Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.
It is a sad commentary on the life of Asuka Langley Sohryu that Mariko Buick is not the worst thing to have ever happened to her…
In the Dark Room: Fourth Exposure
By MidnightCereal
"Mr. Yamada, you had some things you wanted me to see?" Agent Choi closed the door behind him and strode to Agent Benny Yamada's side, all the time moving efficiently, with purpose. Now away from the door, the sounds in the corridor faded, replaced by the hum of high-end machinery.
"Sir," Yamada addressed the stern-looking Korean, "I still want you to see these. They were on Captain Hyuga's personal kiosk, encrypted, and you want to commit them to memory and then notify everyone it concerns not to panic while simultaneously getting them the hell to safety."
Agent Choi took off his glasses, placing them next to the young security agent's flat-screen monitor. "I want you to do two things, Yamada. First, please move back so I can see what you want to show me. Second, take a damn breath. Good young agents are hard to come by these days."
He moved in closer as Yamada rolled back in his desk chair. Choi placed his palms on the desk as he scanned the highlighted documents on the glowing screen. When he reread them, his thick fingers dug into those palms like blunt spikes. He took a breath, and then said, "Shit."
"Asuka…what're we watching?" Mariko inquired. Her voice was chick-down soft, as were her movements as she slowly glided to and sunk into the couch. Asuka wasn't fooled; no docility in tone or physicality on the taller girl's part would convince the German that Mariko was anything but a coiled, waiting viper. Between heartbeats, Asuka once again gauged the distance separating them.
"The best thing I've ever had the pleasure of crying to," Asuka answered, still smiling, daring to blink only when her eyes itched for moisture. She pointed the controller at the old DVD player below the television, and it responded with a faint but high whine. After a moment the whine faded and the blue screen was replaced with green. Organic shuffling verdant shades carpeted a backyard. Darker vines rose in the background, coiled and collaborated, shrouding the red brick wall in thick mingling foliage.
Bubbling, impish laughter entered from the right of the stereo sound as its owners –a small boy and girl- tore across the screen, thoroughly engrossed in some ludicrously tiring game. There was a break in the film and suddenly people were standing in front of the wall. For the first time intelligible words could be heard.
Asuka didn't have to concentrate on what was being said, instead watched Mariko lean in slightly as the adults on screen jovially discussed –in German- why it was that Geli wanted to go to Heidelberg when her parents had both graduated from Gottingen. When Geli –a girl with chestnut hair- suggested she wanted instead to attend a good school, a man and woman (a couple) ooohed good-naturedly while a second lady failed to hide laughter behind her hand. This last person caught Mariko's eye.
"Asuka…she's-"
"Don't talk to you about what I wouldn't want you talking to me about. Right? Watch."
"She looks like-"
"Watch."
Something short caught the woman's eye, and she looked down and past the camera, her voice pattern becoming softer, sweeter, her face filling with equal parts love and intense pride. "Come here, honey. Are you getting tired?" she said, putting her hands on her knees and beaming.
There. Right there in the corner of the screen. Geli, the couple and the single woman all looked there as a small auburn mop toddled into the foreground. It belonged to a terribly young child, and Asuka could see in Mariko's horrified expression why she was watching this video and who the lady was when she swept the baby up in, and into this to crook of her arm and the child looked back with sky-blue eyes…
"Turn it off," Mariko said, shooting up from her seat.
"Sit down. It's not over yet."
"Asuka, please, I can't watch this anymore! Please don't push me-"
"YOU PUSHED FIRST, BITCH!" Asuka raised the camera in her hand as if she were about to hurl it, and Mariko achingly returned to her seat, quivering with some malignant instability.
When Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu kissed her young daughter on the cheek, the baby's face scrunched and disappeared over mother's shoulder. Kyoko laughed, and then cooed.
"Mariko, you remember when I asked you to guess the first thing I feel when Shinji comes to mind?"
The short-haired girl was bent over, her face hidden behind her tense hands. And she was completely silent before finally saying, "You said anger."
"And it was," Asuka softly confirmed. "Before I saw that video. But this," She pointed to Kyoko, bouncing the little girl on her arm, "made all the difference in the world. Looking at this is as close as I've ever been to my mother in a long, long time. And…and I just don't mean impressions of her, or feeling her presence while piloting Eva."
She just barely reigned in her laughter when the other girl gasped.
"You didn't know that, did you? It's probably not the case with that scrap heap sitting at headquarters now, but my Eva, Shinji's Eva at least, they housed our mother's souls. The last time I fought, I could feel her watching over me." Mariko's green eyes were screaming. "Even though people were trying to kill me at that very moment, I was so happy."
"You shouldn't say things like that, Asuka."
"Why? What's going to happen if I do? What'll happen now that wouldn't have happened a week from now? In a month? You think I'm going to wait?" Asuka gritted her teeth, and through them she said, "This is going to happen NOW. No one else is here, and I'm going to do what I should've done when I first found out."
"I don't want to kill you…please turn it off…please."
"God…" Asuka did laugh, then. "I can't believe this. I want to thank you…I never feel like this unless you're threatening my life, you know that? I didn't realize how much I miss being…angry." She shook her head. "But I don't hate you…why can't I hate you?"
She turned up the volume of the set. "The more I thought about finding mama in Eva though, the less happy I got. That I found her there, that wasn't really proof she cared about me, that I wasn't abandoned. She could've done it all in the name of her work. But this woman…she'sright there. Holding me. Kissing me."
The tears Asuka shed when she had first watched the home movie returned, and she blinked furiously to rid herself of them. She let out a broken chuckle when she dared to watch her favorite part, and said, "Look at that! I'm trying so hard to get away, and she won't let me go. Not for the world. Not for anything. She won't leave me alone." When the Second Child chuckled again, Mariko let loose a sudden deep sob.
"It's pity, Mariko. I pity Shinji now, for the first time. He doesn't have this, because his asshole father stole everything that reminded him of his wife. I have proof, proof that mama was alive and that she loved me with everything she had."
The Sixth Child's hands balled into white-knuckled fists over her bowed face. "Shut up. Please. Shut up."
"I can see her for what she was, finally. Not just impressions or horrible memories. Her hanging by her neck with her tongue sticking out. Just proof. Shinji doesn't have that. Never will."
Asuka swallowed and braced herself. "How about you, Mariko? What about your mom? Feelings? Impressions? Horrible memories?"
"Mom hid me from everything," Mariko calmly, immediately answered, to Asuka's alarm. "But it wasn't because of shame, so I accepted it, accepted there was a good reason because she loved me. She hid me because I was different, I knew, even as a little girl. I forgave her, always." Mariko stood. "But then she tried to kill me. And that was the end of her."
That was when Asuka noticed Mariko wasn't shaking anymore.
That was when Asuka noticed Mariko was holding a knife.
"It's okay, Asuka. Smash it to pieces. It's over for me. Maybe this is what needs to happen for this to end, you know?"
"No. I don't know," said the German teenager. "I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't' know how to stop you, exactly. But that doesn't mean I can't be prepared."
Asuka set the camera down on an adjacent shelf, and used that same hand to reach behind her jean shorts. It came back around in an effortless, practiced motion, the object it produced causing Mariko's pretty face to pinch into a supremely undignified expression.
"You know that all Nerv guns are deactivated off-base."
"Yeah, I know." The Second Child peered at Mariko beyond the barrel of the GLOCK 37. "AllNerv guns."
"This…isn't going to end well. Is it?" Mariko's voice was dead now, its heartless resignation creeping through Asuka's mind like a slow infection. "Whatever happened to 'clean and elegant, without waste'?"
Asuka just snorted. "Oh, fuck that. I just say that when I get cocky. I've never won clean, not once, ever in my whole life. Did Shinji tell you we had worked together to beat an Angel, and we trained a week just to walk in unison? Hell, I couldn't even hula-hoop when I first tried, nearly tore my ACL mastering that plastic fucker. So I'm guessing I'll have to tear something else to get one over on you."
Asuka's shoulder twitched as the kilogram weight at the end of her fulcrum became one-point three kilograms, one-point seven, one-point nine…"Put the knife down, and it won't have to be your new asshole." Two-point four.
With all the life of a week-old carcass, Mariko said, "I'm not going to be put away in some white box with no windows."
"Be good for just a few more minutes, okay, darling?" Kyoko gently reassured her fussy toddler. "We'll be going soon."
"Mariko, you don't have to go there, just away from here. And you will, and if you can't do it under your own power, I'll see you off on my own."
"I promise," Kyoko said.
"I always keep my promises."
Mariko took a step forward, and Asuka kept her promise.
Laughing with a mouthful of food was something Maya's traditionalist mother had frowned up upon, expressing her displeasure to her three young children in needlessly pedantic, yawn-inducing tirades. Bits of waffle flew from her mouth as one memory came to her, of mom vainly trying to keep from laughing at dinner when her brother Kenta came home one day with, what was quite simply, the worst haircut in the history of the Ibuki lineage.
Her shoulders were still bouncing as she took another mouthful, her lips still curled upward as her cell phone vibrated on her kitchen table. Not bothering to drop the fork, she chewed, flipping the phone open with her free hand.
"Yes, this is Dr. Ibuki. Hello, Agent Ch…no, he isn't here. I don't know where they are, probably home. School's been out for maybe three hours…she doesn't, no. No. Is, wait, is there a prob-"
As she listened, stern professionalism began to correct her posture. She wasn't smiling anymore.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?"
The fork clattered to the floor.
"Right, call theircell phones. That's the only way you'd get through to Shinji, anyway…I'm not panicking. Patch me through on a secure line, they don't know your voice."
In the second it should have taken to contact Shinji and Asuka, Maya Ibuki considered the most succinct way of delivering the vital information.
This is taking too long, came the thought, harried, frustrated, fearful.
At last, a phone rang.
Somewhere in her house.
At once the elegant words she had prepared to speak to her charges were replaced by just one…
"Scheisse."
There was nothing else to say, that could be said. No word was more apt, no phrase more eloquently designed to summarize the depth of the…the…fucked-upness of the current situation.
Scheisse. Mariko had stepped forward. Scheisse. Asuka, as skilled at firing a weapon as she was at solving algebraic equations, discharged twice at point-blank range. Scheisse. Mariko was still standing, staring and smiling apologetically behind a genesis of refractive ripples only now beginning to disperse at their translucent hexagonal fringes…
SCHEISSE.
"It…probably won't make you feel any better," Mariko began, green eyes so very exhausted, "but I have no idea how I do that."
"No shit?" was all a wide-eyed Asuka could muster as she lowered the useless steel in her hand. This was yet another of those horrible days, where the worst nightmares were realized in constant, successive waves and it was the first that Asuka could see coming. She liked it better when she was blissfully ignorant of their approach. Dazed, she flashed a glance down to the ringing cell phone in her pocket, for only a moment.
Just long enough.
Asuka tried parrying but her shoulder blades crashed into a wall as Mariko filled her field of vision with godless speed. The thrust came low and hard and out of blind instinct Asuka's free hand shot out to deflect it. She slapped Mariko's hard wrist, succeeding only in altering the trajectory by a fraction.
All conscious thought vaporized when something cold slid between her floating ribs and she was back in the plug again bleeding to death by the pint a thousand knives ripping at her belly and eating her eye laughing like white wolves and chewing her guts held in only by her suit and her arm split like a ripe melon rose to blow her brains out at this close a range no one would survive it and Mariko ducked-
Asuka's arm went entirely numb when Mariko reared back and smashed her own forearm into hers, sending the GLOCK flying across the living room. The blade slid out when the black-haired girl's backward momentum carried her away from her panicked prey. Asuka staggered away from the wall with a hacking wet cough, and finally crashed to the floor in a boneless heap.
Asuka's whole side was hot, cold, damp. Damp. She sensed a dozen different things and none of them were pleasant. She opened her eyes. Why was it so hard? Her legs were kicking slowly, pushing her weight across the floor in a modified army crawl. Where was she going?
"Where are you going, Asuka?" Someone asked. Oh yeah, Mariko, the one that stabbed her. "This is the first time I've ever been able to talk about mom. Don't you wanna listen?" Her voice was closer now, and when Asuka painfully rotated so that her elbows propped her up, she stared into Mariko's green eyes. They were filled with gratitude for some reason.
My phone is still ringing. The movie's still on.
She backpedaled on her palms, Mariko advancing slowly now, patiently. "Don't look at me like that, Asuka. It breaks my heart. I know how you get when you don't win. It's not your fault. You didn't know what you were up against. I'm the failure, Asuka. Me and all my sisters."
So loose now, was the young woman.
Like an animated doll.
"You know, the people at Nerv back then, they never told me what they made me for." She shrugged as if a puppeteer pulled a string connected to her shoulder. "They didn't bother telling us why we weren't good enough."
She continued stalking Asuka, whose hazy mind tried to process what the girl just told her. The Second Child's palm slapped against a floor bereft of carpeting; they were in the kitchenette now. The refrigerator hummed indifferently as Asuka looked at her attacker who was, for some reason, slapping the flat of the blade against her head.
"When I look back on it," Mariko reflected, "what they did –even before they got rid of us- was evil on some level I couldn't reach if I tried. Even with mom, the closest thing I ever got to being a normal kid was getting a room at her house. And even then she rarely let me out for anything other than going to Nerv for more tests. I think that's what really made me sick, staying in that damned room."
Mariko drew a silver edge lightly across her damp forehead as if dipping a quill in a vat of red ink. "Did she give birth to me? No. But she would do everything for me that I asked. I never had to cry myself to sleep, she was always there with hugs and kisses. I guess moms are like that everywhere, huh, Asuka?"
The injured young woman was about to say something until she breathed and her side seemed to erupt in flames. She cried out instead, completely unprepared for the intensity of the pain.
"She spent almost all her free time in there with me. Just reading and talking, always holding me like I was going to slip away. She bought me that camera, to take pictures of things passing by my windows. She'd grab my face and make sure I was looking her dead in the eye when she said she loved me. She said it, everyday, all the time. For years. She'd sleep in there with me, all the time, crying for me.
"But. Whenever I asked her to take me somewhere, or just go outside, she would say," Mariko's voice went an octave lower, "'You're in the middle of the desert. What you see out your window isn't any different than anything you'd see for hundreds of miles around'…" Every muscle in Mariko's body became steel wire. "BUT I WANTED TO SEE IT!"
Asuka flinched and then slipped on something slick below her palm. She knew what it was, didn't bother to look down. Just keep moving. Just get away. Somehow. She coughed again, and the copper fumes in the back in her throat were actually joined by blood now.
"Why was she taking that from me? Why was I her prisoner? You know, Asuka? All that love and I couldn't go outside? That shit doesn't mesh! Even if it was just dirt and rattlesnakes and jackelopes for ten THOUSAND miles around, I wanted to see it!
"You know what that told me? It told me I wasn't supposed to be there. Why were my sisters waiting in some orange tank? For what? For me to die? For someone to kill me so they can be the ones to be poked and prodded and have needles jabbed into their arms and legs and necks? So they can sit next to a window for years like some criminal?"
"Are…are you asking me?" Asuka finally managed when Mariko paused for a breath, a thin red line trickling down the corner of the red head's frowning mouth. "H-how the fuck would I know?"
They were halfway through the kitchen now, and Asuka's hand rose to the counter. Tentatively and then with a strength she surprised herself with, she began to rise from the crimson-streaked floor, catching herself when a foot slid over a slick patch. She wanted to throw up, but gritted her teeth and managed to swallow the bile as she now stepped backwards, bent at her red waist at an obtuse angle.
"I suppose you wouldn't know," Mariko admitted as she continued the slow pursuit. "I think I should've been happy when they died. But I couldn't hate them. I didn't hate them." She pounded a fist between her breasts, ruining her white shirt with bloody paw prints. "I felt them die. They didn't even havesouls but I felt them vanish like they never existed. I…Iscreamed for them, Asuka! And mom came running into my room and I was screaming about how all my sisters were gone, that someone had killed all of them."
Some part of Asuka –the part that was not stabbed and profusely bleeding- sympathized with the unstable young woman, whose composure further buckled with each outlandish revelation.
"She had the nerve tohug me." Venom and vulnerability warred in Mariko's wavering tone. "I didn't even see the needle. I felt it enter my…personal space, before it got to my neck." Her lips pulled back in a snarl, the first time her outside appearance matched her actions. "I shoved her with the light of my soul and she flew. Out the door, down the stairs…" She gasped. "…AND THEN I DIDN'T FEEL ANYTHING FROM HER!"
Mariko swallowed as her head dipped. For a moment, Asuka forgot to retreat; she watched as hiccupping sobs worked the Sixth Child's shoulders as a hand came to wipe at wet eyes obscured by long black bangs. Mariko looked at her, and Asuka instantly found herself and took another small step back.
"I walked down the stairs and looked at her. And I think that maybe she wanted me to do it. But it kills me because I don't know why! Why would she want to make me sick? She made it so that she was the only thing I had. Didn't she want to stay with me? Wasn't I worth it? Didn't she want me? That's why I bothered taking her picture, anyone's picture. They don't leave me that way. They stay with me. Forever."
Mariko's hiccupping weeping turned into laughter as she ran a blood-soaked hand through her short locks. "I left after that. Ran. H-how was I supposed to know that a child isn't supposed to make it that far in the desert?"
Asuka's phone rang a second time. She seethed as the hole in her side delivered a healthy surge of pain, and shook her head for some reason. Kyoko laughed again in the living room, but the sound seemed so far away. Asuka's hand tracked backwards over the counter, running across an electrical cord…
"You know they never even looked for me, Asuka? They didn't care how I disappeared, as long as I wasn't coming back. So, can you imagine the look on my face when Maya and Hyuga showed up at my high school? I played it cool and waited it out, somehow. They had me alone nine, ten times." She chuckled awkwardly. "I started to think they didn't know who I was, not who I really was."
Mariko breathed. Asuka prepared. "I don't think it was a coincidence, now. I think this Hyuga guy wanted me to kill Shinji, in case he fucked up. I still felt free, though. No one was trying to kill me here. It was getting easier every day. And then I could tell you things and control it. BUT JIN JUST WOULDN'T SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT HIS DAMNED MOM! WHY DID HE SAY I REMINDED HIM OF HER? WHY'D HE TEST ME?"
Then Mariko looked through her with eyes so wide Asuka feared they would fall out of the American's head. "I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS!"
"Then don't," was the simple response, plea.
"It's too late." A slow shake of the head. "It's too late. I was a fool to think I could dream like a normal girl."
Mariko held out a hand.
"Asuka…"
It was sticky and smeared with Asuka's congealing blood.
"I know how to do this so that it won't hurt…"
Mariko Ashley Buick's face wore a pleading expression, a mother's expression.
"Don't move."
Despite the advice, Asuka moved a lot.
As the wounded pilot reached into the knife drawer she just tore open, Mariko came in to finish her…and then staggered as the full coffee pot in Asuka's other hand smashed into her unprotected face. Asuka herself recoiled but kept her feet as sheets of lukewarm Mocha blend splashed her and drenched her reeling attacker.
Asuka's wild eyes lingered on Mariko as she escaped the kitchen, then flew open when something with a predator's teeth bit into her bare foot. She tumbled back into the living room with a cry. Her fingers immediately went to the shard of glass lodged in her naked sole, but were not at the wound a second before Mariko's foot crashed into her ribcage.
"WHY DO THEY ALWAYSMOVE?"
Asuka responded in a most appropriate manner, jamming the bloody shard into Mariko's ankle and causing its gasping owner to buckle. The Second Child leapt to standing on her good foot and half ran, half limped to something in the hallway that birthed the germ of a plan in the periphery of her near-panicked mind. The nightstand that collided with the back of her head nearly dislodged it.
Again crumbling to the floor she felt exhausted for the first time, her reserves leaking out of her wounded side, seeping into the cream fibers of the carpet. Now streaks of red paint appeared beneath Asuka as she was dragged backwards by her ankles.
"WHY DID YOU MOVE, ASUKA? DO YOU LIKE HURTING ME?"
Molten steel inside her back stole Asuka's breath and she forced her eyes not to roll into her cloudy head when the blade escaped.
"WHY COULDN'T YOU HELP ME?"
If the first jag produced the piercing scream lodged in Asuka's throat, the second one unleashed it. There was defiant power in that tortured, earsplitting wail; it permeated every square centimeter of the air surrounding her and somehow she absorbed it and used it to fuel the primal sound until it was all but self-perpetuating. She siphoned off kilowatts of it to wheel onto her ruined back and buck her hips to send the maniac above her sprawling forward and to one side. Mariko caught herself with a bloody planted hand.
Perfect.
Asuka instantly trapped Mariko's wrist with one palm as her opposite shoulder launched her other palm at Mariko's locked elbow. It connected with a savage wet snap, and it was Mariko's turn to scream.
Asuka turned from the teenager clambering backwards off of her. Her adrenalin pushed through her extremities and fought against the dizziness attempting to spin her in the corridor like a cement mixer. As she crawled, hacking, gurgling coughs ripped wet red flecks from the roof of her mouth and through her crusted lips. As Asuka lurched her side protested vehemently. Twin pools of liquid ice pyrolyzed the fang wounds in her ravaged back, and still she crawled because she was almost there.
Asuka could finger the cool fringes of it with quivering digits. They slid off a smooth edge, but she inched closer, panting as fatigue and blood loss began to overcome instinct. This had to work. It had to. Shinji wasn't going to find her like Yukie found Jin. She wasn't angry at him anymore.
I promise, one day, you're going to walk out that door and when you come back, I won't be here.
She wanted his Miso soup. She wanted his pancakes.
One day soon, Shinji. I promise you.
She wanted to stay.
She got it.
An obscene force crashed into her and she blacked out.
"Wake up, Asuka. We're going home."
Asuka did what mama told her. Mariko looked down at her with an unidentifiable expression, straddling her with the blade poised to strike at the end of her good arm.
"Smile," said Asuka, and they both brought their weapons to bear.
"Sir? Which flower are you looking at particularly?"
"Um…" Shinji answered gracefully. He pointed. "Those."
The woman tucked a lone grey strand beneath her daisy-print do-rag and followed the young man's finger. "The Chamomile, sir?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Which kind?" She asked with infinite patience.
"Uh, what kinds are there?"
"We have Wild Chamomile, Sweet Chamomile, German Chamomile, Roman-"
"German."
She smiled at his decision, reaching up to grab a bouquet.
"There are prettier flowers, young man. I assume these are for someone special?"
"She's very special," he admitted with complete sincerity.
"Sometimes these flowers are used in teas or in balms to relieve pain. I hope…she's not in some pain?"
"No," he said, smiling warmly. "But maybe this'll help her feel better all the same."
Asuka peered upward with an eye closed. The open one stared, frozen and fighting the maddening urge to also shut. With effort, she drew a breath past her lips and the phlegm on her tongue. The weight above still hadn't moved. A patch of her sight was lost to a blotch that covered her field of vision like a puzzle piece. Another drop, one more, and she finally lowered the camera.
Mariko was still there. Her wrist was still held to the blade in her mouth.
Something warm and wet hit Asuka's cheek in a thin, steady trickle.
"You're heavier than you look, you know that?" Kyoko said.
End of Fourth Exposure
A/N: Um…there's one more chapter left. What you see as chapter seven was not originally included when I first wrote the story. There's just so much damn'splainin to do.
Hopefully, the next and final chapter will wrap up everything nicely. Think of it as the two-hour long season finale of a show that is usually one hour long. That's right, people. Chapter 14 will be double-size.
Am I the only one who thinks that Kaji is the R. Kelly of the Evangelion Universe? Seriously, he's a known womanizer, he hangs around 14 year-old girls, and his initials are R.K.
Case closed.
Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.
Next Chapter: The Final Negative
Hey James! Beat Down 2: The Hurtening