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Healing
Three days after Unit Two's spectacular arrival and Unit One's victory, both pilots were still incapacitated.
The young girl, Asuka, was slipping in and out of a coma. Her injuries were superficial, but had been complicated by malnutrition. The doctors anticipated that she would be fully conscious given another day, and be able to walk in three.
Shinji languished in a holding cell masquerading as a hospital bed. He spent most of his time watching pre-Impact American sitcoms he couldn't understand, and trying to not go insane.
-
NERV and its commander could not afford to dismiss or demerit Lt. Katsuragi, despite her questionable actions in defense of the Third Child prior to Unit One's launch. They were, however, still perfectly capable of punishing her.
An official UN report had to be filed, and the members of the UN Relations Board were, unfortunately for Lt. Katsuragi, all enjoying some unexpected excused vacation. In their absence, responsibility for the report fell to her.
The UN and NERV took careful note of one another. Neither claimed authority over the other. The UN was a largely administrative body that handled the day-to-day survival of humanity. NERV sought to undo the devastation of Second Impact.
The UN kept people fed. NERV brought the fight to the Enemy.
The mandate of neither organization infringed upon the other. But still, there were politics to deal with. Procedures that must be observed. The official report the Lieutenant would be preparing was the requirement of one of the numerous treaties between the two organizations.
The challenge Misato faced was the nudge and wink that accompanied all reports to the UN concerning the Enemy. Trying to cite the Cthaat Aquadingen or Necronomicon was problematic. Tended to make the low-level functionaries at the UN curious.
So UNKNOWNs dotted the report like tears. The rest of it was straight prose fiction. If Misato had any predication to writing, she might have not been so miserable.
Then again? Producing sixty pages of small-print that conformed to a complex style-sheet? Not a good time for a single person. That was why a committee of seven usually dealt with it.
It had taken her two solid days of work, but the Lieutenant finally had a working draft – which she had no intention whatsoever of revising. She had been instructed to give the finished report to Dr. Akagi, who would upload it to the UN mainframe whenever the next communication window was. Misato knew that if she handed the report to Ritsuko in person, the doctor would look at it, point out four things wrong with the cover sheet, and have her "Do it again."
So Misato had security move the bi-monthly fire drill of the Technology Center where Ritsuko worked to coincide with her delivery. Waited until the doctor had filed out of the building with the rest of the techs and used her ID on the back entrance. Ran up two flights of stairs, slapped the report down on Akagi's desk, and was gone before the techs re-entered the building.
-
Feeling quite happy with herself after that, Katsuragi walked across the verdant green of the Middle Sector, which was a fairly accurate model of The Way Things Had Been. Trees, grass, and all manner of plants flourished under a massive, unified light source. The black pyramid that housed the management offices and the adjacent pool, right in the center of it all, framed the area with a mystical quality.
The wind that wafted across the park and waved through the grass was rich with smells. Not a bit of the acrid sterility that pervaded the rest of the shelter was present here. Just sunlight the way she remembered it, a solid stopgap against the nihilism that comes with living in a world you intellectually understand is dying. If not for the Middle Sector, Misato was quite certain everyone would have gone stir-crazy long ago.
She thought it best to absorb it now. The smell, the light, the living atmosphere. Where she was going next would have none of those.
-
Most of the hospital had been shut down early on to economize men and material. When you live underground, in a world of highly developed safety regulations? Turns out it is astonishingly difficult to injure yourself accidentally. After an initial wave of shared illness following Arkham shelter's establishment, everyone without an immunodeficiency just didn't get sick.
Pregnancies were extremely rare. People didn't talk about it.
The medical staff all worked other jobs. When their skills were not required, the doctors and nurses and orderlies were cooks and programmers and janitors. Protocol placed at least one attending staff member at the hospital at all times, a position that was awarded monthly, by lottery. Most of the time that meant someone got a month's vacation.
Two months back there had been a case of appendicitis. That had been pretty exciting, the first real medical emergency in nearly two years, since that civilian overdosed on an exotic combination of stimulants on a train en-route from the New York shelter and decided everyone else was from some place called "Yuggoth." Started smashing furniture and trying to slice the other passengers with the pieces. By the time the train arrived at-Station the guy had been beaten to death. Body got taken to the hospital, frozen in the morgue, and promptly ignored by the on-staff doctor until someone got around to sending him an autopsy request.
A few days later the dead guy woke up. Smashed his way out of the morgue and killed the doctor in a terrible way. Shelter biometrics picked up the doctor's death and alerted security, which proceeded to shoot, burn, dismember, and finally bury the dead guy in a block of cement. Bits of him were still moving as they were thrown into the cement.
That was the story, anyway.
-
The last three days had been very busy for the hospital. The entire medical staff had been reactivated. Intense sessions with the Second Child were capped before and after with lots of heavy drinking, as the doctors tried to recall things they had learned back in medical school. There was extensive medical documentation and software for analyzing and recommending treatment, part of a standard UN package, but the hospital's mainframe had been carted off after the hospital was diminished, and no one seemed to know where it was. It was rather troubling, to not have any verified medical knowledge available. Word had it some clerks in storage, the morons who had supposedly signed for the missing medical mainframe, were enjoying confinement in Terminal Dogma while Intelligence staff went over nine miles of storage containers by hand.
If the Second Child's injuries had been even a little more serious, those clerks from storage would have simply disappeared.
Despite the superficial nature of her injuries, there was something off about the Second Child. Something the doctors could sense only through an atrophied intuition. Vitals were all within human limits, but the girl had a sort of strength normally reserved for adrenaline spikes. The quantity of sedative they had to use to subdue her was just unreal. And then there was her attitude...
-
The Third Child's lunch was waiting for Lt. Katsuragi at the nurse station. The older black woman behind the desk spared Misato a glance and tapped the food tray twice with her pen before returning to a daily puzzle sheet. After signing a visitor's registry, Misato scooped up the tray and went to the pilot's room.
Shinji was dozing when she flashed her ID at the guards. The clatter of the tray on his bedside table woke him.
"Oh, hello Lieutenant," the boy greeted. "How are you?"
This politeness wasn't exactly forced, but there was still distrust in Shinji's eyes. Misato supposed he blamed her in part for his ordeal… blame she probably deserved. He had closed up, and was most of the time simply reactive to her. He didn't start conversation or lead it. Aside from simple answers to her queries, the boy expressed no specific interest in anything, aside from the condition of the pilot of Unit Two. He had asked Misato that question only once, and seemed satisfied after hearing that the other pilot would be all right.
"You're getting out of here," Misato replied conversationally. She watched Shinji carefully. He didn't have any reaction but "Oh."
Slightly disappointed, Misato went to the closet, withdrew a sealed package, and threw it onto the bed. One standard NERV uniform.
"All you have to do," Misato began, and noticed a very definite tic in Shinji's eye. Of course he knew what was coming. "is to agree to work with us."
The boy's gray eyes lowered and looked somewhere to her right. "I don't have a choice," he muttered. "If I don't agree, you'll just drug me and dump me in that thing again."
That clicked. He didn't remember being shot, one minute she had been behind him, and the next… he thought she had knocked him out.
Misato was torn between explaining what had happened to him, and her frustration with the way he was acting. He was… whining. That child she had glimpsed at in the Under Station had come out, and it was making Misato mad, but at the same time she couldn't blame him…
An idea came to her.
"Get up. Now."
The boy, startled, got out of the bed.
"Follow me. I want you to meet her."
And of course he knew who she was. Sparing the guards outside the room an On-My-Authority, Misato led her charge, who she was trying very hard not to think of as a petulant child, to the intensive care unit.
-
While the Second Child was relatively stable, the doctors were cautious about moving her. Minor cranial trauma aside, the girl had made it clear that she didn't like being touched. She had regained consciousness when a nurse had been readying to shave off her hair. One broken electric razor and a screaming, blubbering nurse later, the girl still had her shoulder-length auburn. During a cursory inspection of the girl's breasts, the female mammographist had been assaulted. Ended up with a major concussion.
The first attempt to move the fierce red-head had ended in a way no one seemed to want to talk about.
So the Second Child was still in the intensive care unit, despite being in a relatively stable condition. Privacy screens had been erected. Specific parts of her body were assumed perfectly healthy and not touched.
She was quite a charmer.
-
The black nurse spared them a glance as they went by. Misato led the Third Child across the cold lobby. Through the double-hinged doors that led into the other wards. Down a long hallway where the clack of her shoes suddenly seemed to ring too loud.
A hospital wasn't the sort of place where you should be able to hear stuff like that, the echoing of footfalls. There was supposed to be the hum of machinery, intercom chatter. And people.
Lt. Katsuragi shuddered. The Middle Sector was an abstract comfort. This empty hallway was a terror.
They finally arrived at the ICU, where a thin, sweating man was waiting for them. Misato half-expected him to try and stop them, but instead the man only nodded, smiling at them both, and turned on his heel without a word. They followed him into another room that was lined with glass cubicles, one of which was shielded from view by a drawn U-track curtain. Several privacy screens had been erected as well.
"There she is," the man murmured. "Don't touch her," he addressed Shinji with an uncertain grin. "She bites."
As the man left, Misato noticed his hands were bandaged.
-
In addition to the thin hospital gown, a large black comforter was draped across the girl's middle. Misato silently thanked whoever had put it there. The gown had really left little to the imagination, and she hadn't brought Shinji here for that.
The boy was almost hiding behind her. The Lieutenant shifted to one side and gently pushed him forward... and the Third Child stiffened up at her touch. Biting a lip, from curse or apology she didn't know, Misato stood back, and waited.
Shinji approached the other youth hesitantly. Though drawn and pale, the pilot of Unit Two retained a certain fierceness about her. Even unconscious her body carried itself with a certain implicit warning, fingers grasping but not yet claws; knees slightly bent, primed for motion; a face that looked intense even in sleep.
"This is Asuka Langley Sohryu," Misato said to Shinji. "She's like you. She never had a choice. But she chose embraced her task, her destiny, rather then run from it."
The Lieutenant immediately regretted her choice of words, but at "destiny" Shinji gave a small start.
"This is the Second Child," she gestured to the sleeping pilot. "When you agree to work for us, you, Shinji Ikari, will become the Third."
Face solemn, he turned to her. "You're trying to make me feel bad for wanting to running away, I know." He limply gestured to Asuka. "But she is hurt and I am not," he seemed to be having trouble speaking..."And I shouldn't feel bad, but I do… why, is that?"
Shinji's voice actually broke there at the end. He looked away. Misato saw the tears drip off his chin anyway.
"This isn't f-fair…" he began, and then stopped. He wiped his face, very much the schoolboy… and then met Misato's somewhat pitying gaze.
"So I'll do it." He said, the softness in his eyes bleeding away. "I want to leave now."
-
After changing into the ill-fitting NERV uniform, the young Ikari hunched over the bedside table and carefully signed his name in Nipponese on the forms he was given. Guarantee of Service, Guarantee of Health Care, Fealty Oath.
Then he was free.
There was one small detail that Misato had neglected to mention. She doubted that Shinji would take it well.
He squinted against the source that lit the Middle Sector. Even despite his regained intense, quiet attitude, he had to stare at the park. He couldn't have seen anything like it before.
Astroturf and small trees with large leaves, bred for CO2 conversion; that was the extent the UN put into maintaining nature.
Shinji didn't stop, but he slowed down, began to slowly drift towards the green plain. It was cute. The Lieutenant could certainly understand the attraction.
"Later, Shinji." Misato said, trying to make it not sound like an order. "We have to get you situated first."
"I never thought…" the boy murmured. "I've seen it in the movies but... I thought this was all gone. Destroyed."
Misato slowed, fell into step beside Shinji. "You've been thinking of this as a dying world, haven't you?" she asked. "Its okay to admit it, many people think that, but they're wrong."
Shinji met her gaze briefly, then looked down at the path. "You don't say that. You can never admit that. If you do, you'll go crazy."
"We don't live in a dying world, Shinji," Misato said. "The world is constantly on the edge of rebirth. We…" but then she stopped and finished lamely, "things aren't as bad as they seem."
At that Shinji laughed, and didn't bother saying what they were both thinking. Things really couldn't get much worse.
They continued to the Housing Commission.
-
"No," the boy said.
"But the Commander…" the Housing Commissioner began.
"You're sick," Shinji was addressing Misato now. "No," he repeated.
-
As a senior member of staff, Misato enjoyed an apartment at Middle Sector, with a view. After accepting the position of liaison to the foreign pilots, she had had some engineers come in and put a door in the partition between her apartment and the one next to it, connecting them. She had felt pretty smart at the time.
In the Now, a stormy Shinji stalked about his new home as she tried her best to explain why he had to stay with her.
"Look, you don't even know your way around…" she was saying as the boy started opening cupboards in the kitchen. "You don't know where to go or who to talk to."
"When you were taking me down to that thing," the last word was vicious, "you had to look at a map."
Ouch.
"I wouldn't mind living across the hall or…" the boy began.
"These aren't standard living quarters!" she cut in. "Only senior staff have the opportunity to live here," and the rhetorical coupe de grace "I'm doing you a favor!"
The young man gave up.
-
Shinji had assumed that there was a certain entitlement to being an Eva pilot. At the moment it seemed an invitation to torture. He was used to privacy, accustomed to it. He was used to going to sleep with the reasonable certainty that either his chrono would wake him up or he would slowly shift from sleep to wakefulness of his own will.
He did not like the idea of someone getting in his room while he was asleep and rooting through his things, or maybe staring at him until he woke up, or suddenly jump on his bed while screaming at the top of their lungs. The Third Child wasn't exactly sure where he had picked up the notion that any of those things would happen, but none of them seemed too ridiculous at the moment.
He didn't care if it had been an emergency situation, he still couldn't trust Lt. Katsuragi after she had done. Trick him into thinking she was advocating for him, then get him from behind? No, that was not someone he wanted to live with.
And there was just too much... space. His room was twice the size of his previous barracks assignment, and had no lock on the door. He also had an entire washroom to himself. And a lounge area, with television. And three other furnished rooms. It was like he had inherited a whole block of housing. What was he supposed to do with it all?
Shinji sat on his bed. Tried to think of what would happen next.
They would put him back in that thing, the Evangelion. They would make him go aboveground and do… he didn't know what. And after however many hours of that, he would have this open and exposed apartment to come back to, that he had to share with the Lieutenant.
Suddenly Shinji didn't want to go to the park, or anywhere, for that matter. He lay down on his bed, wondered at how much more comfortable it was compared to his old foam mattress, or the couch in train segment four, or the hospital bed. He quickly fell into a dose.
Then Misato was in the room, jumping on his bed and screaming. Shinji jerked awake, but it had only been a night-fright, a dream that seemed real. He eyed the closed bedroom door warily, wishing for a lock, and then tried to go back to sleep.
-
In the ICU, Asuka's eyes opened.