Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is the creation of Anno and Gainax. I don't own it, make no claims to it, and am making no profit from this fan fiction. No infringement of copyright is intended. In other words, please don't sue.
Disclaimer: I do not own DC comics or anything associated with it and am making no profit off this fan fiction. No infringement of copyright is intended. In other words, please don't sue.
Chapter Twelve: Déjà Vu
Flying through the air above Tokyo-3, Blue Beetle took a moment to assess her current situation.
Gendo Ikari seemed to at least suspect that Ritsuko Akagi and the Blue Beetle were one and the same, which would inevitably bring enormous problems for her down the road unless she could convince him otherwise. She had recently almost died at the hands of some kind of super assassin, and while the scarab had managed to patch her back up, she still felt weak and her entire body hurt.
That last part wouldn't have been a problem, except the Fifteenth Angel just had to choose that moment to appear, and the JSSDF had summoned her to stop it. So it looked like she was on her way to fight a battle with the odds stacked very heavily against her, and even if she won, she'd no doubt be feeling it tomorrow.
(So, business as usual, then.) The scarab summed up.
Despite herself, Blue Beetle cracked a smile at that.
"It's funny because it's true," she remarked.
(The general's on the line for you.) The scarab informed her.
"Put him on," she replied.
"Beetle, this is Katsuro," the general's gruff voice sounded in her ear. "The satellite network has detected the Angel in geosynchronous orbit over Toyko-3."
Outer space. Awesome, Blue Beetle and the scarab thought simultaneously, the former with exasperation and the latter with excitement.
"Yes, I'm picking it up with my suit's sensors," Blue Beetle said as the scarab brought an image of it up on her HUD. "Looks like a new type of Angel." She added worriedly as she studied the glowing crystalline wings.
"Which means we have no idea what form its attack will take," Katsuro agreed. "And of course the damn thing has just been holding position so far. Even our most advanced hardware can't hope to hit a target up there."
"That's where you're wrong, General," Blue Beetle said with as much bravado as she could muster, even while she silently wished that she could just go home, lay down, and maybe nap for a few hours. "I can get to that thing."
"I was hoping you'd say that," Katsuro said with obvious satisfaction.
"What the story down there, though?" Blue Beetle asked. "Who's in command of this battle?"
"Right now, NERV has operational control," Katsuro said, and the sapphire superwoman swore that she could hear him scowl. "But frankly, I don't give a damn. If you can engage and destroy that thing, then you do it. Now."
"Planning on asking for forgiveness instead of permission?" Blue Beetle surmised. "That's a risky move, General."
"Only if you don't manage to destroy that Angel," he retorted. "Regardless of what Ikari might be telling his superiors, NERV doesn't have anything that can destroy a hardened target that high up, either. Unless of course they've got some kind of god damn super weapon we don't know about."
Blue Beetle only barely managed to stop herself from telling him that NERV had no such thing. No doubt he'd have some uncomfortable questions for her if he realized that she knew more about what NERV did and did not have at its disposal than he did.
"I'm on my way," she said, terminating the call. "Scarab, punch it."
(You got it.) The scarab replied eagerly.
The jets on the bottom of her boots flared with greater intensity, and thunder without lightning rumbled through the sky as the Blue Beetle quickly broke the sound barrier and only kept accelerating.
The woman inside the blue and black armor grimaced. Normally, she could withstand the G-forces of the scarab's top speed easily enough, but with her whole body still suffering the effects of Deathstroke's nearly lethal attack, every fiber of her being was protesting the acceleration.
Oh, this is not a good sign, she thought, wondering what it would be like when she actually started fighting.
(Don't worry, Ritsuko, I'll make sure you hold together.) The scarab reassured her, even as its eagerness for violence and combat shone through clearly across their mental link.
"Good, because right now I feel like there's nothing but chewing gum and paperclips keeping me in once piece," she replied.
The scarab replied with the mental equivalent of a chuckle.
Then Blue Beetle pieced the layer of storm clouds that blanketed the Tokyo-3 area, steely gray giving way to the perfect, endless blue of the clear sky. Only moments after that, the blue gave way to the diamond studded blackness of outer space.
Unable to resist, the sapphire superwoman spared a moment to turn and look back at the Earth, gasping as she took in the great blue sphere beneath her. It was amazingly beautiful, much more so than any mere satellite image could ever hope to convey.
We have to save it, she thought solemnly as she turned her gaze back to infinite void of space.
Difficult though it was to believe, Blue Beetle couldn't initially spot the giant crystalline monster floating in the darkness right away; it was still hundreds of kilometers away from her and was little more than another pinprick of light against the blackness.
Fortunately, her armor's many sensors had little difficulty detecting their foe. With a thought, Blue Beetle brought the Angel's image back up on her HUD as she approached it. It was hard to deny that the thing was beautiful, but all the sapphire superwoman saw when she gazed at its luminous crystalline form was one dangerous question mark.
"Scarab, any clue on what this one does yet?" she asked.
(Not yet, but I'm analyzing it as quickly as I can.) The scarab replied. (By the way, Unit Two is setting up one big freaking positron gun back in Tokyo-3.)
"No surprise there," Blue Beetle said, knowing that even the biggest gun NERV possessed would never be able to break through an AT field at such long range. "We should be able to just ignore them. The odds of them hitting us are miniscule." She looked ahead again, seeing that the Angel was close enough to observe with the naked eye now. "All right, time to do this. Scarab, give me a ludicrously destructive gun. I want to finish this in one shot and go home."
(You got it, Ritsuko.) The scarab replied with obvious relish.
They didn't need to worry about damaging their surroundings up here, after all.
The chunk of alien hardware in her in back briefly took control of her arms, drawing them together, and the armor on them merged into one piece, holding them in that position. More metal sprouted from the gauntlets, and it occurred to Blue Beetle that the whole process looked almost organic in nature.
Except that when it was done she didn't have a flower, instead she had a firearm that was nearly as large as she was.
I really do need to ask the scarab where all this mass comes from, she mused to herself, even as took aim at the Angel with the aid of a targeting reticule that had popped up onto her HUD.
A loud beep let her know that she'd gotten a lock.
(Charging Ragnarok Cannon.) The scarab announced, trying to sound professional but actually coming off more like a kid excited to go on a fast amusement park ride. (Firing in three…two…)
The scarab never reached "one".
A bright beam of pink light burst forth from the Angel just then, illuminating a tiny portion of the blackness of space and washing over the Blue Beetle.
The effect of the Angel's attack hit the scarab just an instant before it got to the woman it was bonded with, and she was treated to the "sound" of its mental screams ringing inside her skull.
She didn't even have enough time to feel anything other than surprise and the beginnings of alarm in response before the Angel got to her, too, and suddenly she wasn't in outer space any longer.
She was in her rocky home, cheerfully going about her work for the day. New tunnels needed to be dug out, because the size of the Hive would be increasing soon.
She was looking forward to the Hive's expansion, because more voices being added to the collective mind was always good. However, the actual task of making the tunnels was difficult; her pincers could barely penetrate the hard stone at all. Yet she and dozens of her fellows continued to toil away, all of them sharing the knowledge that this was necessary for the Hive.
It was nearly time for her rest cycle when the stone above her rumbled ominously. She and all her fellows looked up, confusion and fear pulsing across their shared thoughts and then spreading to the rest of the Hive. None of them had any idea why the roof of the chamber should be shifting like that. They had studied it and found this section of their home to be completely stable.
(Flee.) They all agreed.
Moving as though they were separate parts of the same being, they formed an orderly line, insectoid legs skittering across cold stone, and headed for deeper into the tunnel.
Only a few of them managed to get to safety before the roof completely came off the chamber, exposing them to the vacuum of space.
They didn't need to breathe in order to survive, and their species had long ago adapted to the harsh cold and merciless radiation to be found in space, but the sudden decompression tore them all out of their home and sent them spiraling helplessly into the infinite blackness beyond the safety of their rocky dwelling.
For a moment, she and all her fellows who had been pulled out into the void along with her thought that they were doomed to drift listlessly until they starved. The entire Hive despaired, because the lost of any of their number always diminished the Hive as a whole.
Then her body, which was lazily spinning end over end in the null gravity, turned in such a way that she found herself staring at a figure clad in blue and black armor from head to toe.
The armor looked familiar somehow, but she couldn't comprehend why; none of the members of the Hive had any memories of ever seeing such a strange creature before.
Nevertheless, the sight of the being, which had probably been responsible for the remove of the roof in part of their home, filled her and all her fellows with fear. Her six legs twitched wildly as she tried to direct her movement, all to no avail.
Then the creature grabbed her, and she almost fit right in the palm of its huge hand. She tried harder than ever to escape, but the strange monster held her with inexorable strength.
The creature brought its free hand toward her, and its fingertip started to glow with a malevolent blue light. Panic spurred her to struggle all the more fiercely, even though she and all the rest of the Hive knew it was futile.
There was a flash of turquoise light, accompanied by an explosion of pain that made her writhe in pure agony.
As the agony slowly subsided, she became aware of the ringing silence inside her mind, the voices of the rest of the Hive absent for the first time in her life. She felt slow and stupid without their collective intelligence bolstering her own, and concepts which had been simple mere seconds ago were now complicated and confusing. She could barely remember what she'd been doing before the blue attacker had arrived.
With mounting horror, she spotted a pair of long, thin appendages floating lazily through space, and she realized that they were her own antennae, which the attacker had severed. She was crippled! She would be cut off from the mind of the Hive forever!
Her species lacked any word that meant "alone", since they normally didn't understand the concept. But she understood it now. She understood it very well indeed.
The blue monster said something she didn't understand, then put her into a large, clear container, sealing it. She was so disoriented and muddled that she didn't even struggle.
Then—
A beam of blue white death streaked past the Blue Beetle, coming far too close to the armored superwoman for comfort and jolting her out of the state the Angel had put her in.
She could still feel the gruesome scenes playing out in the back of her mind, like a computer program quietly running in the background while the user worked on something else. She could still feel what it had been like for the scarab as the aliens cut it open without anesthetic, grafting mechanical parts into it and making it more machine than flesh, then rewriting its DNA and its mind, again with no thought to its comfort.
Across her mental link with the scarab, she could tell it was going through something similar, except with her memories. She could pick up vague snatches of some of the countless times her mother had belittled her running through its head, along with some of her more unpleasant encounters with Gendo Ikari.
So this is what the Angel does, she thought, trying to ignore the extremely distracting scenes playing out in both their minds. But two people sharing this body must have confused it…
She supposed that meant it was a good thing that the Angel had turned its attention toward her rather than the Evangelion pilots down on Earth, but at the moment she just wanted the tortures that had occurred in the scarab's past to stop playing like a movie in the back of her brain.
She tried to fly out of the path of the light beam the Angel was projecting, but it followed her no matter how quickly she moved, like a strobe light.
"Okay, clearly we're going to have to do this while it's attacking us," Blue Beetle grumbled, noting that her absurdly huge gun had vanished while she and the scarab had endured the brunt of the Angel's attack. "Give me that Ragnarok Cannon thing again."
(You got it.) The scarab replied, itself struggling to ignore the Angel's attack.
Again, the gun emerged from out of her armor, though notably more slowly than it had last time, and Blue Beetle pointed the weapon at the Angel. The weapon hummed dangerously as it powered up.
(Firing in three…two…one!)
Nothing happened.
No blast of bright blue death erupted forth from the wide barrel of the weapon. The humming grew softer and then eventually fell silent.
"Something wrong?" she asked, irritated. The Angel's attack was really grating on her.
(Uh, yeah.) The scarab replied sheepishly.
Rather than taking the time to explain, the chunk of alien hardware in her head sent all the information directly to her in the form of a thought rather than dialogue, allowing the Blue Beetle to instantly understand.
In order to fire the Ragnarok Cannon, the scarab needed to overcharge the armor's power source. However, it couldn't do that safely and work the gun at the same time while the Angel was attacking them; it was being forced to devote too much of its processing power toward the task of paying at least some attention to her bad memories.
"What do we do?!" she demanded.
(I don't know!) The scarab replied. (But we'd better do it fast! I estimate that we have about five minutes before this does seriously bad things to both our brains!)
"Wonderful!" she replied, again trying futilely to escape the beam of pinkish light.
She started frantically going through a list of functions she could still use even with the scarab in its impaired state, and unleashed some of the most powerful attacks they could muster at the Angel. Unfortunately, all of them impacted harmlessly on the crystalline creature's AT field, even at such close range.
The Blue Beetle was nearly ready to despair when another blast from NERV's biggest positron rifle streaked up into the blackness of space, again landing a hit on the Angel that did nothing.
(…Ritsuko?) The scarab spoke up.
"Yes?" she replied.
(I have a really dumb idea.) It told her.
"…this is going to hurt like hell, isn't it?" she grimaced, suspecting she already had a good idea what it had in mind.
(Doesn't it always?) The scarab asked.
"True," Blue Beetle groaned. "What's the plan?"
The scarab communicated it to her, and Blue Beetle groaned as her suspicions were proven correct. This was going to hurt like hell.
Seeing no other choice, she moved herself into position, a new gun barrel emerging from the armor, along with a strange apparatus sprouting from her back. The Blue Beetle positioned herself in exactly the right spot and waited.
(Hey, you know, it's not too late to back out of this.) The scarab said quietly.
Blue Beetle grimaced. If even the scarab was fearful of what they were about to do, then it was really going to hurt. However, her resolve didn't waver.
"No," she said. "If we run away, then it'll turn on the EVA pilots. Besides, we're so close to getting NERV's funding pulled. We can't stop now."
(Okay.) The scarab said.
Down on Earth, Unit Two fired the positron rifle one more time. Blue Beetle didn't even have to turn her head to look back at it; her armor's sensors calculated its trajectory, allowing her to adjust her position.
Then the beam struck her back, and she screamed.
It was the worst pain she'd experienced yet, even counting when Deathstroke had so recently run her through. She felt like a lightning bolt was coursing through her, except unlike lighting, it just kept going on and on, causing every nerve ending she possessed to howl with agony.
Yet her armor did its job. The antimatter particles from the quickly deteriorating beam were collected by the gadget on her back, funneled through her armor, and burst forth from the gun on her arm as a much more focused bolt of energy, only about as thick as a pencil.
The bolt of highly focused antimatter easily pierced the Angel's AT field this time, then speared right through the core embedded in the center of its body, thanks to the scarab's sophisticated targeting computers.
For a moment, the Angel seemed to ignore the damage done to its most vital part, and an exhausted Blue Beetle wondered with dismay if she would have to continue doing battle with it.
Then the glow pink wings abruptly exploded, pieces flying in all directions. The shards of crystal bounced harmlessly off Blue Beetle's armor, but the shock wave from the explosion sent the sapphire superwoman tumbling end over end through the blackness of outer space.
After all the punishment she had taken lately, it was just too much. Blue Beetle's eyes drifted shut as both she and the scarab passed out, leaving them to drift quietly through the darkness of outer space.
"The MAGI are no longer picking up a blue pattern," Maya announced from her place on the NERV command center. "The Angel has been destroyed."
"Who killed it?" Gendo asked, his hands folded in front of his face.
The three bridge techs winced. They'd known, of course, that he would ask that, given the fierce competition between NERV and the JSSDF for control of the war, but that didn't mean they had the answer.
"It's difficult to say, sir," Aoba said. "The Angel destroyed a lot of the monitoring satellites in the air before combat began, and the positron rifle creates a lot of interference when it fires."
"Oh, come on!" Asuka exclaimed, as a communications window from Unit Two popped up on the main viewer. "I shot at it, and it died a couple of seconds later! What more do you need to know that I killed it?"
Gendo glanced down at the bridge techs, as though to say that the redhead made a fair point.
"According to the MAGI's calculations, the timing was a little off for it to have been Unit Two's attack with the positron rifle," Makoto said. "And we can't explain why the third shot would've killed the Angel after the first two failed to breach its AT field."
"There's not enough information to make a firm conclusion on who got the kill shot at this time, sir," Maya said.
Asuka scoffed at this, clearly of the opinion that there was plenty of evidence that she had gotten the kill, but Gendo ignored her. It wasn't difficult to see that, though they were reluctant to call it either way, the trio of technicians were clearly leaning toward the conclusion that Blue Beetle had gotten the kill.
The JSSDF, and NERV's other detractors, wouldn't be so hesitant about proclaiming Blue Beetle the victor, he knew.
"Major," he said, getting up from his chair. "You have command."
"Yes, sir," Misato replied, then quickly began to issue orders to recall the Evangelions and transform the city back to its peacetime configuration.
The Commander paused just long enough to glare briefly at the hologram of Ritsuko that was standing behind Ibuki. Then he stepped through the door behind his chair and left the command center.
"This emergency meeting of the SEELE council is now in session."
To any outside observer, it might have seemed strange, watching the secretive cabal going through many of the same formal motions that their public face, the Human Instrumentality Committee followed. However, all the men hidden behind their blank monolith avatars were used to boardrooms, places of governance, and other locations were protocol was always observed as a matter of course. It came naturally to them; they were all familiar with it.
What they weren't familiar with was the feeling of intense panic that came with watching as years and years of work threatened to go to waste.
"I trust you've all read the reports," SEELE 01 spoke into the dark, virtual meeting chamber.
"Yes," SEELE 11 spoke up, "I think it's fair to say that we have."
The reports, of course, were preliminary summaries of the latest Angel battle. There were still many questions present, but they were nevertheless extremely disconcerting.
"I never would have imagined that Ikari would let things get so bad," SEELE 07 grumbled. "He knew that NERV needed a victory."
"Blue Beetle blindsided all of us," SEELE 04 said. "I doubt Ikari just let her beat NERV to this one."
"Regardless, Ikari seems to have failed us," SEELE 05 spoke up.
"Seems to have," SEELE 02 pointed out. "The JSSDF has remained curiosity silent so far."
"It's only been a few hours since the battle," SEELE 05 said.
"I would've expected them to have claimed the victory within minutes of its end," SEELE 02 countered. "That they have not yet makes me think there's something we don't know. Perhaps NERV really did kill the Angel, and they'd just rather we have to figure that out for ourselves. Or perhaps Blue Beetle died." He added hopefully. "Without her, they lose all credibility when claiming they can replace NERV, regardless of who killed this last Angel."
"We can't depend on that, welcome news though it would be," SEELE 01 said. "We must assume that the JSSDF will soon claim that it was their operative that killed the Angel, and NERV's funding should be revoked."
"NERV's funding cannot be revoked without the agreement of the UN Security Council," SEELE 08 pointed out. "And we control most of the members."
"Yes, but mostly by threatening to reveal or fabricate career-ending scandals about them," SEELE 07 retorted. "Public sentiment against NERV has grown so powerful that if they block a resolution to cease funding them, they will removed from their positions anyway!"
"My people still have the Chinese representative's daughter in custody," SEELE 12 spoke up. "He will never disobey me."
"But he can be replaced," SEELE 07 said. "We may have to accept that the disbanding of NERV is inevitable, and that we can only delay it."
"Then let's hope we can delay it long enough, because if NERV is disbanded before the proper time, then the Scenario is ruined," SEELE 01 said grimly.
Long after the latest battle against an Angel, when night had long since fallen upon the city of Tokyo-3, a figure surrounded by an aura of emerald light soared into the air, rising so quickly into the dark sky that she seemed to become a green star in the heavens.
"Ring, locate Ritsuko," Green Lantern ordered as she reached the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.
A thin beam of jade light burst out of her power ring, then snaked off into the distance. Green Lantern quickly followed it, rising into outer space itself.
It wasn't long before she found Blue Beetle drifting aimlessly in the zero gravity emptiness outside the planet's atmosphere.
"Oh, Rits," she sighed. "Ring, medical scan."
Green light came from her ring and then swept harmlessly over Blue Beetle's limp form. A second later, a readout appeared above the ring in glowing green kanji, and Green Lantern heaved a sigh of relief.
Her friend was all right. All the abuse she'd taken recently had just caught up to her, and the scarab, knocking them out as their bodies at last demanded rest.
Gathering the sapphire superwoman up in her arms, Green Lantern headed back to Earth, enclosing them in a force bubble as they descended to avoid the more unpleasant effects of reentry. Once they were safely back in the Earth's atmosphere, she guided them to Ritsuko's home, taking care not to be seen on the way.
"There we go," Green Lantern said as she lay Blue Beetle down in her bed.
She was about to leave, then, but she hesitated, not liking the idea of leaving her friend like this, still clad in her armor and oblivious to the world around her. If the Commander chose this moment to send another Section Two thug to snoop around Ritsuko's home, it could mean disaster.
"Ring, is there anything we can do for her?" she asked. "Maybe at least take that armor off of her?"
"It is unlikely that this ring can remove the armor without causing grievous harm to the wearer," the ring stated in its perpetually flat voice. "However, this ring can reboot the AI in the wearer's back."
"Okay, do that, then," Green Lantern said. "The scarab should be able to get rid of the armor, at least."
Her ring pulsed, and for a second, it seemed as though nothing happened. Then, the Blue Beetle let out a loud groan and sat up, the armor appearing to melt off of her as she moved.
"Rise and shine, sleepyhead," Green Lantern said.
Then with a thought and brief flare of jade light, she dispelled her superwoman attire, once again taking on the form and appearance of Misato Katsuragi.
"Ugh, what time is it?" Ritsuko asked, rubbing her temples.
"It's after ten o'clock at night," the Ops Director answered. "You've just been floating around. I would've gotten you earlier, but I couldn't get away until now. You know how it is after a battle." She added apologetically.
"Yeah, thanks," Ritsuko said.
"So, what exactly happened up there, anyway?" Misato sighed.
The blonde sighed, clearly not keen on the idea of going over all of that, but she launched into the tale anyway, telling the Ops Director about the Angel's attack and how she had managed to concentrate Asuka's attack so it would actually kill the Angel.
"So, it was sort of a team effort, then," Misato concluded.
"I guess you could say that, yes," Ritsuko allowed.
The Ops Director's eyes narrowed. "But somehow, I get the feeling that you won't be mentioning that when you report back to your buddies in the JSSDF."
Ritsuko couldn't help but wince a little at that. "No, I won't," she admitted. "And I'm guessing I'll be the only person able to provide any decent footage of the end of the battle?" Misato nodded. "Then it should be easy to get away with."
"And if I tell people the Blue Beetle's not being honest, everyone will want to know how I know that," Misato shook her head. "You know it'll probably mean the end of NERV if you and the JSSDF get to claim all the credit for this one, right?"
Ritsuko nodded. "And then we can fight the Angels together—as Blue Beetle and Green Lantern—while the Children don't have to risk their lives anymore."
Misato hadn't forgotten about that, and the idea still appealed to her, but she never had liked how secretive Ritsuko was being about this whole thing. The way she had been maneuvering around everybody didn't sit well with her, either.
However, there was little she could about it, not without revealing that she was the Green Lantern.
"Fine," she said. "Just do me a favor and take tomorrow off, okay? You really need some R&R after the last couple of days you've had."
"Nonsense," Ritsuko scoffed. "I'll have no trouble going to work tomorrow. After all, I'm not as old as I used to be. Body of a strapping twenty-something and all that." She added, flexing her arms for emphasis.
Misato rolled her eyes. "You're crazy, you know that?" she asked. "What could be the harm in taking a day off? Hell, if I had a high-tech stand-in like you do, you'd barely get me in headquarters once a week unless there was a battle!"
Ritsuko couldn't help but chuckle at that. "Why do I not have a hard time believing that?" she asked. "Anyway, to answer your question, I just can't help but feel that something bad will happen if I let holo-Ritsuko take my place for too long."
"Fine, whatever," Misato relented. "Just don't come complaining to me when you get in trouble for sleeping on the job tomorrow."
"I won't," Ritsuko said.
"I should really get back home with Shinji and Asuka," Misato said. "I'll see you tomorrow. Goodnight."
"Night," Ritsuko replied.
(She's a little annoyed.) The scarab observed as the Ops Director vanished from sight.
"I can hardly blame her," Ritsuko said. "Would you get Katsuro on the line for me? I need to report in."
The following to the JSSDF, who was almost apoplectic with relief at learning the Blue Beetle was still alive, probably lasted all of twenty minutes, but it felt like an eternity to Ritsuko. Yet it finally ended, with Katsuro quite satisfied by her promise to send him footage that would "prove" she, and not NERV, had slain the Angel.
(I'm transmitting the recording now.) The scarab said as she finally terminated the call.
"Good," Ritsuko said, rubbing her eyes. She was so absolutely exhausted, but she couldn't sleep quite yet. There was one more thing she had to do. "Scarab, did you see what the Angel showed me?"
(Not really. I just got a glimpse here and there. Why?) It asked.
"I think you should take a look at it," she said.
(All right.) The scarab said, with the mental equivalent of a shrug.
It went pawing through her mind for the memories in question, and Ritsuko guided it to them. She waited for several seconds as it reviewed them repeatedly.
(I don't remember any of this.) It said quietly.
"I'm not surprised," Ritsuko replied. "But it does seem to reveal a lot about you. Apparently, you were part of a species that lives in asteroids, and you were abducted for the express purpose of being turned into a weapon. They probably used your species because you're so used to being connected to the minds of others, and because you can apparently survive everything they put you through."
(They took me away from my home, my people.) The scarab said in a small voice.
"Yes, they did," Ritsuko said. "I'm sorry."
(It's not your fault.) The scarab said. (After all, you promised you'd help me find out about my origins, and you just did. I can hardly blame you because they suck.)
"I know," Ritsuko said. "Still, it's far from ideal."
(That's true. But it makes me even more grateful that whatever commands those aliens programmed me with got lost, and that I ended up working with you instead.) The scarab said, brightening.
Ritsuko smiled, touched.
(And with any luck, we'll never even hear from the aliens that did that to me ever again.) The scarab said.
The blonde chuckled. "After everything else we've had to deal with, I'd say the universe owes us at least that much." She yawned. "God, I'm beat. I'm going to sleep. Night."
(Good night.) The scarab replied, and in seconds, both of them were enjoying a well deserved rest.
The next morning, NERV headquarters was already abuzz about the assumedly imminent disbanding of the agency. Ritsuko had reported in to General Katsuro the previous night and had sent him some footage of the battle that made it appear as though the Blue Beetle had destroyed the Angel all by herself. The flag officer had, in turn, not hesitated to claim all responsibility for the Angel's defeat in behalf of the JSSDF and their special taskforce.
A vote was already scheduled to take place at the UN in a few days on the matter of NERV's funding, in fact.
For her own part, however, Ritsuko ignored all the speculation, and she advised all her underlings to do the same. It wasn't that she was uninterested in NERV's fate, of course; she had gone to an enormous amount of trouble to try and get the paramilitary's all important funding yanked, after all.
However, chatting about it wasn't going to help anything, and for all the bravado she had displayed last night, Ritsuko was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. She just wanted a boring and completely ordinary day for once.
Up until late afternoon, she got one.
Then, only half an hour before she would have clocked out and left for the day, the phone on her desk beeped loudly.
"Akagi here," she answered, picking it up.
"It's me," the unmistakable voice of Gendo Ikari replied. "Come down to Terminal Dogma immediately. It's important."
"Yes, sir," Ritsuko said automatically, but he'd already hung up.
(That doesn't sound good.) The scarab said.
I'm sure it's nothing, Ritsuko replied silently as she got up from her desk. Ikari calls me down there like this all time, and it's usually for the most mundane things. Honestly, I think the man likes enigma for its own sake.
(Hey, maybe he wants you to make him an anti-Blue Beetle weapon.) The scarab suggested.
Ritsuko couldn't help but smirk briefly at that. I think it's a little late for that, but it would be very comforting if that's what he wants.
In minutes, she had reached the restricted elevator that went down to Terminal Dogma. She slid her ID card through the reader next to the door, then punched her pass code into the number pad below it, making the doors open. Trying to quell the foolish sense of trepidation rising inside of her, she stepped inside the elevator car. A second later, the doors slid shut and it started to descend.
There were no buttons inside this one, which she supposed made sense, since there were only two floors this elevator could stop at. Still, it had always unnerved her.
Eventually, the elevator reached NERV headquarters' restricted sub-sub-basement, and Ritsuko stepped out into the dimly lit chambers, initially seeing no sign of the Commander. Grumbling softly to herself with annoyance, she set out to look for him. Fortunately, though Terminal Dogma was vast, it was mostly divided up into only a handful of enormous chambers, so checking all the rooms wouldn't take very long.
Honestly, he couldn't have made this any more annoying if he tried, she thought. All she wanted to do was go home, have something to eat, take a nice hot bath, and then collapse into bed.
She finally found him in the last room she decided to search. It was probably the least important chamber of Terminal Dogma, being used mostly as a place to store various items and documents that the Commander wouldn't feel comfortable keeping in even the most high security areas of Central Dogma.
"You wanted to speak to me in private, Commander?" she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Hmm, yes," Gendo replied absently, not even looking at her.
Ritsuko knew she should've been annoyed at having been abruptly summoned and then subsequently ignored by Gendo. However, all she could feel was a rising sense of trepidation. Something about the way he was gazing at one of the walls was unnerving her, but her tired brain couldn't quite puzzle out why.
"May I ask why, sir?" she questioned eventually when he didn't speak again.
"It has come to my attention that the continued existence of NERV is very much in jeopardy," Gendo said, finally turning his head to look at her, "thanks mostly to the efforts of the Blue Beetle."
Ritsuko tried to act as though he hadn't just stated the obvious. "Yes, sir," she agreed. "…Do you want me to try to find something that can stop her? A way to sabotage her armor?"
"That will not be necessary," Gendo said, turning to look back at that spot on the wall again.
Finally, it clicked inside Ritsuko's mind.
She was getting so freaked out by the way he kept looking at a blank wall instead of at her because she had seen him do it before, not in her own life, but in that of the other version of her, the one that had been known as the Scarlet Scarab. That spot on the wall was where the hidden weapons would emerge.
Eyes widening, she looked down at his gloved hand, spotting a tiny remote control clutched in his grip that she hadn't noticed before.
Ritsuko opened her mouth to shout, to yell at him not to do it.
Gendo pushed the button before a single syllable could escape her.
Author's Notes: And so poor Ritsuko's worst nightmare comes to pass. Will she escape her alternate self's fate? You'll have to check back next chapter to find out.
I'm not entirely sure if the picture of the scarabs I'm painting here is accurate. The Reach Negotiator seems to imply that the scarabs weren't genetic constructs of the Reach, but I had trouble following the comic after issue 25, so it's possible that was later contradicted. Either way, finding a suitable species for their plans and then modifying the hell out of them in such a fashion seems like something the Reach would do.
Anyway, thanks as always to my readers and reviewers, and thanks to my beta reader as well.
Omake!
You Get What You Pay For
Eyes widening, she looked down at his gloved hand, spotting a tiny remote control clutched in his grip that she hadn't noticed before.
Ritsuko opened her mouth to shout, to yell at him not to do it.
Gendo pushed the button before a single syllable could escape her.
Nothing happened.
"Uh…"
The seconds soon started to drag out awkwardly.
"Damn it," the Commander cursed, pressing the button several more times. "Just give me a second here…"
"Technical difficulties?" Ritsuko asked, while the scarab laughed hysterically.
"I should've known not to let the lowest bidder install this trap," Gendo grumbled, for once looking embarrassed. "But it worked so well for the EVA ejection system and the pallet rifles…"