Disclaimer: I do not own Neon Genesis Evangelion or any of the things I want to in this world of ours. The only thing created by me on the NGE area is this fanfic series. If you sue, I'll sue back.

Shinji and Rei sat on the couch in front of the TV, not quite looking at the three hour documentary about snails. Shinji made a face as the image of an especially nasty slug came into focus and clicked the remote. He flipped to the first channel he found. It was a pornographic channel. Beet red, Shinji turned off the TV and took up a magazine that lay on the table. It was a porn magazine. He threw it across the room, even redder than before. Rei looked at him confused.

"Why did you turn it off? It seemed like a good show." Shinji looked at her with a face that showed that he wanted to scream 'Are you out of your mind!' in her face. She giggled.

"I'm only joking, although it was pretty interesting…" Shinji was at once very interested in the pattern of the carpet on the floor.

"You're too tense, you know." Rei snuggled up close to him and put her arms around his waist. Shinji smiled and put his arms around her and he turned the TV back on. Now he found a channel that showed a very good movie. It was just about to start.

"What's that movie called, Shinji-kun?"

"It's called 'Armageddon' and according to the newspaper it's very good, it's about a drilling team sent up to an oncoming asteroid to save humanity."

"Sounds like our job, saving humanity." The movie rolled on and they both were soon absorbed in it.

-Spoiler warning-

As the little romance scene with AJ and Grace took place, Shinji and Rei also had a little romance scene. They cuddled and kissed a bit on the couch when Misato walked in with a bowl of popcorn and sat down to watch the movie, not paying attention to the cuddling couple. She took a handful of popcorn and shoved it into her mouth.

"I love this movie." She said between the bites and thus interrupted the almost one hour of silence. Then the time came for the Shuttle launch. They all three sat as tense as ever and counted down with the persons in the control tower.

"3, 2, 1, 0!" And as the shuttles thrust upwards on their jet exhausts, they all cheered for the successful start.

-End spoiler warning-

When the movie ended, there were mixed feelings among the people watching. Shinji felt happy that the teams made it. Misato was feeling sad for the people who died both in space and on Earth. Rei sat and thought of how they made the special effects back in the twentieth century.

They all had a few relatively calm days at home, with a few exceptions when Asuka came over to visit. It always ended the same, either with the three pilots sitting in groups of one and two glaring at the other part. Or it ended with Asuka running away to her apartment crying or Rei running into her room, with Shinji coming in afterwards, trying to calm her down. This was one of the latter days. It had started off with Asuka coming to talk to Misato, then Shinji and Rei walked in and they talked a bit about the mission that lay ahead of them. Shinji later excused himself and went to fetch something from his room. And Misato went for a nap to sleep off some of the alcohol in her system. Then Asuka said something completely unprovoked.

"I hope nothing happens to your unit that may harm you in some way during the mission, wonder girl." Rei looked at her with fright in her eyes. She hated talking to the German girl.

"Why should it?"

"No, of course, how stupid of me, the commander would never let anything happen to his dear little doll." Tears threatened to break through Rei's eyes.

"I am not a doll." Asuka grinned triumphantly at Rei.

"Of course you are, you completely obey the commander. Even if you were told to commit suicide by driving three spikes through your right eye you should do it."

"I am not a doll." Rei repeated herself a bit louder.

"You are nothing but a pilot for the commander. Has he ever treated you as a person? No, he thinks of you as his marionette doll that he controls in the Eva unit by pulling strings. He controls you complet…"

"I am not a doll!" Rei stood up and slammed her fists down on the table, knocking a few coffee cups over and spilling the contents all over the table. Asuka ignored it and continued.

"ely and he knows it. He is your puppeteer and you are the…" A slap was heard in the kitchen before Rei bolted to her room and slammed the door shut behind her before throwing herself on her futon. She started crying. Shinji walked out in the kitchen with the camera he went to fetch in his hands. He had been interrupted in his actions of putting in a new film by Rei's shout and the film hung out of the back of the camera, ruined by exposure to the light.

"Asuka-san…I told you not to talk about that with Rei in that accusing way." Shinji put the camera down on the table a little harder than he had intended and went to Rei's room. Asuka smiled and walked out the front door. Her plan to ruin Rei's self confidence had worked beyond her wildest imaginations, or a least that's what she thought.

"Rei-kun…it's me, Shinji…I'm coming in." Shinji slid the door open and closed it quietly behind him. He walked over to Rei's futon and knelt down beside it. Rei's fragile body shuddered under inaudible crying, her sobs muted by the pillow she buried her face in. Shinji put a hand on her back and caressed it carefully, stroking it like on a cat. She looked up at him, and then threw herself in his arms and cried loudly onto his shoulder. Shinji held her and whispered soothingly in her ear, just like she had done for him when he had that horrible nightmare.

"I am not a doll, I am not a doll…" Rei repeated between the sobs while Shinji stroked her hair.

"Of course you are not…Misato-san is more of a doll than you are And you know how calm and balanced she is." They sat like that for two hours, and all the while Rei repeated the words 'I am not a doll' over and over again while Shinji held her and caressed her hair and back. At last her sobs subsided, and she laid down on her futon again, pulling Shinji down with her and snuggling up tight against his side still in his embrace. The clock was 23:54 and they soon fell asleep in each others' embrace.

The alarm pulled them out of their blissful sleep with a sound that everyone in Tokyo-3 has come to hate. They rushed out of the apartment without having the time to eat breakfast. It was lucky that they had fallen asleep in their ordinary clothes and did not have to run NERV HQ in their night garments. They arrived at the briefing room just in time to see Asuka scream at another security guard and then enter the briefing room. They ran inside to join the others.

Fifteen minutes later, two of the three Eva units stood on ground level and watched the angel getting closer and closer. It was called Matriel. It was a large, oval body with four long, thin legs protruding directly from it, its black colour gleaming slightly in the weak morning sunlight. It tilted its body with the underside pointing towards them. Matriel's nine, round, orange eyes fixating the Eva units. It started moving towards them slowly, the body hanging mere metres over the ground. Shinji and Asuka waited. They were ordered not to engage in combat with it, Rei should use the Lance of Longinus to ensure a quick victory. The angel was only a few hundred metres from the Eva units when Ayanami Rei ascended from Central Dogma with the Lance of Longinus in her Eva's hands. Shinji blinked at her image in the comm. frames. She smiled and blinked back at him. Shinji did not doubt that they could take the angel out. They were heavily armed for this mission and they had many spare magazines or energy cells for the weaponry. Asuka's Eva unit carried two weapons except her progressive knife. A huge axe and a bazooka fitting the Eva. Asuka smiled while eyeing her weapons. Shinji's unit 01 carried his progressive knife, a rifle and a handgun in a waist-holster. He wondered how the handgun felt firing. Rei walked out in the weak sunlight, revealing what equipment she had. Her progressive knife of course and a huge laser sniper rifle hung in a chain over her back. She also held the Lance of Longinus in a firm grip. She focused on her task at hand; getting them all to the parallel dimension of the angels. She motioned for the others to be prepared and started measuring distance, velocity and other data needed. Once done, she threw the Lance with all of her Eva's might. The spear went clean through Matriel without even being hindered by the AT field. As the angel died, the AT field instantly imploded and the Lance disappeared into the portal that the imploding AT field had opened. 2.79 seconds later, the Eva units also disappeared into the portal between the dimensions. The portal closed exactly 3.5 seconds after it had opened.

Ikari Gendo looked at the big screen in the control room of NERV. He turned to Fuyutsuki and looked a bit embarrassed.

"Fuyutsuki, do you know how the hell are we supposed to get them out of there?" Fuyutsuki smacked a hand over his face and he groaned over the commanders' stupidity.

The portal seemed to be a long tunnel of rainbow coloured lights that stretched long into the horizon. The three Eva units and their pilots were hurled around in the tunnel like feathers in a maelstrom. After what seemed like an eternity, the tunnel got an end. A white light shone at them brighter and brighter until it filled their view and it felt like they were blind. Then the carpet of white lifted and they looked out over the world of the angels. They had landed on a hill-like mountain, looking somewhat like one just outside the city Tokyo-3. The grass stretched in every direction as far as they could see. Objects seemed to move in the tropical heat that made the air tremble and create optical movement illusions. All in all, the environment looked like the one in the outskirts of Tokyo-3. The Lance of Longinus sat buried in the hillside a few hundred metres from the place where the Eva units lay in a heap. In her unit, Asuka lay a few metres away from the other two on her back, she had held on to her weapons as hard as she could, and she held them up in the air, shaking them triumphantly. Shinji in his unit lay on his back on the ground with Rei's unit on top of him. Rei crawled off him and stated relieved that all of their weapons had followed through the portal with them and remained intact. They all stirred on the ground and got up. They looked around and Rei walked over to pick her Lance up. Shinji swung the rifle onto his back and pulled out his handgun. He inserted a clip and cocked a bullet. Asuka put her bazooka on her back and swung the axe a few trying times through the air. She nodded approvingly and looked at Rei who struggled to get the Lance out of the ground. She succeeded and stabbed in the air with it a few times to get rid of most of the dirt clinging to the blades. Then she started doing a complex kata with the Lance as a usual pole arm, swinging it masterfully and graciously. Shinji's and Asuka's jaws hit the ground with enough power to get measured on the Richter scale. On a dangerously high level. Rei opened a comm. link and smiled sheepishly while cocking her head and scratching the back of it.

"I only followed a pre-programmed kata to see whether the system functioned well or not. If I could do that sort of things, I would not have needed to be saved that time a long time ago." Asuka looked at Rei through the comm. link.

"What do you mean be saved?" Rei looked at Shinji who nodded.

"Tell her the story in short then." And Rei thought back at the time when she was attacked.

"It was during a jogging session six months ago. Shinji-kun and I had sat down to catch our breaths on a park bench when I was taken away by some thugs. Shinji-kun was knocked unconscious with a blunt instrument. When the thugs attacked me, I thought my last moment was there, they had carried me to an abandoned subway station. Then, Shinji-kun arrived and saved me." Shinji nodded in approval, thinking she was done.

"He was so heroic; he risked his own life to save me. He smashed the first one into a wall and kicked him. Then he beat up the other two quickly, and the last one he talked to. He said: 'If any of you ever lay your hands on my love, Rei, I will defend her with my life and slay you vile brutes who dares threaten her.' And then he disposed of the last one by driving the thugs' face into the floor with such power, such strength." She sighed at the slightly altered memory. Shinji sighed.

"Well, that's pretty much it." Shinji said to Asuka who stared at Shinji with disbelief. "Except for the speech." Shinji added, murmuring so low that only Asuka heard it. Then he walked forward and took the lead.

"Stay close, and stay sharp here." He looked at Rei in the small comm. link window. She was still daydreaming.

"That goes for you too, sweetie!" Rei jerked and was awakened from her daydreaming. She muttered something about that she was 'going to show Shinji-kun' something when they got home. Shinji ignored this and started walking. He glanced at the numbers showing how much battery time he had left. Under his time were also Asuka's and Rei's numbers. He looked again. He blinked. He looked a third time. He blinked. The box showing his time read:

'245hours23minutes38seconds'

The other ones times read similar numbers.

'He wasn't kidding when he said that we didn't need to worry about the battery time.' Shinji thought with a bit of admiration. It was pretty impressing to be able to expand the battery time from five minutes to more than one hundred days. They started walking down from the hill and kept walking when they reached the base.