Disclaimer:
The Following work of fiction incorporates the works of Hideaki Anno, the wonderful people at Studio Gainax and Studio Khara, and of Robert E. Howard, with respect to John Millius and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A thin stream of blood trickled down his forehead. It was too heavy and too dense to disperse into the LCL around him. He reached up and brushed it from his eye, and felt the Eva mimic the motion, or perhaps the Eva made the motion and he merely mimicked it. He could no longer tell which was which. A burning lance of pain ran through his belly, and his left arm was a network of hot wires laid one over another. Together his many hurts sang a song of agony and it was a song of triumph also. He was the machine and the machine was him. He could feel it breathing in time with his own. He could feel the hard stone under his hands as he perched onto of the skyscraper waiting for the angel to come at him again. Like an insect, he waited to pounce on his prey. Misato screamed in his ear, exhorting him to retreat, her voice like a distant memory. There was only the thunder of blood in his ears and the acid tang of his own bleeding on his tongue, and the fury of vengeance burning in his chest. He had a vague sense that, somewhere, there was a timer ticking down.
The angel moved, snake-like, through the city, winding its way through the maze of skyscrapers, most of them empty or full of useless rifles or simply great slabs of concrete sandwiched between steel plates. He was on top of one of the latter, the Eva's head swaying from side to side as he traced the creature's movements. He could feel the severed umbilical trailing from his back but he didn't care. He had the rest of it looped through his left fist, and he was waiting. He looked at the alien thing that wound toward him through the air and knew it was afraid of him.
He lept. He felt the skyscraper tilt from the push he put on it when he jumped. He went over the beast's back and landed on it, the Eva's massive feet scraping along its back with an awful, shrill sound, and the thing shrieked in pain. It bucked and flailed, but he held, digging the Eva's fingers, his fingers, between two of the segmented plates on its back. It reared up like a serpent rising to strike, trying to throw him off, and yet still he held. He took a looped length of the umbilical cable and threw it around and around the thing's neck until he was bound to it.
It rose up into the air, turned, and came back down, trying to drag him off. Red alarms flashed all around him as the Eva was ground into the pavement, lifted, and crushed through layers of steel and concrete as the combatants struck one of the shield buildings. The cable frayed but it held, and this time, he kept to the thing's back. With its one truncated light-whip it snapped at him. The thin coil of light wrapped 'round the cable and snapped it with a great, resounding crack, and Shinji would have fallen back had he not pulled up one of the segments of armor plate and begun pulling at the pale, bloodless flesh underneath. The beast was shrieking in pain and fury, and he felt himself sliding across the seat as the angel spiraled through the air. He felt lightheaded, and spared a glimpse over his shoulder. It was carrying him out of the city.
The timer hit zero. The world started flickering. Raw, seething fury surged through him, like molten rock in his veins, and he threw his mouth open in an enraged scream. He heard a voice, distant like an echo in the mountains, whispering something to him about absolute borderlines and safety limits and thresholds, and it devolved into an awful, terrified screaming. In some other life, he might have cared. For now, there was only rage. His back hit a hillside and to him it was just mud and the trees were just tiny hard leaves of grass, and he tore his foe from the sky and rolled with it. It face him now, that face that was not a face, and its red-hot arm was about his throat. He felt his feet touch the ground and pulled the angel back and slammed it into the earth, feebly. He cried out, a scream of animal fury tearing loose from his throat, burning in its wake, and the Eva echoed him. He felt a mouth open that wasn't his mouth, felt the alien pleasure-pain of bolts tearing loose from his gums, the painful whistle of air on his blunted teeth. He couldn't remember what he was any more.
It was only struggling now. He reared up and forgot technique and poise and precision and forgot himself, and when he bucked forward his mouth found flesh and he bit into it, felt it split and slide around his teeth as they sank in to the root, and like an enraged animal he twisted and pulled, drawing by the shoulders, and felt a long streamer of torn flesh follow after, spraying him with gore. The heat of it on his chest was like a baptism. He swallowed, and felt a gulp of LCL flood down his throat, and in some phantom sense, felt a thick hot chunk of raw flesh slid down another gullet, also his own. He had to concentrate. He needed to kill it.
He saw what he wanted, shining red, glowing with life. He couldn't move one of his arms and the other was a nothing but lancing pains, so he dug his face into it. He knew he had a horn and he used it, slicing through the thing's flesh. It was making small sounds now, almost like a child's pained screams, as he tore it open with tooth and horn until the core was exposed. He picked it up in his mouth the way a snake picks up an egg it means to swallow and closed his jaws. It resisted for a brief time, and the resistance only whipped up his fury. He crushed his mouth closed with all his might until the red sphere burst and its contents flowed over his teeth and jaw and down his throat, and he swallowed happily, throwing back his head so that he might get more of it down before his teeth finally snapped shut and the sharp shreds of the core hung broken from his mouth.
Finally, he let himself fall over. The world became vague, fuzzy. Somehow, he made the entry plug eject and the LCL drained, and the sudden return of gravity as buoyancy fled hit him like a mountain and he buckled under it, but kept moving. He turned the handle of the hatch with his good arm, letting momentum do most of the spinning, until it fell open, and then flopped over the edge. He wasn't sure how far he fell to the ground, only that he landed in soft earth and wet grass. The Eva lay on its side, almost rolled over on the plug, and he had to duck out from under it, limping. The dead bulk of the angel, already putrefying beside him, stank like death. The entry plug slid in of its own accord and the neck armor closed, and the Eva rolled onto its back, pulled down by gravity. He stood beside it as it lay there staring up at the sky in repose, and felt that its one eye was watching him.
He heard voices behind him and turned. The two boys saw him standing there holding his arm, the plugsuit stripped away in a sliced latticework from the sympathetic burns, blood matted in his hair and covering his face and dribbling from his lips, and he grinned. One of them pointed a camera at him.
He blacked out.
Two Weeks Earlier
Misato woke in the darkness and shivered, feeling a presence. Light streamed in through the drawn curtains of her bedroom, turning the piles of cold car magazines, empty cardboard boxes, piles of clothes and the bench where she disassembled and cleaned her sidearm into an alien landscape fraught with strange angles. She lay curled on her side, her knees pulled to her chest, in the fetal position. There was someone behind her, and she slowly turned her head, to avoid giving away that she was awake.
Shinji stood in the doorway. It was too dark to see his face, but she knew he was looking at her. She could feel his gaze sweeping over her, examining her, and heard his breathing quicken. She rolled over onto her back and sat up on her elbows, watching him back. He'd slept in his underwear. In the early morning gloom, he looked like a statue carved from gray stone. He walked into the room silently, testing his footing with each step, his every movement loaded with peculiar grace.
Her shirt had ridden up in her sleep and her shorts had ridden down, but she didn't feel exposed. She got up on her knees, her heart pounding in her chest, as he drew nearer. She could feel heat radiating from his body like a furnace. It made sweat prickle on her forhead, and her throat went dry. He just stood there staring down at her. She put her hands on his thighs and slowly slid them up, surprised at how supple his skin was. Her fingers probed over the sweaty cotton of his briefs, and curled around the waistband. She yanked it down.
His mouth fell open and emitted a high-pitched screech.
Misato sat bolt up right, flailing to free herself from her blankets and find the alarm clock. It was still dark outside. She rolled around aimlessly trying to remember where the damned thing was, annoyed by its wretched screeching. Finally she found it, swept away the empty beer cans that stood on it like grave markers, and hit the snooze button. She fell back down onto her pillow, lying on her back, and covered her eyes with her hands. She peeked out between her fingers. It was five in the morning. She knew she had to get up, but she didn't want to. Her hands fell down by her sides and she took a deep breath to blow her hair out of her eyes.
Lying there in half-sleep, half dreaming, the last moments of her slumber drifted back into her mind, and she felt a coldness tighten in her stomach. She shouldn't be thinking about him that way. Stupid dreams. She looked over at the clock again. She had another two minutes before it went off again, and closed her eyes, but they opened again immediately, almost against her wishes. She tried to kick her legs to sit up, and found herself oddly encumbered. Sometime during the night, she'd wrapped herself in a pile of blankets so tightly she could barely move. She had to roll to untuck them from under her body, and by the time she did, she had to turn the alarm clock off again. This time, she had the presence of mind to actually slide the switch to keep it from going off again.
This part, sitting up on her knees and trying not to doze off, was the most difficult part of waking up. She could sleep sitting up like this, if she really wanted to, just pillow her arms on her knees and lean her head on her arms and go to sleep, she'd done it before. Her head was heavy and her mouth was dry, full of cotton. Every time she moved, it was like there was a pile of old pencil erasers inside her skull, sliding around against themselves. She looked at the cans. She'd only had six beers. Lightweight.
Shakily, she stood up, and stopped before sliding the door open. She pulled her shorts up. She was going to have to get decent sleeping clothes if she was going to keep Shinji around the house for very long. Tugging on her waistband was a perilous game of chicken between keeping herself covered and hiking them up so far her ass was half hanging out. She felt oddly cold and exposed, alternately tugging her shirt down to cover her belly and picking at the shoulders to avoid showing too much cleavage. When she was satisfied she wasn't letting anything hang out, she padded out into the hallway on the balls of her feet. She didn't hear any movement, so the alarm clock must not have woken him. She bit her lip and risked sliding Shinji's door open.
He wasn't in his room.
She ducked into the kitchen in a panic. The door to the bathroom was hanging open and it was dark inside. She turned and ran out into the living room, and felt a warm breeze on her face, and a soft breathing sound. She stood and stared at what she saw for a good thirty seconds before she could fully process it. Shinji was out on the balcony, and he'd balanced himself on the railing, standing on his hands. He lowered himself down and pumped himself back up into the air, doing some kind of funny pushup, like an upside down overhead press. She stood dumbly and watched him, in awe of his body; he didn't look like he could be real. Whether he noticed her or simply finished, he started to fall backwards, curled his legs, and executed a perfect dismount, landing in a crouch. He scooped up a towel from the old lawn chair she kept outside and wiped his face. His whole body was shining with sweat.
Oh, and he was in his underwear.
"You're going to get arrested for that," said Misato.
"For what?"
"Public nudity."
"Why does the law demand I wear clothes? It's hot."
"You can say that again," said Misato, eyeing him.
"What?"
"Yeah," Misato sputtered, "You could have closed the door. You're letting my air conditioning out."
Shinji shrugged, and slid the door closed.
"The lock," Misato sighed.
He blinked, then thumbed the latch.
"Why do you lock the door?"
"So no one breaks in?"
He seemed confused by that. "You have a gun."
"Yeah, well, I'm not going to go out inviting trouble, now am I?"
"Breaking into my home would be a mistake."
"Oh," said Misato, putting her hands on her hips. "Feeling protective?"
He scratched the back of his head, and blushed.
"Right," she said, quickly. "Shower up, we have to be at Nerv in an hour. You have a full day of training and synch tests scheduled."
"I may have made a mistake," Misato said, quietly.
Ritsuko glanced at her. She had little time for small talk. There were a million things that needed doing. She had to ensure that there were no oddities in the regrowth of the cloned tissue used to repair Unit One's hands, then oversee the connection and rigging of the new nerve endings, the sensor systems, over a thousand plates of carefully articulated armor. It wasn't simply a matter of sending an order down to the parts department and sticking the new bits on. It was a deliberate, complex process and it had to be done in record time, every time. She could only pray that after he underwent some training, the boy wouldn't go out of his way to do so much damage to his own Eva.
"What was a mistake?" Ritsuko said idly, rolling her chair to the window.
"Moving him into my house."
"Mmm," said Ritsuko.
She hated the test bodies. It was an emotional, irrational sensation and she'd long ago learned to reject it, to understand it as an unconscious process and file it away in her mind so it no longer concerned her. It was now part of the checklist. She was sure anyone who looked at them felt the same way. Legless, one armed, unarmoed and misshapen, they had an essential wrongness to them that made the technicians that serviced them and the testing area, the 'Pribnow Box', uneasy. Newbies often threw up. When Shinji walked out towards the test plugs, he glanced at them and kept walking as if he were taking a stroll through the park.
She was fascinated to watch him. He picked at his plugsuit, tugging at the arms, and stopped to tug down on the thigh pads, wiggling his hips from side to side. She blinked when she realized why he was doing that. She glanced at Misato from the corner of her eye in time to see her quickly whirl away from the window, blushing like a teenager. Ritsuko leaned on her hand and tapped the button for the microphone on the desk in front of her.
"We don't have all day, Shinji."
He looked up at the booth, and she felt a shiver run down her spine. There was an intelligence behind his eyes, some kind of ongoing calculation. She wasn't sure if he was looking for escape routes or plotting the best way to kill her or trying to figure out the last time she'd bleached her hair. His every glance was heavy, weighted, and when he looked away she felt the same sort of relief she'd feel if a dangerous predator stopped to look at her and then passed her over, moving on to better pray. He was still walking funny when he reached the test plug.
"This will be like piloting. I'll ask you some questions, but mostly I'll be taking readings from the system. You'll just sit there and clear your mind, until it's time to start the simulations."
His voice came back tinny, through the speakers. "I see."
Ritsuko sat back while the system went through the synchronization process. The danger was much lessened when using the test bodies, and so there was little point in directly monitoring each phase of the process. She preferred to run this series herself, though, to ensure that all his baseline readings were established properly. Misato hugged the back of her task chair and spun around like a child.
"Can he hear us?"
"No," Ritsuko sighed.
"I had a dream about him last night," said Misato.
"That's normal," Ritusko said, idly. "Dreams are an outlet for the stresses of daily, life, and-"
"No," Misato cut her off. "I had a dream about him."
She made a tiny motion in the air with her fingers.
Ritsuko stared at her. "You're shitting me."
"I had to tell somebody," said Misato. "It was driving me nuts."
"I'll bet," Ritsuko smirked. "I hope you're not planning on acting on it."
"Of course not," said Misato. "What do you think I am, crazy? The Commander would skin me."
Ritsuko snorted.
"You wouldn't believe what he was doing when I woke up."
Ritsuko laughed quietly and made a small motion with her curled fingers.
"No!" Misato snapped, crossing her arms under her chest. "He was doing handstand pushups on the balcony. In his underwear. On the railing."
"You made that up."
"I did not."
The computer chimed, and Ritsuko glanced at it. "Shit," she breathed.
"What?"
"There must be an error." She thumbed the button. "Shinji, I have to break the synchronization and run it again. Just relax."
There was video feed of his face on the screen. He just sat back in the seat, nonplussed. He didn't seem bothered by the LCL, which was good. He stared blankly, and his biorythm flowed nicely across the monitor. Everything was more than nominal, it was ideal. She'd never seen a human being in better shape in her life.
"What's wrong?" said Misato.
"His synch ratio came up as sixty-two. That's not possible."
"Why not? He's got the suit and the hair thingies on."
"They're A-10 clips," said Ritsuko. "He did have a high unmodified ratio, but it shouldn't be this high."
She watched while the system went through the connections, then waited patiently for the ratio to stabilize. The same numbered appeared on the screen in stark white on a green field. Sixty-two percent. She drummed her fingers on the table, and looked at the readings from the nerve clips.
"Theta waves in his frontal lobe," she said, absently. "He's meditating."
"That's good, right?" said Misato.
"We'll see." She pushed the button. "Shinji, we'll start the simulation a little earlier than I planned. This may feel a little weird."
She turned to Misato. "Let's see how he does."
She turned on the large monitor in the corner. A jerky, weightless-looking approximation of Unit One appeared amid a collection of blank obstacles meant to replicate the layout of the city. As the program loaded, more and more detail appeared. Ritsuko typed in the command to allow the MAGI system to perform some of the calculations and the display became almost lifelike. Normally, the tripartite mainframe was kept isolated and buffered from the Evas, but since the simulations only used test bodies, there was little danger of contamination through the connection.
"Is that what he sees?" said Misato.
"Not exactly. He'll see and feel the view from within the cockpit. It's functionally no different from piloting the Evangelion itself."
"The system in Berlin I used for Asuka's training was much more crude," Misato observed. "What kind of a program do you have for it?"
"Basic targeting and operation of the palette rifle for now," said Ritsuko. "We need to get him acquainted with the weapons systems. I can't have him killing the rest of the angels with Unit One's own severed limbs. We have a budget, you know."
"What is this?" said Shinji.
Ritsuko put her finger on the microphone. "It's a simulation, Shinji. We're going to run you through some basic weapons drills and operational procedures. This is how we'll train you to pilot."
"Then begin," said Shinji.
Ritsuko blinked. Misato smirked at her and shrugged.
"Fine. Next to you, you'll see a panel side down, and there will be an array of weapons inside. I want you to pick up the one that looks like a rifle."
She leaned forward and watched Shinji trudge Unit One over to the weapons depot. Something about the way the Eva moved, even in the simulation, bothered her. It was very smooth, practiced. It was like the clips she'd seen of Asuka doing the same thing in her training regime. He seemed to be getting used to the Eva's odd proportions immediately. It made her curious to see if he'd be able to replicate it.
"This is inefficient."
"What?" said Ritsuko.
"The Eva should have on-board weapons. Why do I have to pick up something that can be damaged or dropped? These magazines are too small."
Ritsuko and Misato looked at each other. "It's for versatility."
"A machine is not versatile. Only a human being is versatile. What's this?"
He moved to the close combat section of the weapons deployment building and picked up a long blade with a hilt of almost equal length. The Eva swept it through the air, turned it, and flourished it in its hands. It moved with an eerie, human quality to it, the head tilting as he tested the edge with the Eva's massive hands.
"Good balance. What does it do?"
Ritsuko huffed. "I told you to pick up the rifle. We're going to work on ranged combat first, we need to avoid-"
Shinji spun the progressive sword around in his hand, pitched his arm back, and held it like a javelin. With the Eva's free hand, he pointed at a skyscraper on the other side of the simulated city, then took a bounding step and hurled the sword overhead. It sailed across the city in a tall arc and buried itself to the hilt in its target. The Eva stood to its full height.
"Ranged combat."
Ritsuko frowned, and her brows pinched.
"Let's see you do that under combat conditions."
She typed in the command, and a mockup of the third angel appeared and charged towards him, lifting its claws high. He saw it, ducked under its slash, and elbowed it int he core. It doubled over and he stood up, grabbed it by its broad shoulders, and brought the Eva's knees into its midsection. It stumbled backwards, and he quickly turned, scooped up one of the rifles, slapped a magazine in place, and yanked the charging handle. As the angel got back up, he emptied the gun into it on full auto, peppering the core with shells.
Ritsuko typed a command, and it stood up.
"A firearm has its applications," said Shinji. "This is not one of them."
He pulled another prog sword free of the arming station, spun it around, and speared it through the angel, using both hands to drive it through the core to the hilt. The computer ticked off a win, and the angel vanished.
"Wow," said Misato. "He is good. Do we have one of those things?"
"I pulled the budget," said Ritsuko. "A sword? Really?"
"What does this button do?" said Shinji.
"It doesn't matter," Ritsuko huffed, rubbing her forehead. "We need to complete the palette rifle program."
Shinji ignored her, held the blade out, and thumbed the switch. The blade hummed, the edge fuzzing, as though out of focus. He tentatively touched it to the roof of one of the mock skyscrapers and it sent out a shower of sparks and a crack ran down through the structure.
"I like this."
"We don't even have one of those," said Ritsuko.
"Then get one."
Ritsuko sucked in a breath. "Pick up the damned rifle. Now."
Shinji looked at her, or rather, the Eva looked at her, right at her, and even though it was a simulation, she felt a creeping sense of unease. He returned the weapon to the rack, picked up the rifle, and quickly, deftly changed out the magazine, ejected an empty casing and let the bolt fly home.
"What happens if I miss?"
"What?" said Ritsuko.
"If I miss. Aren't there people in these buildings?"
"They shouldn't be," Ritsuko growled, testily. "If they have any sense they'll have evacuated when the alarm sounded."
"And if they didn't? Or there isn't enough warning?"
"If you don't kill the angel they're all dead anyway."
"Why?"
Her breath caught. "That's classified."
He put the rifle back in the rack and started going over the other weapons. "You say the sword does not exist. Why is it here?"
"Those weapon designs are a ridiculous extravagance and I have to budget for repairs to the Eva and the other needs of the program. We don't have money for some arms manufacturer's vanity project. We need quick, clean, efficient kills. The rifle and the prog knives should be all you need."
"And how many foes have you slain?"
"What?" Ritsuko snapped, her voice growing heated. "I have an MD and a PhD in engineering. I think I-"
"I have slain and enemy and felt its lifeblood flow over my fingers," said Shinji. "I am not a soft city person like the rest of you. I am alive today because I was able to kill to fill my belly. I know killing."
He lifted a much larger weapon out of the rack. "What is this?"
Ritsuko was fuming. She could feel heat in her cheeks, and he fingernails were trailing across the desk. "That's the rocket launcher," she growled.
"Good," he said, and picked up another one. "This?"
The weapon looked like a long tube, under which was slung a cylindrical, rotating magazine. It didn't have a stock, it was meant to be fired from the hip, at close range.
"Flachette launcher," said Ritsuko. "Like a shotgun."
"This?" said Shinji, pulling out a short, stubby launcher with a wide tube, articulated to break and load in the middle.
"Grenade launcher."
"Define 'grenade.'"
"Sub-kiloton non-nuclear munition. You can't use that in the city."
Shinji broke the launcher in the middle, pulled a shell out of the depot, and slid it home. In one motion he slapped it closed, turned, and aimed it one-handed at the building where his thrown sword was still impaled. When he pulled the trigger the launcher rolled up with a meaty thump, there was a flash, and a good city block was wiped out in the airbust, flattened as a pixelated digital mushroom cloud rose up from the point of impact.
"I like this one. What's this?"
The virtual Unit One knelt, and he hefted a much larger weapon. Like the flechette launcher, it was designed for hip fire. Six barrels spun around a central pivot, jutting out from an mechanically actuated action at the rear that stuck out behind the handle. A belt of ammunition ran to a pack, meant to be hefted and set on the Eva's back, above the umbilical. Shinji swept it around and pulled the trigger, spraying the buildings around him with fire. Unlike the kinetic slugs fired by the palette rifle, the munitions from the chaingun were mass reactive, and once they broke the surface of the structures, they exploded, blowing out the windows.
"I like this one."
Ritsuko forced her fists to unclench. "Can I get you anything else?" she snapped.
"An axe. I want an axe."
Ritsuko stood up and walked away from the console, scrubbing her hands through her hair.
"Rits?" said Misato. "You okay?"
She sighed, and straightened. "How am I supposed to work with him like this?"
"Rits," said Misato. "He killed a bear. With a sword. I think he knows what he's doing."
"So you think I should give him what he wants?"
Misato shrugged. "I think we should consider working with the pilot to devise our tactics instead of treating him like he's part of a machine. If he was just some kid off the street, that'd be one thing, but he seems pretty competent with hand to hand combat. I've seen some pretty well trained people that wouldn't be able to stand up to him."
Ritsuko eyed her. Then she looked at the screen. Shinji was swinging the chaingun around wildly, cutting a swath of destruction through the city. Ritsuko ran to the console and yanked the microphone off the desk.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm bored."
"Enough of this. You'll be Katusragi's problem for the rest of the day."
Shinji breathed the dense, foul tasting liquid, waiting calmly for instruction. Annoying the Akagi woman, he realized, was something of an error, but it was fun. He returned the heavy weapon to its carriage and watched as the mock buildings he'd knocked over restored themselves, forming a virtual layout of the city. Misato appeared in front of him in a jerk video feed of her head and shoulders. She had a headset on, and touched her finger to the side.
"Combat training!" she said brightly. "Defend yourself."
She tapped a few keys. "While we're at it, let's make sure you only have access to weapons that physically exist, okay?"
Shinji shrugged, and felt the groaning vibration as the Eva shrugged with him. He turned in a lazy circle, watching for whatever surprise she might throw at him. He kept his feet wide, positioned in a half crouch with his arms out for balance. He still felt unweildy; the Eva's design was heavy at the top and on the back, and he had to hunch to keep his balance. He would need to get used to that as quickly as possible. He continued turning, waiting for the inevitable attack.
He looked up just in time to see a virtual copy of the creature he'd fought before dropping straight out of the sky onto his head. He yelped and danced out of the way as it crashed into the ground beside him. The building nearest the impact groaned and leaned, the glass shell cracking and shattering. Shinji dug his fingers into the side of the structure and pulled it the rest of the way over, dropping it on the angel, and then trotted back, light on his feet. The creature pushed out from under the rubble, dust and debris sliding from its back as it stood up, and charged.
Shinji watched it, first. It was proportioned differently from a human, and that had tripped him up before. It had longer arms and it used them, keeping out of reach while slashing at him with its claws. He knew it meant to grapple with him and use the impact weapons in its arms, so kept out of reach, with an eye towards the cable trailing from his back. If he could get rid of that somehow, he'd have a better position. As it was, he had to take care to defend it and keep from tripping over it at the same time.
"Aww," Misato cooed in his ear, "What's the matter, tough guy? Scared?"
Shinji ground his teeth and let the thing hit him. It pulled a long gash in his leg with its claws, but it gave away the advantage. It was off balance, pitched forward to put power into the stroke, and now that it was committed, he had only to turn its momentum against it. He seized the offending limb with both of his hands and turned, rolling the creature forward, until he was behind it, then reached up and pulled the knives from his shoulder pylons. He turned the blades underhanded, buried them in the thing's back, and used them as grips to pull himself up onto it. It continued to pitch forward, and he had it pinned.
"Not bad," Misato taunted, "But you have to get the core to kill it."
The angel struggled under him. He sat up and looked at it clinically, then grabbed one of the knives and started digging. It struggled and failed as he peeled away its back carapace, and using both hands, ripped out its virtual spine. Once he'd thrown a few of the organs aside, he could see the rear part of the shining red sphere, and plunged its knife into it. The creature turned int a pixelated white mass and vanished, leaving him to fall awkwardly onto the pavement.
"Is that what it truly looked like?"
"As far as I know," said Misato.
"Are you sure?"
"After I killed it, was it dissected?"
"I guess, you'd have to talk to-"
"I want to see it."
"I'm not sure that's possible, Shinji."
His jaw set. "More."
She shrugged and typed. Another version of the creature appeared, and like the one before it, and the one after, he killed it. It was quicker this time. Its movements became predictable, and by the third one, he would simply wait for a vulnerability in its pattern of attack, jab his blade into the core, and get out of the way while it fell.
"This is getting boring to watch," Misato mused.
"Will the next one be like this?"
"I don't know. We really don't have any idea what the next one will be like."
"Then there is no purpose to this."
Misato sighed. "Okay, I'm pulling you out. Sit tight."
The first thing to happen was the loss of awareness of piloting the Eva. His second set of senses dulled as the simulation ended and he felt the numbed, truncated extremities of the thing they called the test body, a pale shadow of the Evangelion itself. Try as he might to deny it, he enjoyed the sense of power that came with boding himself to the machine. It was exhilarating, feeling so much power under his control, and yet it worried him. He meditated on this as the synchronization ended, the LCL drained from around him, and he shivered involuntarily. The plug jolted him as it slid out of the test body, and he was left to open the hatch himself. His foot slipped a little as he stepped out. He'd have to remember that; the feet of these suits were not designed for traction.
There was a camera watching him. No attempt was made to hide it, and he heard it whirring as it swept across the room to follow him, although it stopped moving once he'd walked past it. In the locker room, he found that when the suit deflated, the weight of the LCL that soaked it made it easy to strip off. Lacking instruction regarding what to do with it, he left it on the floor in the shower. Once he'd cleaned the foul smelling liquid from his body and hair, he went to dress. He found the clothes he'd worn that morning replaced with identical ones in plastic wrappers.
The shoe still made him uncomfortable.
Misato was waiting for him outside. She adjusted the collar of his shirt for some reason, then bounced all the balls of her feet.
"Well," she said, "You did a good job. You should be proud of yourself."
"There is no pride in defeating an inferior opponent."
Misato rolled her eyes. "Come on. We're going shopping."
"What is 'shopping'?"
She smiled at him. There was something unsettling about it.
Misato looked around the cleaned apartment. She was surprised by how industrious Shinji was. She didn't expect anything like this from him, considering how he'd lived his life so far. It seemed that the modern world wasn't as confusing and frightening as she'd feared it might be. She moved through the kitchen, almost confused herself by the expanses of clean countertop and empty floor and the fact that she had actual clean dishes. She'd abandoned the notion of using pots and pans not long after occupying her flat in the first place, and since then the sink had piled up with a small collection of them that had developed their own ecosystem. She was thrilled, until she opened the refrigerator.
It had only taken him two weeks, which was a miracle in itself.
"What did you do with my food?" she called.
"I got rid of it."
"What's this stuff?"
"Food," said Shinji.
He'd replaced her hearty supply of instant food, the pinnacle of modern culinary engineering, with a seemingly endless supply of packaged chicken breasts, various meats, cheeses, eggs, vegetables, all of the sorts of things she generally avoided eating. She moaned as she poked through it. The freezer was worse. He'd cleaned it out of her supply of frozen dinners and bought… well, ice cream wasn't that bad, she thought. He hadn't done anything to her beer, either, but he'd thrown out all of her canned coffee. There was milk in her fridge.
Shinji walked into the kitchen, shirtless as usual, finishing the last of a tall glass of milk as he did. His eyes practically rolled back in his head.
"You like that stuff?"
"Protein," he mused, filling the emptied glass with water.
"Sit down, will you?"
He shrugged and sat at the table. She sat opposite him, focusing hard on looking him in the eye and nowhere else. To her infinite amusement, he seemed to be doing the same. She spotted his gaze crawling down over her collarbone and resisted the urge to deliberately shift and drag her loose t-shirt a little lower to show some extra cleavage. She resisted the urge to cover up, too. Something about the way he looked at her made her feel like showing off and yet made her feel modest at the same time. It was almost uncomfortable.
She opened a beer and took a sip.
"I've enrolled you in school."
"Why?"
"It's not healthy for you to spend all your time with me, and now that your initial trials and tests are done, we don't have anything for you to do all day."
"But I like you."
She smiled in spite of herself. "That's nice, Shinji, but you need to be around your peers. People your own age."
He looked at the table. He looked down her shirt a little, too, but mostly at the table. "I never thought of that before. What are they like?"
"What, you mean teenagers? They're, um, not like you."
"Is that all?"
She sighed. "I can't, well, I don't really know. I didn't go to school until I was a little older than you are now. I had… problems."
His eyes narrowed. "What sort of problems?"
"I don't want to talk about it," said Misato. "It's… bad memories."
"I see. Did someone hurt you?"
She looked at him. He wasn't oggling her anymore. His eyes took on that strange cast they sometimes did, where he became too serious for his age. His jaw was set.
"No," she said, quietly. "Not someone, something. I'll tell you about it sometime, but it's not a good time right now."
She took another drink of beer.
"You'll have a cell phone. If you have any problems or feel uncomfortable, just call and I'll have you taken out. It'll be a huge adjustment, but I think you need it."
She looked him up and down. "You'll be a hit with the girls, trust me."
He blinked. "Why?"
She blushed, and hid behind her beer can. She took a deep gulp. She needed a buzz. "You'll see."
"As you say. What must I do?"
"I'll drop you off at school tomorrow. After that, you'll walk. You need to be up early- they start pretty early in the morning. I'm sure you can handle that."
"I think so," he said.
"You just go in a room and sit there while teachers talk about stuff. Just try not to let anybody provoke you or anything. Like I said, we can find an alternative if it doesn't work out for you, but I think you'll like it. You're an interesting person."
"I'm an interesting person?"
"Uh, yeah," said Misato. "I guess."
She kicked her feet against the floor, making tiny squeaks as her toes touched the linoleum. "So what's for dinner, mister 'I should cook'."
He looked at her flatly. "Chicken and boiled spinach."
"Great," she sighed. "At least I don't have to cook it."
She sat and watched him do his thing. He kept the counter meticulously clean, and worked with a sort of mechanical precision as he set up the pans and poured the water and cut up the meat. She was a little disturbed how easily and deftly he handled the knife, spinning it and moving it around without even looking at it. The food didn't smell bad, per se, it just didn't smell like anything at all. It didn't take long to make, and soon she was staring at a plate of pale white meat and leaves. She opened another beer.
The chicken tasted like chicken, and nothing else. She fished out her cannister of curry pepper from the cupboard and shook it all over everything. Shinji watched her as he did, munching on a leaf that hung from between his lips. She wasn't sure if he was taking insult to his cooking or checking her out, or both. She bounced back int her seat and ate hungrily. A little flavor made all the difference. She washed it down with her beer and quickly moved on to the third. Shinji cleaned his plate and almost demurely wiped his lips clean with a napkin.
"Why do you drink that?"
"It's good," said Misato. "Want some?"
He shrugged, and held out his hand. She started to pass him the can, then stopped. "You can have your own, but just one, okay? You're too young to drink too much."
She had to remind herself of that as she stood up. She downed her beer all at once, ready for another herself, and swayed a little on her feet. Something curious struck her as she was pulling out a new pair of cans- he'd moved all the beer to the bottom shelf. She stood up, hip-checked the door closed, and turned to see him staring at the ceiling. She glanced back at the refrigerator and shook her head.
"Here," she said.
He opened his can and sniffed it, and frowned. Misato opened hers and held it up. "Chug," she said.
"Excuse me?"
She tipped her beer back and started gulping it down. Shinji took her meaning and joined her, finishing just after he did. Blinking, he stared at the empty can and gingerly put it on the table. He weaved a little in his seat, and stared at her, wide-eyed. He ran his fingers up and down the can, squeezing it a little, and shook his head, as if just waking up.
"I see," he said.
She stood up. "I said just one for you."
She swayed a little more than she wanted when she walked to pick up the cans and toss them in the recycling bin, and for some reason, her inability to balance herself manifested itself entirely in her hips. She nodded her head towards the living room.
"Let's watch TV."
Shinji shrugged. He did that a lot.
He followed her into the living room. She yawned, bounced onto the couch, and folded her legs, leaning back into the cushions. He glanced at her and sat down, not on the far side but sort of in the middle, and leaned back, imitating her. She yawned heavily. A moment later, he did the same. She picked up the remote and flicked on the television. He stared at it in awe, even though she'd had it on before.
"This is a lot for you to take in, isn't it?" she said.
He nodded.
She finally settled on something, some old movie. She didn't pay much attention, and ended up nodding backwards, her breathing turning shallow as she drifted through the haze of beer into a haze of sleep. She felt Shinjis' fingers ghost over her hand as he took the remote, lingering there just a moment, as if they wanted to stay longer. As she fuzzed into the strange hyper-awareness between waking and sleep, she could feel him at her side, a presence, drawn to her somehow. She cracked her eyes and saw he was paying more attention to her than the television as he flipped the channels, and turned a little in the seat.
When she woke up, it was dark outside. She pitched forward and shakily stood up. Shinji jumped up beside her, grabbing her arm even though she didn't need the support. She playfully pushed him off.
"Not on the first date."
He blinked.
"Kidding," she sighed.
"What's a date?"
She eyed him. "Are you sure you're from the planet Earth?"
"Yes," he shrugged.
She huffed, and stumbled towards her bedroom. "Get some sleep. Up early for school, got it?"
He nodded, and headed towards his room.
She stopped with her hand on the wall, and stood in the door to her room. "The beer thing was pretty clever," she said, and then slid the door shut behind her.
Toji paced the classroom. He was early, and he was early because he hadn't spent the night at home. He felt tired and he felt grimy, having changed into his school uniform before going to the hospital that night. He'd spent most of the time sleeping slumped in an angular, uncomfortable chair while the prostrate form of his sister remained motionless inside the oxygen tent. He hadn't heard her voice since the day of the attack, when he'd heard her crying out as the rush of people into the shelter pulled her hand out of his. He still had bruises from the guards shoving him through the doors as he frantically sought her in the tide, and heard her voice drowned out by a chorus of others. So, you see, it was his fault.
He needed to hit someone. Badly.
Kensuke was a tempting target.
He ran up to Toji, his overloaded backpack swinging wildly, throwing him off balance, his laptop cradled under one arm, fumbling to keep his glasses in place. He was panting, as though from a long run, and he shrugged out of the bag as quickly as he could and put the laptop on the desk with uncharacteristic lack of concern. He was practically jumping up and down.
"What?" Toji growled, flopping into his seat. He put his head on his hand and fought the fatigue that welled in him.
"There's a transfer," said Kensuke, "A new student! I hear Ayanami is coming back, too!"
Toji sighed. Kensuke was infatuated with the pale girl with the weird hair and the sour attitude, mostly because he could project all kinds of weird fantasies onto her. He was convinced she was an robot pilot and his computer was full of covert pictures of her. He called it research, but most of them were angled up her skirt, in search of an illusive glimpse of the white cotton promise hidden within. So far, his search had been fruitless, and he was bumping up against Toji's tolerance- he didn't want to be with Kensuke when Hikari caught him outside the girl's locker room or skulking in a stairwell with a skyward camera.
To record the day's momentous events, he'd brought his video camera. Toji resisted the urge to slap it out of his hands as he walked around the room, panning the camera over everything and muttering to himself. There was a commotion in the hallway, and Kensuke moved with surprising stealth to the back of the room and took his seat, tripoding the camera on his desk with his arms. He looked through the viewfinder. When the transfer walked in, he leaned away from the camera itself to look with his own eyes.
"Is that a new gym teacher?" he said quietly.
Toji watched him. "He's wearing a uniform like ours. I don't think so."
He was weird, that was for sure. His hair was close cropped; it looked almost military, and he was built, no one he'd ever seen in school was that fit. He wasn't actually wearing a uniform, but a man's shirt and slacks that matched the simple white shirt black pants combo the school mandated. From the look of him, boy's clothes wouldn't fit. The sleeves of the shirt strained around his arms and the seat of his pants was so tight it pulled on the pockets, exposing tiny white slivers of the inside of his pockets. He wasn't any taller than anyone else, though, and he didn't look any older. His fingers and his face contrasted with the rest of him, almost feminine. There was a knot of girls at the door staring at him as he walked to the center of the classroom and sat down.
Some body Toji knew only as an athlete of middling ability walked up to the transfer. "That's my seat."
The transfer looked at him flatly. "Wrong."
The boy blinked and edged away from him. There were plenty of seats, anyway. There was something about the way the new guy moved. He looked around all the time, stopped to study the windows and the door, and he tested the desk, pulling on the top until it creaked before he pulled out his laptop. He held it like a book, fumbled with it, and finally glanced at Kensuke before he put it down on the desk and found the latch to open it. He looked around the room constantly, and the few times his gaze settled on Toji, he instantly felt like he was being weighed, judged, held up against some kind of standard. It was unnerving, and it was insulting.
Toji's fists clenched on the desks.
A second tumult started when Ayanami walked in. It was mostly boys, Kensuke included, that watched her. Toji felt creeped out by the attention. They stared at her even more when she was hurt, like today, her arm in a sling and a bandage wrapped around her head awkwardly in a way that made tufts of her funny colored hair stick out in all directions. Toji got reprimanded about wearing his track suit enough, it made him wonder how she got away with dying her hair blue.
Hikari was busy herding everyone into the room, but even she stole glances at the new guy. When the old teacher came in she did her stand-bow-sit thing, and everyone did it but the new kid and Ayanami. They had that in common. Toji slumped in his chair. He ignored the lecture- the old man was going on about Second Impact again, just like he did every day. He'd get some work sheets, fill them out at home, and listen to his father complain about how the school system had declined after Second Impact. Second Impact was all he ever heard about. It made him sick.
He watched the new guy. He ran his fingers over the case of the computer and poked at it like it might bite him, nervously glancing to the side as he typed in his login information, using his index fingers. He spotted a few of the other students touch-typing and started awkwardly imitating them, staring at the keys the whole time. Kensuke looked over the shoulder of the girl in front of him, watching the new kid's screen. He didn't even seem to care about Ayanami at the moment. He shouldered his camera so it had a view of the new kid's back and his screen, and hit enter. A chat window bloomed on the new kid's screen, and he rolled back in his seat in alarm. That earned him a few glances.
"I'm asking him if he's the robot pilot," Kensuke whispered.
"What the hell for?"
"Look at him," said Kensuke. "He's got to be some kind of soldier or something. I bet he knows martial arts. Do you think he knows martial arts?"
Toji palmed his face. "He's not a robot pilot."
Kensuke turned the laptop towards him. "Oh, yeah?"
A single word blinked on Kensuke's screen.
Yes.
The classroom went mad. The only person who didn't react was the old teacher, who carried on, his lecture droned out by the shouting. Even Ayanami turned away from staring out the window and blinked her one red eye. Toji was always unnerved by her stare. The new kid looked bewildered as the entire class crowded around him, barking questions about the robot and the piloting of it. The girls pressed closest, shoving the boys out of the way. One of them smelled him. Only Hikari maintained any semblance of self control, although she looked like she was about to start beating them all back with her clipboard by the time one of the principals and the school nurse barged in and restored order. Kensuke gloried in recording it all.
Toji's desk creaked audibly as his knuckles went white. His leg was shaking.
"Hey," Kensuke said after the furor died down, "You okay, man?"
Toji didn't answer. He folded his bottom lip under his teeth hissed.
He spent the rest of the morning staring daggers at the new guy and watching the clock. When it was time for lunch, he was out of his seat before he was even dismissed, earning him a salvo from Hikari that he ignored. The transfer student wandered out of the classroom with the others, ignoring the small knot of students that formed around him and quietly questioned him as he walked outside into the back yard, where the students ate in the open air. When Toji stepped out of the shadow and into the sun, he squinted.
"Hey," he called.
The others saw him, and cleared away from the new kid in a hurry. For his part, he turned slowly, doing that weird everywhere-glancing thing, like he was planning something. His movements became even more liquid, more fluid, graceful, even. He walked on the balls of his feet and his movements were those of a cat in the day, back high, proud. He stared Toji down with a gaze that nearly made him reconsider his present course of action, until he saw in his minds eye a small shape hidden in a plastic tent, and the cold hiss of machines.
"You're the pilot?"
"That's right."
"Your piece of shit robot put my sister in the hospital."
"How?"
"You knocked a building on her!"
His head tilted to the side. "Why was she outside? There are shelters."
Toji stalked closer to him, puffing out his chest. He was taller, at least. He had that. "This is for my sister."
He threw a punch. It was wild and he thought, at first, that he missed because his vision blurred from the tears, but the transfer simply wasn't there. He did a funny thing, put his foot out to the side as if to trip someone, then shifted his entire body onto one heel, moving out of the way so fast that Toji stumbled past him and he heard the crowd around them jeering.
"Fuck you!" Toji shouted, his voice so tight it started to crack. He took another wild swing, and missed. "Hold still and take it like a man."
The next hit connected. The transfer's head snapped to the side. Toji thought that he'd been the one to be hit. His whole arm hurt, and pain lanced up his knuckles through his wrist. His hand had folded back from the blow, and his hand was tingling. He turned and threw a punch with his off hand, and the transfer caught him somehow, easily, holding him by the wrist. When it was over, he was standing there with his arm turned at a funny angle, and he thought it would break. Struggling only made it worse. His eyes teared up, and he made little pained sounds, almost like sobs.
"It was the angel that did your kin hurt, no matter the cause of it," he said, very softly. He released Toji, then spun him by the shoulder and dragged him forward by the collar. "I killed it. Others will come. I will kill them, too."
He stared into Toji's eyes, and Toji realized he'd made a grave mistake. It was like standing outsider a panther's enclosure at the zoo, and locking gazes with a predator. He was out of his league.
"I will kill them all."
Toji shook himself loose and stood there. The transfer looked at him. "You have a warrior spirit. What is your name?"
"Toji Suzahara," he gasped, not quite knowing why.
"I am Shinji Ikari."
"Hit me back," said Toji.
Kensuke did that look-but-not-through-the-camera thing again. Of course the little twerp had recorded all this.
"That would be unwise."
"You have to. Balance the scales."
Shinji shrugged, and his hand lanced out so fast that Toji didn't realize he'd been struck until the world went white and he spun around on his feet, nearly falling down. He didn't even wind up or telegraph it, he just did it. Toji looked back at him, rubbing his chin.
"Where the hell did you learn to fight like that?"
Shinji smiled quietly to himself, but said nothing. He paled as he heard the sound, glancing off to the side. The evacuation alarm wound up in the distance, first an angry dirge, and then a mounful wail. Toji's throat tightened. He looked off towards the city, and then back towards the door. Shinji was already moving, running not towards the shelter but the front of the school. He was as fast as a track runner, and more agile. He vaulted the fence with ease.
Kensuke grabbed Toji's shirt. "Hey," he said, "I have an idea. Oh, and your lip is bleeding."
Misato hurried onto the bridge, tugging her jacket down. It was pointless, she knew, but she felt the need to look official. Sometimes, she missed the discipline of the armed forces. These paramilitary types were too sloppy and inefficient, at least when it came to doing something important. Once she put on the role of Director of Combat Operations and walked out on her deck, it was all business. She stood with her feet wide and her fists planted on her hips.
"Status report."
Hyuga looked over his shoulder. "Blue pattern detected. It will approach the northern defensive grid in two minutes."
"Status of the grid?"
"Still mostly down."
She huffed. "The pilots?"
"Both have been retrieved and are en-route. Unit One is being prepped for launch."
"Let me see the angel."
At the front of the cavernous space where the MAGI were house and operational command took place, there was a holographic projection- it was capable of producing a detailed map of the city, or most often, projecting a massive display from the camera system in the middle of the air. She saw a rumor of the angel first, dust and foliage and debris rising up ahead of it. She sucked in a breath when she saw that it was flying- she hadn't expected that. It moved through the air without apparent means of locomotion, slowly shifting, serpentine. It was a blend of some monstrous insect and a snake, undulating through the skies. Its head was enormous and armored, if it was a head at all, like a battering ram, and flailing beside it were trailing, flesh appendages that glowed with their own light. Tiny readings appeared on the screen. They were hot.
"Has it shown any hint of a ranged attack?"
"We'll see in a moment," said Hyuga.
A batter popped up. Folded on itself, it looked like a blank gray building, until it unfurled and revealed a series of massive guns and missile batteries that fired a streaking salvo at the creature's belly. The munitions flowered harmlessly against its AT-Field, not even touching it, bursting in air. With a sort of contempt, it swept one of its whips through the body of the battery and cleanly sliced it. The top half shifted slightly before the ammunitions stores went up in a bright orange flare that consumed what remained of the defensive emplacement. The angel swept past it, offering not a moment's further effort.
"So," said Misato. "Close combat. Good."
She felt the Commander's eyes on her, but ignored it.
Ibuki looked over her shoulder. "Tech division reports Evangelion ready for launch."
Shinji appeared on a side screen, staring grimly into the camera. He flexed slightly, tugging against his suit. Some tiny part of Misato's brain that was supposed to be shut off right now couldn't help but notice how his chest stretched the material as he breathed.
"Pilot Ikari," she said quickly, blinking to force herself to concentrate. "This will be a close combat operation-"
He grinned ferally.
"-you will follow my orders, understood?"
His grin faded into an easy smile, but he said nothing. Misato watched him as she said, "Launch."
The look on his face was priceless. No one was that stoic.
The main screen switched to a view of the Evangelion rocketing from the launch tube. It bounced to a halt, and before he was ordered, Shinji yanked free, almost ripping the restraining bolts loose, and jogged into the city, the Eva hunched like an animal. For a moment, she was speechless; the way it moved was too smooth, too human. She glimpsed the unpainted primer gray armor on his forearms and reminded herself what would happen if she didn't keep him in check. She couldn't let him injure himself like that again.
"It's coming up on your left. I want you to get a rifle."
Surprisingly, he did as he was bit, sprinting to an arming station to pull out the heavy palette gun. He glanced at the tower as if he expected the weapons from the simulation to have manifested there, somehow. Misato was pressuring Ritsuko to give him what he wanted, but it was slow going, and after the repairs Unit One would surely need after today… she shook her head for focus.
"Soften it up before you engage. Controlled bursts, remember to-"
He ignored her, and charged headlong through the first open path towards the creature that appeared to him. He took the palette gun by the barrel with both hands and swung it, bashing the enemy across its armored head with it like a club. Misato's stomach clenched, and she could feel the Commander at her back staring daggers into her. The angel snapped to the side, and he hit again. This time, the stock of the rifle dented and twisted, until it was useless as a club. Shinji grabbed the angel by the head and twisted it, trying to drag it into the ground.
In its writhing, it flattened an entire city block.
"Not in the city!" Misato shouted, "Fall back, and-"
The angel bashed him aside with a flick of its head, and he reached out with his left arm to grapple with it again. The light-whips flashed around him and curled around his forearm. The LCL in front of his face frothed as he screamed in pain and the angel's appendages dug into the armor, wisps of smoke curling from the Eva's arm as it jerked Shinji around and slammed him through an armor panel. It loosened one appendage to wrap around the Eva's helmet, and there was an audible crack.
"Open fire with defensive batters nine and twenty-six," Misato said calmly.
Hyuga turned around. "What? You'll hit the Eva!"
"It'll kill him if we don't disengage it. Do it."
Hyuga looked at her askance, then turned around and did as he was bid. The turrents popped up and opened fire, the shells battering the creature and the Eva both, tossing them around as though they were caught outside in a strong wind. Orange light flickered around the Eva's body as the shells hit. He must have been activating the AT-Field and molding it to his body, maybe instinctively. She watched his face on screen. There was a thin streamer of blood running down his forehead, and his eyes had shrunk down to pinpricks, as if he was staring into a bright light. She swallowed.
"Pilot status?"
"He's in trouble," said Maya. "Heart rate and blood pressure elevated, EEG abnormal, and the synchrograph is weird."
"Put the MAGI on it. Get Director Akagi up here, too."
Maya nodded.
"Shinji," Misato said, very calmly. "Retreat. That's an order."
He looked at the camera, at her, with his too-blue eyes. "No."
He yanked his arm free, stripping away armor in the process, and the Eva's arm was spurting blood for a moment before the flow staunched itself. With the same arm he batted the angel aside, and with both hands he wrestled with it, wrapping his arms around it, and drug it around the rubble. Misato motioned for Hyuga to cease firing and the explosions stopped, and the angel and the Eva struggled against one another. It reared up, pulling the Evangelion with it, and slammed it back down. Shinji rolled out of the way before a scoring stroke of its whips hit him and instead, they sliced into the pavement, cutting an overpass into neat slices. He ducked behind an arms tower and the angel cut it twice, and the pieces slid apart in a blooming cloud of dust. Shinji kept moving, circling around it, and it was too slow to turn. He had it by the tail.
Misato saw a small structure on the top of the creature, where its body broadened into a battering ram. The tiny, bony mask must have been its real face; like a butterfly, the marks on its back were a false face. It was almost fascinting, but the creature was staring at Shinji as he grabbed its tail and fiercely torqued its body. It was thinking.
"Shinji," she said again, her voice heating. "Damn it, I said pull back, we need to-"
The angel lashed out, and severed the umbilical. On the screen, Shinji started, and spotted the timer that lit into being beside his head. It was running faster than normal from the exertion. He'd have a minute at most. It moved with lighting speed. The light-whips impaled through the Eva's middle, and Shinji screamed again, but it was a scream of rage. He took hold of one of the coiled whips, biting through the pain, and simply tore it away from the angel's body, and it fell back from him.
All hell broke loose. The Evangelion made a sound, a strange noise like a groan, and Shinji let go of the creature, dashed past it, and then scrambled over it, on top of one of the buildings. It perched there, folded in a crouch, elbows and knees poking out from its sides. The angel turned and with those whips, it lashed out, unmaking the building under his feet even as he jumped at it. Misato shouted for him to retreat but he ignored her. On the screen, his face was a mask of pain- he was bleeding heavily from his hairline now, and his lips were back over his bare teeth. He looked like fury itself. He jumped clear over it, rolled the Evangelion, and Misato winced. It wasn't meant to do that.
Somehow, he came up intact, grabbed the severed umblical, and she started to cry out to him that it wouldn't work, but he didn't try to reattach it. Instead, he looped it around and around his wounded arm, like coils of rope. The angel banked around and came at him again, picking up speed. He crouched and sprung into a leap. The Eva sailed impossibly through the air and he slid along the angel's back, pressing flat to it. He got his fingers under one of the armored segments and pulled it up, wedging his fist in, exposing the slippery flesh underneath, and dug his fingers into that. The thing screamed in pain. He took the cable in his other hand and threw it about the angel, looping it until it pulled tight, and he yanked on it. The beast screamed. It turned wildly in the air, trying to throw him off, and she could see the blood draining from his face. It sliced the cable away to free itself and started powering away form the city. It rose up, and spiraled into the hills. Misato winced; the school wasn't far from there.
The timer went dead. The view from inside the plug fuzzed as the reserves kicked in. She had seconds at most.
"Eject," Misato said sharply. "Pilot eject, it'll kill him if we-"
"No," the Commander said quietly.
Misato whirled around. She was about to say something when Maya screamed.
"The synchrograph! The third stage connections are reversing! The Eva is going berserk!"
"What the fuck does that mean?"
The feed from the plug went dead. The Eva threw its head back and the armor over the lower part of the helmet tore to shreds in one great motion, spreading open like a flower of metal, exposing blunt teeth heavy with gore inside. It bellowed in fury, an ancient, alien sound that rattled the floor and shivered through her bones, making her knees week. She realized she was covering her mouth out of sheer instinct. The sound wasn't even coming through the speakers, she could hear it underground. The Commander was on his feet, his thin lips curled into an almost-smile.
The angel bucked under him and the Eva roared and pitched forward, burying the horn on the helmet under the armor plate he'd started pulling up, and pried it loose with a horrid, we tearing sound. The angel shrieked in pain as the Eva opened its jaws wide and started chewing on it, tearing loose chunks of flesh and swallowing them. A hologrammatic diagram of the Eva appeared to her side and flared with a dozen red points.
"What the hell is that?" said Misato.
"Microfissures in the armor," said Maya. "It's like the Eva is expanding somehow!"
The Evangelion moved like an animal, pulling its head up to tear new bites of white, slipper flesh free, muscle fibers and viscera training through the air around it as it opened its jaws too-wide to admit fresh gulps. It shuddered and moved with a grim purpose, as though suddenly regaining itself. It began tearing into the angel's body with one hand; it must have broken the other in the impact on the mountainside. It sniffed, actually stopped and snuffed in a great breath, before it dug its head into the angel's body and bobbed back up, holding a red sphere in its mouth. Misato's breath caught. The angel's body went slack, and the Evangelion rolled to the side, but remained mostly upright. Its jaws tensed, then bit down. The core crushed between its teeth, dibbling down over its jaws even as it reared back to take a hearty swallow.
"Pattern blue terminated," Hyuga said, dumbly.
The Eva slumped on its side. "Plug ejecting," Maya said, confused. "Pilot vitals lost."
"Get a recovery crew out there. Now."
Shinji's eyes blinked open, and he immediately pressed them shut again. The glare of the hospital lights assailed him for the second time in as many weeks, and he clenched his teeth. When he felt the bandages wound around his left arm and hand, he realized why he was there. It was always too bright in this place and too cool, and the air stank of chemicals. He hated it. He sat up, and the monitor next to him beeped angrily. He waved at it as though it were an insect.
Hands gently pressed him back down by the shoulders, and somehow he knew Misato purely by her scent, and for that reason only didn't break her arm.
"Easy there, tough guy. You need to rest."
She looked tired. Her hair was frizzed and there were red marks on her cheeks, and her nose was raw. He felt out of sorts and his head felt heavy, and instinct guided him to lean up and touch his lips to her chin. It was fatigue that held him down, but her cheeks deepened with color. She must have read his look.
"What happened?"
"Well," she said, "You killed it. You also disobeyed my direct orders. Repeatedly. I'm lucky I still have a job."
He blinked. "What?"
She sighed. "Your insubordination reflects poorly on me, Shinji. The Commander said I'm lucky I'm not facing demotion. Only the fact that you actually killed the damned thing saved my ass."
"I see," said Shinji. "I am glad your ass is safe."
Her eyes narrowed. "That was lame."
He held up his hand so he could see it. It was swathed in bandages, so much that it was a useless nub. He touched his head. There was a patch of gauze taped to his forehead. When he touched his tongue to his lip, he felt stitches. Misato sighed and ran her fingers over his scalp.
"Don't worry about your hand, you'll be fine. The doctors went a little overboard with the bandages. You can have that off in three days."
He wiggled his fingers inside the heavy wrap. They felt fine. He didn't understand why he needed the bandages at all. Against her protests, he sat up, and leaned on his knees. He took a breath, and then swung his legs over the side of the bed.
"Hey!"
"Get me out of here," he said sharply. "I don't like hospitals."
"Put on some pants first," she sighed.
Misato stepped outside while he dressed. He wasn't sure why; it was nothing she had not yet seen. He managed to get his damnable pants up and zipped, but the shirt presented a problem. She poked her head into the room and did the buttons up the front for him, her fingers trembling slightly, though he knew not why. When she did the last button she smoothed the fabric over his chest.
"Great," she said, folding her hands behind her back. "Let's go."
He was silent during the walk out of the infirmary and the car ride back to the apartment. It was long past dusk. He must have been unconscious for hours. He felt new, and strange. His hand itched madly, and every time he looked at the wrap around his fingers, he grew annoyed with it. It flexed easily as he opened and closed his hand, like a mitten. His eyes felt heavy, and leaning against the window of her car, he started to drift off to sleep.
Something assailed his mind. He glimpsed a distant world where there was only darkness over slabs of white stone, geometries alien and strange all around him. He traced the cleanly cut lines of the structures to where they met, but the joining of them made no sense, every angle either too wide or too acute for the planes to be straight, and yet they were. It was as if a circle somehow held more or less than three hundred and sixty degrees, or both at the same time. It was some kind of city in the void, and it was colder than cold. A red sun burned in the sky, too huge and yet too cold, for there was no warmth in this place. He sat bolt upright. Misato grabbed his shoulder. In the distance, he saw a huge white shape. He blinked again, and it was gone.
"What is it?"
"Nothing," he lied, his voice wavering. "Just tired."
She looked at him askance. "We're here."
He got out of the car and walked shakily up the front steps. A glance at the building stuck him odd. No lights were on but Misato's; it seemed the place truly was unoccupied after all. He walked mechanically from the elevator into the apartment and sat down in the center of the couch. Misato shrugged out of her jacket and hung it in the closet, then sat down beside him, almost touching him. She folded her hands and stared at them.
"I have to reprimand you. You were wrong to disobey my orders and you were wrong to-"
"I hate to kill it," he said sharply, rage bubbling through his words. "I hate them."
She looked at him. Without warning, she leaned over haltingly, and touched her lips to his cheek at the curve of his jaw, brushing them against his skin almost gently. Her hair brushed against his neck and the flowery aroma of the covering scent she wore filled his nostrils, sliding over the musky smell of her own sweat and worry beneath. An electric jolt ran through his body and he awkwardly stiffened against the back of the couch.
"Consider yourself reprimanded."
She stood up and offered him her hand. "Come on, you really need to get some rest."
Dumbly, he let her lead him towards his bedroom. She undid his shirt for him. He stared at her all the while, she never met his gaze, looking to the side or at her hand instead.
"I think you can handle the rest yourself."
He could, at that. He shrugged out of his shirt as she closed his door, kicked out of his pants, and curled on the mat. He turned to face the wall, and the last sound he heard before he faded into slumber was the cracking of an opened beer and a heavy gulp, and Misato muttering to herself. Sleep took him like a fall of heavy rocks, and it was deep and dark and full of the whispers of something ancient.
"The Evangelion," said Ritsuko, "has increased in mass."
Very few people were immune to the sepulchral air of Gendo Ikari's office. This was by design. It was calculated to intimidate. In the case of the present subject, there was an issue of familiarity. She was his second in command and had spent considerable time in the vast dark space under the glow of the Sephira. They had pored over data in one another's presence, and as they saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. He had also fucked her on the desk on two non-consecutive occasions. That most likely had an impact on her perception of the chamber as well.
His voice echoed in the room. He was not to be fucked with tonight, as it were. "By how much?"
"About two percent. There's stress fractures in the dermal and sub-dermal armor, especially around the chest, arms, legs, and back. Most of the new mass is muscle, some of it is bone. The carapace was heavily damaged in combat and some of the wiring in the restriction harness was fried, but the biological systems are all intact. It's more than healthy, it got bigger and tougher during the battle."
"Can we attribute that to the consumption of the angel's flesh?"
She shrugged. He could see that she was deliberately exaggerating the motion, the effect combined with the low cut of her blouse to make her cleavage more noticeable. She'd gone heavy on the makeup, too. He smirked behind his gloved hands. He enjoyed this game, knowing that his deliberate dismissal of her childish flirtations would make her desire him all the more the next time he deigned to to spend a few hours listening to her idiotic banter before making proper use of her. She was deliciously easy to manipulate.
"I think we can, yes."
"And the actual cause?"
She stiffened. Anything she said other than "I don't know" would be a lie. "I'm working on some hypotheses. I'm waiting for the MAGI to give me some answers before I draw any conclusions.
He smirked. Predictable. She smirked back and fluttered her eyelashes, no doubt thinking he was flirting with her.
"There's something else you should know. The graphs you predicted didn't appear. The berserker state was unlike anything we've seen. The secondary connection was a flatline, it was Shinji… the pilot's graph, and that of the Eva proper, that were all over the map."
Gendo frowned. That was unexpected, to say the least. The pilot's graph should have dropped to near zero during the berserker state. He almost wished the old fool Fuyutsuki was there to help him muddle through the numbers, but the old man's scorched bones were in a box somewhere by now, collected as evidence from the camp where he'd held the boy hostage.
"Sir?" said Ritsuko. "Will there be anything else?"
She cocked her hips to the side, noticeable but not enough to make it obvious, pushed her chest out, drawing in a deep breath as she did. Gendo resisted the urge to smirk again.
"That will be all."
The look of dejection on her face was priceless. She huffed as she turned to leave. He was glad to see her go, and to watch her departure in equal measure. When she was gone, he leaned back, pulled of his glasses, and scrubbed his fingertips over his closed eyes. A tone chimed on his desk, and he snapped forward, folding his hands. The Chairman did not deign to request his sub ordinate's attention, he demanded it.
A circle of white light appeared on the floor, and within it the old bastard flickered into being, his holographic visage forming over the projector like a demon summoned in some hoary alchemist's lab. He leaned forward, his mechanical spine groaning, and pounded a feeble old fist on his desk, somewhere in Munich. Gendo remained fixed, impassive. It pleased him to appear emotionless, and served his purposes.
"Ikari," the Chairman growled.
"Keel," said Gendo, as if addressing an old friend.
The both ignored each other's inane barbs. The old man tended to stick to the point, his one virtue. "I have reviewed the combat footage from the firs two sorties, and the psychological profile your secretary developed."
Gendo viciously suppressed his smirk. The Chairman's insistence on referring to her as his secretary would have sent Ritsuko into a rage.
"And?"
"This is unacceptable. There could not be a candidate less suited."
Gendo frowned. "His facade is strong, yes, but it will only lead to a more severe breakdown."
"Not according to the Akagi woman. The report describes his willpower as bordering on superhuman."
Gendo waved a hand dismissively. "She overestimates her own capabilities."
"I am a cautious man," said Keel.
Gendo would have groaned, if his manifold deceptions would have permitted it.
Keel went on. "I am ordering you to make all necessary preparations to execute Case Crimson."
Gendo sat up. "What?"
"Are you deaf, Ikari? Your son's apparent capability will only add to her instability. I have a resource of my own that will only enhance the process when triggered. I will arrange their meeting at once. You will proceed with Crimson as ordered. I will relay further instruction as required."
"As you command," said Ikari.
"The normal Committee meeting will proceed as normal. The details of the Ascension are not within their sphere of influence. Am I clear?"
"Of course," said Gendo.
He leaned back as Keel vanished. He opened a drawer in his desk, and waited for the light inside to blink green, indicating that the Chairman was no longer eavesdropping on him. Then, he burst out laughing.
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The Riddle of Steel: Director's Cut
Chapter Three: Welcome to the Jungle