Chapter 2

On the shore a girl awoke, and felt nothing but pain.

Asuka Langley-Soryu was no stranger to injury. Nearly a decade of pilot training had resulted in many bumps and bruises. Her right arm had even been broken during a rather intense sparring match. Exhaustion had set in, but the prideful redhead had refused to stop. All it had taken was a simple misstep and Asuka had been put out of action for nearly six weeks. While she hadn't minded a bit of relaxation to begin with, after the second week she had been spotted sneaking into the training gym, much to the despair of her teachers. They had eventually needed to threaten to tie the Second Child to her bed before she would stop trying.

But feeling her entire body wracked with pain was new to Asuka.

Every fibre of her being shrieked in agony. She was literally unable to move. Helpless, she could do nothing but stare at a sky that appeared to be filled with red, as well as a moon with a gory streak of blood bisecting it. Idly, the girl wondered why she couldn't see out of her left eye, as she heard the plunk of something dropping into water nearby. Asuka attempted to turn her head, but even that was too much effort for her body, pushed well beyond its tolerances.

'What the hell is wrong with me? Scheiße, why can't I move? Have I been paralysed?' Her mind raced while her body lay idle, trying to piece together what had led her to be laying... where? The sound of waves told her she was near a body of water, but her nose could smell mostly blood in the air, as if something had been slaughtered nearby. She would not know until much later how close that was to the truth.

'I remember... what? The white Evas... I was obliterating them, even after they cut my Unit's power cord. But then... they got up. I killed them and they just got back up! I was winning damnit! How dare they cheat! And Ikari! The stupid Third Child was nowhere to be found as usual, probably had those dumb headphones on while I was calling for him.'

A shadow passed over her, and as Asuka attempted to focus her remaining eye on this sudden interruption to her introspection, she felt trembling hands grip her throat. Unruly brown hair hovered near her face and faint whimpering, so familiar after her time in Tokyo-3, told her who the owner of the hands was.

'Wait, he's here too? Stupid Shinji is here? Where are we? W-wait, why the hell are you strangling me, you idiot? What the hell is going on?! Answer me!' The anger rapidly drained from her. 'Is...is this how I make you feel, Ikari? You want to... kill me, is that it? Heh, well I can't exactly say I blame you. After all, I've done nothing but harass and ridicule you ever since I came into your life. But... why has it taken this long for you to express how I make you feel? Why didn't you say anything?! Talk to me!'

A flash of light, and she was back in her Evangelion, blood pouring from her destroyed eye as the Mass Production Evangelions swooped down and began tearing at her Unit-02. Despite the giant red robot running out of power and shutting down, she could vividly feel their claws in her own stomach as they ripped through the armour and tore out her Evangelion's internal organs. Her back arched, throwing her body away from the pilot seat as if she could escape the attack. Around Unit-02, the white harpies suddenly took to the sky, intestines firmly in their mouths as they desecrated their kill.

A flash again, and she was back staring at the brown hair in front of her face.

'Oh god, he's sitting right on my stomach. I feel sick, I was disembowelled, and he's on my stomach.'

Her right hand clenched slowly, and she finally noticed the vague sensation of cloth tightly wrapped around her arm, from her shoulder all the way to the palm of her hand. She remembered the final assault by the harpies now. Left arm clutching at her ruined face, right arm raised towards the light coming through the roof of the Geofront. Only barely cognisant of the fact that her Evangelion was still mimicking her movements.

Only one thought on her mind: 'I'll kill you...'

The sudden shock of her right arm splitting in half around the light as a hurled lanced destroyed Unit-02's upraised hand, and hers with it. Finally, as if to ensure her death was as painful as possible, several more lances stabbed through her Evangelion, the injuries mirroring themselves agonisingly on her own body.

As she passed mercifully into unconsciousness and eventually death, Asuka felt a deep rumbling as the earth around her shook. The last piece of reality she saw was Unit-01 ascending through the Geofront on giant wings of light. The last thing she heard as her right eye finally closed was the insane scream of a boy who had arrived too late.

Returning to the present, Asuka could feel herself slowly running out of oxygen. Shinji's hands were still choking her, despite the lack of strength behind them. She was going to die, Asuka knew that. Her murderer would be the sad young boy who could never stand up to her, because she had always knocked him down. Asuka's constant attempts to get the Third Child to notice and react to her had failed, because he was scared... no, because he was terrified of her. Yet he somehow managed to keep a smile on his face whenever he served her meals or cleaned and tidied up after her. She had never even thanked him for anything he had done for her, simply abusing him whenever something, no matter how minor, was not done to her exact demands.

Was it any wonder the most common word out of the Third Child's mouth was "sorry"?

'I kept telling him to stop apologising, and then acted as if everything was his fault. He'd say sorry, then apologise for saying sorry. Stupid Shinji. Wait, no... Stupid Asuka...'

Summoning as much of her dwindling strength as she could muster, Asuka directed all of it into her right arm, moving it up at a glacial pace. She cupped Shinji's cheek, and she heard a faint gasp as Shinji felt her warm touch. His head shot up, and cobalt eyes locked onto her remaining sapphire eye.

She could not help but notice the lack of light in those perpetually sad orbs. Even when he had been in one of his depressive states, Shinji's eyes had always had some life in them. Now, they looked distant, dead. Shinji seemed to be staring through her, as if not truly aware of the situation. Asuka slowly, gently, stroked his cheek, trying to convey solely in her hand what she lacked the strength to say aloud.

'Looks like it's my turn now. I'm sorry, Shinji. For everything I forced you to put up with, including myself, I am sorry.'

She felt his hands unclench from around her throat, and her lungs inhaled instantly, desperate for oxygen. Her arm fell back to her side, devoid of strength after the Herculean effort of lifting it. Asuka felt water dripping onto her face as the boy above her finally broke down and sobbed openly, trying to curl into a ball while still straddling the redhead. As Asuka's remaining eye slowly wandered down and took him in, she noticed just how terrible his appearance was. Shinji's dark brown hair was filled with sand, and his shirt was dirty and unbuttoned. He smelled like stale sweat, as if he hadn't bathed in days, mixed with fear.

'Oh no... Shinji, stop crying, I'm fine. No wait... I feel like I'm going to throw up, and your dirty butt on my stomach isn't helping matters. Move your ass, Ikari, before I hurl! Ugh, I feel so...'

"Disgusting..."

The sobbing stopped instantly as she finally managed to speak. The two teenagers were both still for what felt like an eternity, before a sudden burst of movement from Shinji surprised Asuka. As if rising from a starting block, he got to his feet and took off, leaving a shocked girl behind him.

"Shin... ji..." Asuka struggled to call out to him. It was barely a whisper, and even if he had heard it, she somehow knew he wouldn't stop. The fading sound of running feet was the last thing Asuka heard before she slipped into unconsciousness.


Several hours later, Asuka awoke to a somewhat pleasing discovery. The pain had dulled itself somewhat, and she was finally able to move her limbs. It still took many minutes to summon the strength to sit up, and the first thing she saw was so surprising Asuka nearly lost her battle with gravity, barely managing to get her arms behind her to prop her body up. Her right arm cried out as it took her weight, but she ignored it in favour of the sight in front of her.

A vast sea of red stretched out before the Second Child, and she finally realised the source of the strange blood smell filling the air. LCL, the same fluid that was used in the Evangelions for synchronisation and shock absorption. The smell was much stronger now, and it alone was almost enough to make Asuka vomit.

The vision of a mountain-sized face, bisected cleanly through the centre, broke her attention away from the scent of blood long enough for her stomach to settle down again.

For a long while, Asuka could do nothing but stare at the decaying, rictus-grinning half-face of her former fellow pilot Rei Ayanami, destroyed buildings littering the area around the giant mass of white flesh. Even the decapitated statues dotting the sea nearby were not enough to shift her gaze from that one hill-sized eye staring back at her.

It was only when the redhead's arms began to tremble under her weight that Asuka eventually lowered herself back to the ground. With nothing else to do while she recuperated, the girl began to think to herself, pondering how she had ended up on the beach near a destroyed city, being strangled by her room-mate and fellow pilot Shinji Ikari.

'What do I remember? That scream... that awful, terrible scream. Nothing human should make a sound like that. Was that Shinji? He finally shows up, and gets greeted by a mutilated carcass where he expects to see me.' Asuka frowned, her mind working overtime with the limited information she possessed. She only vaguely recalled people yelling over the comm link, so focused was she on killing all of the Mass Production Evangelions. 'That can't be enough for him to scream like that, right? He surely hates me after everything I did to him. It has to have been something else.'

A shiver coursed through her body as the wind picked up, chilling her through the thin material of the plugsuit. The suit was a marvel of modern technology, containing various medical and life support systems, but it had little to no insulation. The majority of their plugsuit time was either in the NERV base or in an entry plug, where the LCL would be temperature-controlled for the comfort of the pilot. Outside, exposed to open air, there was little protection from the elements. Adding to that the fact that it was the middle of the night, according to the position of the blood-stained moon, and it was little surprise that Asuka was starting to freeze.

She wrapped her arms around herself, struggling to retain her precious body heat, and curled up into a ball. The fact that all her limbs appeared to be fully functional dispelled the earlier worry that she was paralysed, and a small smile grew on her face at the realisation.

Unwilling to stare at the strange sight in the sky above, or the more disturbing one sitting in the hills, Asuka turned her whole body to the left. While the pain in her body had dulled, every movement in her right arm sent worrying jolts up the limb, and Asuka grew slightly afraid. Were the bandages the only thing keeping her split arm together? They were incredibly tightly wound, so much so that she could barely flex her wrist.

She decided not to remove them, remembering an adage her grandmother, a retired haberdasher she always called "Granny Cosmo", once told her after a very young Asuka had scraped her knee. The old woman had retrieved the first-aid kit, placed the girl on her lap, and cleaned the injury up before placing a band-aid on it, before warning her that "it won't get better if you pick at it".

Her left side touched the ground, and she saw something unusual. She raised her head slightly, and brushed some hair out of her eye. A small pile of food and water lay before Asuka, carelessly discarded by someone. Before the redhead could determine who could have left it, she was rudely interrupted by her stomach growling angrily.

Asuka pressed a hand to her belly as she grimly remembered the last time she had eaten. It had been just before the phone call from her stepmother. How long ago was that now? Asuka, Shinji and Misato had been silently eating dinner. She couldn't remember what Shinji had made, only that whatever it was, it had been utterly delicious as usual. Whatever else she said about the Third Child, she privately admitted that he knew how to cook like a professional chef.

'Of course, he would be a profession chef compared to Misato.' Asuka wryly thought. 'I'd rather starve to death than eat one of her culinary disasters. That crazy woman could set cereal on fire, and she'd still eat it and consider it a masterpiece!'

Anxious for sustenance and spurred on by her complaining belly, Asuka crawled over to the food pile. It had taken her a while to get used to some of the strange flavours Japan seemed to have in abundance, and Asuka was thankful that she was now accustomed to the tastes of many new snack foods. Her heart, and stomach, would always belong to German cuisine however. The thought had once occurred to her to ask -no, back then it would have been a demand- for Shinji to make bratwurst, but it had been pushed to the back of her mind during the week they had been forced to spend together while training to fight the Seventh Angel.

Asuka eagerly ripped open a bag of steak-flavoured chips, devouring them with glee. Her stomach finally settled as it was filled, and her nose thankfully no longer noticed the pervasive stench of blood in the air. The girl discarded the empty packet to the wind, and started sifting through the rest of the food. She was amazed to discover that the majority was comprised of snacks she enjoyed. During the search, she discovered something that brought a wide smile to her face. A small green cigarette lighter was held up to her face, as if she could not believe her eyes. Now she would not have to worry about freezing, if she could find something flammable.

Asuka cast her gaze about, and she quickly spotted an easy source of wood. A series of crosses stood in a row behind where she had been sitting.

After a few false starts, Asuka eventually climbed to her feet, her legs shaking slightly as she stood upright. Her muscles complained of the effort she was putting them through as she slowly walked towards the crosses. A tired brain eventually realised that something was amiss with this surprisingly adjacent fuel source. Looking closer, she saw a glint of moonlight reflecting off one of the crosses. Asuka fell to her knees in shock as the girl realised what she was looking at.

A silver cross hanging on a nail, its chain dangling and swaying slightly in the breeze, with a red splotch spattered across its surface.

Her left hand, still clutching the lighter, flew to her mouth as she recognised the distinctive item. It was Misato Katsuragi's necklace, something the woman had worn for as long as Asuka had known her. Her right hand slowly reached out, and her thumb rubbed at the red stain. It flaked off slightly, and Asuka realised that it was blood. The stain was completely dry, and the necklace had obviously ended up in Shinji's possession. Misato was dead, and he must have been with her.

Their guardian had given her life to protect Shinji.

Asuka glanced at the other crosses, and she made out names scratched into their surfaces. Her ability to read the Japanese language was not as good as her ability to speak it, but she was at least able to make out the names of her classmates, someone who she had never heard of called Kaworu Nagisa, Kaji's name...

And her own name.

Asuka froze in surprise as everything she had seen recently came together. A ruined city. A sea filled with blood. The gigantic corpse face. The streak of red across the sky.

Asuka had heard rumours of Third Impact. The supposed cataclysm that would occur if an Angel were to make it through NERV's defenses to whatever lay deep beneath the earth. Humanity would be wiped out, swept from the face of the earth as if they had never existed. It was now clear that the hypothetical had become reality.

An uneasy feeling swept through the girl's body as Asuka started turning things over in her mind. Shinji and Asuka had obviously survived the end of the world, despite the best efforts of the harpies that had murdered her, so why did she have a grave marker? Kaji's marker lent serious weight to what Shinji had tried to tell her before she had run away and ended up in an abandoned house, sitting naked in a rusty bathtub as she slowly bled to death.

There were supposed to be no more angels, so it could not have been them that triggered Third Impact. The Mass Production Evangelions, those white demons of SEELE that were even now slowly sinking into the water, could they have done it? They had been sent to NERV to... what? Capture something? Kill everyone? They might have been the ones to trigger Third Impact. Asuka regretted not paying more attention to whatever the bridge crew had been yelling about during her fight.

And then there was the state of Shinji's appearance. The dead look in his eyes and vacant expression on his face. Not even at her most venomous had Asuka ever seen the Third Child look at her like that. Shinji was somehow involved with this catastrophe. Was he the one that caused Third Impact? No, one of her favourite jabs at Shinji he was too passive. Had he merely been a witness, forced to watch as everyone around him died? But why then would Shinji try and kill her, instead of welcoming her back to the land of the living?

There were far too many pieces of a disturbing puzzle missing, and one of them had just recently run off. Asuka shivered and hugged herself as the wind picked up again. She decided to postpone her... investigation until she could locate Shinji. Before that could happen though, she needed rest and warmth. The grave markers were left alone. Despite the strain it took on her tired and injured body, Asuka managed to scrounge up more wood and got a small fire going quickly.

After downing an entire bottle of water, a rummage through the small food pile turned up another packet of steak-flavoured chips, as well as a chip flavour that made her hesitate for a moment. She only knew one person who would eat sesame chicken flavour. That bag was set aside, just in case Shinji came back. Asuka's hopes were low that he would return, but the Third Child had surprised her before.

Like jumping into a volcano to save her...

She finally lay down as close as she dared to the crackling flames. Resting her head on her uninjured arm, Asuka eventually drifted off into an uneasy, dreamless sleep.


A girl dozed under a red sky, and felt nothing but warmth.

Asuka stretched out her arms, attempting to bring the warmth closer. A twinge of pain shot through her right arm as the person carrying her stumbled slightly at the sudden intimate contact, but she ignored it, concentrating solely on the heat source.

"Mmm, Kaji," she mumbled sleepily. This wasn't the first time the scruffy man had had to carry her to bed after a long training session. "I'm so tired. They had me in the entry plug for hours and I'm exhausted."

Despite the lack of response, Asuka pulled herself as close as she could. The girl had never felt this comfortable in a long time, and she didn't want to fully wake up without a damn good reason. Asuka would eventually have to go to school unfortunately. The classes were utterly boring, as she already knew everything they were teaching. The only things to look forward to would be chatting with Hikari and enjoying whatever Shinji had made for their lunches.

Maybe she should do something nice for him one day. Shinji's boxed lunches were excellent, and dinner at the Katsuragi household was heavenly as long as their guardian was kept away from the kitchen. Tomorrow, she'll take him shopping, and teach him how to make some dishes from her homeland. If Shinji could make Japanese food taste divine, what wonders could he produce with German cuisine? Asuka almost drooled at the thought of a traditional German dinner created by the Third Child before remembering something.

"I had this really weird dream, Kaji." There was a moment of silence, and then a deep, questioning grunt came from her heat source. "I dreamed the world had been destroyed, and Wondergirl's stupid decapitated face was all giant and sitting in the hills near the city. The sea was red, and it looked like someone had taken a bucket of red paint to the sky." No response came this time, but she continued regardless. "Yeah, pretty strange, huh?"

Asuka frowned as a few drops of water splashed on her face, and she yawned slightly as she realised she was being held in a bridal carry. Whoever was carrying her had just stepped over something. "Mmh... Kaji, are you taking me back to your place? Why didn't you bring an umbrella?"

She felt herself being lowered to the ground, and she grumpily protested as the heat source tried to get away. Asuka locked her arms around the person's neck, wanting to stay warm. A deep voice said, "Wait here, Asuka, I'll be back in a minute."

"Oh, fine," she grumpily replied. "I'll just lay here and freeze then, shall I? Hey Kaji, do you have a cold or something? You sound really weird. Hah, if I didn't know better I'd think you were Shin-"

Asuka's eyes shot open as her brain finally woke up at the sound of footsteps and a door slamming open. She was inside what appeared to be a service station, and the sound of rain on the roof was quickly increasing in volume. Her body felt sore again, probably from being carried, and it took her several agonising seconds to crawl to her feet. Shelves blocked her view of the windows looking out of the store, and it took too much time to stumble towards the front of the store and out under the roof protecting the fuel pumps.

Rain was pouring down relentlessly, and Asuka could barely make out a figure in a white shirt running down the street. Before she had a chance to call out to the fleeing boy, a bolt of lighting struck a building nearby, and the thunder nearly knocked her to the ground.

There was no sign of Shinji when she eventually straightened back up. Asuka's chance to get the answers she needed had fled as quickly as the storm rolling in across the ruined city. She dejectedly walked back into the store, sat down against the shop counter with her head on her arms, and watched the storm pound what remained of Tokyo-3. Asuka could not help but be thankful that Shinji had come back to her, if only to carry her to safety before running away again. If it hadn't been for him, she would have been completely soaked by the downpour as she tried to find shelter in her injured state.

"You're a damn coward, Third Child... but... thank you," she muttered to herself, before drifting off into sleep once more.


A/N: This story is also on the Sufficient Velocity forums. Those of you that are up to date there may have already noticed a few differences. There won't be anything that utterly changes the plot, mostly just things where I went 'Hmm, actually it sounds better if I write it like this instead', or 'no wait, that was a bit wrong'.

I forgot to mention it on the first chapter, so I'll do it here. Thank you to everybody that's kept up with the story over the year it's been at SV. It's because of you people that I had the desire to continue.

Special thanks go out to Strypgia (a.k.a. Panther2G), Ranma-sensei and Gryphon for their continued efforts in making sure my story actually makes sense before I post it.

But extra special thanks go out to Mike Mars, author of That Which Could (Not) Happen. I posted a plot bunny on another forum, because I didn't feel I would do the story justice, and he showed up and encouraged me to to try. Without him, Ya(N)aF would probably never have existed.