Author's Notes: Actually, I'm not so sure a story like this really lends itself to a definite pairing ;-) still, you know my preffie
Also, the main reason I kept it T rated was because I didn't plan on doing any kind of actual lemon in this one. The original Observations was rated K+, but I think back then the ratings weren't as strict, because there was quite a bit of twitchy stuff later in that story. And I mean all that in a good way, of course ;-)
Chapter 2 -- Alas Poor Sachiel, We Hardly Knew Thee
The ground trembled beneath him, and Shinji cast his tired eyes to the skyline with a deeply depressing sigh. Here we go again... He watched as the giant monster swatted at the buzzing VTOLs around its head. Every once in a while the Angel's swinging fist would connect with a craft, and the pilot's tiny little dejected scream was audible even from where Shinji stood. Haven't they learned anything? Why are they still charging head-on to die? He did not know that the VTOL pilots had no memory of the previous reset.
The monster seemed to give off a long screech of rage as it turned its head in his direction. Oh, well that's not too surprising. It remembers me. This is turning into a very bad day... The monster let out a roar, and Shinji was somewhat surprised. Didn't it screech a minute ago? Wait, it's still screeching... No, that wasn't right. The screech got louder and louder, and Shinji had just turned around, having come to the conclusion that the screech was not from the Angel, but it was too late.
In fact, the horrid squealing was from Misato's car tires. It seemed the woman had just bought drifter tires (for whatever reason), and she was making good use of them. Shinji got off a surprised yelp, and then he was inside Misato's sports car. The woman had slid the car sideways for over a block, and she had flung open the passenger door right before impacting Shinji's stationary form.
"Hiiiiyiiiis, Shinji-kuuuun!!" the raven-haired woman yelled enthusiastically. Shinji coughed desperately, disentangling himself from the crazy lady, trying not to choke on her hair, which had changed directions as suddenly as the car, and was finding its way down his throat whenever he breathed in. "Oooh, you naughty boy!" she shrieked, doing her best to blush mightily. In between spinning the steering wheel crazily from one side to the other, she managed to place a hand on his skull and imbed it into the frame on the opposite side of the car. "Keep your hands in the vehicle at all times, and if you have to hurl do it out the window!!" she screamed happily. "Hopefully in the direction of that thingy out there!"
The car veered crazily, bouncing around the street and off buildings like a pinball as Sachiel did his best to stomp the car into the pavement. Idiot little kid, going off and killing me... It was obvious the Angel remembered their last encounter. The big guy extended his lance, desperately trying to skewer the car, but instead only serving to trap his arm into the hardened armor of the street. Dammit! The Angel tugged on his arm, trying to free himself.
"Ahahahahaha!" The woman was at the same time, driving (if you could call it that), looking back at the stuck Angel with a gleeful expression, and punching numbers into her phone so fast her thumb was blurring into invisibility. "GendoGendoDo-it-do-it-do-it-he's-trapped-he's-trapped!!" Misato screamed into the phone's receiver. Shinji squeezed one eye shut, holding his head and trying to parse out what she was saying. Gendo must have replied, for the crazy look in her eyes intensified to truly dangerous levels. Before he could reach over and put on his safety belt, Misato's hand had shot over and slammed the belt across him, while at the same time she speed-dialed another number into her smoking phone. Her next four words were partially intelligible, but by the time Shinji deciphered them, there was not even enough time to panic. "Cancel-that-linear-train!"
As he pondered her words, he heard her gun the engine (if such a thing was possible with her foot already at the floor). Then he went weightless, and it all clicked in his mind. She had jumped the car into the air using an all-too-conveniently-placed tow-truck with its ramp down as a jump-off point (he later found out she had phoned ahead earlier saying she needed to be towed. In her own words, "either it was going to work, or I would have needed his services anyway!" As it turned out, she managed to need both). But why? Shinji wondered to himself. And what is she on?
"hehehehehehehe!!" a string of drool hung from her happy expression and out the window as she clinched the steering wheel. Behind her, an N2 mine went off, propelling the car and its occupants into a long screaming arc through the air. Somehow, the string of drool continued to trail along the back of the car, quivering in the airstream. The scream (and the drool-string) were cut off abruptly as the car punched right through the closed gates of the linear-train station, and Shinji lowered his arms to find that the car was falling through the air down towards the ground of the geo-front below. He glanced over, and Misato seemed happy, but he knew that was not a firm indicator that he would survive the landing (if her previous actions were in any way connected to how she might act in the future, which itself was no sure thing).
Shinji awoke to find himself in traction, in a NERV hospital room. Gendo stood at the foot of his bed, a perturbed expression on his face (which was no different than normal actually), and Misato stood beside him, a face-splitting grin plastered on her head, bouncing rapidly up and down as she stood. Against all odds, the woman had managed to escape without even a scratch.
"Why'dja try to climb out tha window, Shinjikun??" she shrilled. "I told'ja I had a drag-chute! Everything-would've-been-fine!"
"Never mind that, Captain," Gendo said, looking just a tad uncomfortable. "We have to get the boy and Rei into the machine..."
Something twitched inside Shinji's skull at the mention of that name, and his eyes flitted to the side, coming to rest on the object that until recently he had adored, and now he feared with a passion. "...c-c-c-c-clone!" he stammered out, managing to toss himself from the bed, dragging along all his IV-drips and machines behind him in a big jumbled mess as he tried to exit the door at high speed. Rei gave a sad little sigh and closed her eyes again. Shinji passed out.
In another world altogether, it was a bright sunny day. The birds were singing and the wind whispered through the trees as Shinji walked along. Rei was perched on his shoulders, and he held his mother's hand as the three of them enjoyed a walk in the park. Well, the two of them walked, anyway, Rei being piggyback.
"This is pleasant," Shinji observed.
"Isn't it?" Yui agreed quietly.
"We should do this more often," Shinji said happily.
"But I thought you hated to pilot," Yui responded, concern on her delicate features.
"...pilot?" Shinji wondered, and everything changed.
He was in his entry plug, and Rei was perched on his shoulders, her feet jammed through the little openings of the pistol-grip controls. In a horrible moment of hallucination, he remembered what had happened.
Hallucinatory Flashback
"We've got to get them both into the entry plug before he wakes up," Gendo yelled, as Misato carried both pilots, one over each shoulder. Rei desperately tried not to scream from the pain.
"Why, oh-wise-Commander?" Misato shouted the question into Gendo's ear as they both ran for the Eva-Bay. Gendo winced.
"Rei syncs at fifty percent, and the boy probably won't do much better. Maybe together, they'll be a hundred percent..." Gendo muttered.
"Oh-oh-oh, plus, put together, they both have enough bones intact to count as one healthy individual?" she prodded, and Gendo had to reluctantly agree.
End Hallucinatory Flashback
"...c-c-c-clo-" Shinji was about to shriek out the hated word, and Rei slapped a hand over his mouth, and another over his eyes.
"Quiet, boy," she said softly, holding back her tears. "Rei is trying to pilot." Her right foot twitched against the pistol-grip control, and Unit-01's right arm bitchslapped Sachiel into a building. Shinji managed to squirm out from under Rei and crawl to the back of the entry plug as Rei continued to lay the smackdown on the poor Angel. As long as he was in the entry plug with her, she could use his sync power, willing or not. Her fighting style (Shinji noticed, as he hyperventilated, which is quite uncomfortable in LCL), was a little strange to say the least. She appeared to be using a rather arcane style of Drunken Fist.
Or maybe that's because of her injuries, his lucid side wondered. Then the Rei-terror grabbed hold of his mind and he pounded uselessly against the back of the plug. "Open the door! Let me out!"
Yui materialized behind him. "I'm sorry, Da-, er, Shinji, I can't do that," she intoned, looking at him with a wistful expression before turning to observe Rei's antics. The Angel had lashed out with its energy lance, and Unit-01 had, quite humorously, fallen just at that moment, somehow getting its legs tangled up with the Angel's.
"Oh, oops, sorry about that," Rei murmured, kneeing the creature 'accidentally' as she got to her feet. The Angel doubled over in agony. "...ooh, hey, that looked like it hurt," Rei crooned, bending over and stretching a hand out towards the Angel. The poor thing tried to backpedal and give itself some room, but Unit-01 happened to be standing on its foot, and it went into a heap on the street. Rei seemed to trip over the the thing's legs, and elbowed the Angel in the eye as she fell. "...oops! I didn't mean to..."
"Why is this happening..." Shinji moaned from the rear of the plug. When his pitiful pleas did not get him any reaction, he became perturbed. "Someone help me." Nothing. "Mother...!"
"...what??" Rei and Yui yelled, turning their heads at the same time.
Shinji found this slightly disturbing, and Rei's cheeks colored a cute pink. Outside, the Angel was desperately trying to escape out from under the fallen Unit-01. "Look, Pilot Ikari, it's confusing enough that I have to try to sync with this woman, so could you cut me some slack?"
Shinji pondered the situation. "...actually, when I think of you as my mother, that feels right." He was surprised to find the fear had mostly gone, and he sat down cross-legged, his hand on his chin. A light-bulb seemed to go off above Rei's head, and she turned in the plug-seat, accidentally tapping one of the pistol-grip controls. Sachiel had just managed to free himself, and Unit-01's hand fell onto the thing's leg. The Angel clawed the pavement trying to get away.
"Come sit on your mother's lap," she said, smiling and patting her knees, and Shinji hesitantly stepped forward. "There now," she said in a very motherly way as she reached up and smoothed out his hair, which was drifting lazily in the LCL. Shinji smiled. The girl really did look and act kind of like his mother, and he began to relax. "...oh, hold on a moment." Rei drew her prog-knife and tacked Sachiel's leg to the pavement. By this point, the Angel was beyond frantic, and with a splorching sound it left its leg behind and proceeded to hop away down the street, trying to escape its tormentor. "Oh well," Rei said cheerfully, reaching around to steady the boy on her lap. She accidentally elbowed him in the cheek, and he cried out.
"...aah, I'm sorry about that," she said in a sing-song voice, compassion in her eyes. "Here, let me make it better..." she touched her lips to his cheek, and he calmed down. Her lips quickly slid over to his, and she frenched him. Which had been her plan all along.
"MMMPHFFFL-AAAAH!" Shinji managed to disentangle his mouth from hers, a disturbed look on his face as he scrambled off her lap. "That's not how mothers kiss...!" he stammered, his face beet red, hands over his mouth in horror and embarrassment. He curled up into a fetal position behind the plug-seat as Rei gave another of her sad little sighs.
"Too much too soon?" she asked quietly.
"Probably," Yui answered her.
Gendo watched the viewscreen in Central Dogma as Satchiel hopped away in one direction, and Unit-01 trudged along in the other direction towards an entry point.
"How do we call that one?" Fuyutski asked from behind him.
"Tie, I think," Gendo answered his old friend.
"Are we going to let it get away?"
"...eh," Gendo grimaced. "How much trouble can a one-legged Angel get into, anyway?"
Fate sniggered evilly. She only got to unleash her true powers when certain phrases were uttered, like 'What could possibly go wrong?' or the like, and Gendo had provided her with a perfect opening.
Author's Notes: That didn't go anything like I'd originally planned. As if I had a plan (snicker). How much trouble can a one-legged Angel get into?
Also, is that a cliffie? I can't quite tell...
This is sad, but I think Misato is a self-insert, atleast in terms of how I feel as I write the story :-p.'.'.'.'.'.