As it is, the next chapter might also be late. I've got three tests coming up (yippee :sarcasm:), and I'd also like to get Metroid Prime 2: Echoes fairly soon, W00T!!1 (now if only it weren't for those damn tests :mad:). But I'll try to get it in.
6. Memories, Part Deux
As he was walking back towards that god-forsaken beach that reeked of death, the sky began to change from shades of darkness to a slight orange. In a few moments, it meant, the very first sunrise in this new world, this hell of his own doing, would happen. Probably nothing worth taking note of, though. The sun would continue to rise the day after, the day after that, and the day after that, ad infinitum, until the end of the universe, just as it had before Third Impact. With time, the "first" sunrise wouldn't be any more unique than any other sunrise that had come to pass. The world would settle back into a rhythm, a routine of sorts, and cycle perpetually. Day after day, it would still be the same rising and setting sun, same white moon, same stars, and same pain and emptiness that he had to deal with just like every other day past. In the end, nothing was really unique. Originality was nonexistent, because it was really the same recycled crap over and over again.
Probably the only things that counted as being different were the black-colored second moon and the ring of blood in the sky, but even those would cease to amaze given enough time. And all they really managed to do was to remind him of how he had failed everybody, which was also something he had to put up with every day.
So really, there's been no net change in the scheme of things.
Shinji wasn't in the mood for a celebration anyway, for the night was far from over for him.
He had been up all night gathering his supplies, but even after all those steps and paces he wasn't tired. He did not crave sleep in the slightest. He had felt no heaviness in his eyelids since he had first woken up on the beach. Even now, he felt more awake than ever before. It was as if he could not bring himself to rest, as if there was something more important than rest, something that had to be settled once and for all. You might even say that he was walking with a purpose.
His purpose; find out what made a certain Red Devil the way she was.
He
still hadn't been able to answer his own question; why did he care why
Asuka was so mean to him? Why did it matter now what made her into the
person that she is to this very moment?
How much did her mother's death have to do with it? What does he hope to get out of it in the end?
Well that was obvious; he wanted answers. But why did he want them? What good did it do him now? It was pointless to understand Asuka at this stage, if it hadn't been a pointless venture all along. Even if he knew what he desired to know, Asuka would still get mad at him and physically abuse him and continue to yell derogatory insults at him.
Maybe he wanted to know why because if he knows the cause, then he can stop it. If he knows what it is that makes Asuka so angry, he can stop it at the source, stop her from being angry, stop her from taking it out on him.
If he is aware of it, then he can change it.
Even so, Of all people, why did she give him the most difficult time?
The likely reason that Shinji was Asuka's favorite prey was that he never tried to defend himself. He very rarely took a stand for himself and butted heads with Asuka, but even then he walked away with his tail between his legs every time. Little surprise she always picked on him, then. The second likely reason was that he was always around her. They did practically everything together for the past year of their lives; home, school, and NERV.Except for the occasional flocking with friends and cliques, they were never very far apart. So he was always in her presence, and therefore always under attack.
Shinji was forced to conclude, therefore, that it was simply a matter of convenience.
Yet it felt as though there was more to it than just that. No matter how she acted around other people, she seemed to be deliberately cruel only to him. With everyone else, she was either just trying to be a show-off or trying to keep people out. But it was always on those terms. Asuka might get, mad throw a temper tantrums, and very often pick a fight or an argument without letting it go for several hours, but she didn't seem to do it with the intent of spite. But with Shinji, every one of her words and actions were filled with malice. There was either something he had done in the past or something about him that just made Asuka truly hate him.
The fifteenth's attack seemed to be a key contributor, but it wasn't the end-all solution. Asuka had already acted as she did before that catastrophe, she just acted that way even more so afterwards. So it had to be something he had done before that.
Come to think of it, Asuka hadn't really started to emotionally abuse him until after he had rescued her from the volcano after the eighth. But why then? Hadn't she "returned the favor" during the ninth? Weren't they even now? Or was that not enough? Does she act the way she does because she would have rather died than received his help?
Why, then, did she look like she wanted to thank him afterwards?
Or was that simply wishful thinking?
But the more Shinji thought about it, the more the whole thing sounded incredibly stupid. If she caused him that much pain, why didn't he just go some place else? What was so important to know the truth...to understand her?
Shinji thought back to a conversation he had with Kaji and how Kaji had said that the Kanji character used for the word "she" literally translates into "woman who is far away." It was Shinji's interpretation of the conversation that trying to understand others is an impossibility. You can never hope to understand other people because people cannot even understand themselves. That seemed to fit his current situation to the tee, because Shinji didn't even know why the hell he was trying to go through with this.
Shinji found himself talking to himself. "Kaji, if it's impossible for others to understand other people...if it's impossible for me to understand Asuka, then why am I doing it? Why bother if it can't be done? If we can never hope to know the truth about things, then why do we look for the truth at all?"
"Because it is the nature of human beings to seek the truth, Shinji."
The voice didn't really seem to come from any direction. It felt so very close, and at the same time so very far away.
And of course Shinji was startled.
He turned around a full 360 degrees, darting his head and scanning the entire area about him, looking for the pony-tailed, unshaven owner of that voice. But whoever it had belonged to, they were not here to be found. Every which way he looked, Shinji found nobody else but himself.
Out of some laughable spark of hope, he began shouting out at the potential second party. "Hello? Hello? Who's out there? Is that you, Kaji?"
He wasn't even answered by howling wind, it was that quiet.
"Okay, the first time was weird, and it was probably just all in my head. But a second time? That's just TOO weird." Shinji said to himself. He had only been in this world a good eight hours now. It was way too soon to start going crazy already.
"But maybe I am going crazy." Shinji thought. But he knew that he was going crazy, so at least some portion of his sanity remained. He knew that the voice he just heard wasn't real, no matter how much his senses told him that it was. He hadn't completely lost it.
Yet.
The only thing that linked the two incidents so far was that he had spoken to himself out loud. It wasn't much of a connection, but it was all that Shinji could come up with. But he didn't feel like pushing his luck and having voices inside his head screaming at him to paint pentagrams on walls and eat human flesh, so for the time being he decided it might be best to avoid talking to himself (at least aloud). He didn't even feel ready to deal with real people; he certainly didn't need to be driven mad by imaginary people.
Yet if he wasn't ready to deal with real people, what made him think he could tackle Asuka?
After an hour or so of more walking, Shinji's feet finally made contact with bone-white sand and his gaze met the lake of blood. It was a bit difficult to ascertain if he was in the correct vicinity, given that every portion of the beach looked identical to the last and that there were few distinguishing buildings or markers around, but Shinji was certain that this was the area where Asuka was suppose to be.
But there was no Asuka to be found.
"Aw come on! Don't tell me I made her up, too!" He shouted, forgetting his vow to not talk to himself.
But then he saw disturbances in the sand. They appeared to be prints of some kind. From the looks of it, the person had crawled up the beach a ways, then stood up and began walking. Shinji was no expert on tracking, but seeing as he knew he didn't make these tracks and given that the hand and foot prints were too small to be his own, he had to conclude that they were Asuka's.
But the only thing it meant to Shinji at that moment was that she was not here, which made his task all the more difficult.
"Son of a BITCH!" he started kicking sand with his foot and began to curse.
A part of him was relieved that he hadn't imagined Asuka (forgetting that the wounds on his face could have told him that), but another part of him was mad as sin that she was now gone. He also felt like slapping himself for it not even occurring to him that she might try to get away. Any trace of her stopped at the edge of the beach, where there was no more sand to record her journey.
If Shinji couldn't track down Asuka, he was going to have to search for her. But even with a good three quarters of the city now leveled, it would still take an impractical amount of time to find her. By the time he had finished looking, she might have gotten away from the city, maybe even out to one of the other neighboring cities. But he had to at least assume that she'd stay in the confines of the city because a) for at least a while, she's going to want to stay somewhere familiar and comfortable, at least until she recovered, which led to b) that she's too weak and injured to do any long-distance traveling. But there was also a very real chance that she might seriously hurt herself or die...
"Not that I care about her or anything," he said coldly. "But if she dies on me I won't get what I came here for." Which was true enough; if he wanted answers, he needed her alive and responsive.
No, if he was going to find Asuka, he needed to think like Asuka.
While Shinji didn't really understand Asuka personality-wise or psychologically-wise, he did know her personal habits well. More than likely, she might want to take off the bandages and examine her wounds. That probably meant she was at a hospital somewhere, provided she had found one. If the wounds were not serious and they permitted her, however, she was going to want to take a nice, long, hot shower or something along those lines. She was going to have to use that special German brand of shampoo that she is so fond of and that specially imported body wash that she just cannot live without. She was also going to want to get out of her LCL-soaked plug suit and put on some real clothes.
And that got him thinking. When Asuka had moved out to go stay with Hikari, she took all her clothes and her toiletries, including the shampoo and body wash. If they were absolutely essential to her, then she'd probably head to Hikari's. The only problem with that theory is that Hikari's place was wrecked along with many other homes after the sixteenth. It had still been standing when Asuka ran away there for a week, and Section 2 had found her lying naked in the bath tub, but her things might have been destroyed as well. Even so, it was an optimal place to begin searching.
Another place he could check was back at Misato's apartment. Asuka hadn't taken all of her possessions with her, so odds are that there was something back at the apartment that she would not want to be without.
The odds of finding Asuka seemed better and better. Add to that the fact that she couldn't move at a very quick pace, given how worn out she was when he found her. But at least two complications put a damper on all of this. One was that he couldn't tell how recent the tracks were. Asuka might have just left, or she might have gone off as soon as Shinji was out of sight. Second, he still didn't know where "here" was in relation to any other place. If he didn't know that, it was likely that neither did Asuka. So again, potentially, she could be anywhere right about now.
This all assumed, of course, that she hadn't gone and killed herself or something. But Asuka seemed to proud to commit suicide. She probably saw it as running away or being afraid, and the Great Asuka Langley Sohryou was too good for that. So until he found the body, he'd have to assume that she was still alive of her own free will.
"Okay, I know of a place I want to go, but I don't know where I am. I want to find out where I am so that I can find out how to get where I'm going. If I were Asuka, what would I do?
"Well, I certainly wouldn't ask for help from anybody (not that I could now, anyway), so I'd probably look for directions of some kind. I'd probably look for street signs or something, probably a map as well.
"No, I can't read Kanji very well, so maps and signs might not do me a whole lot of good. But I still don't know where I am, so I'll probably want to look for something familiar. A building of some kind, something that tells me something about where I am. Most of the city is destroyed, so that doesn't leave a great deal of places for me to go.
"I can't go to the Geo Front 'cause it's up in the air right now and where it used to be is filled with LCL. The school was also definitely destroyed, so that's a no go.
"Aw hell, she probably just randomly wandered around." he said in defeat. Which was probably the only reasonable conclusion, given that she wouldn't know where she is. She'd have to search on foot and hope that she came across something she knew.
True, Shinji didn't know where she was at this very moment. But if he was right, he knew where she would be. Asuka was a very bright girl; she'd find a way to get her bearings and get to her destination. Even so, he was still taking quite a gamble that he knew her so well. He was also assuming that she was staying still in one spot and had not already moved on. But it was all he had to go on. It was all he knew, and he can only do what he knows to do.
But the longer he took to locate her, the less likely it was that he'd get to her before something undesirable happened.
'Again, I just need her alive. It's not like I care about her anymore or anything.' he thought, trying to remind himself of why he was doing this.
But he couldn't, because he still didn't truly know why he was doing this.
"You never were a very good liar, Shinji." a voice said out of the blue.
But it was neither the voice of Kaji or Misato. This was a third voice. It was a very soothing voice to Shinji, and it filled him with feelings of friendship and trust. This was the voice of somebody he could confide in, with whom he could share all of his darkest secrets and not be cast out because of what he really was. It was a very accepting voice, as though he could be true to himself around this person and have no fear of rejection.
It was the voice of somebody very dear to him.
It was the voice of somebody who betrayed him, and still he is very dear to him.
So dear to him that Karuo's death was almost literally on Shinji's hands.
Images of the fifteen year-old boy with blood-red irises just like Rei's and short white hair filled Shinji's mind. He thought back to the first time they met, out in the ruined streets of Tokyo-3 one week after the sixteenth Angel attacked. Shinji was walking without any particular destination in mind, and suddenly heard somebody humming to the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." That was when he and Karou had made their introductions to one another. Even then, he seemed so warm and inviting, and he had this serene smile on the whole time. It was nothing like Kaji's smile; Karou was not simply calm and collected, he seemed truly at peace, as though nothing could ever ruin his day.
He thought back to when they were showering in the locker room at NERV, when Karou had confessed his love to Shinji. This was the only person, to Shinji's memory, who had ever said "I love you" to Shinji. Even if he was a guy, the words didn't seem very homosexual. Okay, standing in front of him stark naked with no towel around him as he said it did come off as rather fruity, but beyond that he didn't seem to be implying that he was gay or anything. It didn't seem like the word "love" was implying physical or sexual relations. Instead, it conveyed true caring, true acceptance, as though it would matter to somebody whether or not Shinji woke up and existed the following day. Karou wasn't asking to be his lover, he was asking for his acceptance, and to be accepted by him. He already seemed to know and understand Shinji very well, even though they'd only known each other for one day, and already he wanted Shinji to let down his defenses and let someone in. And in return,Karou had offered no defenses at all. He was very open and comfortable with himself, and Shinji was allowed to come and go as he pleased into Karou's heart and soul.
Then he thought back to when Karou had possessed Unit02 during Asuka's coma, and had commandeered it in his effort to locate and join with Adam down in the depths of NERV. Shinji could recall the exact moment when he was summoned to Unit01 and briefed on the target. He remembered the initial shock, disbelief, and the rage that he had been played for a fool the entire time by Karou. Then he remembered when Karou had found Lilith (who Shinji had also believed to be Adam), and instead of trying to get away or prepare an attack, he lowered his AT Field and asked Shinji to kill him. He didn't seem to goad him into doing it or tease him about how Karou had betrayed his trust. It was not as if Karou was deliberately trying to make the situation more difficult for Shinji than it already was. Yet he wasn't suicidal in the sense that he was depressed and hated everything and had no desire to go on. It was almost like Karou was asking Shinji to grant him mercy. He recalled the last words Karou and said to him, how if life and death were equal alternatives, then death was the only true freedom.
In spite of how Karou had betrayed him, Shinji did not want to kill him. Shinji didn't care what Karou was; he was the only being, the only PERSON, who had ever understood Shinji so well. He was the only person to truly care about Shinji, to love Shinji for being Shinji. He did not put up with him because he was an excellent Eva pilot or because he did all the cleaning and cooking or because he was some kind of celebrity. Karou didn't love Shinji because he had a use, Karou loved Shinji for simply being himself. No one, save Kaji, had ever really done anything like that for him, as far as he could remember. And now, not only did this person turn out to be something that his duty as an Eva pilot required him to destroy, but this person was now asking Shinji to kill him, to cast off that which he had so desperately needed all his life but had never genuinely received.
True acceptance.
To be needed by somebody for simply being alive, and not because you suddenly had a purpose or a use.
Karou had given Shinji that which he had ever really wanted, and now he wanted Shinji to let that go. That he could even ask that of Shinji had made it infinitely more agonizing. He had surrendered, without much of a struggle, and still he wore that damn wonderful smile of his.
Didn't Karou grasp the seriousness of what he was asking? Or was he just leading Shinji on this whole time? Was it some sort of revenge, or an attack, or simply some twisted Angel sense of humor?
And yet, maybe Karou hadn't been merely toying with him. Even if he was an Angel, sincerity had formed the tips of every word he spoke to Shinji, piercing him through the soul, reaching out to him in ways that few had ever been able to. Of that much Shinji was certain.He had to have meant all those things he had said, it had been too real, too...beautiful to all be a lie.
Or was Shinji simply letting his feelings get in the way of his better judgment?
No, he had gotten to know Karou while no one else even bothered. He alone knew what a wonderful person Karou was, even if he did happen to be the enemy. And what reason did Karou have to lie about all those things? If Karou had the power to remotely synch with soul-less Evas (or at least Evas whose souls were in hiding) and also possessed his own AT Field, why didn't he try to reach Adam sooner? Why had he taken the effort to get to know Shinji?
Besides, he had already learned the truth about Humans and Angels and how they were really all the same. So was Karou really an "enemy?" Where did you even begin to draw the line? And seeing how it was ultimately Humans who initiated Third Impact, who was really the bad guy here? Who was really the antagonist of this twisted story, and who was left to be the protagonist?
Certainly not Shinji. At the least, he would be an anti-hero. He hadn't performed any sort of service for humanity in the name of honor, community, selfless sacrifice, or any of that other ideal chilvalrous bullshit. He had done it for himself, he had destroyed everyone and everything because he had believed that this was the world that he had always wanted. He thought that everyone could die and go to hell, so a world without peole must have been what he wanted. But to even call him an anti-hero was stretching it a bit, considering that Shinji didn't feel like ANY kind of hero.
But Shinji was losing track of the situation here. Another voice was speaking to him, and instead of doing something about it Shinji was being inwardly philosophical. "Alright, third time's a charm. I'ma have to draw the line here. This is going to stop right now!"
"(chuckle) Oh, Shinji, you're still as tense as ever." the voice carried on.
"You're not real, so I'm not going to dignify you with a response." Shinji said.
"But you just dignified me with a response right now!" the voice was still calm, but seemed to be amused at the same time.
And he made a good point.
"Damnit, you're not real! I know you're not real, so I'm not crazy yet. I'm not crazy, so I must still be in control. And I'm in control, so I'm making you go away!" Shinji's trying to stay calm, but at the same time he's fully aware that he's talking to an imaginary voice.
"What a fine line of reasoning, Shinji. Bravo! But I assure you, you are not becoming psychotic."
"I'm talking to you, aren't I? You're not really here!"
"Then why are you still talking to me?"
"I...Hey! Don't change the subject!"
"(chuckle) It's perfectly alright, Shinji. I understand completely."
Imaginary or not, this is getting to be too strange for Shinji's tastes. That, and how could he face the person whom he had cared for so much but had murdered? "No, STOP! Don't say anything else! You're not real, I'm probably just really stressed right now or something, just go away!"
No hint of disappointment is to be found within the voice, it is just as serene as ever. Just as serene as that smile. "Shinji, I know you better than you know yourself. I do not believe that that is what you truly want, Shinji. Would it make you feel better if I was visible?"
"No, go away!" Shinji yelled, bowing his head and covering his ears with his hands, as if trying to grab his mind and hold off the forces that were invading it. He clamped shut his eyes and tried to wait out the voice until it became bored with him.
Not even waiting for his approval, the voice assumed the form of Karou Nagisa, a white-haired albino male, the Fifth Child chosen to pilot the Evangelions, and the seventeenth and "final" Angel.
He appeared before Shinji, still smiling benevolently as always.
"Is this better, Shinji?"
Shinji still refused to open his eyes, afraid to look. "No, go away! You're not really him!"
"I am as real as you need me to be, Shinji."
"What kind of ambiguous answer is that?"
"Shinji, if I'm not actually real, then it won't matter whether you can see me or not. As long as you actually 'know' that I'm not real, there isn't really any harm in looking at me, now is there?"
Shinji had to hand it to this apparition, the logic was sound.
And so Shinji opened his eyes. He took a minute to study the face before him, and when he was through his own smile met Karou's.
They stood there in silence for a moment, until Shinji broke it. "I have to admit, it is good to see you again....Karou."
"It is good to see you as well, Shin-jun."
Shinji blushed ever so slightly at the "-jun" being thrown in. "So, are you really standing here before me, or am I going crazy?"
"What does your heart tell you, Shinji?"
Shinji seriously pondered the question for a moment before answering. "I...I don't know. I don't know what to think! This is all happening too fast, you know? One minute you're dead, then the next everybody's dead, then I'm trying to kill Asuka, and now this! I just need to know, Karou. I need to hear from you if this just another trick somebody's playing on me."
Though he was still smiling, Karou paused for a moment, as if trying to choose his words very carefully. Either it was difficult to put into words, or it was an explanation that Shinji was not necessarily going to be very happy with. "Well, yes and no. You are only partially correct; I am not really standing in front of you, Shinji. However, I am very much with you."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?! Are you real or not?"
"I trust that you have been having them; the memories that are not your own. You have begun to remember people, places, and events that you have never encountered, emotions that were not your own."
He wasn't entirely sure how this ghost knew about that. But if he had heard him talking to himself inside his own mind, it wasn't a very large stretch of the imagination that he might know other things about Shinji. "Just a little bit, not a whole lot."
"That is to be expected. You have also figured out that this was because of your exposure to Instrumentality, am I correct?"
"Yeah. So what?"
"Well, you might say that I am a memory of sorts."
"Huh? How can you be a memory if I'm talking to you right now?"
"You see, Shinji, you have absorbed the memories of all of Humanity. Even in the mere matter of minutes that you were exposed, you received countless lifetimes of memories from others. But you ripped yourself away before you had the proper amount of time to process and digest it all. You became an individual again, instead of remaining as a part of the collective whole. When you re-assumed your single form, your single and unique perspective, you lost the ability to simultaneously hold other's perspectives. Yet your mind still retained all the knowledge that had been passed onto you. You can no longer hold more than one perspective at a time in your mind, and so all those thoughts have been pushed back into the deeper parts of your mind to be dealt with at a later date. To try to deal with it all at once would overwhelm you, and so your mind is having to slowly process it all, one person at a time, one lifetime at a time."
"So, the reason I can't seem to recall much is because I can't recall it yet?"
"Precisely. Your mind was able to deal with some facts first, facts such as the truth behind Third Impact and the Human Instrumentality Program. Others, such as personal thoughts and desires from other people, frighten you, and so you block them from yourself until you feel ready. Some you are more ready to accept than others; mainly the ones from those who are the closest to you, such as Major Katsuragi."
Shinji thought back to his purple-haired surrogate mother and how she had died because of him. Some of earlier was starting to make sense now, but he still didn't completely get it. "But you still haven't really explained why you're standing here before me."
"Shinji, you haven't just absorbed people's thoughts and memories. Your soul was also one of many, one among others. Billions of souls have touched your own, mingled with your own, and shared so much with you. You could say a very small part of everyone's soul is now mixed with your own. You have more than just their memories, Shinji. You possess everything that makes them 'them!'"
"What are you trying to say? That you're the part of the soul that is Karou?"
"You might think of me more as a projection of Karou's personality."
"Projection?"
"Yes. In a way, this is a method your mind is using to cope with everything it has taken in. I am the culmination of the memories and neuronal heuristics that make up the entity you know to be Karou. I can interact with you in exactly the same way as the 'real' Karou would.I am not 'truly' Karou, but for all intents and purposes, I AM him. So you see, I can be as real as you need me to be. I can be a simulation, or just an after-thought. Or I can actually be Karou."
"So you're just a fancy illusion fabricated by my subconscious?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes Shinji."
"...Then you can go away! Like I said, you're not real, you're a product of my mind, so I say what goes. And right now, you don't go."
"You still have doubts. I understand, Shinj-"
"No, you DON'T understand! How can you? You're not even really him! So don't feed me this shit about how you understand how I feel! You're not really Karou, no matter how much it would be nice if you were."
"So you do wish for me to be real?"
"It..it doesn't matter what I want, because he isn't here! And talking to his 'projection' isn't going to help, either. You're nothing more than a cop-out, I'd just be lying to myself if I started thinking you really were him!"
"But am I not him in at least some way, Shinji? I have his memories, I react in exactly the same way as he would."
"That's not enough! You...you're not even real. You said it yourself; you're just my mind playing tricks on me. You're just a copy, so I don't even know you! I just want you to go away and leave me alone!"
"Then is Ayanami any less important to you simply because she is a copy?"
Shinji was silenced by that line of reasoning. It was true; the Rei he had come to know was just a clone, to be quickly replaced by an identical unit in the event of her "demise." But the Rei that Shinji had grown close to was not some cardboard-cutout version of Rei Ayanami. Even if she seemed distant, emotionless, and calculating, Shinji had gotten to know her.Underneath it all, she did have feelings that needed to be considered. She was very good at hiding them from everyone else and suppressing them, but she had let them slip on more than one occasion, such as when she slapped Shinji for saying that he placed no faith in his father, or when she would visit him in the hospital to check up on his condition, or when she had sacrificed herself by overloading Unit00's core in order to save Shinji from the sixteenth.
She might have been a clone, but she was no copy.
Shinji didn't feel mad about getting angry at the illusion. He might have looked like Karou and sounded like Karou, but that didn't make it Karou. "You will NOT talk about Ayanami like that again, YOU HEAR ME! And I am ORDERING you to go away. I didn't ask you to appear, I didn't summon you, and not matter what, you are NOT Karou! So go back to hell and leave me alone!"
This entire time, the pseudo-Karou had not stopped smiling. This moment was no exception. "Very well, Shinji. I will leave you alone for the time being. But we shall meet again, make no mistake about that. I had expected that you would react in such a way. But despite what you make think, I do understand, Shinji. When you have had time to deal with all that you have just learned, I will speak with you again."
The imaginary Karou began to slip from invisibility, but not without some words of closing. "One more thing, my Shin-jun. Do not preoccupy yourself with guilt of having caused Third Impact. Third Impact did indeed happen; however, it was not necessarily completed. There is still hope for the Lilum."
And with that, he completely faded out of existence.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Shinji's anger quickly dissolved into a mixture of doubt and hope. Could he trust everything the apparition had said? Was it true that he was basically a glorified MAGI computer, an interactive AI program with a personality? Or was this only an elaborate fabrication of his mind, making up stories because he couldn't deal with cold hard truth
Of course, only the Karou projection had promised to leave him be, if only for a limited time. How soon before the projections of others he had ever cared about came to haunt him?He had already heard the voices of Misato and Kaji. What might they say to him in the future.
And, he more or less knew what they meant to him. But what did he really mean to them? Even if they were just figments of his own imagination, Shinji was not looking forward to confronting them.
He couldn't even deal with simple delusions, what made him think he could take on Asuka?
Did he even really WANT to face Asuka now?
So....yeah. That's what I've got going on inside Shinji's head. I'd like for the next chapter to take another peek at Asuka's head.
Truth be told, though, I'm sort of running out of steam on this whole project. When I first sat down and wrote this, I was just emptying out my thoughts. Now that I'm not as fixated on the series anymore (don't get me wrong, I still love this series to death!), I'm not thinking about it nearly as hard.
My other problem is that I know how I want the story to end, I just don't have it planned out on how to get there. I haven't really planned anything at all, I've more or less pulled this and chapters 4 and 5 out of my ass. I'm pretty much writing these chapters on the fly one to two days before I submit them. Not a good practice, I know, so if you wonder why future chapters aren't up to par or anything, it's probably because of that.
But I don't want you guys to worry. I'm going to finish what I started, and I'm going to do it PROPERLY. Even if my writing or the story starts to suck, I'm NOT going to just cop out and write some half-assed final chapter that prematurely kills everything. However long it takes, I'm going to try to let this thing finish naturally.