Rei stared with an empty gaze at the blood on the mirror slowly dripping down into the sink, she slowly turned around and slumped down on her knees. Shinji stared at Rei, an equally empty gaze in his eyes as he clutched his left hand. The very hand that had combed her hair until he had dropped the comb. Asuka pushed the door open and stared at the scene before her. The mirror and sink was full of blood and a few pieces of shattered bone. Rei was slumped down on the floor, and Shinji clutched his left hand. She looked at the mirror that had the spider-web of cracks in it. She then stared at Rei and Shinji again. At the unharmed Rei, and at the bleeding Shinji.
The one factor that saved Rei's life was that Asuka had shivered slightly, making the laser dot shine into Shinji's eyes. He had then immediately lashed forward, gripping the gun barrel and yanking it upwards as the shot went off. The bullet had ripped through his hand, tearing a gaping hole in it and splattering the blood and bone everywhere.
Shinji dropped heavily to his knees and looked at Rei, confirming to himself that she was okay, before blacking out. The last thing he saw was Rei snapping out of the trance and flooring Asuka with a punch in the face, then kneeling speechlessly beside Shinji. He also saw Misato rush to the phone. The thing he lastly thought was;
'Misato-san, always the soldier, never asking why or what…'
White, sterile white. That was all he saw as he woke up. He noticed the cutting pain in the eyes caused by the naked light bulb in the ceiling. He noticed the feeling of the hospital gowns against his body. He noticed the immense pain in his hand and the feeling of a burden on his chest. Even though he did not know what it was, he decided it was feeling good, leaving it at that. Shinji closed his eyes again and slowly drifted away towards unconsciousness. But, despite his tired and wearied looks, he was not permitted any further rest by Ritsuko, who by pressing a button behind the one-way window increased the light emitted from the light bulb, thus making it impossible to sleep, let alone look without covering your eyes.
"I get it, I get it…" Shinji groaned in unison with the person lying on his chest. Shinji's brain and body came to a screeching halt. He sat up. He looked down on his chest. Tearstained gown. Blue hair. Pale face. Red eyes gazing up on him. Shinji sighed and fainted.
When he woke up again, the room was at an inhabitable brightness level. He looked at his chest. No Rei. Shinji fainted. The last thing he heard was a series of curses thrown in between sighs.
When he woke up again, Rei grabbed his eyelids and held them open.
"Quit fainting already!" Shinji blinked and looked at the right hand that held his now watering left eye open. The knuckles were blue-beaten and some seemed to have dislocated and later been abruptly put back into place. This made Shinji worry slightly over Asuka's health-condition.
"You didn't beat her too rough, did youuuor maybe you did….." Shinji's voice dropped to supersonic apologies as he saw the glance Rei gave him at the mentioning of Asuka's name.
"She's not dead…" Rei stated, colder than Pen-Pen in a tub of solid ice at the South Pole (if it still had existed that is). The glare almost made Shinji go hypothermic.
"That's good…isn't it…?" Rei glared again and Shinji's voice dropped to a bat conversation level.
As the doctors and technicians looked over the childrens' synchronisation charts, they noticed something incredibly odd.
"Langley Soryu, we have some questions we need answered."
"I know what you want to know." Asuka spit on the floor.
"We believe we know why these rash actions occurred."
"Oh, do you really? Please, do fill me in on the matter in which I apparently have no experience." The doctors, slightly taken aback by the girls' advanced use of words continued in a slightly cautious tone.
"Your synchronisation charts showed a significant drop in all aspects. Synchronisation with Unit 02 as well a mental stability have decreased to a mere 12." Asuka spit on the floor as the doctors ranted on about their precious charts. She abruptly cut them off.
"Shut up…I'll tell you why I did what I did." The doctors simultaneously picked up their portable voice recorders and started them up.
"Ever since the idiot and wondergirl came back from that freaking vacation with the major, they started getting closer and closer. I started to feel a bit rejected. As we went in to the other dimension, wondergirl started ranting about how the idiot had saved her from some thugs actually, I bet he never would have done that for me, that coward. Anyway, when we came back it got worse. They actually stopped seeing me as often as usual. I guess what had pushed me over the edge was the fact that the idiot was mine. My own! I can't let that, pale-skinned, -red-eyed freak steal MY baka-Shinji away from me! He's mine, I won't let him run away with that slut! He's all mine! Gott im Himmel! Er ist mein! Mein und mein allein! (God in heaven! He is mine! Mine and mine alone!)" As Asuka started screaming uncontrollable in the hearing room, the doctors and security guards rushed in and sedated her.
Shinji looked sad at the bandaged remains of his left hand. They had told him that once the remains had healed up, they would replace the missing fingers with artificial ones, but Shinji never had liked the idea of artificial limbs. He thought of it as a way of making the human body worth less and less the more you could replace. In the end, he thought, there would only be brains with artificial bodies. He sighed. Rei looked at him questioningly.
"Why are you so sad about having your limb repaired, Shinji-kun?" Shinji smiled weakly and explained his thoughts. Rei frowned.
"You might be right, it is most unsettling." Then she averted her eyes and stared at the ceiling for quite a while before standing up from the chair.
"I think I shall head to the cafeteria, do you require anything, Shinji-kun?" Shinji shook his head and let out a deep breath. He fell asleep as soon as the door clicked shut. When he woke up, he was someplace else.
The cold steel of the operating table made him feel tense as he bent his back, trying to get as little of him as possible to touch the steel. Someone held his left hand, he noticed.
"I am sorry, Shinji-kun. They told me to do this in order to make you relax." Before Shinji answered, he noticed the strange feeling in his left hand. He had five fingers again. He fainted.
Shinji was let out of the hospital a few days later, sad, but alive and healthy. He was sad because of Asuka's sentence. She had been put in a cell deep down in the NERV complex with the sentence of five years for attempted murder and assault on a fellow pilot. However, it would soon seem as if she would not have to sit the sentence out.
Keel Lorenz put the tips of his fingers together and smiled to the other holographic representations.
"Our plan falls into place."
"Even without Tabris…"
"The plan will commence…" The others followed.
Shinji had not even gotten to hear one word from either Asuka or the doctors taking care of her. Rei however, looked like a million bucks knowing that she had inherited an infinite amount of cash from someone she never heard of, at the sound of Asuka's sentence. It was clear that the relationship between the girls were not the one labelled "being on the best of terms".
Rei helped Shinji get on the couch as soon as they got home. Rei had to literally pry Misato off Shinji, since she almost crushed his hand while hugging him. However, the calm did not last even an hour before hell broke loose.
"It's quiet, Fuyutsuki…too quiet…"
A series of explosions shook the complex, flickering the lights and making them go out. As the electro-magnetic effects of the N2 bombs wore off, the lights flickered and became alive again. The NERV headquarters were a chaotic mess. Furniture, people, bodies and computers lay everywhere, littering the floors. Gendo heaved himself off the floor as worthy as he could after being knocked down by the blast and hit the big, red button on the side of his desk. A blaring alarm kicked in and lit the evacuation signs as well as the signs for level one emergency preparations. The desk in Gendo's office showed more of monitors and keyboards than the actual wood the desk was made of. All of the monitors were a fiery red with big, black letters spelling out the four worst words Gendo knew. EMERGENCY! ENEMY UNITS INBOUND! He clicked past the warnings and got up a window showing the status of the Geofront. He cursed as he brought up the video uplink showing the big hole in the surface, leading the SEELE troops down into the Geofront.
Shinji was shook out of the couch by the blasts and reacted just in time to catch Rei falling from said couch. They got up and ran over to the windows, the smoke rose from the area they knew belonged to the NERV agency. A small red dot popped up on Shinji's watch, and the text beside it that popped up spelled; REPORT – NERV. A similar message popped up on Rei's watch. They ran over to the weapons cabinet and typed in the ten-digit access code. Shinji relaxed a bit as he grabbed his Walther P99 and checked the clip. He looked and saw Rei do a similar check on her Enfield revolver. They grabbed the rest of the armament and rushed out the door, just in time to miss seeing the steel sills lower themselves over the windows.
Asuka cursed and glared at the smoke in the distance, grabbing her Luger off the bed and snatching the other things as well as her overcoat as she ran out the door. She promised herself; if she survived the near future, she would never return to "that dump" as she referred to Rei's old apartment as.
Gendo cursed even more as he saw the gash on his hand he had received as he got his big, ornate chair over him. Koso stood next to him and treated his own gash on his upper left arm. This was not received by the chair however, but by a flying glass splinter from a nearby computer he had passed while walking to the office before the attack. Gendo did not treat his wound; he let the blood drip down onto the keyboard closest to him as he stared in vain on the screen showing different sectors of the base being taken over by the SEELE forces. Then he smiled and pushed a bloodied button. The video feed from the recently taken over areas disappeared and was replaced by static. Koso smiled. That trick had been used before, and had worked just as well the previous times. As the video feeds came back online, all that could be seen were dead bodies.
"There's another one!" A series of gunfiring was heard and the falling of bodies next. Maya, Ritsuko, Makoto and Shigeru crouched under the tables and desks in the Central Operations Room of NERV, dodging bullet after bullet while trying to re-activate the intercom system for where they were.
"They're like cockroaches crossed with ants!"
"What are you talking about?!"
"They're stubborn bastards that come in numbers!"
"Shut up!" Ritsuko clutched her left shoulder in an attempt to stop the blood flow.
"Are you alright, Akagi-sensei?" Maya's voice was barely audible through the gun firing that commenced as soon as a SEELE trooper came in sight.
"I'm fine, lieutenant…" The explosions shook the room and silenced the enemy gunfire effectively. Ritsuko looked at the mess around them. Two scientists lay dead, she was wounded along with Shigeru, and Makoto was the only one having bullets left in the gun. Suddenly, Makoto shouted eagerly.
"It's nobody left down there!" Ritsuko let out a deep breath.
"Finally, a breather…"
"I see you used the trick I showed you so long ago…" Gendo grinned and pressed the button repeatedly. For every time he pushed the button, static covered the monitors and muffled explosions were heard. Koso smiled as he watched screen after screen show more and more dead bodies. Until the enemy figured the trick out.
Shinji stared in disbelief at the twenty SEELE troops that stood around him and Rei.how they had been able to pop out seemingly of nowhere, Shinji could just not understand. Neither could he understand why the left sides of the heads of the SEELE soldiers suddenly burst open in a cascade of fire, blood and brain substances. However, an explanation was soon given throughout the intercom system.
"SHINJI!!! CAN YOU HEAR ME?!!!" Shinji and Rei and practically everyone alive in the complex cringed at the exaggeratedly loud sound coming from the battered speakers.
"HOW THE HELL…oh, so that's the volume button, thank you Fuyutsuki. Now then, onto business. Shinji, get to unit 01 and move out. Ayanami, you do the same and follow Shinji's lead, understood? What do you mean they can't answer, Fuyutsuki? Any way, move out. Oh, and by the way. The death of the soldiers were caused by a small trick I…alright, Fuyutsuki, invented. By the time we were trusted by SEELE, we made them some special hands-frees for their communications systems. Inside, there is a surprise, when I push a button, the hands-frees explode!" A series of mad-woman cackling was heard before some kind soul blew up the power station. The last thing heard besides the laughter was the muffled sound of Gendo and Koso fighting over the intercom systems' microphone. Shinji sighed and started off to the Evangelion cages, dragging the shivering Rei behind him. Despite all the fighting she had done, she never was on good terms with seeing blood and injuries, especially not severe head-traumas such as these where the brain spills out on the floors and walls. The following person however, liked the new colour of the walls. Asuka liked to call it "hint of brain."