Chapter Six
Today was the big day.
Misato Katsuragi, the operations director and Asuka's new superior officer, was flying out to meet the flotilla, and bringing the Third Child with her. Asuka had to be ready. She began carefully preparing herself, amused at the objection of the officers to the length of her morning shower, despite the fact that she was aboard a nuclear powered supercarrier with its own desalination capabilities. Boys and their little traditions could be so silly. Of course, that her security detail forbid any of the female officers from using the showers while she did may have been part of it. She brushed her hair until it shone, tied the ribbon around her throat, and bound her hair back with her nerve clips. There was a cool breeze throwing her silky crimson hair over her shoulder as the VTOL came in for a landing.
She watched intently as the part aboard the craft disembarked. Katsuragi came first, dressed as scandalously as usual. She had a whole pack of children with her; potential pilot candidates, perhaps. One of them had some sort of camcorder with him. She couldn't believe Misato would tolerate a breach of security like that. Two boys emerged, the short dumpy one with the camera and a taller, athletic one in a track suit, who paused to talk to someone still inside the craft. He must have been the Third; Misato had said he was athletic, whatever that meant. She turned and rushed for the stairway that led from the flying bridge to the flight deck.
Of course, the wind chose that moment to lift her skirt up over her head, baring her rear end and the small of her back. She yelped in surprise and shimmied away from the railing, shoving the fabric down with her hands as she did. Straightening herself, she made sure not to run across the deck. Apparently, two more had left the craft while she was on her way down. She straightened herself and moved towards them.
"Hello, Misato," she said cheerily. She scanned the group of children the director had brought with her.
She walked up to the boy with the camera. "You're not the Third. You're too short."
She walked to the boy with the track suit. She eyed him up and down. "You might be. She said you were an athelete, you-"
"Thanks for the show," the boy said.
Her eyes narrowed. "What?"
"Your panties," he said, smirking.
"Oh," said Asuka. "Here's the viewing fee, you jerk!"
She hauled back and swung her hand, hard, only to be caught in a jarring impact as a firm grip clamped down on her forearm, almost tightly enough to hurt but not quite. A quiet voice said, "He's not the Third Child. I am."
She turned, ready to snap at the simian who'd grabbed her hand, and froze.
"Holy shit," she said, yanking her hand free.
Misato had said athletic, she hadn't said Greek God. Despite being an inch or two under her own height, in an unassuming white shirt and black slacks, the interloper was solidly built- Kaji couldn't dream of being that big. He moved with a strange, almost feline grace, and when his gaze settled on her, she instinctively took a step backward, the way she would from a caged animal. His arm fell to his side and he stood unnaturally still, studying her.
He turned to the boy in the tracksuit. "Next time we raid, we get hers first."
The other two boys immediately burst out laughing. The Third joined them, laughing so hard he actually clutched his side. Asuka stood staring at them all, wide-eyed, until their mirth subsided.
"You are crazy," she whispered.
He crossed his arms. "And you are?"
She stiffened immediately, planted her hands on her hips, and looked down her nose at him. "I am the great Asuka Langley-Soryu, pilot of Evangelion Unit Two, the first full production Evangelion. You must be Shinji."
He shrugged. "Yes."
"Good," she turned on her heels. "Follow me."
"About that viewing fee," he said, catching up to her, just a step behind. "Here's your change."
This wasn't going well.
First of all, bringing Kensuke aboard an aircraft carrier was probably a mistake. It was the first time the boy had ever been in Misato's presence that he wasn't trying to look down or up or around some item of her clothing. He seemed to be more sexually attracted to the ship itself. Second of all, she was certain that Asuka and Shinji were going to murder each other. Shinji was grinning from ear to ear, despite the livid, hand-shaped bruise that covered half his face. In Asuka's defense, he did slap her right on the ass.
As much as he was grinning, she was scowling, taking small, deliberate bites of her meal as they sat in the officer's mess, which had been cleared for the occasion. Oh, and Kaji was there. Misato didn't know who to scowl at harder.
The lech leaned over and put an arm on her shoulder. He looked at Shinji.
"So," he said, "tell me, Shinji. Is Katsuragi still wild in bed?"
Kensuke dropped his fork, and his eyes slowly swiveled to Shinji. Toji turned beat red, and a bite of steak fell out of Asuka's mouth and plopped on her plate with a tiny, audible little splat. Misato's jaw worked silently, and she shrugged the oaf's arm off her shoulder.
"I don't know," Shinji said calmly with a half-hearted shrug, "She's more the kitchen table type."
He calmly took a bite of food, and all hell broke loose.
"I can't breathe!" Toji shouted, laughing so hard that only falling over Kensuke, who nearly dropped his camera, yelped in surprise, and then joined in on the laughter. Asuka leapt out of her chair and started screaming at Shinji in incoherent German that was more than half insults and allegations about his parentage and table manners, and Kaji sat bolt upright, his eyes wide with shock. He looked at Misato, and she realized, furiously, that she was actually blushing.
Kensuke slid out of his chair, fell to his knees on the deck, and pressed his forehead to the floor. "I am not worthy."
"Get up," Shinji rolled his eyes. "We're with people."
Misato realized there was a white-clad ensign standing in the doorway to the mess, quite rightly staring at them all as if they were totally insane. She did her best to fix her gaze on him, and waited for the others to join her. Asuka went beet red when she noticed, and sat down primly, visibly clenching her teeth.
"There's an emergency." He said, "Something is coming."
The barge that carried Unit Two was almost as large as the Theodore Roosevelt. Asuka hadn't bothered to buckle her seat belt as the VTOL carried her and Shinji towards it, and she stared lustily out the window at the tarpaulin-covered form of her Evangelion. Opposite her, Shinji had gone completely quiet. He sat up into the cramped seat, perfectly straight, and had cupped his hands together in his lap. He was whispering something quietly to himself, and had his eyes pressed tightly shut.
She leaned back into her own seat, her knuckles white as she grasped the armrests. The landing was a little too hard, and the VTOL slid a bit on the helipad. The barge was beginning to roll, a little too much. Something was coming. Asuka got up first, moving with a purpose, dancing down the exit ramp before it even touched the deck. Shinji sprinted after her, caught up, and loped beside her in silence, his demeanor completely changed. She didn't know why exactly Misato insisted he share the plug with her, but there was no time to argue, and in any case, she was too excited.
It took a full five minutes to run across the rolling deck from the helipad at the Eva's feet to the head. The plug projected from the Eva's neck. Asuka lifted the tarp and crawled under it.
"Wait here," she snapped.
Making sure the tarp was down, she shuffled up against the side of the plug, pulled out the emergency plug suit, and started stripping. She left her clothes in a pile by the side of the Eva, slipped into the suit, and pulled it up around her neck. Hunching inward to keep it from sliding down her body, she flipped her hair over the collar and hit the button. With a hiss, it slid into place, just as Shinji threw the tarp up and walked under it. He grabbed his shirt and simply tore it away, popped buttons clattering over the decking at his feet. He threw it aside and pulled off his belt.
"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded.
His eyes were hard, cold, and fixed on her. "Grow up," he said simply.
Thankfully, he kept his pants on. Maybe not thankfully. He had so many muscles Asuka couldn't name them all. He passed her and started climbing the metal staircase into the plug.
"Where do you think you're going?" she shouted, following after him.
"You're sitting on my lap."
"You-"
He looked over his shoulder, His voice grew softer, and yet harder. "We don't have time for this."
She clenched her jaw and followed him. He slipped into the cold, uncharged LCL first, sinking in it up to his waist. Despite his lack of dress he ignored the cold and seated himself in the command chair, letting his hands fall to the sides. Reluctantly, she crawled in and slid into his lap, then pulled the control yoke down to hold them in place in the seat. It was a little awkward.
With a flick of the switch, the door to the plug closed. Her Eva was designed to launch much more expediently, and could activate with a much smaller support crew. In a pinch, like now, she could actually do it herself. She expelled the air from her lungs and as it rose over her lips took in a deep breath of the now pleasantly warm LCL, and leaned back, forgetting for a moment that Shinji was behind her.
He reached up and hugged her to him, crushing her arms to her sides, and in so doing yanked her hands away from the controls.
"What the fuck?" she shouted, trying to wriggle free.
He sat calmly, not reacting. His eyes were pressed tightly shut, and he continued to mumble his mantra, stopping only to whisper harshly, "You don't need those. Be quiet."
"The activation," she snapped, "I-"
She felt it, the familiar rush of synchronization. Something reached for her, as if from an angle she couldn't see, and slid against the back of her head, and after so much practice, it was easy. She felt the Eva glide into her brain, its massive limbs resting against the support apparatus, but she felt something else, something different. There was the Eva, and somehow, on the other side of it, was a burning, raging tide of heat, blurring into the sense of the Eva, and then into her. It made her skin crawl. The feel of the Eva changed, shifted, and she felt something, a profound difference.
"How did you…"
Breathing. Not hers. Not Shinji's. Someone else. A thundering shudder that passed up through her legs and into her chest, thrumming in tune with her own heartbeat, and his, pressed into her back. He shook a little with each beat, his eyes flicking back and forth rapidly under his eyelids, as if he were dreaming. She stopped struggling and simply stared.
The flash of colors came, but she ignored it. She felt more than saw the world around the Eva, flooding into her mind through the synchronization. The camera view around her was simply inadequate.
"I…"
She felt something else, a tug, a sort of pull off to their left. She felt it darting towards them, sliding through the cold sea with monstrous speed, a great beast, a predator come to feed, come to regain what was stolen. She knew what it wanted it, felt it, a great pull in the direction of the aircraft carrier, a subtle urge. She almost wanted to chase it herself.
She clenched her jaw. Unit Two stood up.
Misato had a lot on her mind, all of a sudden. Unit Two barely made it, standing on the deck of the barge that carried, swathed in the tarpaulin that covered it like a cape. They would have only a few minutes of battery charge, at best, the Eva had no underwater capability, and she had no technical support. This was an unqualified disaster. Unit Two took a flying leap from the deck of the barge as the angel reared up and bit it in half with a long, toothy jaw, then dove underwater, barely visible the whole time. The surge of water that followed it, displaced as it moved, drug the two halves the barge down under the water, and they began to slide under the surface.
Unit Two crossed the sun, legs up like a hurdle jumper, and then came down in a ponderously slow arc, planting both huge feet on either end of the destroyer, no doubt smashing a billion dollars' worth of equipment into a ruin, if it didn't outright kill anyone. The Eva contracted into a crouch as it landed and then sprung again, the force of the jump shoving the deck of the destroyer almost to the waterline and propelling Unit Two into another perilous jump over the deadly water.
She watched it cross the gap, and said, out loud, "Oh shit."
She barely had time to grab a bulkhead as Unit Two slammed into the deck of the carrier, throwing up great screeching panels of steel that tumbled over each other, slammed into the fighters on the deck, and sent several of them splashing into the ocean. The Evangelion sank into a crouch and twitched, as if it were fighting itself over what to do. The right hand reached up for the progressive knife in the left pylon, and then froze, quivering. Behind the Evangelion, the angel surged forward, the sea swelling over its white, blubbery back, then dipping below. The carrier was huge, but it couldn't take that.
Unit Two's hand clenched into a fist, and it stood up, throwing both hands into the air. There was a muffled series of booms and broken chunks of steel and composite armor rained from its head down to the deck below as it leaned back and screamed through all too human teeth, howling in rage and anguish. Misato's eyes widened and she saw the officers around her sink to their knees. Only the admiral, a grizzled old man with enough medals to nearly cover his chest, remained standing.
"My God," he said as the color drained from his face.
Asuka was terrified, but there was something else. He'd stolen it from her, forced her out of the synch, and she was just along for the ride, almost as if she was the Eva. She could barely feel her limbs. Her mouth was tingling, her tongue fuzzy; she felt as if she'd been drinking, like the night Kaji had let her have a few beers to get her out of the idea she was going to drink with him. She turned to Shinji and her stomach clenched. She wasn't sure he was Shinji anymore.
His eyes flew open, and the soft blue of his irises was gone. His eyes were actually glowing, light green around a darker green in the center, and the LCL was starting to swirl in a circle around his head. He opened his mouth and coughed out wet, angry laughter, and she could swear his incisors had lengthened, almost into fangs. He gargled something incoherent and she felt a sudden surge of hate as the Evangelion turned to face the angel, dragging her with it.
Something was happening, she could feel it. The two sensations she'd felt burning in her head were almost one, like he'd become the Eva, not just synched with it, and she was wrapped up into it, drawn into its terrible heat. Worst of all, she was starting to like it. Every nerve in her body was on fire, and she felt an intense urge, a need, a profound desire to sink her teeth into something and wrench it around with the strength of her neck until it was dead.
He roared, and she roared, and the Evangelion roared together, the sound rippling through her body in a terrible wave that rattled her bones. Together they turned and leapt into the water, and she knew they would sink like a stone and didn't care. Some detached, still human part of her mind saw the counter beside her ticking down to zero and remembered that was important. She screamed something at him about power or timers or something and he ignored her, and the Eva swam, actually swam, through the water. The power timer flickered and turned red and then a screeching set of alarms ripped through her mind as it started running backwards, then forwards, and then went insane, the displays flickering into a dozen babbling nonsense messages in German and Japanese.
Shinji was screaming, snarling in fury like an animal as the angel came for them. It opened its jaws and the Evangelion dove through them, burying itself in the Angel's body up to the waist. It bit down and she felt teeth slide into her guts but didn't care. The rage was on her now.
Shinji surged forward, almost crushing her into the controls, his arms lancing out to mimic the Evangelion's own as they reached for the core, the glowing red sphere at the heart of the angel's body, glittering before them. She found herself joining him, her arms sliding over his, and she felt the cool, smooth material in her hand as the Eva took hold of it.
"Mother!" Shinji screamed, "Mother! Mother! Mother! Mama!" again and again as he squeezed, squeezed her so hard it hurt and squeezed the core, and she was screaming it too, bellowing it at the top of her lungs, bubbling the LCL in front of her face. A surge of sensation rippled through her and her scream turned into a shriek as her body went rigid and pressed against his.
The world became a blur. The core exploded, white heat rushing around her in a wave that paled against the fire in her own body, spreading in waves from her belly that made her gasp and writhe. She felt the steel of the carrier deck warping and twisting as Unit Two tore its way up and over the side, then hunched like a great ape on the deck, its head turning this way and that, great jaws slavering with saliva.
"Shhh," she heard Shinji whisper, "rest now. It's over."
He wasn't talking to her.
Everything went normal. Out of power, the Evangelion simply went dark, and she fell against him, her head falling beside his. She realized her cheek was resting against his, but she was exhausted, unable to move, her entire body fuzzy and numb. She felt as if she was going to pass out. She rolled her eyes up to look at him, but he was asleep, snoring softly, the LCL in front of his face tinged a little by the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
"What the hell was that?" she whispered, giggling a little. She felt really weird.
Considering the amount of damage that had been done to the deck of the Roosevelt, it was good that they were near the harbor to begin with. Asuka was forced to change into some ensign's spare uniform, which did not flatter her figure in the slightest. Shinji, for some reason, refused to wear the shirt from his uniform, and stopped to take a deep breath of the sea air before walking down the gangway, the breeze ruffling his hair.
Asuka felt a little weird every time she looked at him. She swallowed, hard, and followed the others down. Her knees were still a little shaky. She turned and looked at Unit Two, still crouched over the carrier deck, now lashed down with huge cables to keep it from dumping over the side in a large swell. When she turned, Shinji had already reached the pier, standing in the sun and laughing with his friends. He froze as he saw someone running towards them. A slight, pale girl with silvery-blue hair and strange crimson eyes almost crashed into him and he kissed her furiously, lifting her up so that her feet kicked above the ground.
Oh.
The rest of the day was a blur. Misato said goodbye and she realized that she hadn't seen Kaji since before the attack; he'd apparently left by Harrier moments before the launched its assault. Some Nerv stood, a weirdo with long hair, led her down into the bowels of the Geofront. She supposed she was meant to ooh and ahh over it, but she mostly wanted to sleep. Her quarters were strangely familiar; the facility in Berlin used the same design.
She said nothing to the long haired idiot as he wandered away, and slammed the door closed behind her. It was, by Japanese standards, a large apartment, small by hers. Her stuff mostly filled it, and she had a lot of unpacking to do. She decided it could wait. She made sure she would have a towel and something to put on in the morning and fell onto the bed, desperate to sleep.
She was hardly aware she'd dozed off when she woke up. She heard a quick knock at the door and wandered over to it groggily. As she approached, something slid under it, scuttling along the carpeting. She stepped over the object and looked out through the peephole, saw no one, and then opened the door to find any empty hallway.
Someone had stuffed a thin plastic folder under her door. She opened it, and found a shiny DVD-R inside, "WATCH ME" written on the surface in marker. Confused, she put it down on the counter, and then dug out her old laptop. She popped out the DVD of combat footage she'd been studying, slipped the new disc into the drive, and pressed her earbuds into her ears. The disc autoplayed, dumping straight to the beginning of a movie file. A message flashed on screen in Japanese, too fast for her to read, and then a narration flared in her ears in accented English, subtitles flashing below in Japanese.
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of…
She watched for a while, confused. She'd never seen this before, but it seemed oddly familiar. Some bearded man talking to a kid about steel. She thought about shutting it off and going back to sleep, but she waited a few minutes more. She stared into cold blue eyes, and watched Mama's head fall to the ground.
Before she even realized it, it was over, and she sat shaking, the laptop too warm in her lap, tears streaming down her cheeks. There was a note stuck in the blank DVD case. She pulled it out and unfolded it. Written in an unsteady, unfamiliar hand, was a single sentence.
What is the riddle of steel?
OMAKE
As Shinji stepped off the gangplank, a tall woman in a smart pantsuit approached him.
"Shinji Ikari?"
"Yes?"
She handed him an enevelope. "You've been served."
"What the hell is this?"
"A sexual harassment lawsuit. My client alleges you groped her and made sexual innuendos in front of her coworkers."
"What?"