wasn't simply cutting classes. No one ever had to tell her, because she knew. But they wouldn't let her in, wouldn't let her see him. One of them denied he was even there.
And now the blackness seemed to close in on her, suffocate her, until she wanted to retreat from the veranda of her house into the building itself, but that darkness blocked her from behind as well.
And suddenly, mysteriously, it vanished. The feeling disappeared and the darkness receded, content with its given providence.
"Hikari!" her mother called from inside. "School tomorrow! Get to bed!"
"Alright, mom!" she said, and turned around and left the darkness behind.
****
Ikari Gendo sat at his desk and rubbed his temples, exhausted. The night was late and the day had been hard. Fuyutsuki stood dutifully behind him, and for a moment Gendo wondered if he was nothing more than a particularly large, unruly marionette waiting for Gendo to pull his strings and make him dance. He found the notion suprisingly amusing.
Finally he leaned back in his chair. Without warning he hissed to the air, "What? What could it be!"
Fuyutsuki looked down but didn't need to ask the question.
"SEELE hasn't destroyed us yet," Gendo said, sounding as frustrated as the sub-commander had ever heard him. "But that means there must be a reason for our continued existence. NERV—and its upstart commander, in particular—poses too much of a threat to SEELE even now for them not to eliminate us if they had the choice."
"Yes sir," Fuyutsuki said. "Perhaps one of our more experienced hackers could—"
"No. SEELE makes a practice boardering on paranoia of not storing anything of the slightest value on accessible computers. There are rumors that they have one single mainframe, a gargantuan supercomputer, secreted away in their most secure location, but it has no contact at all with outside systems—no network, local or otherwise; no access points except from the keyboard right in front of it; and no unauthorized users. And in my very honest opinion, SEELE would store anything as sensitive as what they're planning to do with NERV only in the twisted recesses of their own minds."
"Yes," Fuyutsuki replied, "but do you suppose we could send our most covert agents to find the computer and query it…or even destroy it?"
Gendo scoffed. "It'd be easier to walk into Hell and gain an audience with Satan himself than it would be to get into that computer's stronghold—if it even exists. I have only heard rumors, after all."
Fuyutsuki nodded and was silent. Gendo seemed to be thinking. Then:
"You're dismissed, Kozo. Go home now. I've got a bit of paperwork to finish." He sounded, suddenly, very tired, exhausted to the bone. Even Fuyutsuki worried distantly for his stoic Commander. But he nodded and walked for the door nonetheless, and it slid open before him. He paused.
"Good night, Commander," he said, not really looking back.
Gendo's voice came from behind him. "Good night, Kozo."
The sub-commander walked out and the door shushed shut behind him. Gendo stared at the closed portal, contemplating the man who had left. Reticent but wise when he spoke, the only person on the staff willing and able to speak his full mind to Gendo when the mood took him. Yet Gendo ultimately held sway even over him. Fuyutsuki would himself make a fine commander, but he had either never been offered a position or never taken it.
Gendo's mind wandered, and he thought about what he would do about sleep that night. Often he simply spread out a futon on the floor of his office, although Fuyutsuki, first to arrive in the morning, was the only one who knew. He remembered when he used to sleep at home, or at least in a house; back before Shinji, and then after Shinji but before Yui had died. And after Yui had died there was no reason for the house anymore, for work became his life, and he left even his little son to the world's whims.
Do I regret that now? Gendo asked himself, staring into the dark corners of the room as though they might have the answers. Perhaps. But…not in the way a father would.
He took out the futon he stored habitually nearby and laid it on the ground. When he lay on it, the darkness seemed to close in on him, and whether it was condensing the room to protect him, or advancing and surrounding to destroy him, he was not sure.
Of course, he had lied about the paperwork.
****
In the night, Shinji dreamt. He feared the night, feared sleep, for he knew that with sleep came the dreams: re-enactions of his battles, flashing before his eyes. But they did not always turn out as they should have. He did not always win.
But Shinji never died. He was never that lucky, even in his dreams. Always the victims were his friends, his family. Again and again he saw Asuka's mind snap, Ayanami's Unit 00 explode. Once he thought he saw her head pass by his cockpit as the mech vaporized, its eyes glassy, the life gone from them.
Every time he would awaken, coated in cold sweat, hating himself for what he had done, or not done, according to the dream. After minute upon minute of staring into the solid darkness he might at last ascertain that he was at home, that his friends were still, for the most part, alive; that the battles were over.
But sometimes even then he could not convince himself. Sometimes, even then, he would fall back asleep not really knowing if he had woken up at all.
****
Amamiya Noriko woke to the sounds of chirping birds and gentle sunlight cascading through her bedroom window.
With a sudden thought she jerked up in bed, her stomach lurching. Today was the day. Today she and her family would be returning to Toyko-3.
She thought back, her mind stretching past what seemed like an eternity of being away. She remembered the first 'Angel attack' on Tokyo-3: buildings collapsing around her, people panicking despite the loudspeaker's injunctions to the contrary. She remembered scrambling to find shelter, praying that the shelters would even hold up against the otherwise unstoppable force.
She remembered, more acutely, that she had not been able to find shelter. When she finally did, it was too late; the door had been locked and despite her cries those inside were too frightened to open it. She had run desperately, trying to find something that might not collapse on top of her, finally scrambling to the top of a hill where there was nothing that would.
From afar she had watched the battle: first, a giant black beast striding through the streets of Tokyo-3, like the oversized creatures she saw so often in monster movies. U.N. assault planes and vehicles had attempted to intercept it, but their bullets, even their missiles, had dropped off of it without the slightest mark.
She remembered the horrible, all-encompassing fear, freezing her body in place amongst the grass, hoping and praying as she never had before that the battle would not come toward her, and that the rest of her family—separated from her in the rush to find shelter—were safe.
Then there had been the robot: as large as the thing it fought, and looking even more awful. Its eyes, its face—locked in a permanent expression of malice, seeming to glow with the love of battle as it fought. It struck over and over, and was struck over and over, until finally it was toppled against a building and blood sprayed from its head.
Why did the robot bleed? she would ask herself again and again. Why blood? But the horrible red spurts had been imprinted on her mind forever, and often when she closed her eyes—especially at night—she would see them.
And then, miraculously, their fighter started up again. Climbed to its feet despite damage that should rightfully have destroyed it, survived even the final, ultradestructive self-sacrifice of the monster.
That blast had carried her off her feet, thrown her for meters. It had blotted out her hearing for several days, although—thank God—when it returned it was no worse than it had been to begin with.
Immediately after that battle, as soon as the doctors deemed Noriko 'fit and ready', her mother brought them all out from Tokyo-3: Noriko, her father, her younger brother.
Her father had objected, but in an uncharacteristic display of will her mother had told him she'd be damned if her children were going to grow up in an environment where the next minute could bring death, where years of their lives might be spent in fear. And her will had been so great and so lucid that their father had capitulated.
So they had moved far away from Tokyo-3, until her mother was confident that they would not be attacked again. Really she had wanted to take them somewhere even father than that—outside of Japan, to the United States or Europe; but their father had flatly refused to leave the country.
But now the reports were that the attacks had ceased. No more Angels were expected, no more horrible beasts or nightmarish monsters. And so Noriko's mother had agreed to move back to Tokyo-3. And so preparations had been made, and so Noriko had packed and readied and now—now she was going back.
Her stomach flipped over again as she pushed back her futon covers and rose to meet the day.
****
Something had happened in the hospital wing's administration. Misato did not know what the catalyst had been, but Asuka had suddenly been deemed fit for release from their care.
Misato was surprised but not at all displeased; she looked forward to welcoming Asuka back to her apartment, her 'family' complete once again. She wondered whether Asuka's temper would have mellowed from so long in a hospital bed, or only become inflamed for the same reason.
Either way, she expected Asuka would be glad to have a change of scenery and a bit more freedom. In fact, the release orders were strangely lacking any real guidelines for what to do with the girl once she was out—no requests from the doctors to check on her again, no injunctions to stay inside or to go out and get some fresh air.
Asuka herself was not sure what to make of the order. For better or for worse, she had become accustomed to the routine of the hospital and her near inability to leave her bed, much less her room, except for particular check-ups and the like.
All she really understood was that she had been reclining in her bed a few days ago when a doctor—a marked change from the silent, almost indifferent nurse who usually made the rounds—came into her room and told her that she was to be released within the week. He had not said precisely when, only that it would happen. She imagined they were taking the intervening time to check and double-check, and possibly triple- or quadruple-check everything to make sure no one in any other departments would be upset with their releasing her.
But it didn't matter to her one way or the other. The stale hospital air, sometimes tinged with an unpleasant scent wafting from other wards, had become normal for her. It no longer bothered her to have a nurse meandering in and out of her room at preset times. In fact, part of her wondered if she would not be perturbed by their abscence.
Instead of examining the question in what she was certain was a hopeless pursuit, she lay back and closed her eyes. Soon the chatter in her mind subsided, and she drifted off to sleep.