(Admiration)

My left hand had to be pried from the controls; It's not responding properly.

I realize that my face is sticky with my own blood.

The diffuse pain that filled up all my being begins to crystallize in discreete locations.

I've seen it many times, drawn in various syringes by Dr. Akagi, but I'm surprised every time that it is red like anyone else's.

And yet:

Commander Ikari lifts me, carefully, delicately, out of my seat in EVA 00's entry plug.

As if I was something precious.

As if I was someone.

He cares not that the LCL stains his uniform.

He barely flinches when his raw, discolored palms touch the plastic and rubber of my suit.

He balances my weight, expertly, using some ingrained procedural knowledge undimmed by the years, as one who has been used to carrying other people before.

He rises to his feet, and with great shock, I find myself held against his broad chest.

This is the most that anyone had touched me, in all the brief years of my existence.

I had not known what the heat of another person's body even feels like before today.

I had not known the Commander to act anything but impersonal and professional with anyone.

I had not seen his steely purpose-oriented focus soften even a little.

He barely sounded like himself. "Shh, it's allright," he said, as one might when trying to calm a child.

He kept a tight hold on me, until he was able to hand me to the paramedics.

I awoke in pain all over, much more pain, even, as I was habitually accustumed to handle.

I felt it even though I found myself hooked up to various beeping machines, outfitted with an intravenous drip and wrapped in many, many bandages, even on the clean hospital beds, through the smell of antiseptic, through a foggy haze of what must be medication that just barely spared me from even greater agony.

I must have been dressed, processed and stripped out of my suit while I was out, a defective piece of wetware forced to keep on functioning, a tangled, mangled piece of flesh. Despite the oxygen mask strapped to my face, and the straps holding it in place digging uncomfortably into the backsides of my ears, it hurt to breathe.

But when I opened my eyes, he was there.

Commander Ikari. Sitting by the side of my bed on a plastic chair, still in his stained uniform from before, his own, bandaged hands hanging in his lap.

For some reason, he still hadn't put his glasses back on.

He smiled, thinly, when he noticed my tentative gaze.

"Commander Ikari…?" I asked, thinly.

Weakened as I was, it was a struggle to make myself heard through the oxygen mask.

"Did- did you get hurt-?"

"It's nothing", he assured me, curtly brushing it aside – but at that point, he struggled a little to compose his words. "I just… couldn't let it happen again, right before my eyes."

"Again? What do you mean?"

He didn't reply right away.

I couldn't say why, as he didn't see it fit to tell me: "You needn't concern yourself with that."

That's how it always goes. He never tells me anything, for after all, I am just part of his work, a tool with a fixed role, no different than the EVAs I am supposed to pilot.

Why would he tell me more than what I strictly need to perform my role?

And yet, that role is my entire life. I know not where I am going. What I am doing. What I'm likely to be dying for.

It must be understood, however, that the Commander rarely ever smiles.

Other employees at NERV may discuss their personal lives or indulge in some personal pastime when waiting for test results to come back, but never Commander Ikari.

I had rarely ever seen him on the surface in the daylight, usually when he was about to leave for one of his many business trips. He was wont to wear tinted shades out in the daylight because he'd spent so much time underground for his work that he'd grown unaccustomes to the brightness of the day star.

I never got any impression that there was anything in his life but his work – nothing but pointed focus, and single-minded determination.

In entertaining my idle fantasies of kinship, I thought sometimes that this made us alike. That it bound us, since we had both given our lives completely to this pursuit -

And here we were, both of us wounded.

Seeing him come to visit me like this, smiling at me, speaking to me tenderly, touching ever so ephemerally on personal things -

Well, it appeared congruent with what I wished sometimes to see.

It is not as if I had any illusions. I knew full well that I had bled a lot more for this than he had. He could quit and leave the project to someone else, go upstairs to the city and make himself a good life with his wealth, and I could not.

But this faint facimile of kindship was offered to me after I had accepted that I would never have it, and I knew well that this was the most for which I could ever hope.

Thus, I cherished it.

This palest echo of care that was still all I would ever receive.

"But where are your glasses, Sir?" I asked, in part because I had been curious about it, but largely, because as a matter it seemed trivial enough that I might actually get a sincere answer for this, some crumb I might be content with.

He grinned at this, chuckling awkwardly.

It was like I was getting a passing glipmse of a whole different person today, like the ghost of a person long gone. I did not expect this to repeat itself.

As for the Commander, he gestured with his arm to the bedside table: "Over here. Akagi-kun brought them over earlier, though I wonder why she bothered. They're cracked, the frame must have melted from the LCL. Seems like I won't be spared the hassle of getting new ones – seems like a waste of time, really, with the Promised Time so close around the corner…"

I wish he hadn't reminded me of that.

But it did not matter what I wished.

"So," I inquired, "This means that you won't be needing these ones anymore?"

"Sure. Why are you asking?"

"I was wondering, if it's no bother, if I might have them."

"I don't see why you can't, but whatever would you want with a piece of useless trash?"

"...why? I am not certain. Perhaps, I think, as a memory."

"As a memory, huh?" He chuckled again, but it was different from before, somehow.

I don't think it was a joyous sound.

"...is that a problem? I am familiar with the concept from books. If you believe it is inadvisable-"

"No, not at all. You can have it. All things considered, this shouldn't surprise me."

"Why is that?"

I can't help but concluded that this answer was not precisely what he wanted to hear.

It gave him pause, somehow – though I cannot say why he would be surprised that I would not know the reason to something he never told me about.

It must have occurred to him as well, for he decided that it was best to let the matter rest.

"Nevermind. It doesn't matter."

That was all he said, that day.

It was not long then before he got up and left.

Of course he did – he must be wanting to change into a fresh uniform.

He must have more work to do. It was hard to believe that he had lingered here solong as he had, and now that he had confirmed that I had woken up, there was no reason for him to linger here any longer.

If I found it easier to ignore the pain and that creeping sense of fraught emptiness when he was here, then that would have been completely incidental and irrelevant.

He left.

But he did leave me the old glasses.