This coffee tastes… quite alright, I finally decide.
The tin can of coffee, its body dripping tear streaks of condensation all the way down its base as it suffers the muggy atmosphere of the room, sits in front of me at the edge of the unwashed corner table. I eye the can with suspicion and consideration from where I sit at the far side of said table with my back facing one of the brick walls of the student union, or at least what counts for one around here. It stares back at me, or at least it might have, in a world where tin cans of iced coffee had sentience and eyeballs, but that is not this world, and I think I am glad for that.
Small mercies, this fact of life is. Tin cans that have eyes would be an abomination in my humble opinion, because metal and flesh were never meant to know each other intimately in that manner, and a child of their union would be in unspeakable agony every waking second of their life. Yes, I am glad that these monsters do not exist, because that would mean another one I would have to suffer the ambient presence of in my daily life.
Thank you, iced coffee, for your small mercies. Thank you, iced coffee, for not being able to receive my thanks. I reach for the can of iced coffee, making sure to maneuver my right forearm as I do so as to not let any part of my skin touch against the disgusting, glutinous streaks of old meals caked across my table, and grasp around its head with a pincer-like vice using my thumb and pointer finger before taking a long sip.
Mmm. Yes. Delicious, indeed, despite the fact that I know this canned coffee is basically half milk by the way it tastes, before a quarter of sugar and god knows what else takes down the content of actual coffee down to a quarter itself. I'm surprised that the producers can even afford that sugar, never mind the coffee beans needed to make actual coffee, at this particular moment, but I'm surely not complaining.
I think it's the best part of my day, actually. Nothing beats this… well, going to the dining hall for meals is pretty good too, but this is my one true pleasure during the day. At this moment, there are no long papers to write, no humming masses to wade through, no classmates asking questions they'd know the answers to if they only read the textbooks. There's only me, my coffee and my corner table; just the way I prefer things.
I set the coffee can back down on the table with a soft clink, and lean back into my chair as far I've learned I can without tipping over backwards with an equally dim creak before sweeping the interior of the student union with an errant eye. I find nothing new; posters of all shapes and sizes hang from the rectangular bulletin board, advertising and announcing their various messages in a rainbow spectrum of colored lettering, ones that are promptly ignored by the clusters of students seated in their own rickety wooden chairs around the dirty wooden tables that speckle the room.
They jest and converse in low tones, making sure to be careful not to disturb anyone else out of sheer societal obligation as they go around and around and then back again in their own worlds, retreading inside jokes and old banter like one would the dirt path home after the school day has ended. The murmur of the crowd has always been irritating to my ears, but it's preferable to wearing the same grooves in my carpet as I pace through my dorm in circles and flex my tired fingers and try to figure what word would come next in a seemingly endless paper. It's preferable to the scribble of my pen on paper as I force my hands through the motions of hiragana while ignoring the dim flicker of confusion that tickles at the shadowy, dim back of my mind. It's preferable to ruining an entire draft by the occasional, split-second mistake of my eyes seeing wrong and my hands automatically switching to writing in the roman alphabet.
That's another benefit of these coffee breaks; it gives me the energy and perspective to pick up my pen and start writing all over again instead of covering my desk in a morass of black ink after I snap said pen in half during a fit of rage.
I close my eyes peacefully, pick up my coffee can and take another silent sip.
Or at least I was going to.
A sudden jerk at the other end of the table upends my elbow from it's position against the edge of my side, and the first thing I feel is the icy-cold drip of coffee splash down from beneath my nose, which is then soon followed a few seconds later by the bone chilling feeling of having something wet drip through you clothes and drag it's freezing tendrils down your chest. I slam the can of coffee down onto the table and snap my eyes open as fast as I can, shooting a scathing glare at whatever or whoever just tore apart my solitude.
It's a girl, about my age, dressed in your standard youthful flair of blue jeans and a t-shirt. I dimly register her companion, another young woman with short, blonde hair, but whatever snide remark I was about to snipe at the two of them originally dies in my mouth aloonce my eyes register the sight of a waterfall of glossy, midnight-shaded indigo hair, and the svelte face that it frames.
"Uh, sorry-" Misato Katsuragi yelps ungracefully, with at least some decency to look half ashamed of how she just bumped backwards into my solitary corner table, "I'll buy you another one to make up for it?"
I wake.
My bare skin is caked in a thin, sticky layer of cold sweat, and my eyelids peel open like a pair of rusty shutters being wrenched apart as I lay under the mountain of stiff blankets thrown across the breadth of my bed's mattress, and it feels like I am being crushed under the entire weight of one made of stone and soil as well. Yet, I do not move. I merely lay still, completely still, so still that my hotel room feels like a tomb instead of an overpriced excuse of a luxury, sandwiched between the layer of scathing cotton enveloping me and the harsh fabric digging into my back, and stare upwards at the ceiling.
My hotel room is haunted by a low, ghostly shade of lime green; no doubt a result of the alarm clock that sits upon my bedside table casting its gaze upon the interior as it details some god forsaken hour between darkest midnight and brightest dawn. Beyond that, though, is sheer blackness, and although I know that the ceiling is painted with a coat of white that is speckled with dust and other marks, I cannot see them through the dark.
My eyes take a breathless moment to adjust to the shadows, inky black swirling from exactly that to the shades of deepest hollow gray and navy blue that live as brothers in the places light won't shine, tinted green by the intruding rays of the alarm clock. Enough of this prevaricating; I turn my head, my cheek meeting with the moist pillow as I do, and take a glance at the alarm clock.
Three-fifty-one AM. An hour earlier than I usually start my day. I'd prefer the extra hour of sleep instead of… this, but there's nothing much to be done about it. Might as well start bright and early; the time will pass anyway, regardless if I decide to rot in bed for another hour or actually get to work early. My hand reaches out from beneath the covers, only guided by the low glow as it fumbles around the bedside table in the dark. I squint as my fingers finally meet with the light switch, and-
Ouch. It never gets easier, doing that. I squeeze my eyes shut as the ceiling lamp flares to life and sears my eyes with its morning joy, and then wrench them open after a moment more of watching blobs of neon green and purple dance in the back of my eyelids as I launch myself straight up in bed like a garden rake whose metal head has just been stepped on by some unsuspecting fool.
My hotel room, as it has always been for the time I've stayed at this particular joint, is draped in what counts for finery in the current year. The walls are painted immaculately with a particularly exuberant shade of beige, one that reflects the light of the circular lamp of glass and metal that hangs from the center of the ceiling, while the floor is covered in a plush carpet whose threads alternate in rows of chestnut and maroon colors. The furniture is similarly shaded; everywhere I look there is some variation of orange and red, purple and brown, black and white that greets my gaze. A singular painting hangs on the wall to my left, inscrutable in its meaning if one didn't give it more than a few seconds of consideration, while a boxy television takes up the entire top of the dresser that sits parallel to my bed, it's screen a glossy black as the newscasters and actors dream in the night.
This hotel is nothing to lose one's mind over, but this hotel is nothing to sneeze at, either. Once a person has been to a few of them, they've seen all of them. The only thing that's surprising about this one is that the owners of the Washington Plaza seem to keep it in a very clean state for a hotel in a city that is always one bad enough weather event away from falling off into the stormy depths of the Atlantic. The perks of being in America's only city that came out sitting pretty by 2002, maybe.
I throw my bed sheets to the side and lurch out of bed, the soles of my feet hitting the carpet with a soft thump as I reach out for my glasses and take them from the bedside table and place them on my face. The world washes out into a shade of dull green as my vision sharpens into the clear lens I use to view reality.
Then, I reach out again, and take my two most important possessions from where they were sitting on the bedside table next to each other.
The familiar weight of my pistol and the worn leather of my wallet in my hands is a comfort as I make my way to the bathroom.
-
Ouch.
I take a second to carefully maneuver the razor to another angle and obliquely pull the handle downwards, slicing a bare stripe through the unkempt crop of black hairs that have accumulated on the underside of my chin and down my neck during the whirlwind of these past few days. It took me one too many cuts and razor burns than it should have for me to make it a habit of being careful when shaving.
Easy now. I pare another stripe from my chin, and the hairs fall into the sink as I watch the man in the bathroom mirror do the same. The surface of it is covered in a layer of condensation that layered itself across the flat expanse as I took my shower, a muggy, cloudy layer of steam that is slowly dissipating with each passing second. The man in the mirror, an opaque silhouette of tan skin and dark hair, raises the razor again and shaves away at his beard. I do the same, although my eyes periodically flicker over the man's shoulder and peer into the darkness of the hotel room that is reflected there, and then towards the gun that sits on the countertop a mere few meters away in case something moves in the darkness in those seconds where I look into it.
But regardless, I continue shaving, getting rid of the poor excuse for a beard that has snuck up on me. I was never one for them anyway; they just make a man look like he doesn't have much interest in taking proper care of himself, if one wants to put it diplomatically. With each stroke of my hand, with each passing second, I am able to see more and more of the man staring out at me from the mirror.
I stare at Tatsuo Tokuda, agent of NERV's Section II. He's a lean, tan-skinned man, with some unidentifiable combination of features that makes one wonder what part of the world he's from, their best guess being that he's a hafu that's spent too many days in the hot sun. He has black hair styled into a short undercut that he often combs back unsuccessfully before leaving it parted down the middle, and eyes that are shaded the brackish gray of the North Sea during a stormy day. There's a long, thin scar whose middle is hidden by his boxer shorts that runs vertically up from his left thigh and onto his stomach from when he accidentally gored himself hopping a barbed wire fence after stealing food during one of the riots in Kyoto in 2001. It was the worst pain he's felt in his life so far, save for finally waking up.
I know him. I know myself. I know that it's only me in the mirror, despite the feeling that tugs at the back of my brain when I look at myself in the mirror or at the scarce few pictures that I'm present in that exist.
I stare at myself.
I have been myself for twenty-nine years now.
I am I. Tatsuo Tokuda is Tatsuo Tokuda.
These two statements are one in the same, because I am Tatsuo Tokuda.
I lay the razor down on the sink with a sigh, before retrieving my gun and wallet from where they wait quietly on the bathroom sink and make my exit from the bathroom. The relatively cool atmosphere of the hotel room is soothing against my still-hot skin, and I know it's only a matter of time before it stops being comfortable and starts to be freezing, so I promptly slalom over to the armchair shoved in the corner of the hotel room and retrieve my usual outfit from where it's strewn in various pieces across the chair in preparation of getting dressed for the work day.
The pair of black dress pants and similarly-shaded tank top shirt tucked into them fit over my body as naturally as breathing, and I appreciate that fact, because it makes putting the kevlar vest on so much easier. It's familiar, heavy weight settles evenly across my shoulders, having almost become a second skin to me in the years since I joined Section II, and the sensation of wearing the bulletproof vest fades away into the background ambience of the world as I retrieve my white, long sleeved button down.
Next comes that, barely concealing the bulk of the vest underneath it's thin fabric after I've buttoned the shirt all the way up to the neckline, and then the leather shoulder holster from the chair. I shrug it around my shoulders like a backpack, and I snap the latch into place to lock it into place before sliding my handgun into the holster. The Glock 17 sits snug against the left side of my ribcage, ready to be ripped from its home and into action at a moment's notice should the need arise. One can never be too comfortable in a business like this, and every second counts when you've found yourself in a tricky situation.
These are both especially true, now that I might actually need to start using my gun.
I don't pause in the process of retrieving my black suit jacket and finally finishing getting dressed, but my mind is far away from any present matters. Well, as much as it can be, considering that every matter, be it past, present or future, is linked to one another like a nest of rats with their tails tied together into knots.
The year is 2015, and this morning is the first time I've dreamt about my college days in years.
Maybe this is a sign. Maybe it isn't.
I'm not about to tempt fate, though; I've long since learned to think otherwise. There's no avoiding any of this. There never was a choice in the first place. Not even when I thought there was one. There wasn't one when I got in this deep, there never was one when I signed on at NERV and there sure as hell wasn't one when the plot itself wandered straight into my table and spilled my iced coffee.
I mustn't run away, as the new generation slang goes. Not that I was planning on it, anyway.
But still, I'm afraid.
I stand in the quiet of my room, ready for the day, but my feet don't move. My briefcase sits on the table, filled to the brim with all the intelligence about my current mission that's currently available, and so is my pager, silently waiting for me to request an update on Oliver Walsh's activities from Pushkin and Kraus, but my hand guides itself towards where my wallet sits at the edge of a cluster of empty take out boxes and gingerly retrieves it.
I've had this wallet for as long as I can remember. It's probably older than me, based on how cracked the leather is. It flips open easily, perhaps a bit too easily for comfort since it feels like it might split in half at the seams at any moment, but I never particularly cared for it anyway, only what's inside of the wallet.
Not the fat stack of bills inside, although that's pretty important, but the two items stuffed into the plastic slots where a driver's license or identification card should be. One is my badge, just a brass piece of metal shaped like NERV's oak leaf with the word's SECTION II emblazoned in harsh black lettering across its front, and the other…
Well, it's the four of us, once upon a time. The four of us, variations on a theme of the children our lives revolve around. Except I never did figure out who was supposed to be who.
I think we took that picture the only time that the four of us were in one place, and we're young. Comically young, only a few years older than them. I can imagine that day in the darkness of the second it takes to blink my eyes, and then I'm here again, a decade later in my hotel room, ready for whatever comes next but still so afraid.
I snap the wallet shut. Come hell or high water, I made this choice, and I have to live with it.
Time to get to work, regardless of what comes next.