Not long after I got thrown in the prison cell I passed out, and when I found myself awakened again I was lying on a mattress at the back of the cell. My sweater and pants had been removed and I was now only wearing a dingy, paper-thin blue and grey colored shirt and pants: a prisoner's uniform. There was a pair of cheap slippers on the cement floor, and to my right there was a toilet and a sink, both made from metal, and that was all there was.

The shock of being tossed in here after nearly having my head blown off was still heavy with me, but was now combined with the emotions of everything that had transpired collapsing on top of my heart. It had all been a lie. SEELE didn't give a rat's ass about me, they just wanted my EVA and I had delivered it to them on a silver platter.

Needless to say I felt horrible. Even before going to Japan I was already having second thoughts about this whole arrangement and when I didn't exactly go through with the chairman's plan to slaughter the rest of the EVA pilots at Tokyo-3 they figured my usefulness had run out and now here I was: cold, abandoned, and alone. Well, not exactly alone.

Next to me was the boy who I tricked to get the EVA, the one I had hated so much for so long. I had been happy to see him from the other side of the glass, to see him isolated and suffering, only to end up joining him a few moments afterward. Keel had threatened to kill me if Patrick didn't do as he said, which meant that Patrick was important to them and I was important to Patrick. The conclusion of that was obvious, even to me.

But now the truth had come to me too late. Silly, naïve me had entrusted the adults around me with my care and well-being and here I ended up, buried deep within a mountain with nothing to lean on. My life was over, and while I was still breathing there wasn't much hope for me here at all.

Daddy, I screamed inside of my mind, Daddy what happened? Why did you leave me here? Why didn't you tell me anything? Did you think I couldn't handle the truth? Or were you just darker than you let on to me? For years I had trusted him despite feeling rejected much of my childhood, but he was gone now and here I was in a cave made up of stone and plexiglass, shivering to death.

Still stunned and feeling weak, I wondered over to the far right wall and slid down to the floor, my head between my knees as the tears came. Some good crying would do now, I thought, but I couldn't see any way out of here.

The lights never changed in our prison, so I had no way of knowing if it was morning, noon or evening. No one ever came to check on us, there was only the motion of the security cameras that swiveled as they faced the plexiglass wall, occasional meals in carboard boxes that consisted of bread wafers and cups of water that were mechanically shoved through a small slot inside of the wall, and muffled noises from the cell next to me. Patrick wasn't saying anything to me either, and I guess I couldn't blame him.

I was ashamed of myself and angry at everything. I had made choices to get into this mess but I had also been led here too. I was the Screwed-Over Princess, useful only as a means to an end. Some good EVA did me.

This was rock bottom for me, literally it seemed as here I was surrounded by rock at nearly the bottom of whatever this mountain was. There was nowhere to go, no one to save me, and no time left. I was about to become one of those faceless statistics of how many people were done away with by other nasty people throughout history.

There was however one matter that I had to face and that was the boy next to me, the boy who now was my only companion in this stony grey icebox. But what could I say? Was he really the brother he had been telling me he was since our first encounter? Or was all of this still part of the big lie, yet another string of horrible things I had been entwined with? I didn't want to trust in anyone or anything anymore, not even myself.

Tired from either worry or cold I fell asleep leaning against the cell wall. When I woke up I was still against a wall, but on the other side of the cell, the one adjoining Patrick's space, as somehow during the night I had moved myself across. There was a presence right in front of me and I looked up. He was standing just a few inches away from me, wearing black pants and a white shirt. Tall, handsome, with dark hair and dark eyes, he smiled at me with that easy grin I knew too well. I gasped in recognition, thinking I must be dead already and here Vance was to take me to Heaven.

"Vee?" I said to him, sniffling as I spoke.

"Hey, Tiger," he replied in a soft voice.

"Am I…"

"Don't worry," the ghost whispered, "everything's gonna be okay now."

"But…"

Before I could say anything else the image of Vance disappeared. Seeing him gone, I was now even more despondent. I just pushed my head into my knees and whimpered. Seeing Vance was just too much for me, even if it was only in my dreams.

Another voice came from the other side of the wall. "Erin? Can you hear me?" I really didn't want to talk to anyone else right now, so I just ignored him and kept silent. Even so Patrick was quite persistent.

"Erin?"

"What do you want?" I angrily shot back.

"What's your favorite color?"

Seriously? "What the hell kind of question is that?"

"Do you want me to guess?" Patrick replied in a warmer tone. "I guess it's…green!"

"Ha. My eyes are green. That's so obvious."

"But it also happens to be my favorite color too."

"Liar," I told him. "You're just saying that!" Patrick continued despite my hostility. "Okay, try this then. Your favorite number is...Five!"

"Idiot! Everyone's favorite is either one, five or ten."

"Not seven? Lots of people choose seven. So five it is, then? Let's try another one," he said, continuing his guessing game. "Your favorite animal is…a Tiger!"

I had to admit he was getting accurate at this. "You guessed that!"

"No, really. Do you know how I know?"

"How?"

"What are the colors of your plug suit?"

"Orange with black stripes!"

"Am I right?"

"Well," I conceded, "okay, but you could have still guessed that."

For the next few minutes Patrick continued to ask me a series of questions about my own likes and preferences, providing his guesses to the answers before I answered anything. Not only could he guess my favorite foods with dead-on accuracy but he guessed nearly everything about me he could offer up. Did he know all of this in advance, was this all part of the trick of gaining my confidence? I still wasn't sure, but there was something else he knew, something that no one else in the world would know other than myself.

"The ghost in the entry plug," he told me. "The one that came to you the day you blacked out. Erin, I saw it too."

He had tried to tell me before at Tokyo-3, but I was so angry then that I didn't want to give him any clue as to what really happened, but he knew, he knew every detail. There was no avoiding it now. It wasn't just that there was a link between the two of us, but was why that link had been made. We both had something in common with the EVA and there's only one way that would have been possible.

"Now do you believe me?" Patrick finally asked. His voice was calm and sure.

I couldn't deny it anymore that there was something between us, something strong. "To be honest," I confessed to him, choking up as I tried to keep myself from crying ".they told me that you had some way of linking with EVA using drugs, that's why I saw stuff in my head!"

"Do you still think that's true?"

"No, I…I guess not now," I confessed, feeling horribly anguished.. "But...Oh, I'm just so confused!"

"Take it easy," Patrick said in a reassuring voice. "I'm not going to bite!"

Taking deep breaths, I tried to calm myself down more as the weight of what I had discovered fully started to hit me. "Um...where do I start?"

"Just start at the beginning," he said. "What really happened in that last EVA test?"

"I blacked out!"

"Before then."

"I was..I was scared to death, and there was this...cloudy, skeleton thing that came inside of the plug. It came right up to the throne and then...it was trying to tell me something."

"What did it say?"

What did it say to me? I struggled to remember it, that dark-toned howl that ran through my mind. Like a leaf in the wind I managed to catch it. "it said...'Find the other!' And then I blacked out."

"That was it? Do you remember anything else?"

"No! I mean, really no! I just remember waking up in the hospital later. It must have been a while because my hair was all long. I'm sorry, they told me not to say stuff like that to anyone else!"

"When did you wake up?"

"It was two months ago, I was in this hospital and they kept me locked in my room. Then one day this old guy in a wheelchair comes in."

"Chairman Kiel, the same guy that put you in here?"

"Yes, only he was a lot nicer that first time. Insisted that I call him 'grandfather.'" I told him. "Anyway, he then tells me all about what happened at Second Branch, and before in Tokyo-3. They said that you did all of it."

Patrick sighed. "I guess I can't really blame you for being upset. There wasn't any way SEELE was going to give you the whole story."

"After that they took me here to the mountain," I explained further, "and then they started coaching me on how I could get my EVA back, by going to Tokyo-3 and stealing it."

"So that whole emotional thing you went through when they brought you into NERV that first day, that was just an act?"

"Well," I admitted, "actually that was pretty much how I reacted when the Chairman told me about NERV-2 the first time."

"I'm sorry," Patrick said in a mournful tone. "I guess I never considered what you might be feeling after all that. I spent a lot of time pushing everyone else to find you and I had sort of hoped that you'd know who I was and what really happened already."

"I guess I'm the one who should be sorry," I told him. "It's just that I was so angry when I found out! I just wanted to do anything I could!"

"Do you believe me about Dad?" asked Patrick. "I mean, I know your relationship with him was a bit different from mine. It must be hard to convince you of what he was doing."

I sighed hard. "I...I don't know what to think. Dad was nice, you know. I mean, when he was around he always made you feel good, always had presents and treats and stuff. But there were a lot of times when he kind of had another side to his personality, especially when he was on the computer as long as he was. A lot of times he didn't even come home at night and I was all by myself in the house. I felt like I was an orphan sometimes."

"I know the feeling," Patrick commiserated. "At least you had him there, for me it was months at a time before I'd even see him. Every time he came up to uncle's cabin he'd tell me 'I'm doing something important for the world but one day we can be together' and I got that for years and years. Then when I finally got to go to Second Branch he wasn't even interested in talking to me. It's almost like he wanted me to be pissed off. He never mentioned you at all and then when I did finally find out he told me to forget all about you!"

Hearing that from Patrick shocked me, to know that Dad treated him like that and didn't tell him about me. "What?! Why...why would he do that?"

"Something about Mom and then also what went on with you with the EVA," he went on to explain. "I know that he had serious issues with Shinji's dad over EVA, like he blamed him for Mom getting taken inside. Anyway, I guess that would change anyone having something like that happen." Patrick paused and there was a long silence between us. "I'm really sorry you had to go through this. I only wish they would have found you sooner."

"Well, just one more stupid thing that happened. Hey," I called out, suddenly feeling energetic now that I had someone to at least talk to. "Who's that blue-haired girl?"

"Who, Rei?" Patrick asked. "Did you see her at the GeoFront?"

"No. I saw her in my dreams."

Patrick was a bit hesitant. "What did you see, exactly?"

"There was this one time where she's standing in front of this sort of big fish tank where she was? You know, with LCL inside? It was really creepy, there were body parts and stuff inside the tank! Was that real?"

"Yes!" Patrick exclaimed. "That's the Dummy Plug Plant in the very bottom of the GeoFront."

"I remember seeing that, and I remember that same girl standing in front and talking to you."

"You saw that?"
"Yeah, I don't remember what you were saying though."

"One of my more stupid attempts to get her to go out with me," said Patrick. "Did you see anything else?"

"All different stuff," I told him, relating back several of the experiences I had thought were just dreams or feedback from the EVA. "You inside the EVA, you and other pilots at NERV. Then there was this time when you went out in the snow. Things like that."

"So this link between us really does goes two-way!"
"Yeah, um, sometimes a little too much!"

"Like what?"

"Well," the feeling of being kissed by Patrick's girl was still something strong in my mind "...let's just say that I know how much you like your girlfriend."

Patrick chuckled a bit when he heard that. "How..Umm, oh my that's awkward! But wait! If you could see and feel all of that, then why weren't you convinced from before?"

"I told you I was so angry I didn't know what to think! I just wanted you gone! And then I get all of this stuff in my head from you and it just drove me crazy!"

"Did you tell anyone else?"

"Yeah, as part of the training to go into NERV they had me speak to this German woman here. She wrote down all of these visions I got. When I asked her what they were she said they were just residual psychological experiences from your link to EVA. I didn't realize until now it was all really going on!"

"Oh, no," he realized, "they were using the link between you and me to spy on NERV!"

"There was something else," I told him. "Something really scary." I went further and told him about the time I had the nightmare where I felt my face melting off. I still remembered how horrifying that felt, so strongly that I wondered if that was real or just a nightmare. Patrick also unfortunately confirmed that too, was something which was relayed to me through our link, and described the full incident to me. While piloting Unit 04 he was defending Tokyo-3 from a SEELE attack, but one of SEELE's N2 warheads had penetrated through their defenses. Having no choice he extended the EVA's AT Field and absorbed the bomb. Everything I had felt that one night, including how my entire face felt on fire, actually happened to him.

"But your face," I asked Patrick, "you look okay! What happened?"

"This is my replacement face," he told me. "Remember the 'fish tank'? The one with the body parts?"

"Yeah?"

"They used some of those to grow my skin back," he told me. "Courtesy of Rei and a very eccentric French scientist named Foch."

I gasped as he said the name. There was another survivor of Second Branch besides me! "I know that guy!" and suddenly I didn't feel quite so alone anymore.

Over the next few days Patrick and I got to know each other much better. Ironically being stuck in a prison together gave us nothing else to do but talk, and we spent hours and hours going over each other's stories and trying to figure out how we ended up here. I asked Patrick to tell me his side of it, still being unsure of who or what he was but wanting to learn as much as I could about him. He gladly indulged me, starting from the beginning.

"So you grew up in the mountains?" I asked him after hearing his own story. "I mean, since you were a baby?"

"I guess I did. To be fair I don't remember much about being that small, but it was always me and uncle and in that small cabin we had up in Big Bear."

"What about mom and dad?"

"They would come up to see me. Occasionally. I mean, one or the other would show up I guess every so often. I always like it when mom showed up."

"You remember her then? Mom" I asked it like an innocent question, but to me this was the true test: was he really my twin? If he could answer about Mom the way I remembered her, that would be all I really needed to know if this was all true.

"Honestly it's been so long now I don't recall too much," Patrick recalled. "I can't even imagine what she looked like anymore. I mean she had blonde hair and wore glasses, and she seemed very, very smart. I knew that much."

From my own memories of Mom I knew at least this much was true. "What else do you remember?"

"She's spend time with me just playing and hanging around. She kept this little garden outside of the cabin and it was always my job to water the plants when she was away. I remember not wanting her to ever go away, like I'd grab onto her leg and try to keep her from leaving once." Patrick sighed deeply, then continued on.

"She always liked wildflowers. I think after she died I still kept trying to water the plants, but eventually they died too."

The wildflowers! I remembered that myself, and how much mom liked to garden. "What did you do when mom died?"

"Cry a lot," he said flatly. "I felt horrible. I didn't like living with uncle much and Mom was like the one bright spot in my life then. Then she was gone. Uncle didn't really ever tell me how she died, only that it was some kind of accident."

"But dad keep seeing you after that."

"Yeah, he'd come by maybe every one or two months or so. Less when I got older, but basically he'd always do the same thing: bring me some sort of toy, then talk to me about how he was working so hard and then one day I'd come and live with him. All such bullshit. I can't believe it was like this. When I found out about you I always wondered what the hell really happened. Dad was, how shall we say, very uncooperative about the issue."

"So he didn't tell you either, did he?"

"No, it wasn't until you showed up that I even knew you existed. Well, there were the a year ago they started. It was always like you were in the entry plug, although back then I didn't know what that was. You?"

"For me it was the cabin!" I told him. "I could see everything, just kinda blurry and stuff but I knew where that was!'

"So do you remember going there at all? I mean, you were actually there once."

"No, well sorta," I recalled, still trying to piece together that fuzzy memory I first had when I came out of the coma. "It was kind of weird and I wasn't even sure if that was real. Wondering through some sort of forest and then there I was. But was that really me?"

"Yes! Yes it was! I remember when I first saw you, and you were pretty freaked out."

"But how did I get all the way out there?"

"Absolutely no idea. But once uncle saw you show up he tazered you and then told me start packing. Like I said, you were pretty hysterical. Screaming out 'what's alive is dead, what's dead is alive' and like that."

I leaned my head back against the wall, wondering about everything I was now hearing. "Geez, I didn't realize. I don't remember any of that. I just remember waking up in that hospital, then finding out that Second Branch was….gone."

"Yeah." He said in a softer voice.

"Patrick, what really happened? I mean with Second Branch, and Dad and all."

"A lot of crap. God I just hate the whole thing, even now. So stupid."

It was then that Patrick told me the rest of his tale. Somehow I had made it to his cabin and after encountering him for the first time I had fainted. Not long afterwards my dad's security people had tracked me there and took Patrick to Second Branch in order to take my place as Unit 04's pilot. Right up until that moment in the mountains neither Mom nor Dad had ever told him that I existed.

When Patrick arrived at Second Branch, everyone kept their distance from him and no one talked to him about me at all, except for two people: Jo and Vance. Patrick had met Jo just once as he was given a physical exam, and at first Jo didn't tell him anything. He was persistent in questioning her however and managed to get out of her more about me. Everyone else at Second Branch was too scared to talk about me with Patrick, and to him it seemed like I had never existed at all. That made Patrick angry enough to confront Dad about what really happened, and Dad then told him to forget about me and get on with piloting.

I couldn't believe dad could be so cold like that! Was I nothing to him after my whole life? It seemed difficult to believe, but the anger in Patrick's voice when he talked about Dad made it pretty clear they didn't get along. I could only think that maybe I was the reason why.

"Dad…Dad lied to me about Mom, didn't he?" I blurted out.

"Yeah," Patrick answered in a somber tone. "Yeah, he did."

"But does that mean…does that mean she's not really dead?"

He sighed. "I'm not even sure what to call it. EVA plays by its own rules, pretty much. But if you're able to feel me, to see from inside, she's the reason why."

When I heard that my whole body shook. The ghost I had been so terrified of since I saw it, how it was able to just reach out to me, and how it had despite its horrifying presence seemed so familiar, there was a reason why this was so. Why had the EVA seemed so comfortable all of the times I had piloted it? How did I know the EVA was a she? I knew because I knew the EVA itself.

I had somehow always felt that the EVA was a part of me, from when I first began to pilot it, but I was a part of it too. Now I knew why, I knew why this was true. The puzzle was finally complete, and the picture of what was built was at once horrible and beautiful. Mom was alive, in some sort of way, and she had always been there. I don't know why the ghost had suddenly come but I knew why there was a link between Patrick and myself: Mom, or what she had become, was bringing us closer together.

I leaned against the wall, pressing myself against as I spoke to Patrick. The walls to my sense of reality were shaking, as it seemed like everything I knew about myself and my life were just completely wrong.

"So she's inside the EVA then? She's the ghost that I saw?"

"Yeah and that's true for just about all of the units. At least all of ours, I can't speak for the Harpies."

"Harpies?"

"The Mass Production Series, the ones that SEELE uses. That's what we call them. No souls in those things, just the dummy plug. But they're monsters…"

I thought about when Dad told me mom was gone, remembering that he never could bring himself to say that she actually died. No wonder, if it was like this. But why was it like this? Why did she need to be part of EVA? There were so many questions just coming to my brain.

"Did Dad know what was this was? What with Mom and EVA and all?'

"I think he did, I think that's why he got kinda…bad." Patrick was silent for a little while and then said "he didn't tell me much, and when he did tell me it was pretty blunt. He blamed Commander Ikari for a lot of what happened with Mom and all, but I think he pretty much just hated everything in the end. He told me once, 'The World doesn't…"

"…deserve to live," I finished for him.

"You knew?"

Gulping with emotion, I confessed to Patrick. "Dad had these times he would just be nasty," I said. "I mean…I think he tried to be good with me at times. I really think he did, and I just wanted him to be his good self so much but it was just so hard to reach him. For so long he was my whole world and now to find out how much he was hiding from me…I'm so stupid!" I cried out. The tears came again, I felt horrible for it and kept telling myself not to cry anymore but I couldn't stop it.

"Don't say that," Patrick consoled me. "How were you to know?"

"Because I saw you! I saw your whole life!" I shouted. "I saw it when you were living in the cabin, then I saw it when you were piloting EVA, and then I saw it when you were with your friends. I even saw you fall in love! I felt it too when you fell in love. I saw and felt everything and I just kept ignoring it! Instead I came there to get revenge on you!"

"Congratulations," he deadpanned. "You got it."

I scoffed, but the realization that helped bring him into his mess was heavy on my shoulders. "I massively screwed up," I said to Patrick. "I just let these people use me, and then I lied about everything when I went to Tokyo-3. I tricked you to get into the EVA and I just stood by when your friends…when your friends got killed…"

"It's alright. I got the idea."

"I didn't know they were going to take you with us! They never told me that before I left. I'm so sorry! It's my fault you ended up like this."

Shockingly, Patrick wasn't at all reluctant to speak to me even after my confession. "Well, think of it this way. Ever since I found out you existed, all I ever wanted to do was to meet you and talk to you. Now I can do it."

"But it should have to be like this," I mourned, looking around at our prison walls. "We're both done for here."

"Better late than never."

With little else to do Patrick and I spent the next few days just talking about anything and everything that was between us. While he told me of all of his adventures in Japan with EVA once he became her pilot, I told him everything I could think of about my own story, starting from the beginning.

It was painful again when the topic changed to Vance. When Patrick had first come to Second Branch, Vee befriended him nearly immediately and was the only one who told Patrick the real story behind what Dad was doing, at least as much as he knew. The two of them spent months together as they trained and at least according to Patrick became very close.

But something got in the way of their friendship, something awful.

Dad had sent both Vance and Patrick to Japan along with their EVAs to train against the more experienced Japanese team. Unknown to Patrick, Vance was on a secret mission, which was to steal a special engine the Japanese had captured from a defeated Angel. During one of the training sessions Vee and his EVA tried to take the S2 engine while it was being loaded onto an aircraft. Unfortunately, Rei got to the S2 before Vance could reach it and Vance was seconds away from killing her before Patrick intervened.

Patrick was forced to turn on Vance and shot him with the EVA's weapon, allowing Rei to get away. He died not long afterwards, still fighting in the EVA to keep from being captured by the Japanese.

It was hard hearing the story, but I knew from the sorrowful tone of Patrick's voice how hard it was for him to be forced into the choice between the girl he loved and his best friend. As he told me the whole tale, I could tell how much Patrick cared for Vance, and how much he had helped him adjust to living among other people while at Second Branch. For the short time that they lived together they had become brothers in a very real sense. I also knew Vance, though, and I knew that Vance was capable of and somehow none of this really surprised me. After Patrick told me everything, I recollected to him about that one time in the desert during our date, and about how I cried when Vance hunted down the rabbits. Patrick had done more than I was able to, he had stopped him but it came at a horrible price.

The worst part was hearing about what happened afterwards. Vance and his father had been set up by Dad to fail. My father had wanted Vance to die, and he had wanted Patrick to be mad about it, angry enough to use Unit 04 and eventually attack Tokyo-3 itself in revenge. The very worst part was that Vance's uncanny ability to pilot the EVA so well didn't come naturally, it came because Dad was giving him medicine to help him sync, medicine that was eating his brain at the same time. The headaches and dizzy spells that Vance would often get came from that. That day in the hospital, the day of my eventful sync test with Unit 04 where I encountered the ghost, I saw the medicine that he was injected with and that's what was killing him. He had been dying the whole time he had known me.

Did Vance know he was going to die? I wasn't sure, something about him always seemed unusually determined, so maybe he did know and went along despite this. But Dad knew, there's no way that he didn't.

Part of me wanted to run away from what Patrick had told me, and just rack it up to yet another attempt to control or sway me. SEELE had said that Patrick was a spy, and a very dangerous one, and that NERV and the Alliance would try to win me over to their side by offering me things I couldn't resist. But I had been there as Vance was slowly poisoned, and as Dad had increasingly become further and further isolated and angry. I had seen things with my own eyes that I hadn't been able to put together until now, about the EVAs and what we were doing. I always knew that something seemed wrong about my life, and that there was a part of me missing. Now that other Side of me was sitting on the other side of a wall in this dark place, and the puzzle of my life so far had been made complete.

Did I still have doubts? Maybe, but the clues to my life fit too well for Patrick to be just making it up. Here he was too, like me he had trusted others and found himself at short end of the stick, lonely and abandoned. But I was here with him and that seemed to make all of the difference. He didn't act sad, and in fact despite our circumstances he seemed downright happy to be right next to me. He asked me so many questions about my life and I told him everything that I could think of, literally everything I could remember about the last fourteen years. We belonged together and the universe had brought us together, albeit in probably the worst way possible.

We continued to talk for hours and hours until both of us became so exhausted that we couldn't think of anything else. Patrick got sleepy and then drifted off, leaving me leaning against the cold wall of the cell as he rested. My mind sifted through everything that I had learned, my whole world had expanded and changed, and not entirely for the better.

"Daddy, why?" I tried to project my thoughts to him, as if he would hear me some way. "Why lie to me so much? Why keep me away from Patrick for all of my life, knowing what it was doing to me? Why did you hurt Vance like that and do so many other ugly things, all over the EVA?" My mind couldn't come up with an explanation that made sense.

My father seemed at times like a good man but distant and unconnected. He had to look good, that was for sure, he was always meticulous about his appearance and his reputation and never took criticism very well. EVA meant something to him, something important enough to sacrifice his own family for. From it all I felt horrible, like I had been cast off as an unneeded appendage once I could no longer pilot EVA.

Did he ever love me at all? I wondered, but knew there were times, small moments shared between us too when maybe he did, but it was always contested with EVA. It had never been what he should have been between my father and I, and I had spent a lifetime of trying the bridge the gap between us to no avail. I knew how much my heart had just wanted all of my Dad at once, but I could never catch him.

Now Dad was gone, caught up in the storm he unleased and taken away to parts unknown, and I was left here all alone. Well, not all alone as it turns out and I suppose if there was a silver lining to any of this it was that I was finally together with Patrick, the other half of me that was missing for so long. At least I could take solace in that, at that the end my puzzle was complete and we were together for whatever lie ahead of us, but I feared for the worst.

With nothing but time on our hands, my questions for Patrick expanded to anything regarding Evangelion I could find out, as it seemed like there was just so much more to this project that what little I knew of it while piloting at Second Branch. Patrick had come into EVA just as the Japanese were pitted in combat versus the long-awaited Angels, and while he had not fought the Angels himself, he had learned much about it after moving in with the Japanese team.

There were a total of seventeen Angels according to Patrick, of which the first, code-named Adam, was the one responsible for the Antarctica disaster in 1999 that wiped out half of Earth's population, tilted the planet's axis and started all of this mess. Nearly of the others attacked Tokyo for a six-month period last year, one by one with each Angel more powerful than the one before but still ultimately defeated by one or more of NERV's Evangelions. It had cumulated in a final battle at the end of the year, where an Angel disguised as a boy named Kaworu Nagisa took control over Unit 02 and tried to contact the Second Angel, which was held deep underneath Tokyo-3. Unit 01 had stopped it by killing the boy-Angel, literally crushing him in her hands. I recognized the name, as it was the same name as the silver-haired weird boy I ran into in the EVA cages inside of the mountain before I was sent to Tokyo-3. Was he the same boy, back from the dead? It might have been, which would explain how creepy he had felt that one time I spoke to him.

Since then all of NERV's battles had been not against Angels, but against other Evangelions instead, as SEELE had attacked NERV in order to start their own version of Third Impact. Patrick had been there at Tokyo-3 when it almost happened, and had been fighting the Mass Production Series of EVAs, or "harpies" ever since.

"Tell me about the others?" I asked him about the Evangelion pilots he worked with. "How did you meet them?"

Patrick's voice perked up a bit as he described his encounters with the Japanese pilots, especially one in particular. "I saw them first around October of last year, when Double-V and I went to Japan. They put us in the same classroom for about a week so we could interact with them. That was when I met Rei for the first time."

"Oh?"
"Yeah, it wasn't really smooth at first. Back then she was really, really introverted, but I remember just seeing her there sitting in the school hallway and reading, and there was sort of this really peaceful, gentle look on her face just like a little child. I think I was on the hook even then."

I have to admit I was genuinely curious. "How long did it take her to go out with you?"

"About a week. I sort of confessed to Shinji but anyway Shinji somehow got Rei to show up when I asked her out on a date. Kind of bumpy but it was fun, and I got her to open up a bit. Fed her lots of ice cream."

"You did that?!" I exclaimed, remembering one time when Vance stuffed me with so much ice cream that I got the giggles.

"Vance recommended it. Said Ice cream was the cure for ice queens."

Typically Vance. "He said that?! That bastard! I wasn't an Ice Queen!"

"Maybe he was just trying to warm you up too," Patrick quipped. "Anyway, it worked like a charm on her. But then things got so fucked up and then I didn't see her again until all hell broke loose at the end of last year. Once I got back to Japan I just keep trying at it until she finally decided I was okay."

I was very curious now, as I had seen this girl several times in my visions as part of our link and she always seemed very mysterious. "What's she like? I mean when she's not piloting or whatever?"

"Incredible," he told me with a cheerful tone in his voice. "Really beautiful, very gentle, super smart. A bit awkward at times: she grew up inside the labs at Tokyo-3 and so she didn't really meet 'normal' people until more recently, so there's still a bit of adjusting she does to fit in with the others. But it's really fun watching her do that, and discovering all of these new things."

"And I'm sure you don't mind the kissing parts too, right?"

Patrick laughed hard. "Oh, yes! Oh, man I really miss that right about now." He was quiet for a bit after that, then told me in a lower voice. "Not sure if she'll take me back after all of this mess," he said. "But I can't see myself ever being without her."

I knew that feeling all too well. "You gave up a lot to try and help me," I told him.

"I did, and what could I do, you know? I mean Rei warned me about this, and so did Mari, but I just saw that look on your face and I had to whatever you needed me to do to help."

"I'm sorry I tricked you then," I told Patrick.

"But you still needed my help, yes? You just didn't really know it then."

"I did," I confessed to him. "Not that this helps us much now."

My brother was, despite everything we now faced, encouraging. "All I can say is don't give up hope. Don't know how or why, but somehow you'll make it out of this."

We're now at the pinnacle of the story, where the twins are re-united and beginning to get in sync with each other. This particularly chapter is fairly dialogue- and narrative-heavy, but we will start the downward slide with the next chapter and things will begin to pickup speed from there.

Events outside of writing are still getting in the way of consistent production at the keyboard, so I'd expect to see the next chapter in 3+ weeks. Still on target for a 20 chapter story done by Summer. Stay tuned.