Beneath

Chapter Three

Asuka hit him, and he fell. Shinji buckled and slammed into floor, making not the slightest motion to protect himself. Not so much as a twist in order to land on his side. He landed face-down with a thud, and was still. And quiet.

And then, Shinji Ikari began to truly fall. The meager remnants of his personality at last slipping free of flesh, dripping out of his mind. There was the floor, and Asuka was speaking, and then. And then.

The world went away. It was replaced by a colorless place, indescribably vast. Shinji drifted on some kind of current, gliding among the strange not-place's only discernible features - localized distortions of space, shimmering as though unbearably hot.

This went on for a very long time. Shinji did not mind. The corruption of his soul had advanced to the point where he had barely functioned, back when he had a body. Without one, without certain biological needs, he basically ceased to exist. Everything that was Shinji was still there, but it was inert. Sleeping.

And then he collided with one of those distortions in space. And reality slammed back into place. There was a large popping sound and cries of shock and pain, and suddenly Shinji was staring at... someone else.

There was a boy on the ground before him, one cheek sliced open, blood painting that side of his face and dribbling on the shirt beneath. He had brown hair - peppered with broken glass - dull blue eyes, and a very familiar look of fear.

Shinji looked around, vaguely surprised he had the motivation to do so. He was in an arcade of some sort. It appeared he had emerged in the middle of a game cabinet, which was shattered and smoking, the joystick and buttons melting, the screen an empty cavity.

"Y-you," the boy on the floor said. His eyes were fixed on Shinji, but no one else on the scene seemed to be reacting to his presence.

"Me," Shinji replied, fixing on the word. "Yes. Me." Something inside him shifted, the bizarre anatomy of his soul bending at the mere utterance of a self-identifier.

And the world became less real, but did not vanish. Everything grew thin and translucent, the floors and walls and everything beyond them. The boy too, grew transparent, and Shinji saw what lived inside him. There was something in there, a band of energy that glowed bright, and pulsed in time with the light of Shinji's own soul. But it was different. Shaped in a way Shinji could not replicate. There was more to it than energy - the brain was there too. The actual, physical brain. The energy flowed in on one side, and emerged on the other... changed.

The boy opened his mouth, but no words came out. He was trying, badly, to fight down a scream.

Shinji's soul twisted and pulled. It wanted to be like the boy's band of energy. But Shinji had no body to oblige it.

That world, and the boy that looked so like Shinji, fell away. He was back in the void. Drifting. Drifting. Drifting.

You came a voice in Shinji's head.

Me, Shinji replied.

And suddenly there was something huge and black before him, a mote of self-aware and physical reality in the void. It wrapped around him and dragged him forward, until they came to a particular distortion of space and then.

Yeah. And then.

Shinji woke up. He was underwater. No. In LCL - everything was tinged yellow around him. He seemed to be in some sort of support harness, which hooked across his shoulder and groin. Other than that, he was naked. He was in a tube of some sort. There was a plug just over his head, and if he pushed on it, stretching downward, his toes brushed the bottom, sliding across some dull vent-work.

Where was he? Where was Misato? This had to be NERV, but aside from the light that shone down, coldly, from the tube's plug, there was only darkness. Beyond the limits of the tube there was nothing at all.

Why was he alone? What had happened? Shinji groped through recent memory, finding only a long gray dream. Him living without living, avoiding life and everything else beyond bare survival. Listening to Asuka talk at him and finding her words unremarkable and unworthy of response, even when she broke down and finally said what he had wanted to hear from her for so long. I care. Let me help you.

"Asuka!" his voice was distorted by the liquid, and he hammered the tube's side. Where was she? Someone had to be watching, right? He must be in some kind of extreme trauma unit. Had some kind of accident after the. That Angel. The 28th, had it been? The pyramid and the whip. He remembered fighting it, but could not seem to recall how he had won. Or if NERV had triumphed at all.

He looked down at himself. The flesh he could see around the harness was intact. No obvious damage, no psychosomatic bruising. His recovery had to be complete. He hammered the side of the tube again, wondering if the blackness beyond was vast or close. Was the tube in a chamber with no other source of light, or was he slotted into some sort of enclosure? Shinji unbuckled the vest and peeled it off, dropping to the bottom of the tube, which was curved and smooth. He pressed his face against the lowest point of the curve, but could make out nothing outside it. He could see the transparent material the tube was made out of, because it was curved and thick, and the edge was visible.

The top of the plug was featureless, without even a seam.

"Akagi!" he tried now. "Akagi, let me out!"

Was this some kind of experiment? How could they have just forgotten...

Red light appeared outside the tube, a faint glow that resolved first into three distinct blobs of color, and then two perfect circles across a crescent, forming a rough parody of a smiling face.

You said a voice Shinji remembered from the gray haze after the 28th Angel..

"Help me!" he shouted, not caring in the least about the thing's nature, whether it was a mask or something stranger.

...damn the voice gained inflection, and the crescent smile flattened into a line. You survived.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm alive!" Shinji was pressed up against the tube, close to the thing as he could get. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The thing before him did not trouble him, per se, but its presence aroused in Shinji a terrible fear, a terrible sense... of time.

Asuka. Asuka, damn it. He had just gotten close to her, close enough to touch her. He wanted her right now. He wanted to kiss her angry face. She could be furious with him afterward, he didn't care. Because he wanted to kiss her, see? And he'd do whatever it took for her to want to kiss him back.

You have been gone for ten years the thing outside the tube lied.

Shinji spun around. Looked at the darkness on the other side of the tube. Empty, honest darkness. It was a lie. Somewhere overhead, Asuka was waiting at home, hating him for not being there to cook for her. Misato was dealing with the paperwork the fight with the 28th Angel had caused. Father would be doing... whatever it was that he did. Ayanami would be listening to the SDAT he had bought her last Christmas.

The lying red light floated into view again. Shinji tried to smack the tube walls in fury, but the LCL slowed him down. A lie. A lie. A LIE!

It is not a lie the thing said. And.

Shinji was somewhere else. It was dark, but not a close dark. He was standing under his own power on concrete, and dressed in his school uniform. LCL dripped from his hair. Light shone from overhead, white and clean, revealing the grass surrounding the sidewalk he was standing on.

"I'm sorry," said the person beside him. Shinji turned and jumped away, not out of surprise or shock, but by basic, blind instinct. The thing beside him was covered entirely in - or made out of - a shiny black material. Its face was smooth and featureless one moment, but a line of red light appeared on it, which quickly widened into a circle that seemed almost a hole in the face. There was a hint of depth within that bloody light.

This thing. It had opened an eye to look at Shinji, and now the other eye opened and the mouth appeared as a small mouth beneath. The thing had been standing beside him, eyes and mouth closed. Like it was...

Shinji turned to look at what the black thing had been praying to. It was a... there was a metal cube, a statue upon it. On the face of the cube a heavy brass plate was mounted, and that was covered in raised letters. Names. More than a hundred. More than five hundred. Maybe three thousand in total arranged in neat columns across the face of the cube. And the statue.

The statue was of Shinji. It was wearing his plugsuit, sitting on a rock, neural connector band in one hand, staring down. Its arms twisted in a way that projected agony.

"I wanted to make this world whole," the creature beside him was saying. Shinji absorbed every word, but didn't look at it. He was staring at the memorial. Approaching it.

"You left your reality. Your prime reality, and it was poorer for the loss. I thought you were dead. I thought you were too broken, too far gone to come all the way back."

The creature's voice was distorted, but not the same as it had been outside the tube. There, it had seemed to rattle around inside his head. Here it was just a sorrowful voice, carried across the faint breeze that swept through the park. The memorial park.

"Ten years?" But Shinji knew. His words weren't intended as a question... maybe as the last gasp of a dying man, but not a question. The nightmare at his side seemed to understand.

"My," he ate the rest of it, getting close enough to the bronze sheet to start reading names. Fearing. Fearing who he'd find listed among the dead.

"Misato Katsuragi is alive," the creature called out from behind. "Rei Ayanami is alive. Asuka Langley Sohryu is still alive."

How did it know the names he wanted? No, it didn't matter. They were alive. Ten years gone, but they had survived. They.

It was like falling into a swoon. Shinji felt himself slip out of his body again. Not all the way out, just enough to see the world laid bare and transparent. Reaching out for something familiar. People he would recognize. What he found was... difficult.

There was Rei. She lived in Hokkaido now, in a block of teacher housing so... she must be teaching? The house was empty but for her, even this late at night. There was one car in the garage, a single futon. History papers written in young hand covered her desk as she worked, blue hair now long and pulled into a ponytail. Despite the mundane scene, there was still something more than human about her, and she turned to look over her shoulder where a splinter of Shinji's awareness hung. He fled.

There was Asuka. Distant. In... Germany? Shinji could not tell. Could not read the signs that flickered past as he sped to her location. She was standing over
a
crib.
She was standing over a crib. There was a man beside her. It was theirs. They were in love. She had forgotten him. Buried him when the statue went up.

The image wasn't exactly real, but everything in it was true. Something in Shinji's new nature had picked out truth and shaped it in one cohesive, neat image. He could not see Asuka as she actually was, right now. He didn't want to.

Misato was. Another bastardized image, filled with truth. Another crib, another woman important to Shinji standing next to a man he did not know, looking down. There were twins in Misato's crib.

A hand closed on his shoulder, and Shinji dropped back into his body. The creature was at his side. Shinji blinked. It was daytime in the park now. He had been gone for a while.

"They're alive," he moaned. "And that is. Good."

He didn't mean it. Not a word of it. Those people weren't his friends. They had forgotten about him. Left him to rot in a tube in some dark sub-basement of the Geo-Front. He was just a distant memory, more a fact than an image in their minds. Each had once known a boy named Shinji Ikari. There was a statue of him commemorating a war in which they had fought but... he had nothing to do with their lives. There was no hint of his existence in anything they did. No pictures of him anywhere that he could sense. Not even a fucking shrine - he'd be able to smell the incense, if there was.

Shinji smashed a fist into the memorial's bronze plaque. Dead and gone. He was simply not there anymore. A kid walking to school half a mile away was looking down at the old Angel Wars memorial and wondering at the weirdo banging on it all by himself. A few early morning joggers had noticed his body standing transfixed before the statue - though none had noticed his similarity to it. Six people had noticed Shinji since he had been brought to the park, and he could feel their attention linger upon him, even though the kid was the only one of the six still present.

No one else. He could taste the truth. No one had said his name aloud in over six years.

Dead and gone. Ten years.

"I should have let you fade to nothing," the creature murmured beside him.

Shinji nodded in agreement.

Father was dead. Shinji did not know how. Didn't much care. Touji and Kensuke... he couldn't even find them. They had grown into something entirely unfamiliar to him. Maya Ibuki was working for in a corporate office building in Tokyo 2. Ritsuko Akagi was dead. Unit One had been destroyed.

He had been crying for a while now, tears streaming down his face. The Katsuragi apartment was gone. Pen Pen was... he was actually still alive, but probably wouldn't recognize Shinji.

He looked down at his hands. They were bloody. He had been smacking the raised lettering on the bronze plaque quite hard.

"Other worlds," he muttered to himself. "There are other worlds. I saw them. I can..."

No the voice sounded inside his head. You cannot.

"This is. Stop. I," Shinji tried to shake the echo of those words out of his head. "I don't fit here anymore. I'm not right. I can't. I can't help but see them!"

"You cannot leave be allowed to wander between realities," the creature said in a saner voice. "Your presence in another world would be destabilizing. Adjustments would have to be made. No adjustments have been authorized in your case."

"Then. I don't want to wander!" Shinji screamed the last word. "That was the point. That was why I was here. I thought I was done with running. I. I just want to go home!"

He fell to his knees. Thought about attacking the creature, but what was the point. He stared into the sky and tried to lose himself in the passing clouds. Eventually settled with his back against the monument.

"There may be a way," the creature finally said. Shinji waited.

"Your presence may be required on another world, at some point in the future. If you still exist, you will be shuttled from this reality to another. You will be given the opportunity to render aide. If you execute upon that opportunity, you may be granted a boon. Which could include matriculating you into a reality of our choosing."

"May be," Shinji repeated, voice hollow. "May be required."

The creature paused. "It will be," it finally said. "If you are still alive, we will take you."

"Some point in the future," Shinji again repeated a line of the creature's statement.

"Time is relative. This world is oriented off-of parallel from the Locus. For every day that passes there, ten pass here. The event is set to occur within three months, at least."

Nine hundred days. Three years, just about. Three years in this place.

Shinji didn't reply to the creature, just lowered his head until his chin was against his chest. Closed his eyes. More-or-less passed out on the spot, sleeping against the memorial, dreaming of betrayal and teenage lust, and of his missing decade. The creature crouched down in front of him and took off its mask. Shinji regarded Shinji, his face betraying nothing less than total sadness. He touched a finger to his sleeping self's forehead, transmuting bitter dreams into ones of possibility and guarded hope. Someone had to introduce the notion to the kid that he was still alive, and that meant leaving him to stew in more than the mere particulars of his immediate situation. There were other people to meet. Other girls to fall in love with. Shinji's awakening had not gone unnoticed. His life would get complicated in the future, in all kinds of wonderful ways. Even now the tube that had held his body was sending out signals on every available frequency, letting whoever had inherited responsibility for it know that it was empty. That Shinji Ikari was alive again.

"Three years," the Weaver murmured, pulling his mask back on. "More than enough time to come back to life."

He took one last look around, contacted the Locus, and designated this reality #137. Status of Ikari: Active.