Disclaimer: I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion.

Author's Note: Chapter title is a line from The Rolling Stones' "Midnight Rambler".

Thanks to my reviewers! Violet Shadows, Dada kicks ass. Nemesis Zero, definitely. The bridge techs always reminded me of the crew that was left out in the rain while the storm went down--kinda like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, except not QUITE as cruelly & absurdly manipulated. Fresh C, ah hah! I'm glad someone noticed the characterization. There's a reason they're somewhat off-kilter from their "normal" characterizations that comes around in chapter 6/7, so hold in there.

Nightlife 2.1: I'll Put A Fist Through Your Steel-Plate Door

Shinji groaned and collapsed, burying his face into the sweat-soaked pillow. His breath tickled her ear. Her body was breathing heavily beneath his, straining against the lone restraint above his head. There was a peace here, a serenity that existed only in this moment—pure exhaustion mixed with an ennui that bordered on unconsciousness. He could feel the haze in his muscles, and for a moment, as he wrapped his arms around her body, it felt like they were nothing more than embryos nestled in a womb.

When their winds returned, Shinji pushed off the mattress with the palms of his hands, immediately missing the heat of her body as his naked chest rose into the air.

She moaned softly as he looked down at her gorgeous, tired face. The jerk of her forearms reminded him of the handcuffs.

"Oh shit," he breathed quickly, reaching for the key on the nightstand. "I'm so sorry, Rei." His hands shook as he tried to get the goddamn keyhole to line up. One side came open with soft click, and after a moment of quiet cursing, the other gave way as well.

Rei rubbed her wrists after they were free. There were deep indentations in the flesh that were bruising slightly.

"D-doesn't that hurt?" He asked her, watching her massage the marks as he sat on the side of the bed.

"It does," she said quietly. "But the effect is most admirable."

"Admirable," Shinji echoed. He ran his hands through his hair and stared at the way his bare feet made contact with the cold linoleum.

She peered at him. "Is something wrong?"

"Uh—no, nothing." He got up quickly and started for the shower. "I'm going to go wash up," he said, doing his best not to look back.

Her eyes followed him, but she said nothing. Sliding her pale legs across the cotton sheets, Rei gathered herself and stood to follow Shinji into the bathroom.

Water cascaded out of the showerhead with a sharp hiss that cut through the empty air like a million razorblades through tinfoil. Droplets spattered about the stall, but it wasn't a pleasant mist.

Rei nudged him on the shoulder and wordlessly passed him, her nakedness like a tombstone. He heard her gasp as the water hit her skin, but she visibly relaxed underneath the showerhead.

"Weren't you going to wash up?" She asked, lathering a glop of shampoo in her hands.

"There—uh—there's not enough room…" he knew that was a lie from experience. It was a pathetic excuse he used to remain in his perpetual angst.

She eyed him as she massaged the suds into her scalp, but said nothing. The suds flowed and traced lines in her back as water cascaded through her hair. Abstractions whirled across the pallor of her lithe body. If it had been anyone else, anywhere else, it could have been beautiful.

He watched her shower, and when she was done, she grabbed one of the two towels hanging over the sink to dry herself with. Water continued to pound the dingy surfaces. Steam was thick and the moisture penetrated the pores in his skin even as he sweated.

She gazed at him as she used the towel to ruffle her hair.

Minutes later, he finished his shower and exited the bathroom in time to see Rei pouring tea. She was dressed simply in a button-down shirt and underwear. Shinji felt no need to overdress either, so he opted for his slacks. He still felt a little uncomfortable without his shirt on, but Rei didn't seem to mind, so he did his best to swallow his self-consciousness and sat down at the table.

"You're distracted," she practically whispered. She sat the awkwardly-shaped metal cup in front of him before sitting down in the opposite chair. Steam wafted off the rims of the cups like smoke from a smoldering wreckage.

"It…it's nothing," he replied uncertainly. The cup was too tarnished to see his reflection in. Only the amber-green of the tea offered him his face, distorted by ripples caused by the vibrations of his heartbeat.

After a few minutes of stewing under her gaze, Shinji relented. "It's Asuka," he finally mumbled. "She's… getting… bolder, I guess. I don't know. If it were anyone else, I'd think she was trying to flirt with me, but she's just…" He sighed and shivered and continued to stare intently at his cup.

Rei said nothing. She brought her cup to her lips and sipped. Her face was a sunset behind the haze of a pyrrhic victory.

"She's gotten more unstable," he admitted. "All she does is hate, over and over. She's never been all that fun to be around, but lately it's like her only goal is to make me feel worse than I already do. Ever since the twelfth angel, that's all she does. It grates on my nerves like nothing I know."

"All she wants is attention," Rei responded.

"That's all she gets!" Shinji waved his hands wildly, his voice rising in volume only slightly. "She gets it from everyone! The people at school crowd around her like she's some kind of idol! Her sync scores always draw appreciation from the people at NERV! The maintenance crew?—I heard that half of the maintenance crew even got a hold of snapshots Kensuke took from when he sneaked into the girls' locker room!" He sighed and collected himself, babbling as he did so. "He hid in the air ducts during the gym period and Toji had to cover for him. He waited there the whole period just to get about a dozen shots of Asuka changing. He doesn't even like Asuka. He did it all on a bet with Toji."

He sighed again, and suddenly his wind was back. "And that's another thing, too! Even the people that don't like her give her attention! Half of my conversations at school descend into pointless banters with those two about what the hell Asuka's whole problem is! And she just fuels their bickering by yelling louder!"

Shinji raised the cup to his lips, but didn't drink. Instead, he set it down again and continued. "She's worse than Misato. She parades around the apartment with next to nothing on and then berates me for 'leering' at her—and all I'm doing is my homework! Or watching TV! Or—or—just not looking at her! I-I mean, she just goes off, and then she calls me a stupid little boy for not returning these asinine teasing flirts she does." His fingers threaded through his hair, tracing white lines in his scalp. The reflection he saw in the tea was that of a hollow and pitted skull covered in sallow flesh. "It makes me sick."

Rei continued to gaze at him wordlessly. She sipped more of her tea and waited for him to continue.

"And… and just everything else, I guess." Shinji had deflated, but his angst remained. "Everyone at NERV's been acting differently since the twelfth. I know they try to hide it, but I can see it in the way they act around me—it's like… I don't really know what it's like, I just know that they're… it's like they fear something. It's like they fear me. They fear something in Eva, something that I'm supposed to have control over. But the truth is—the truth is that I don't control it at all." He gripped the metal cup in his right hand, but smacked the table with the fist of his left. "Every time—every time—I fail! Every goddamn time! And then Evangelion—whatever it is—it works, it does all the work, and I don't even have the chance to—to—to—"

He sighed dejectedly and finally took a sip of the tea. "…This is good, Rei," he said quietly.

Rei's face colored slightly, and she averted her eyes. "Thank you."

Shinji's phone vibrated against his thigh, and he had to shift in the chair in order to retrieve the device from his pocket.

"Hello?" He cast a quick glance at Rei, who was merely staring vacantly at the pot of tea. "No, I'm out. You what? You do it. I can't do it; I'm not at the apartment. I told you I'm not—I said—yeah. Well I guess you'll just have to do it yourself, then. Fine. Nothing! I'm not with—it's not like that. Goodbye." He clapped the phone shut and dropped it on the metal table and propped his head on his forearms.

"I wish I could stay here forever," he mumbled. "I wish I didn't have to worry about anything."

"I… do not know kind of response you're looking for," Rei started.

Shinji looked up, focusing on the pale face beyond the ridge of the metal cup. "What?"

"Life is pain," she said. "If you cannot bring yourself to accept the nothingness in death, then you must continue to endure the suffering of life."

"Mister Kaji said the same thing," Shinji groaned. "But he said that it didn't have to be that way. He said life didn't have to be full of misery and suffering, and that we made this… well, he said it a lot better than I ever could. 'Wrought our fate with our own bare hands' or something, he said. I can't remember exactly."

"Do you really believe that?"

"Huh?" Shinji leaned back in his chair. "What—well—I mean, I guess. But looking at it that way is just as bad! That's just saying that we're all just victims of forces beyond our control!"

Rei got up and approached the tea pot. "Some of us are." She poured herself another cupful of the fluid. The pot hit the countertop with a dull clang. "What did your father say to you?"

The image of the grave-less memorials hit his brain, and he remembered his father's words and the smell of the dry air and the heat of the V-TOL's engines as it kicked up sand.

"He told me to stop looking for him," Shinji said. He sipped more tea. The light of the moon cast a long shadow of the bed that crept slowly towards the kitchen. Bandages were stacked neatly on the corner of a table. Even the skyline seemed vacant, though lights still shimmered in the darkness.

Rei turned from the counter to look at his face. He drank the rest of the tea in his cup and stood from the table, taking his time to push in the chair and trying to ignore the obnoxious grating sound that resulted. Doing his best to ignore her gaze, he stepped back into the bedroom and retrieved his S-DAT, along with his shirt. He sat on the bed to put his socks on.

"You're not staying tonight?" Rei asked from the kitchen. She didn't raise her voice.

Shinji faltered as his arm missed the sleeve. "N-no," he stuttered. "I—ah, Mister Kaji said he had something for me to do tonight. He wanted to pick me up at seven, but I—well I—I told him I had errands. So he insisted on eleven." He glanced quickly at the dim clock on the table next to the bandages: 10:54.

"It takes twenty minutes to walk to the Major's apartment," she observed. Her metal cup made a sharp clack as she set it on the counter.

He faced the window as he tucked in his shirt and looked down at his S-DAT. "Yeah. He's—ah—picking me up… here."

Rei remained by the counter.

As he made his way toward the door, Shinji tried again to ignore her gaze. This time he failed, and he paused by the foyer to look back at her. Her stare wasn't cold or emotionless or dead.

"Rei, why don't you smile more?"

It was warm, and Shinji felt like he had just watched a sapphire tumble into a cement mixer.

On the curb, he met the sound of Kaji's convertible with an itchy scalp. His hair was still wet from the shower as he clamored into the passenger's seat. The only working florescent light flickered above the pair, and if it weren't for the apartment complexes' lights, the rest of the street would have been bathed in darkness for a few short seconds. Let It Bleed ran circles around itself in the car's stereo; the music was quiet, but the bluesy tunes added an even darker ambience to the already forlorn despondency.

"A little late to be taking showers at young women's apartments, wouldn't you say?" Kaji lit a cigarette as Shinji buckled a seatbelt. He looked at the clock on the dash and stuffed the lighter in his shirt pocket once the tip started to glow. "Or a little early, depending on the context."

Shinji blushed. "It's not like that," he mumbled halfheartedly.

Kaji peered at him with an eyebrow raised, that casual half-smirk tugging at an underlying hilarity only he could see. "None of my business, I suppose." He kicked the engine into gear and the car took off down the desolate street. The lone streetlamp wavered and flickered and questioned the meaning of its existence as it bit at the edges of night.

"Uh, Mister Kaji," Shinji started after a few minutes of rushing wind and Rolling Stones. "Where are we going?"

Kaji took a corner at twenty, drifting around with a steady grip on the handbrake. His cigarette flew out of his mouth as he forced the beast up to sixty on a relatively short stretch of road, and Shinji's grip on the door handle increased exponentially.

Wordless seconds slipped discretely into minutes bathed in silence; the whistle of the wind and the roar of the engine were the only witnesses to their escape.

They rounded a bend and the roadway took on a reasonable incline. Minutes later, they were perched on the same vantage point Misato had taken him to upon his first arrival to Tokyo-3. Kaji pulled the parking brake and cut the engine, leaving the stereo on to perpetuate its tunes.

"Everything I am about to tell you is a joke," Kaji said, after the track changed over to what would have been the second side of the album. "Don't take it seriously."

Shinji looked at the driver somewhat skeptically. A red dot on the corner of a skyscraper blinked in slow monotony, fading in and out with the sound of the tide far below.

"We have reached the time after miracles, Shinji." The man's voice was tired and cold and stained with an indefinable heaviness that permeated his physical body. "And I have gazed upon the face of its prophet." He reached into his pockets to retrieve his cigarettes and lighter once more.

After lighting a stick, he continued: "Have you ever lain awake at night and wondered why you could hear the Smashing Pumpkins or Depeche Mode without your S-DAT on? Or why you periodically have gaps in your memory? Or why it sometimes seems like hours have been crammed into the space of just a few minutes?" Kaji's cigarette was a dim crimson glow—a period in the darkness. "Have you ever felt eyes on the back of your neck, only to find that there's nobody around?"

Shinji stared in mute fascination as Kaji's ramblings descended into a tone resembling emotional vulnerability. "Shinji," he said. "Haven't you ever wondered why you can never remember falling asleep or waking up?"

"What do you mean?" His voice wavered, but Shinji was able to finish the question without stuttering.

"There is a device in NERV," the smoking man started. "It rests below Terminal Dogma—beneath the white giant on her cross, in the very bowels of the installation, in a place so deep I doubt even the Sub-Commander is aware of its presence." Kaji took a breath. "It lies at the heart of existence, where it is so cold that it chills the very marrow of bones."

He coughed, and Shinji blinked, involuntarily gasping as he did so. Shinji wasn't even aware that his arm had gone to sleep because of how it hung over the side of the door.

"They use it to travel through time," Kaji hissed, his voice going weak and turning to a rasp. "They're harvesting the future, Shinji. They're taking parts of Instrumentality and applying it to the current predicament, fragmenting the very core of reality and forcing multiple subjective identities to bear the weight of an entirely objective existence. They're forcing an entire ontological crisis upon the subconscious minds of people who simply aren't ready to cope with that kind of thing."

Shinji gaped, unsure of what to do or think. Kaji was saying things that made absolutely no sense.

"I'm telling you this because you need to know," Kaji whispered, the night's gloom descending and permeating like a damp fog. "I'm telling you this because I'm going to be dead very soon. They—" he sighed and tossed his cigarette butt off the ridge, taking the time to fish another stick out of the box in his pocket and lighting it with a flick of his lighter.

"When I was down there, in the void," he began again, "I came across the scrolls. They weren't anything I had expected—weren't even parchment, or lambskin, or anything like that at all. It was just a folded wad of computer paper, haphazardly stapled and clipped. You know what they said?"

Shinji shook his head slowly.

"Kaji Ryoji dies in Episode Twenty-One," he mumbled. "The scripts were a little over twelve years old, but that seemed so inconsequential." Kaji slumped and breathed heavily. "You ended the world, Shinji. You fundamentally altered everything everybody ever knew or thought or perceived. The world died, and you gave it a rebirth with your own two hands. This stuff isn't scheduled or prophesized, Shinji, it's already happened. We're experiencing a rerun of a television show—it's all regurgitated syndication, and all this time we've been entirely unaware."

He wiped his forehead, and beige coloring came off like makeup. Shinji watched with something akin to repulsion and amazement as Kaji looked at him. The pigmentation on his forehead was uneven and cracked, like the icing of a cake left out in the sun. Beneath the folded layers was a fleshy knot—a scar.

"We've been edited, cut, censored, placed out of order, watched backwards, rewound, fast forwarded, skipped completely, dubbed, subtitled, redubbed, erroneously understood, played backwards for subliminal messages, and misinterpreted more times than can be counted. There are entire piles of unused or defunct scripts lying around in that basement of existence—a literary graveyard of dead plots and anonymous characters that never existed. There have been an infinite number of Kaji Ryojis and Shinji Ikaris all reprising the same fundamental aspect of this reality, and each of them is equally valid as the true Kaji or the true Shinji.

"I died in Episode Twenty-One," Kaji said softly. "And I have died in Episode Twenty-One ever since. But now—now that I know the truth of things, their schedule has kicked into high gear. This time—this time I'm not going to just die, Shinji. They're going to erase me from the scripts. They're going to remove me from existence. They're going to replace me with a different character, someone else who might look like Kaji Ryoji, and might even have the name 'Kaji Ryoji', and he might say things like I do, but he won't be me."

He looked back over the glittering city.

"It's just a matter of time now," he said. "And there's nothing I can do about it."

Kaji sighed again and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. After a moment of silence, he straightened and kicked the engine into life. As the car backed onto the roadway, he spoke again.

"Reality is wounded, Shinji," he said. The transmission chunked and clunked as he put it in first gear, let up on the clutch and eased into the gas. "Have you ever paid attention to the television?"

Shinji, unsure as to whether he should be as baffled as he actually was, shook his head. "Not really."

"Right," Kaji agreed. "It's always on in the background, blinking its nonsense and noise into the ambience." He cleared his throat as he shifted gears and sped through an intersection. "Well, next time you see one, I want you to pay attention to the television."

"Asuka watches it sometimes," Shinji divulged. A billboard flew past, and it was an advertisement for orange juice. The woman holding the fake carton was pale and her smile was as meaningless as the pedestal she was mounted on. "She's always watching the same show—nothing but cartoons fighting and… well… I can't understand what's going on."

"Until recently, it's the only show that's ever been airing." Kaji shrugged. The engine roared. "Now there's a competitor—it hasn't got a name, but it closely parallels real life."

"A reality TV-show?" Shinji raised an eyebrow skeptically. "Mister Kaji—"

"It's not a reality TV-show, Shinji. It's a TV-show modeled on reality—there's no way any television studio on the planet could have access to the things they're showing and revealing about NERV and the Second Impact—that's clearance information even Katsuragi doesn't have. Granted, there's always the possibility that they came up with the whole plot by chance—Hamlet and monkeys style—but that's pretty goddamn unlikely."

They sped through an intersection where the stoplights all blinked yellow.

"That show is the wound I'm referring to," Kaji said. "It's like it's modeled on our reality, but it's some sort of deranged mutation of a bizarre perspective—like a, a, a combat simulation that's had its data become corrupted by some kind of virus." He stuttered for the proper analogy. "And that TV show, that's what it is; it simulates this place, provides an escape from the harsh realities we have to encounter—but it's so sick and depraved that it lost its whole context to an infectious character trope who hijacked the plot. Now he's driving it into the ground, but for some reason, our very existences are inexorably linked to the fate of that show."

Shinji honestly didn't know what to say to any of this, so he simply sunk further into the seat cushions and waited to be dropped off. Minutes phased into each other, and soon Shinji found himself standing on the curb, closing the door of Kaji's convertible, murmuring a half-assed good night.

"Shinji," Kaji called after the boy had already backed away a few steps. "Remember this conversation," he said. "Don't ever forget what I said to you tonight. I won't be who I am right now the next time we meet."

Shinji rubbed his temples and closed his eyes, nodding, ignoring, waving goodbye as he started for the apartment building. He heard the car's engine kick into a roar as the beast sped on away into the night.

The stairs were grimy and desolate, each footfall echoing emptily into the dark of night. As he reached the apartment, his phone rang again.

"Hello?" He answered wearily, tapping in the lock combination on the keypad. The door slid open with a swoosh. "No, I just go in. I'm sorry. It's just—I—no, I'll probably do it tomorrow morning. No I wasn't out with—no!—I didn't do anything, I swear!" His shoes thumped into the wall as he kicked them off by the doorway. "You want to what? How should I know? Did you—you did? Oh. Well then I guess you'll just have to ask her tomorrow. I don't know." He sighed as he shuffled into the kitchen and had to turn on the light. "I'm not going to do that. I don't even own a camera." He poured himself a glass of water and stared glumly at the reflection rippling on the surface.

The light in the living room was on, and the television spat out angry music accompanied by brief flashes of unintelligible lettering. Shinji briefly caught a glimpse of Asuka as he turned from the sink, but he blocked the image with the wall as he sat down, suddenly uncomfortable.

"I haven't done anything like that." He took a long drink from this glass. "I'm still here. I was taking a drink. Huh? Water. No, that stuff tastes awful." He really felt like hanging up. "No, I'm just tired. Don't you know how late it is?" He heard the television spout out sounds of violence from the other room. "Okay. I guess I'll see you in class then."

He hung up and drank more water, trying to plan a way to get into his room without being noticed by Asuka. She was supposed to be at Hikari's, but Shinji didn't feel like going through the effort of confronting her with this truth.

"Where were you?" Her voice cut through his thoughts like a guillotine.

"Uh—I was out with Kaji," he supplied unsteadily. He gripped the glass a little tighter and felt shaky as he rose from the chair.

She was silent for a little while, but her voice carried into the kitchen after a minute. "It's after midnight."

He glanced at the clock on the microwave. 12:22.

He couldn't think of anything to say.

"You were with her again tonight, weren't you?"

He cringed and dumped the rest of his glass into the sink. 12:23.

"Asuka…"

She was in the doorway. "Don't lie to me. I can smell her all over you."

"B-but I took a shower—"

"So you admit it?! God—it's bad enough I have to live with Misato, but even you—"

12:24.

"Asuka—"

Lou Reed and Jackson Pollock oozed out of the television, interspersed with seemingly random combinations of Walt Disney, Michael Gira, and Dan Rathers. It flickered and vomited and chortled into an empty room.

12:25.

"I don't care what you do," Asuka seethed. "I don't care where you go. I don't care who you're with. I don't care about anything you do, because I don't care about you." She looked him dead in the eye as she enunciated the last syllable, then she strode out the kitchen and slammed the door to her room. He could hear her scream, even though she probably used her pillow to muffle it. A few things sounded like they broke when they hit the floor. Shinji winced with every unseen impact.

"I… I don't understand you," he sighed.

On the television screen, a scene played with characters like pieces on a Shogi board, dropping plot devices into the middle of plays, capturing important information for the audience, sliding around vague personalities for further development.

Shinji reached over and turned off the lamp light, picking the remote up off the floor. As his finger closed in on the power button, he paused just long enough to pay attention to whatever it was Asuka had been watching.

"But sir, the sequential impregnation drive is unusable!" A woman with purple hair shot her gaze up a steeply-inclined structure. "Rei wouldn't be able to handle the stress!"

"Do it." The responder was a pale persona whose image was blurry. His eyes were bloodshot and her expression crazed, though its voice was colder than the arctic storms.

"We can't—"

"Do it, otherwise we'll never see the end of it!" The grey old man beside the unfocused character urgently called. "We need to see this through—there's no telling what could happen if we don't!"

Shinji gazed dispassionately at the screen as it flickered its nonsense. "Weird," he mumbled, finally bringing his finger down and letting the television zap into silence and void.

He made his way into his room in the dimness, fumbling with his clothing before lying down. The clock next to his bed spat out an angry set of numbers, but he paid them little heed as he waited for unconsciousness to claim him.