I do not own Neon Genesis Evangelion or the rights to anything associated with it. Gainax created this world, I just play in it.
I do however own any and all original characters that appear within this story.
Long Way Home
Chapter Two:
Shinji Ikari yawned widely as he slid open the balcony door of his apartment and stepped out into the morning sun, a steaming cup of tea in his hand. He regarded the view as the sun illuminated the skyline of the city of Toronto, several miles distant. Meeting the day in quiet contemplation was part of his daily ritual, one that reminded him of just how far he had come, both geographically as well as mentally, in the last five years.
The memories of his past didn't haunt him anymore, thanks to four years of psychotherapy, and he found himself able to review them without going to pieces. There were moments when the memories of the painful past came unbidden to his mind, still painful just by their mere presence, but they no longer controlled him and sent him into a mental tailspin. That was a good thing because today was a day that he knew he would spend in reflection of his past. Today was the fifth anniversary of the day he and Asuka had fought and killed the mass production Eva's and averted Third Impact. It was also the anniversary of the last time he saw Misato.
Every time he thought about it, he could still feel her lips on his and could still hear her words as clearly as if it had just happened. It was at that most desperate moment in time that he had felt his long downward spiral stop and begin to reverse directions. He knew why she had done it, but he didn't care that it was a tactic to get him to keep up the fight.
The fact of the matter was that he had felt love and care in that kiss and his splintering mind had decided to hang onto it for all it was worth. He had been looking for that feeling for most of his young life. He liked that feeling and wanted more of it. He was desperate for it, so desperate that he was willing to commit what little sanity he had left to it, taking a chance that there was something real there.
His therapist had told him that it was just a survival mechanism kicking in, his subconscious mind taking over to try and make him fight and survive instead of fleeing into a dark abyss that would swallow him whole. He preferred to think of it as being saved by the love of another. It sounded more romantic that way.
Either way, he had decided right then that he would take the chance to live and he wanted Misato to live too. So when she pushed him into the elevator he hung onto her jacket and pulled her in after him. He held her tightly and cried an apology to her for pushing her away, for being such a coward that he had been ready to let the soldiers kill him without so much as a word of protest. She smiled and told him that if he wanted her forgiveness he would have to keep on living. He promised her that he would.
When the elevator had reached the Eva cages he found one of the massive first aid kits that were always on hand and with his limited knowledge he did the best he could to treat her wound and try to contain the bleeding. He made sure that she had decent cover if the soldiers broke into the cages and made sure she had her gun.
As he went to leave she stopped him and gave him her bloodstained, silver cross. "For luck," she had said. "Because I made you a promise and you made me a promise."
He knew from the sounds of combat coming from the direction of the command bridge that he wasn't going to be able to count on any help from them in getting Unit 01 launched. He could hear the reports of the battle going on above him in the GeoFront coming over the PA system and he knew that Asuka needed his help, even if all she was currently doing was cursing him for not being there to do so. He suddenly realised just how sick he was of her constant bitching and whining, but he knew he had to help her. Somehow he had to get his Eva into the fight.
And so there he stood, with Misato's bloody cross clenched in his left hand and a renewed sense of purpose in his mind, staring at his Eva which was still encased in hardened Bakelite and wondering just how in the bloody hell he was going to get it out. Even if the people on the bridge could do anything on their end it would still take far too long to melt the hardened material away. As if sensing his despair, Unit 01 began to move on its own, breaking out of its makeshift prison. Apparently his mom was a romantic and had a sense of dramatic timing.
When he sealed himself inside the entry plug and synched with the Eva it was very different than any other time had been. He felt like he was the Eva, not just synched with it. He spread his AT Field and used it to cut his way through Central Dogma and to the surface of the GeoFront. Unit 01 rose out of the ground, creating a roaring wind that filled the air with debris, its eyes glowing and a set of fiery golden wings spreading from its back.
All who saw it, including Asuka, thought it looked like a demon rising out of the depths of hell. That didn't stop her however from screaming at him at the top of her lungs as she finished off the last MP Eva and her batteries ran out. The last thing she heard before her Eva went silent was the uncharacteristically angry voice of the Third Child yelling at her, telling her that "it would be nice if for once in your life you would stop whining and just shut the fuck up!" Shocked at his vehement outburst, she did just that.
The appearance of Unit 01 was what the mass production units were waiting for and as they revived they flocked towards the purple behemoth, leaving Asuka alone. With no weapons other than it's hands, Shinji and Unit 01 attacked the white Eva's and began tearing them apart. He ripped them to shreds, crushing their dummy plugs and their cores.
As he shredded the fourth one he sensed, more than saw an object speeding towards him from above. The Lance of Longinus was returning from it's lunar exile. He rose up to meet it and caught the powerful weapon, using it to dispatch the rest of his enemies. It was the last thing he remembered until he woke up in a hospital four days later.
Three days after he awoke he saw a list of the names of the dead from the attack against NERV and he found Misato's name on it. It devastated him, stripping him of the tiny little shred of newfound hope that he had gained and making his heart feel like a burned out shell. He had spent those three days waiting for her and trying to figure out what he was going to say to her, how to tell her what he felt for her. But it was too late, she was gone.
He had tried to run away from the hospital but he was stopped from doing so by Asuka of all people. They caused a huge scene, screaming and yelling at each other and actually coming to blows before they were separated. It wasn't long after that incident that they became almost inseparable. They entered therapy together, they went back to school together, they lived together, and they engaged in a frenzied, physical relationship together.
Three and a half years later, they finally saw that they couldn't continue their relationship as it was. The sex had been scorching and it had given both of them what they needed at the time, a closeness like neither had ever known and an escape from the loneliness of the past, but they couldn't sustain any kind of a more meaningful relationship on it alone. They had both changed a great deal and they parted as friends, knowing that was likely all they would ever really be. Asuka went back to Germany, feeling the need to get away from Japan, at least for a while.
Shinji stayed, but it wasn't long before he began to feel that he needed to leave as well. Money wouldn't be a problem since his father had actually left him a sizeable amount of it. He didn't even care anymore that it was probably embezzled from the UN and he didn't take the time to wonder why his father would have bothered to leave it to him in the first place. He was also receiving a pension for life from the government just as all of the other survivors of the attack on NERV were. The government had been horribly shamed by the way it had been manipulated by SEELE and sought to make amends any way they could. Between the two sums he could comfortably live off of the interest alone. Evidently, suffering did have a price.
He had paid it, sure enough.
The final decision to leave the country was made for him when he woke up late the morning after his eighteenth birthday in the bed of Maya Ibuki, hung over and with a naked Maya on one side of him and an equally bare Ritsuko Akagi on the other. Personally, he had come a long way in four years, but he realized that if he didn't get out of Japan soon he was risking spending the rest of his life in a pattern of self destructive behaviour. It had been a wild and fun night though, with alcohol, nostalgia, and a reason to celebrate leading them there and he found that he didn't regret a moment of it, none of them did. A shared journey through hell had served to bond them together, giving them a certain closeness that only those who had been through it themselves could ever truly understand.
But while he was tempted to stay and drink and have steamy sex with Maya and Ritsuko until they all wore themselves out in an effort to exorcise their demons and forget about the hell they had all been through, he knew that he couldn't. Like him, they were just trying to get along any way they could and put the horrors of the past behind them. It hadn't worked with Asuka and it wouldn't work with them either. He couldn't allow himself to get caught in that trap because he would just be substituting a new type of behaviour for his old one. It would become a crutch to him just like Misato's behaviour had been hers.
As he had with Asuka, he parted from Maya and Ritsuko as a friend. They understood his need to find his own way somewhere else, and there were no hard feelings among them. A few days later Shinji packed a few belongings and hopped on the first available flight he could find when he got to the airport. It was a flight to Vancouver. He hadn't cared where it was going, just so long as it took him away from Japan.
He stayed there for a few weeks but eventually moved on to Toronto, again by taking the first flight he could get, where he had settled into his current residence. Vancouver was nice but had still been too close to Japan for him and the large Japanese community reminded him too much of home. He knew he was just running away again in a sense, but he needed to make a fresh start and as soon as he stepped off the plane in Toronto he knew that he had run far enough. Somehow it just felt right. He needed to prove to himself, if no one else, that he could stand on his own and live on his own, under his terms. So far, he was doing that and he was happy.
He had made some friends who knew him by the name Shinji Kusanagi. It was his own little inside joke since he seemed to have a thing for women with purple hair. It hadn't really been necessary for him to change his name, especially since his father had been officially portrayed as a hero who fought against SEELE and their plans to destroy humanity. Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki had arranged it that way so that anyone who had been associated with the commander wouldn't have to live with the stigma and possible repercussions that being linked with the bastard and his misdeeds might bring. The name change was just a tool to help him start fresh.
He was a student at a small college near his apartment where he studied art and honed his cooking skills. During his psychological therapy back home he had discovered a talent for drawing things, especially people. He was good at it, he enjoyed it, and it relaxed him. He was also prolific. He had several sketch books full of creative portraits of his friends and many of them were of Misato. Not that he ever could, but it was his way of making sure that he never forgot her face.
He kept in contact with Asuka, Maya and Ritsuko through email or phone calls on a weekly basis, and Touji and Kensuke every couple of weeks. He was making a new life for himself and he was content with it. He was finally learning to like himself and to take life from a more simplistic point of view. Maybe someday he would find himself back in Japan, but for now he would take his life one day at a time and see where it led him.
He walked back into the apartment and set his empty cup in the sink and headed towards the shower. As he did every morning he stopped at his computer desk and regarded the photos hanging on the wall above it. There were a number of pictures of him with his friends Touji and Kensuke, but the focal point of the collection were photos of his friends from NERV. There was a spontaneous group shot from one of Misato's parties that had him in the centre and looking rather embarrassed, surrounded by Misato, Rei, Asuka, Ritsuko and Maya. Misato had liked to tease him about it by referring to it as 'Shinji and his harem'.
Beneath that photo were portrait shots of his three favourite people in the world. On the left side was a picture of Rei. No one knew what had happened to her after the attack, not even Ritsuko who had been the last one to see her. Ritsuko had gone down to Terminal Dogma to try to stop his father from starting his own version of Third Impact and he had shot her. Luckily for her, Rei had interfered and thrown off his aim, the bullet striking her in the shoulder instead of the heart. When Gendo attempted to finish the job, Rei used her AT field to knock him away. He was propelled head first into a wall and died of massive head trauma. After making sure that Ritsuko wasn't going to bleed to death, Rei simply turned and left, never saying a word. Ritsuko still wondered why Rei would bother to save her life after everything she had done to her. It was something that still left her with deep feelings of guilt.
The picture on the right side of the arrangement was of Asuka and it had been taken shortly before she left for Germany. She truly looked happy and her blue eyes sparkled with life. She had insisted on signing it for him. "To my favourite baka, Love Asuka." He always got a chuckle out of it every time he looked at it.
The picture in the centre was of Misato. The camera had captured her mischievous nature and she looked so happy. Her eyes sparkled with life and she looked gorgeous. Every time he looked at it he realized just how much he missed her and how much he really did love her. It was the same feeling he got every time he fondled her silver cross that he wore around his neck.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts and headed for the shower. If he spent any more time reminiscing, he was going to be late for class. Later tonight he would raise a glass or two in salute to them all on this day that was so important in all of their lives.
Hayashida Institute: Six Weeks Later
Misato sat on the bed looking out of her window, watching the rain fall. The day fit her mood perfectly, it was grey and dismal, and quite frankly she felt like she was drowning. Her slouched posture as she leaned against the window frame spoke of a defeated and broken soul.
Medically speaking, she was feeling a little better. She still had some bad days, but they were succeeding in flushing the drugs from her body and she was able to think a little more clearly. Sleep was still proving to be troublesome and the constant nightmares were still taking their toll, but the doctors were now able to give her mild sedatives to help her get at least a little bit of uninterrupted sleep. Her ability to eat and keep it down was improving, but her will to seek it out was waning. While her body was on the way to a slow recovery, she was rapidly falling deeper and deeper into depression and despair.
Her single sustaining hope, the one thing that had kept her going, was the hope that Shinji would come for her, but as the days slowly wore on she was losing that hope. In her worst moments she would break down in tears of mourning, positive that he must have died a horrible death out in the GeoFront, broken and alone because she had pushed him out there to fight. She had begun to wonder if it wouldn't have been better for them both if she had just held him in her arms and let the soldiers find them and kill them. At least they would have died together, their torment at an end, both of them in the arms of someone who truly cared about them.
To her, even worse than imagining that he was dead, she would imagine that he was alive but was so completely disgusted by the way she had lived her life that he had abandoned her. She would then get angry with herself, her Shinji wouldn't do that to her. Despite his problems he wouldn't just throw her away like that, it wasn't in his nature. She didn't want to believe that it could be even remotely possible, but it was getting harder not to. Despair had a way of twisting one's perceptions that way, and after suffering one of these episodes she would end up inconsolable until she cried herself to sleep, only to have another nightmare come calling.
She was trying to do what she had always done, she was trying to fight, but it was so hard and she was tired and she knew that she was losing. She tried to hold on to her hope by once again imagining what it would be like to see Shinji speeding up the long driveway and screeching to a tire smoking halt in front of the building. He would then come running in to find her, rushing into her room and sweeping her up in his embrace, holding her tight and letting her feel his warmth. She imagined him kissing her, giving back to her all of the emotion that she had given to him when she kissed him after she had been shot. He would pick her up and carry her away, telling her that everything was going to be okay.
"Who am I kidding," she whispered in a shaking voice. "I'll never be anything more than a filthy, drunken slut that nobody wants and who could never deal with her problems. What I want from him, I don't deserve. He should have just left me to die."
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the cool glass, letting her mind wander off to wherever it wanted to go. She didn't have the strength or resolve to give it a direction. She had nothing left. With burning tears rolling down her cheeks, she let the sound of the rain sweep her away.
Dr. Yoshida's Office:
He felt like he was fighting a losing battle and it disturbed him a great deal. Misato was losing her will to keep going, the nightmares and her fears sapping what little strength she had. It seemed that the key to pulling her out of it and starting her recovery was Shinji. He was no closer to knowing who he was now than he had been six weeks ago. His friend at the police department had hit an organizational brick wall.
His queries had alerted someone in the government, who had spoken to the Chief of Police, who had passed an order down the line to stop any and all queries about NERV personnel. Yoshida then went to the Prime Minister's office to seek answers and was given a lecture on how sensitive the subject of NERV was and that he should forget about any further inquiries. He tried to get across to the Prime Minister how important it was to find out who Shinji was and to try and contact him, but he found that he was speaking to deaf ears. Politics and image seemed to be more important to the Prime Minister than the life of the woman under his care.
He had tried asking Misato about Shinji, attempting to get her to tell him who he was, but every time he did so she got very defensive and protective and refused to answer. She wouldn't even tell him what his role had been at NERV, or hers for that matter. At first he began to suspect that maybe Shinji wasn't even a real person, but after a few sessions with her he determined that she wasn't just fixating on something imaginary in order to give herself hope.
Shinji, whoever he was, had to be a real person and clearly he meant a great deal to her. She was desperate to see him, to know that he was alive and that he hadn't left her behind. Every time he visited her he could see her heart breaking more and more. Soon there wouldn't be anything left of her heart to break.
He sighed heavily as he got up from his desk and went to the window, letting the sound of the rain calm his mind and take away some of the strain. There had to be another way to get the information he needed. Since trying to get it through the front door hadn't worked, maybe he could find a back door that would get him what he needed. The question was, where was that back door.
He closed his eyes and listened to the rain for a while. Soon his mind began to formulate an idea as to how and where to seek the information he required. He smiled as a name came to him, the name of someone he knew he could trust and who he knew would not be afraid to dig for the information. It was a fellow professor from the university, Matsuo Inaba.
Inaba was a journalism professor and some of his more recent lectures dealt with how organizations like SEELE, NERV, and the government had manipulated the media, and thus the public, during the years between Second Impact and the attempt at Third Impact. He had been a thorn in the side of all three organizations during the Angel attacks and he had received more than a few threats during that time for his trouble. If anybody would be able to dig up the information he needed, or at least point him in the right direction, it would be Inaba.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was time for another visit with Misato. Inaba would be teaching a class right now anyway, so he would call him when he returned to his office. Hopefully he could catch a lucky break get the information he needed to try and help her.
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