Chapter 2: Do No Harm
With 2 kills painted on Unit-01's upper shoulder, Shinji Ikari's life became as mundane as a teenage boy's life could be if that life involved being forcibly drafted as the pilot of a giant mind controlled robot, who reflects any battle damage it takes back onto the pilot as real injuries; or the life of one who gets assigned to live in the same home as his direct superior officer, who would happen to be a woman with the body of a professional supermodel but the drinking habits of a sorority pledge.
He now got along with the large athlete at his school who once beat him up, so he could at least say he had a couple friends so far, but his days were still planned out from dawn to near midnight, as he attended school during normal hours, but then had to report to NERV alongside the other Evangelion pilot in Japan.
He still barely knew her. He saved her life at their first meeting, but after that their only interactions had been her reminding him to report to NERV on schedule, or ordering him to scramble for emergencies. His guardian Misato had told him that Rei was brought up in NERV, and so took the position she held very seriously, but Shinji almost suspected that she might be a robot herself. Just, you know, girl sized. Not giant.
Today was another example of that. She approached him after school and told him to travel to NERV. One sentence was usually all he could get out of her.
"Uh, hey, Rei, uhhhhh-" He tried to find something to actually talk about. "What-what was it like before I came here? I mean, what was it like at NERV?"
She kept walking. "NERV focused more on research than combat."
"So, then...um, Listen, I met you after the first attack. Did you fight the Angel but get hurt by it-"
She cut him off. "No, I was injured in a training accident. We are a military force. There is inherent danger in what we do, even when training."
"What? But Misato told me that the sync ratio training was safe!"
"It was not Sync training. It was practical training in Unit-00."
"Oh, uhh hey, Misato called Unit-00 a prototype. Will you ever get one of the finished versions? You know, it might be safer..."
"There has been no discussion of the possibility of doing so. More Evas would mean more Pilots as well. You are proof of that, Ikari."
Shinji's attempt to put on a happy face fell. She clearly still doesn't like having me around.
Ritsuko had him sit in the Sync plug. Again.
Ritsuko had him shoot on the gun range. Again.
Then he did it all over.
Training is worse than actually fighting. I hate it both. He said to himself as he watched the clock tick through the day until the day was over and he could go home. Another day of sitting in the Snyc plug and being sent to the range went by, and much to Kensuke's shock and dismay when he found out, Shinji didn't even like guns.
Ritsuko caught up with him outside the pilots' locker rooms. "Damn that girl, she can't just do things at a human pace. Shinji, Rei left before I could issue these. They're new NERV ID cards. Give this one to her when you see her and tell her to shred her old one."
"Oh. OK."
Shinji tried to follow her home, but it was late and tomorrow wasn't a school day. He gave up the chase and went home.
He told Misato that Ristuko gave him a job to do, though he didn't mention what, and left early the next day.
He traveled across town. He found Rei's building dilapidated and structurally unsound. It stopped him in his tracks. "Has Misato ever seen this place? How the hell does Rei live here; it's a disaster waiting to happen! If this place collapses down on her, which it looks like is gonna happen really damn soon, she's gonna get killed in it. Oh, and she went off on me yesterday about NERV needing Pilots."
He knocked on her door. No answer. He turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. What the hell? If somebody wanted to break in, wait, I pretty much did just break in. I'm proving my own point, here.
Inside there was not much, besides a mess. The apartment was a one room affair, with Rei's bed, which Shinji noticed was a repurposed hospital bed visible from the doorway. Beside it he saw the disorganized pile of bandages she'd been wearing since he'd first seen her.
"Hell with it, I'll leave it here and go." He walked across the room to a clothes dresser. He placed the card on the dresser, but before he could turn himself to leave, he found a pair of broken eyeglasses. "Huh. She doesn't wear these." Unable to slay his curiosity, he put them on, turned around, and came face to face with a hand flying through the air direct towards him. She knocked the glasses off his face, caught them in midair, and placed them back in their proper resting place.
"I would not have taken any issue with you traveling here unannounced, but the next time you attempt to steal these, I expect you to have prepared well enough to succeed."
Her slap had sent him to the floor. He looked up to her, saw she had just gotten out of the bath, and screamed. "I, I WASN'T TRYING TO STEAL THEM, I'M SORRY!"
He scrambled himself up and ran out of the room. She dressed herself and left for NERV that day. She arrived at NERV's security behind him, and could not enter. Shinji walked through the gate, then turned around when he heard the gate shut and alarm reject Rei's card.
"Wait, shit! Rei, did- did you see the new ID card I left on your dresser...you know, beside your glasses..."
Rei's eyes stabbed Shinji like a pair of daggers. "...No. You fled before you informed me about it. Do you mean to say that I came all the way here with a faulty ID that you were sent to replace?"
"Uhh, look, I'll go back to your house and get it for you, no need for you to be caught up in all this."
"No, we both will."
"Huh? Why? We don't need both of us to do that-"
"I am already late. Now, you will be as well. We will both be reprimanded."
"I guess that's fair."
It was a long, awkward walk the two took. Shinji was unable to coax a conversation out of the girl, and he learned that she could handle silence far, far better than he would hope to do.
But, when they did arrive from the round trip back, they mercifully were not punished. Misato demanded to know what the two had been up to, and Shinji plead his case. He did fulfill Ristuko's orders after all, and the mistake did indeed happen when Rei did not take her new card off the dresser. Misato simply ordered the two into their chambers for the day's tests.
Shinji looked at Rei's station on screen. She practically slept through the sync training. Her eyes were closed and she remained completely silent throughout the entirety of their training. She was harsh to him, sure, but Shinji envied her ability to remain detached from all the ridiculous garbage that he'd found himself roped into. Being placed inside a giant robot against his will, fighting gargantuan alien monsters, and feeling all the damage that the Eva took from combat... This job sucks.
Of course, it could only get worse. Shinji watched a comedian named 'Louis CK' on the internet once.
He said: "Optimists are people who think nice things will happen. WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANYTHING NICE EVER HAPPEN?"
NERV's radar system picked up another alien beast over the ocean. It was deceptively harmless but beautiful looking. A deep blue gemstone that flew over the sea, into the city. Shinji was ordered to prepare to launch out while Rei once again sat on reserve.
Unit-01 was sent out to the surface of Tokyo-3. The Angel opened up its crystalline body. The deep Core Organ in the center of the Angel glowed blood red from its power within. It shot Unit-01. It shot Unit-01 with all the energy that an alien monster could conjure within itself. Unit-01 boiled inside its own body as the buildings behind the city block it stood on melted behind it, as a new cave was burned into the hillside far behind the city. All of NERV heard Shinji's scream as he boiled nearly to death as well.
"EJECT HIM!" Misato shouted to the rest of NERV inside their command center. "EJECT SHINJI AND EVACUATE HIM."
The Commander overruled her order. "No. If he is ejected, the Angel's weapon will destroy both him and the Eva. Lower them both back. We will have to continue observing this creature remotely."
They tried. Unit-01's suit of metal armor was melted onto the elevator that launched it to the surface.
Misato remembered that the entire city hadn't melted yet, though. "Fire the Explosive Bolts for that city block! Let it all fall!" Unit-01 and one of Tokyo 3's skyscrapers fell back down to NERV's subterranean Eva cells. The Eva was submerged in the sea of Link Connecting Liquid that filled NERV's lower levels. It steamed and boiled around the glowing, molten plates of armor that had burned into Unit-01's frame. Shinji was stripped nude and placed inside a refrigerated ambulance litter.
The Angel didn't just have a laser weapon. It's gemstone body was indestructible, and was therefore a weapon itself. It morphed again, extending it's vertex down to ground level where it began to rotate. The impenetrable surface drilling through Japan down to NERV's base, unimpeded by any human weapon.
Misato was at her station at command. She rose up from burying her head in her hands. "Call the SDF. We need the particle accelerator."
"Yeah right, they'll never hand that over to us."
"I'm not giving them a choice. We're going to send Rei over there in Unit-00. If they don't rescind it willingly, she will take it from them."
The potential of an attack from an exponentially powerful robotic weapon helped the armchair generals at the Japanese Self Defense Force decide to give NERV the weapon. NERV could make it work. An Evangelion could carry it to position, and as long as enough electricity could be generated, the Positron Cannon could shred apart any object in existence at a subatomic level.
However, Misato had to convince a teenage boy who had just recently been drowned in boiling fluid to get back in to that fluid. She marched to Shinji's bed in NERV's infirmary, where it was reported that he did not receive any burns beyond the first degree. But it would be a miracle if he wasn't scarred by the event for the rest of his life.
"Shinji" She shook him awake. He looked up at her through a morphine-induced haze. "We found a way to beat it. We have a weapon for you strong enough to kill the angel."
"Wha-what do you mean 'we'!? You're s-safe down here while I was up there getting b-burned!" He tried to yell at her but his body burned all over and it hurt too much to get angry.
"That-that's not true, Shinji. If the Eva fails, the Angel won't destroy NERV. This entire base is built up on towers with nuclear weapons primed to explode and collapse everything down. Because if the Eva fails, and if NERV fails, then the Angel will dig down on its own and destroy the entire planet. We're not safe here, Shinji. We'll just die a few minutes before everyone everywhere else will."
Shinji looked down at his hands. "That-that's still not the same! I'm quitting! So, do whatever you're told to do, shoot me, lock me up, whatever. I quit!"
Misato walked to the exit of his room. "I'm not told to do anything about this, Shinji. We'll figure something without you."
Misato left the room. She was about to do the worst thing she'd ever done up to that point in her life. She went to the nurses' preparation station, and ordered the nursing team to prepare a shot of interrogation serum from NERV's brig that she would use on Shinji. She invoked her ability to use War Power when they objected.
She told herself that it was because Earth, and NERV, and she herself needed, needed Shinji to pilot. Rei needs him too, she thought, God knows Rei couldn't do this on her own-
That was it. That's what she told herself. If Shinji failed, then all would be lost.
Shinji awoke again to Misato and a nurse in the room.
"Shinji, I told the nurse how you looked when you tried shouting. You're still in too much pain. We're giving you another painkiller shot." Misato lied.
"Oh, Okay."
He cringed at the sting from the shot. "You should feel better soon. It shouldn't take long."
"Thank you, Misato."
The nurse whispered in Misato's ear. Misato stood for a few minutes and then asked Shinji how he felt.
"Better, I guess."
"Shinji, do you want to lose me, and Rei, and your father?"
Shinji looked up at her. "No."
"Then I need you to pilot the robot. Will you pilot Unit-01?"
"Yes."
Only a short time had passed since the shot. Misato wasn't even sure if Shinji would successfully make it through their briefing. The boy had a cocktail of painkillers and psychoactive drugs strong enough to make Bob Marley consider sobriety shot into him. She hauled him out of bed and walked him back to the Eva fortress.
"Rei is already out there. She's getting you the gun we're gonna use to kill this thing."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"You aim it, and then flip the on switch. It's like turning on a really big bug zapper!"
"What's Rei gonna do?"
"We gave her a heat shield, a really strong one. It should keep you both safe for a while."
"Oh, that's good."
Misato watched Shinji gawk at her through his drug induced haze. "And we've got lots of other weapons pointed at the Angel, too. So far it's only shot at one thing at a time, so hopefully the decoys we put out will keep it occupied."
Unit-00 returned to the city, carrying the experimental particle accelerator in its arms. It took in electricity at one end, and fired antimatter at the speed of light out the other. The amount of electricity, NERV found to be apocalyptic. Its activation would cause a nationwide blackout. Both Evangelion Units were elevated up to Japan's ground level.
Misato helped Shinji clumsily load himself into Unit-01's entry. Unit-00 led him to the sniper nest NERV built for him in the remains of a damaged power station, and Rei readied a decommissioned space shuttle she planned to use as a heat shield against Ramiel's weapon.
Shinji laid down and NERV's computer aimed for him, he fired and all around him was blinded by the light his weapon conjured. A minuscule hole was let on the front face of the Angel's diamond body. A much, much larger exit wound exploded out Ramiel's farthest point. The air shuddered and all were deafened by the curdling scream that poured out from the Angel's body, but it did not fall.
It turned slightly. Rei ran Unit-00 up to Shinji's camp and held the spacecraft's ceramic underbelly out before them both. It fired, and Rei was pushed back under the weight of the Angel's beam, which hit the shield and fractured into a kaleidoscope of fire that ricocheted off into sections of the city that burned in its heat. The outer edges of the shuttle's wings began to char and flake away. Rei felt Unit-00's metal boots scraping and grinding backwards over the earth beneath her. Shinji's weapon burned through it's safety fuse, and it was up to him to load another. This however, required more finesse than simply firing the weapon. He fumbled with the next fuse, he felt like his hands weighed a thousand pounds, and he loaded the next fuse backwards before he finally managed to get it inside the barrel of the gun. It was around this time that the Shuttle's hull failed and Rei was pierced by the same rod of power that Shinji had felt earlier. She was not bound to NERV's elevator system, however, and was blasted off the cliffside they were based on to land far below. The camp, and everything behind it, melted under the fire, and Shinji, feeling the beam strike him a second time, and he fired, fired before NERV had finished aiming for him.
Ramiel felt its own life end. Its beam of fire and it's drill into the earth ceased to penetrate. The Angel's core erupted from within, and its diamond body exploded in an ocean of otherworldly blood, flooding the streets of the city in an ocean of pungent red.
Shinji lumbered out of his nest and staggered to where Unit-00 had collapsed. He tore open the panel on the Eva's spine that contained Rei's entry plug, and he forcibly separated her from her crippled beast.
He ejected himself and made his way to her as fast as he could, finding her with her head in her hands at the disabled cockpit.
"Rei, p-please tell me you're ok-" He panted out and struggled to stay on his feet at the door of the plug.
"Pilot Ikari" She looked up at him. "The shield deflected the Angel's attack off into neighborhoods of Tokyo-3."
"What?" Shinji couldn't see what she was implying.
"There were...civilian casualties."
"No, Rei! You don't know that! M-maybe the streets were abandoned!"
"Pilo- Shinji. I accessed footage from parts of town. They were not."
"Rei there, there isn't anything we can do-"
"I sent the fire to those people because I didn't properly deflect the-"
"That's not true! You did everything you could to save those people! Misato said we had to save everyone!"
"Shinji...The block of the city where the building I reside is was hit by one of the beams."
"Rei, you don't mean..."
"I assume the worst."
Shinji reached over her to the controls, opened a panel and called Misato on the emergency phone in the seat. Before Rei could stop him, he told her that Rei's apartment had been destroyed by the Angel.
"And Rei is sure of that, Shinji?"
"As sure as she can be from here, Misato."
"Well then. I was going to let Asuka live with you and me when she gets here, but this changes absolutely everything. Rei's moving in with us, and I'm not takin no for an answer. From anybody."
AN: Hey, you promised offensive stuff! I did, and we'll get to it.