Disclaimer: I don't own NGE.
Author's Note: The longest chapter yet, and probably the one that starts to make sense of the whole shebang.
CHAPTER iv: THE INTERLUDE OF GAUF; A FILM NOIR ROMANCE
"And what can I do you for, eh?"
Ikari looked up from the spot of wood on the bar. "Oh, nothing." He said politely. "I don't drink—unless, if it wouldn't be too much trouble…" The bartender leaned in. "Do you have any tea?"
"Certainly. It'll be out soon—would you rather sit at a table to drink it?"
"No, this is fine—unless you'd rather I was—?"
The man put his hands up. "Hey, makes no difference to me man. You can stay."
"Thank you."
He sat motionless for awhile; customers idly making harmless conversation around him. Old men exchanged stories and knowing looks with other old men. Singles entered and couples staggered out. A man with a ponytail stepped inside, scruff on his chin scratching the palm of his hand as he surveyed the room. In the far corner, a tall, elderly man drank warm sake by himself, taking up the whole booth. Three off-duty NERV uniforms shared rounds of western beer in a booth off to the side, laughing to themselves, chuckling to others. A player piano in the corner babbled out a half-composed, disjoint melody, but was barely audible beneath the din of the atmosphere. The sound of a viola floated above the din, wafting bittersweet emotion through the air.
The bartender set the tea down on the counter. "There ya are, kid."
He fumbled with his wallet. "How much do I… um, owe?" His voice was quiet. The bar was very loud.
"Just leave a fiver on the counter when you leave. Tea's on the house."
"I wouldn't want—"
"Hey," The bartender waved his hand. "Don't worry 'bout it."
He turned his back and apparently stopped paying attention.
"T-thank you." Ikari slid the wallet back into a pocket of his pleated pants.
He sipped the tea for awhile. The ponytail sat down across the table from the lonely, sake drinking elder. A NERV uniform laughed so hard he fell out of the booth. His mate dragged him back onto the bench and collapsed against him in hysterics.
A brunette entered the bar.
"Ikari," Her voice was very soft.
Ikari rotated on his seat to face her. The smoke at the ceiling dimmed the lights that played shadows across her face. She wasn't smiling. She wasn't frowning, but she wasn't smiling.
Somebody in the NERV uniform booth burped loudly and the other two erupted in laughter.
"Hik—yes."
The ponytail in the corner of the room beckoned to a particularly buxom waitress. She excused herself as she slid between Ikari and the brunette, violet strands of hair filtering through the vision of both.
Ikari broke the silence. "Oh—sorry—have a seat."
"Thank you." She bowed out of politeness, and set her small purse on the table. The ponytail in the corner hit on the waitress as he ordered a drink. She leaned over a little more to offer him a better view. The old man just chuckled and sipped his sake.
The piano aimlessly tinkered on. It drowned out the solo viola player, whose eyes lit with frustration. The melancholy eventually became obtuse background noise.
Ikari didn't know what to say.
"Shin—"
"Hikari," he unintentionally cut her off. He inwardly winced. "Hikari, I—we can't go on like this."
One of the NERV uniforms picked up a glass full of beer and started to gulp it down. The rest of the table started to chant something, but the rest of the bar's noise drowned them out.
"I…" Hikari looked down at the purse in her lap. "I think that's best, too." She bit her lip.
Shinji felt sad. He didn't know the reason behind the emotion, since he wasn't even hurting anyone in doing this. The only person he was really injuring was himself. He couldn't grasp why this all felt so… depressing.
He sipped a little bit of his drink. He swallowed a tea leaf. All the while, his willed his eyes not to leave Hikari's. She was almost in tears, now.
"Do you understand why?" he whispered. He knew she heard him, though.
She nodded, bringing a hand up to her left eye to rub it, pretending that something had gotten into it.
"Do you?"
She broke down. Her body shook as she covered her face with her hands. She opened her mouth to speak, but could only force out faint gasps for air.
"No." she whispered, in between sobs. "N-no…" Tears streaked down her cheeks.
Shinji frowned. Why did he do this? Why did he do this to himself?
He waited for her to calm down before he spoke. She rested a hand on the table, and he sought it out with his own. She grappled onto it like a lifeline. Her lip was bleeding, now.
"Hikari, you're—" he cut himself off, trying to figure out a way to word this. "You aren't real, Hikari." It was a start.
Her eyes grew wide.
He sighed. He felt sick.
"W-what?"
"Just listen." He took a breath. The piano in the corner stopped playing. The tall, elderly man who drank sake suddenly sat behind it and made the keys work. He played a piece originally written for the harpsichord. The viola accompanied.
"You are a mental image," he started, "You're a construct of my own pathetic little mind. You—I created you out of… out of…" he looked down at the table. "You don't really exist, Hikari. You're the product of my imagination. I made you so I wouldn't have to feel so lonely." He bit his lip. He felt very sick.
She blinked in surprise. He slumped in defeat.
The elderly man's fingers tap danced across the keyboard. The girl's strings echoed with melancholy. Nobody heard them.
"Did… did it work?"
"What?"
"Did I make you feel… less lonely?" Her speech was slow and sad, accompanied by the viola in the background.
He cringed. "…No. It felt great, since—since it felt like it was real. But deep down, I knew that it was all fake. I knew that you weren't real. I'm… I'm sorry, Hikari. I really am." She sniffled, but managed to hold her composure.
He stood up. It was time to destroy this place.
"Shinji, you won't forget about me, will you?"
He smiled. "Of course not," He said.
And the walls collapsed in on themselves, and everything dissolved into nothingness.
---
The darkened stage was illuminated only by the blaring red EXIT sign who echoed its tiny laughter into the emptiness of the solitary room. Shinji found himself standing alone in the expanse of center stage, where all the lights had long since gone out. The curtain was drawn wide open like the jaw of a dead beast, exposing the innards of the dramatic device. All of the beady little dead eyes stared out of the cameras like little doll playthings.
Shinji took a breath and approached the door, opening it, falling forward into the blank space beyond, only to find himself—
---------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER iv: THE INTERLUDE OF GAUF; A FILM NOIR SPY STORY
The pistol always felt a little too heavy in the palm of his hand. It was better suited to a soldier, or a cop. He was neither. He was a victim of circumstance. He was on a crusade for the truth. Crusaders shouldn't need pistols.
"Excuse me,"
He bumped into one of the devils standing at the door. The man leered at him with silenced pupils, one hand always at attention where it rested on his nine millimeter arm rest, the hammer cocked halfway-to-the-ready of lead-painted hatred. He glared at the spy.
"I need to get in there." Kaji's voice was defiant and clean. He stared back. He maintained eye contact.
"I'm afraid that you can't." The hammer clicked in the holster. The man could have that rod out and be shooting a dozen-and-a-half rounds through the spy at any second. The hair-trigger on this baby was enough to silence any son-of-a-bitch with a cocky attit—
He slumped against the wall, unconscious from Kaji's fist. Amateur.
He started to open the door. Why weren't there more guards here?
Kaji shook his head. It didn't matter. He just needed to get this guy out of here. He was a key to the truth, and NERV was closer to it than SEELE.
He stepped inside.
---
The room was insanely loud. A boy sat awkwardly at the bar, isolated by a barrier of a few vacant stools that had been abandoned by weary old men with countless bad stories to tell. The bartender was preparing something with hot water involved. The man he was looking for was in the obscure corner booth, solitarily enjoying some warm sake.
He rubbed the scruff on his chin. This wasn't quite what he expected.
He walked over to the booth anyhow.
"Sub Commander." His greeting was curt, but polite.
The elderly gentleman seemed to have been startled out of a reverie, and looked up at the spy, squinting to focus his eyes. "Mister Ryoji. Odd to see you here. Have a seat." He motioned to the empty bench. Kaji took it, grinning.
"So what brings you here, Mister Ryoji?" Fuyutsuki sipped the sake.
"Just Kaji today, Professor." He gave Fuyutsuki a bemused look. "I had originally come to get you, if you'd believe it. How'd you end up here?"
The Sub Commander gave a small snort. "First I'm tied up in a chair, with a horrible headache, being interrogated by the monoliths of humanity, and they bore me to the point of lapsing into a rather pleasant walk down memory lane. Next thing I know, you startle me out of it, and I'm sitting here, in this bar, with a whole bottle full of warm sake as my companion—just the way I like it." He sipped said companion. "And—it's Kuzou, for the record."
"Hmm." Kaji nodded. His tone turned dark, and he leaned forward conspiratorially, motioning Kuzou to do the same. He raised an eyebrow, and set the sake aside. "What happened?"
Kuzou scrunched his brows in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Don't be coy, Professor. I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows about what's really going on—listen:" he licked his lips carefully, glancing around. "I've been fatally shot a countless number of times. I've died a countless number of times. I'm sure I've lived this life—this exact life—an infinite number of times. I know all of my lines by heart; all the scene changes, all the settings, the entire script, by heart." He took a breath. Kuzou eyed him with an odd look in his eyes. Kaji knew that look. It was the look that said 'We aren't allowed to talk about that' look. He cringed as Kaji hissed "Why is this different?"
Fuyutsuki sat back and breathed a heavy, weighted sigh. "I don't know." He said, after a long while. "I'm as in the dark about this as you are."
"So you have no idea?"
"How could I have any idea?" He restrained from pounding the table. His raised voice was hardly noticed in the overly noisy bar, as it was. The viola still hovered above the din, somehow.
"The mere fact that you can remember the 'script', as you so adequately put it, is because we aren't in a normal place. We aren't where we should be—reality, I'd like to say, but this place seems about as real as anyplace else in our entire lives. I don't even know where this is, never mind when—or even how."
"I don't think I'm following you, Professor." Kaji focused on the bottle of sake.
The Sub Commander sat for a moment in silence. "Look," he started. He didn't know how to begin. "I… I can't explain how it worked. Instrumentality, I mean. I honestly don't know how it worked. But I can say for a fact that it never had effects that went this high." Fuyutsuki ran a hand through his hair. It foofed back into place. "To be honest, Mister Ryoji, this goes above and beyond anything we ever attempted with Instrumentality. We—NERV, SEELE, hell, even Gendo Ikari—we never tampered with this."
"What you're saying is that something's been seriously fucked up and you have no idea as to how it happened." Kaji looked over at the bar. The viola played a shrill note. "Figures."
They were silent for a disturbed while.
Kaji rolled his head back against the worn leather of the padded bench, staring off into the smoky abyss. He forced a polite smile as Fuyutsuki raised his sakazuki, as if in mock toast. "To Autumn," he declared, out of the blue.
The spy smirked, amused. "I'd drink to that, but I need something to drink with." The Sub Commander chuckled and sipped anyhow, but nodded. "Yes, of course." Kaji motioned to a waiter. She brushed between a young couple who were staring at each other awkwardly. Kaji paid it no mind.
"Well, well. Imagine seeing you here!" He grinned as she quirked an eyebrow and pushed her nose up at him.
"Well, well indeed. Let's hear the drink order, then."
"I'd rather see your order, ma'am." He couldn't conceal the smirk.
She leaned over the table dangerously, the cut of her shirt dangling lower, her face close to his, her voice barely above a whisper. "Why, think you can handle it?"
Kaji was speechless for half a beat. "Uh—wow. That's a… large order to fill." He somehow managed to get his eyes back to hers.
She stood straight, a hand on her hip. "So it's whiskey, I take it? You look like a man, after all."
"Sure, sure." He cocked the smirk again. "You guessed it."
As she turned back to the bar, she peered over her shoulder. "You remember my name, right?"
"Misato." He said. "Just 'Misato'."
She winked, and returned to the bar.
Fuyutsuki chortled. "Looks like the relationship between you and the Major has certainly improved."
Kaji's ease faltered.
"The… Major…" He suddenly remembered where he used to be. "Major Misato Katsuragi…" He grew sullen. "…Damn."
Someone sat the bottle of whiskey on the table, and ran off before he could catch a glimpse of them. It didn't matter. Everything was the same, here.
Fuyutsuki grew somber as he stared into his sake. "I've been told that playing an instrument can ease stress and even make you happy." His gaze never left the shallow, bottomless sake dish.
"Can you play an instrument?" Kaji poured himself a shot and gulped it down. He winced, coughed, and threw his head down on the table.
Fuyutsuki ignored his reaction to the alcohol. "I used to, years ago. I stopped when the Impact hit—no time, really. Got busy." He sighed and sipped some sake. "I wonder if I've still got it."
He rose, quite suddenly, from the booth, and approached the mechanical device that impersonated a piano. He disconnected the player and sat down in front of the thing, staring at the keys for a little while. The woman with the viola played on regardless, either ignorant of ambivalent of the mechanical player's death.
Fuyutsuki focused on the viola's melody, and—with effort—started to design a light harmony to counter it. The chords were rusty, and the key wasn't quite right, but it fit. Everything started to come back to him as he played; all the movements, the drills, the etudes—everything started to make a little more sense. For a few brief moments, he started to understand what the reality of it all meant.
Kaji watched in silence for awhile, before abandoning the whiskey after only a single shot. He walked calmly to the back of the bar, where a door morphed itself out of the solid brick. The doorknob was a bullet, and it shattered the room to a million trillion pieces of individual thought patterns as he twisted it, moving into the blackness beyond.
---
The blackness beyond took the form of an extremely poorly lit spiral staircase, made of concrete. It was tight and narrow, reminiscent of some secret medieval passageway. Kaji found it difficult to maneuver any other way but down, since the ceiling was low enough to warrant slumped shoulders, and the walls were so close together that it made turning around difficult.
The door behind him slammed shut, sending an echo down into the cramped space. There was almost absolute silence, a sensation he had never experienced before. The only thing that could be heard was the sound of the viola in the bar, far behind him, but as he proceeded down the cramped stairway, he realized that the music did not emanate from the bar at all, but from whatever lay at the terminus of the passage.
He immersed himself in thought as he descended the staircase. Step after step seemed to roll by at a monotonous pace, hardly noticed, as he wandered in the depths of his mind.
What had happened that had made him remember all of the timelines he'd lived? Where was he? Fuyutsuki had said that Instrumentality couldn't initiate something this drastic, but… what if the Third Impact had unseen effects? It could certainly have done some rather impressive damage to the reality or realities in which it had occurred, but couldn't it also have triggered something temporally as well? A catastrophe on the scale is bound to have a pretty big mark on any timeline it occurs in, and since mankind had yet to witness something like that on a scale so big, it would come as no surprise if this whole mess of scripts and stage plays resulted from the original Third Impact—however long ago of far ahead it (will?) end(ed) up happening.
The staircase terminated at an uninteresting door, similar in style and appearance to the one which had begun the staircase. He grasped the handle, and stepped through.
---
The first thing that greeted him was the blinding lights from above. The second thing that greeted him was the sound of his name.
"Mister Ryoji." Rei Ayanami dangled her feet off the edge of the stage. Water leaked from the ceiling, pooling at the stage's edge.
A boy who tried to pass himself off as Shinji Ikari stood at the back of the stage, watching him with curiously smug red eyes. His hair was starting to grey. The illusion was wearing off.
Kaji glanced over his shoulder when he heard the sound of the door closing, only to realize that there had never been a door there. The wall was simply an overly large curtain.
He stepped out onto center stage. There was no applause, simply because there was no one to give it.
"You cannot stay here for long, Mister Ryoji." Her voice was the normal tone, yet there was something underneath of it that he couldn't identify. Was it a sense of existing…? He couldn't quite place it. Was she… was she, perhaps, the real Ayanami, the archetype from which the illusions were based off of?
Her voice disrupted his thoughts. "Go. Now. The door to the side will take you to where you need to be." The Shinji Ikari impersonator had neared the stage. His jaws widened to show rows of razor sharp teeth. His eyes had hardened into determined globes of smugness. The real Ayanami turned to confront him. Her hands clenched into fists.
And he ran.
---
Another darkened staircase—wider, taller, and a better lit, perhaps, than the previous one, but still another staircase. He shook his head as he descended. What was going on? Did anyone even care anymore?
A loud screech and a strong gust of wind flooded up the wide stairway. The dimly glowing fluorescent bulbs lining the walls flickered a little.
It was a subway station.
Graffiti littered the walls. Newspapers were stuck to the floor like carpets and mats. The smoke residue from trillions of cigarettes had tattooed the ceiling and the tops of walls a disgusting sludge color. The butts of said cigarettes had either long rotted away, or rolled around beneath the tracks of the subway cars.
Kaji stepped off the last step. The gate crashed into place behind him, locking itself tight. There'd be no way to undo that without causing quite a ruckus.
A familiar mop of red hair sat on the only bench on this side of the tracks. Her back was to him. Did she know he was there?
"Why hello, Mister Kaji!" She grinned, but he couldn't see it from his perspective. It wasn't the happy grin she always wore around him, though. It was the knowing grin. Almost like a shark's grin. "I was wondering when you'd turn up. You're almost going to miss the show."
She stood and faced him, a confidant hand on her hip. "What, isn't the doll with you? Oh, no—that's right." She diverted her gaze to some of the graffiti along the walls, seeming as if to read it. "She's preoccupied right now." The last line she whispered to herself.
"A-Asuka?" Kaji had to squint to remember. Was that her name? Yes, it had to be.
She breathed a sigh of amusement. "I'm glad you still remember me, even after I walked away from the timelines. You have a good memory."
"Timelines—walk away from—memory—what the hell is this about?" He collapsed against the tile wall of the subway in tired defeat.
"Oh no, no, no!" Asuka threw her hands up, her voice remaining in mock overseer mode. "That isn't the story for me to tell! You're going to have to wait until the train arrives for that one!"