The senior Ikari gazed outward over his glossy, beveled Guangzhou Kailin executive desk upon which were sprawled dozens of documents, dossiers, classified files and bound folders. Spectacles gleaming in the otherworldly cyan light of his private briefing theater, he leaned back in his chair with a gruff sigh. He lowered his head and rubbed his temples, probing irascibly at the dull, throbbing pain that routinely echoed across his skull like agitated tectonic plates being mashed together. It was getting worse. Months ago, the headaches had been intermittent, brief annoyances that could be swiftly dispatched by an aspirin or two. But now, they didn't quickly fade away; rather, they lingered on like a fog, impeding his ability to focus clearly on the beacon of light that drew ever nearer with each passing day. And of course, back then, there weren't the hallucinations either.
It was only then that Gendo became cognizant of the lithe, blue-haired girl standing mutely beside him to his right. The commander coughed, straightening himself up in the chair.
"Rei…" he muttered.
"The commander looks rather tired," the girl remarked. Her voice was sterile of emotion, implying clinical observation, not compassion. "You are not sleeping again."
The senior Ikari used two fingers to straighten his glasses fastidiously upon the narrow bridge of his nose. "Were you briefed on Operation Waterside?" he ignored her implied question.
The first child nodded. "Yes. But I don't understand. Why do you want to—"
The NERV commander waved his hand dismissively, silencing her.
"I've read your objections. Restating them here, in person, will avail you nothing. I have made my decision. The course is set."
There was silence for a long moment, the two of them motionless, their silhouettes periodically lit by the data feed of the large monitors engirdling the desk in semi-circular fashion.
"This is not what she would have wanted," the first child said at last.
Gendo jolted upward and out of his chair, turning to face the petite frame of the crimson-eyed EVA pilot and squared his weight before reaching forward with his arm and throttling the girl's neck tightly with his fist. With a growl that bespoke dark purpose, he slammed her defenseless body into the black wall behind them. The wall, nearly invisible and fashioned from some sort of reinforced thermoplastic glass, fractured as it absorbed the impact.
"You do not know what she wanted!" he hissed, spraying hot spittle onto the girl's pale, tepid face. His teeth bared, he leaned forward, pressing his angular nose into the hollows of her collarbone, inhaling deeply and working his way, from neck to scalp, running his fingers through her silky, feathered hair as he did so. The first child betrayed no emotion, remaining perfectly still whilst the commander of NERV debauched and defiled her adolescent body with his flaring nostrils. "You don't even smell like her!" Gendo nearly shrieked. "So don't you presume to ever know what she would or wouldn't have wanted!"
Suddenly, there was a small, light weight upon his left shoulder. From behind the absurdly-reflective lenses of his spectacles, his gaze wandered downward to wear he took note of a small, pale hand, resting upon his arm. He would have recognized the hand if from nothing else than the narrow silver wedding band upon its ring finger and the unique stone upon it, hewn from a micrometeorite fragment recovered after the Second Impact. But he recognized it because he'd seen it hundreds of times before.
"You… you're not real," the senior Ikari told himself, still rigidly holding the first child in his vice-grip.
"My love," said Yui Ikari from behind him. "The hatchling worries about you, as do I. We worry that you have forgotten why we started out on this path, all those years ago."
"I've never forgotten," Gendo rasped. "Not for one damned second."
"Then why must you persist down this road of self-destruction, my love?" Both Yui and Rei spoke simultaneously, the same words, two voices in perfect synchronicity. "As scientists, we more than anyone else understand the concept of sacrificing one, or ten, or a hundred to save the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands. You cannot rationally justify what you are doing, my love, as a scientist and as a commander both, with so many lives at stake. Not for me. Not for anyone."
The man sneered incisively. "Hah. A scientist. I stopped being a scientist decades ago. I am merely a man doing what he can because nobody else on this hateful, greedy, small-minded and pitiful rock-of-a-planet has the balls to do what needs to be done." His knuckles whitened as his fingers adjusted for better purchase around Rei's slender neckline. "Hate me today, love me tomorrow. It has to be done." Using his left hand, he pried his deceased wife's fingers from his shoulder, letting her arm fall to her side. "This isn't about you, Yui, not anymore," he said. "This is about much, much more."
"Then you truly are lost," his wife replied.
Gendo began to close his fist when the first child said calmly, "Commander Ikari. The phone has been ringing for some time now. Do you ever plan to answer it?"
"Huh?" the other grunted, looking to his right at the small, rectangular machine that was blinking steadily with a lime green light.
The commander looked around himself and realized he was still sitting down in his chair. And he was alone. With a noticeable degree of uneasiness, he leaned forward and pressed a button on the device.
"This is Commander Ikari. I thought I told you not to—"
"Sir, you wished to be notified immediately once Vice Chairman Kouzou Fuyutsuki had returned."
"Yes."
"The Vice Chairman has cleared the front gate, sir."
"Thank you."
Gendo slowly placed the phone back on the receiver before removing a black handkerchief with the NERV logo on it. He coughed into the handkerchief and drew it away from his mouth leaving a small blood stain on the dark fabric.
"Now it begins," he smirked.
Shinji stood in the claustrophobic alcove of Misato's cramped apartment that made the dubious claim of being the kitchen, his fiery hair tied back in a simple pony tail. He'd secured his bangs with a cutesy hair clip of a stylized fox. With Asuka meeting up with Dr. Akagi for a brief physical exam, she wasn't expected back at the ranch until later, and consequently, Shinji could afford to be lazier with Asuka's appearance than usual. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts that stopped mid-thigh as well as a plain black tank top and a red bra beneath. Over this he wore an apron with a print of Nausicaä on its front as not to stain any of Asuka's designer clothes with the grease resulting from his latest culinary endeavor. Completing the ensemble was a pair of Misato's penguin slippers which he tapped in rhythm to the music playing out of his NERV-issue high-definition earbuds. Dave Brubeck's quartet was, quite literally, in full swing.
"You've already eaten," Shinji reminded the genetically-altered hot springs penguin standing directly beside him, his hydrophobic flippers somehow and strangely bent akimbo. It stared at him blinking for several moments before trumpeting an impatient chirp of a sound. Shinji stared at the penguin incredulously for nearly half a minute. It beamed back at him with a sense of expectant entitlement. "Oh God, fiiiiiine," Shinji sighed exasperatedly. "Misato spoils you rotten. I hope you know that." Using the spatula, the third child flipped a strip of chicken into the bizarre creature's beak. It squawked. Shinji just shook his head. "Birds eating birds. Somehow I don't quite feel right with this…"
Misato's coupe skidded dangerously into the last available parking spot outside. The lights died slowly, the globes of the lamps leaving a faint, cadmium halo that lingered for several minutes even after the purr of the engine had long been subdued by the pattering of rain down upon the body of the vehicle. The streetlights girding the spine of the sidewalk sent beams of ghostly blue light down upon the concrete from which a light fog was lifting and condensing into droplets upon the windshields, windows, and mirrors of all the vehicles in the lot. A cigarette arced suddenly out of the fully-opened driver's side window of the Cosmo Sport and landed in a puddle, hissing as the embers died. The door opened. The purple-haired woman clambered out, nearly falling forward and catching herself limply on the door. She muttered something inaudible, then straightened herself up and tossed aside an empty beer can onto the car parked beside her. She giggled childishly, a chortle cut short by a squeak of a hiccup, then she turned and snatched the rest of the Yebisu from the back seat of the car.
There is no greater bellwether of a bad decision ripe to be made than the impulses of a woman who is drunk, horny, and heartbroken.
The rain crashed relentlessly down upon the woman's bare shoulders. Her breath was hot, husky, and brought clouds to the air. Her cheeks thrummed with libidinous vitality, and her eyes possessed a frantic, lupine and predatory glow. Major Katsuragi glared at the light radiating out of her apartment's kitchen window.
"He's old enough," she slurred. "For Christ's sake, he could literally die any one of these days in a fight with an angel. It would practically be a crime to let him die a virgin… what with… the fact that he—hic!—has pretty much saved all of humanity over and over again! And never asked for aaaaaaaanything in return! Nooooooope! Not ooooone—hic!—thing! Only… oh… say a nice word from ollllllll' paps o'er at NERV… hah… the nerve of that guy… hic! Heh heh… Who died and made him God, anyway?"
Misato scrambled up the front steps to her condo, juggling her purse and the beer as carefully as she could in her condition.
Shinji flipped the chicken strips in the pan while Pen Pen fidgeted with a Rubik's Cube. His mind wandered aimlessly to memories of his first few weeks as an EVA pilot. Even now, he still couldn't be sure when it had originally started. The drifting… that strange and otherworldly feeling where his mind and body seemed to come apart and unravel, little by little, piece by piece. Though he didn't know how or when it began, he had come to understand what it was, had grown to more fully embrace the nature of the psychological symbiosis that occurred between EVA and pilot. It had grown to become comfortable, safe, and insulated, a womb if not for the body then for the psyche, if such a place could truly exist. He had grown accustomed to it, and the more he continued to use the EVA as an instrument of war, the less titillating that womb-state had become.
Now here again he was experiencing that feeling anew. Same, but different. Dr. Akagi had been very frank with him when she'd told him that the transference between him and Asuka had more than likely, improbably in fact, not been totally seamless. Firstly, clearly such an event had never before occurred between two human beings in recorded history. Secondly, due to the catalyst of the event being an anti A.T. field similar to that measured during the Second Impact, the logical conclusion was to suggest that since, the body swap aside, the two remained physically unharmed, the greatest extent of the damage would exist at the quantum state. Even for the superstars of NERV's mythological pantheon of scientific titans, delving into such matters required an enormous amount of technology and an enormous amount of money, and currently, both were being stretched to their limits at NERV. Shinji was certain he could thank his father for that. He cursed softly under his breath and switched off the burner. "I'd like to see you handle it," he scoffed, a measure of triumphant optimism escaping into his voice.
At that exact moment, the door to the apartment flung open. Shinji took the frying pan off the stove and placed it on a dormant burner before wiping his hands on a dishrag and folding it neatly over the handle to the oven. He backpedalled into the hallway, squinting down the narrow corridor toward the shadowy recesses by the door.
"Misato?" he called. "Hey, if that's you, I prepared you something to eat since you were out late and I figured you'd probably just call it quits early and do your usual T.V. dinner thing. It's just batter-friend chicken and some edamame, really. Nothing super fancy. Hope you like it though. Best I could do with the cryptic lack of food you've got in the fridge."
The woman kicked the door shut behind herself, then stared wide-eyed at the aproned, bespectacled vision of Asuka's body wearing her penguin slippers and sporting an unfathomably cute hair ornament, and she dropped the beer where she stood as jaw hit floor. She drank in the sight and twitched slightly as though something internal had snapped. Her mind was furiously at work deliberating on the verdict concerning the acceptability of Shinji's current body and whether she, by extension, was truly that perverse and desperate. And she was.
The major tottered forward off the balls of her feet and broke into a trot before she threw her arms around Asuka's shoulders and, with supple grace accrued only from a lifetime of refined sexuality and encore une fois, locked the third child into a kiss from which there was no escape. Shinji's eyes bulged in their sockets as Misato rudely forced her tongue into the other's mouth, greedily sucking at his face while tugging playfully at his ear with her offhand. The boy screamed through pitch-altered vocal chords while struggling helplessly to break free from his captor's embrace. Instead, his efforts to overpower Misato further fueled the flames of her desires, and she pushed him backwards, irresponsibly employing her combat training to spin him around and send him launching into the narrow end of the dining room table. The third child collided with the table with a pain-stricken gasp, doubling over and collapsing face first. This put his small body in a delightfully compromising position for Misato, who slithered up behind the wheezing boy and pressed herself against him, conforming to the budding angles of his adolescent body with her slender-yet-curvaceous physique like water in a glass.
"I think you've waited long enough for this," she whispered into his ear. Her hot breath called Goosebumps to the flesh of his arms as he trembled. "You… you d-deserve a reward for all that you've done for everyone…and for me."
Shinji squirmed desperately. "M… Misato please… you're drunk," he stammered out in a near-whisper. "I… don't want this… th-think about what you're doing… I'm… not even—"
Misato stared down upon the pale, freckled flesh of Asuka's slim back and shoulder blades. She marveled at the stray locks of hair that had escaped the ponytail when she'd tossed him about; their hue, the color of an autumnal blaze, was bewitching against her milky white flesh. Shinji didn't spend nearly as much time outside as Asuka did, so her skin was currently neither tanned nor sullied by cosmetics. Misato was seeing Asuka's skin in an intimate light for the very first time, the unadulterated, porcelain beauty of it absolutely breathtaking. It was so pristine, she believed, that to mar it with impurity would be an act of treason against God himself. The cross-shaped medallion round her neck glinted in the light. She stifled a scream and took a step back, bringing her hand to her mouth as bile crept upward in her throat. She fell to her knees and prostrated herself before Shinji's dainty ankles.
"Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!" she began to sob repeatedly, over and over without even taking a breath. The words came like a mantra. This was something the junior Ikari could understand.
Shinji turned slowly in place so not to injure the woman clinging to his legs, then straightened himself up as slowly and carefully as was possible, placing both hands flat on the table's edge for support while he stared downward. Her hair still soaked with rain, her clothes a mess, mascara and eyeliner gushing down her face in waves, it was, quite literally, the most pathetic state he'd ever witnessed his benefactor having experienced, and he was instantaneously overwhelmed by a terrifyingly immense feeling of pity, guilt, and responsibility, and he nearly crumbled beside her. Only he didn't; instead, Shinji Ikari knelt down beside his violator, and very gently wrapped his arms around her shoulders, laying his head softly upon her tremulous back.
"You are not alone," he whispered quietly in her ear. "You and me… we're both in this together, Misato. To whatever end."
"To what end?" Fuyutsuki bellowed at the top of his lungs.
"To whatever end!" the senior Ikari hissed. The professor watched him careful as he hastily pulled his trademark gloves back onto his hands. "I'm appalled you would even ask me such a question, Fuyutsuki. You disappoint me."
"Frankly, Ikari, I don't give a shisha's ass what appalls or disappoints you. I'm done. I'm out. I'm done taking out your dirty laundry, and I'm done keeping their secrets. It's simply become too much to bear."
"Take heed, professor," said the commander of NERV. "Men have died for words of less conviction when speaking about our… benefactors."
"Look at me, Ikari," Fuyutsuki snapped, slamming his palms down upon Gendo's desk. "What can SEELE possibly do to an old man with regrets like me that wouldn't just be doing him a favor? Huh? Answer me that."
Gendo fixed his glasses securely on his nose. "The years have softened you, Fuyutsuki," he said after a moment. "Made you weak. I thought at first it was just shellshock, after the last few incidents. But no… this… weed… that has been seeded in the garden of your conviction… has deeper roots than I'd imagined."
The Vice-Chairman lunged forward angrily, making a fist directly in front of Gendo's face. "How dare you!" he snarled.
"No, Fuyutsuki! How dare you!" the senior Ikari seethed, vaulting out of his seat. The junior officer recoiled in surprise. "I brought you into this when you were nothing!" Gendo began. "Less than nothing! You were but an empty shell without purpose, like most of the world after the Second Impact. I gave you a reason to live! I gave you a chance to be an integral part of the machine that would carry humanity on swift wings into our destined future! I dredged you out of that flea-ridden shithole in Toyohashi, I got you a position on the United Nations' official investigatory expedition to the South Pole! And when you discovered the truth in the vaults of the Artificial Evolution Laboratory, I brought you into the fold! Now how about some fucking respect for the man who made you who you are today?!"
Fuyutsuki barely managed a wordless nod before returning quietly to the seat on the opposite side of the executive desk over which the senior Ikari was now looming. Gendo took a deep, edifying breath, straightened his collar, and returned to his seat, once more adjusting his spectacles.
"As I was saying, the leak is being handled."
"You've identified the informant then?"
Gendo nodded. "Naturally. And it's being dealt with."
"Who was it? The mole?"
Gendo tilted his head slightly, the vaguest hint of a smirk on his face. "The second matter, and the one you are no doubt fussing so much about, is regarding the financial and military support for the QUAD."
"That new batch of boys over at the U.N. is horrendously by-the-book. And their number crunchers are fiendish. They've asked that we submit clearance codes, receipts and official OPMTs on virtually everything we're doing with the EVAs now. I'm afraid we can't bury our work with the Anti A.T. fields beneath the aegis of extra-terrestrial civil defense projects anymore."
"Absolutely not. I'm quite amused that we were able to string them along this far. But we don't need them anymore, Fuyutsuki. It's time we took the training wheels off."
Fuyutsuki's eyes narrowed as he scrutinized the measure of sincerity in the senior Ikari's statements. "You're not serious…"
"The U.N. has outlived their usefulness," the commander of NERV declared. "The die is cast. We must act now, or forever be relegated to a mere footnote upon the pages of history. While I am at the helm of this ship, I will not allow such a thing to transpire. No. I have already put plans into motion that will see NERV's rise from a police force for the supernatural to a global dynasty of defense. Before long, the entire world will be sending us tribute that we may drive back the beasts that assail them, shepherd them into a new age of enlightenment, prosperity, and connectivity."
"And who plays God, so to speak? You? Me? A handful of a mysterious old crones hiding behind a score of digital monoliths? Gendo, can't you see? The evolution of mankind is not something that can be stimulated or instigated artificially! It must, by virtue of its very nature, occur naturally and in response to the socio-cultural tides of our planet. We can't just grow impatient with a process that has given us several hundred thousand years of survival on Earth and just… fast forward to see where the saga takes us."
"The sentiment of a truly, small and bounded mind," Gendo retorted. "Fuyutsuki, I would have thought that as a man of science, you would believe only in the destiny we create for yourselves. There is no divine or superior force to pray to that will liberate us from this wretched stagnation of the human mind! There is only us. There is only here. Now. I am not a man concerned with the fantastical notions of time-viewing and future-gazing, my old friend. I am a man concerned with creating the future. And doing so has no longer become possible with an oversight committee lingering at every single turn. To instigate the Human Instrumentality, I require more operational freedom. And to do so, I must go beyond our mandate to secure our continuance—and our dominance.
Fuyutsuki shook his head with a deep and wearisome sigh. He looked sadly at his old friend, and what he had become. "Perhaps it might suit you better to have a little faith in your own species. It's been written throughout the centuries by the greatest minds from East to West that there is nothing stronger than faith."
"Of course they wrote that," Gendo Ikari, Commander of NERV, grunted with cocktail of amusement and disdain in his tone. "None of them ever collided with an A.T. field at Mach 2 inside the cockpit of an Evangelion."