Geofront, AEL Headquarters
January 28, 2042
1927 hours

"X-ray shows no fracture or fragmented remains." – Sanada stated as the infirmary's door closed behind him, Kaworu awkwardly trying to feel out the sling his arm was now wrapped in. – "Even so, I would appreciate if you'd leave bullet removal to a professional next time. What if you nicked an artery?"

"I've been shot before, doc." – Shephard replied. – "And not always with someone else around to give me a hand with it. Trust me, if I wasn't sure I could do it, I'd have left it to you. Besides, if he had taken it in the gut, he'd have bled out long before I could get here even if the cops don't pull me over for speeding."

"What happened, colonel?" – came Yui's voice from behind him as she rounded the corner and her eyes immediately fixed on Kaworu's sling.

"Kid came home shot in the arm. Took it out and brought him to Sanada. Won't tell me who did it and keeps insisting he's fine."

"I can move it." – Kaworu replied and started raising his arm to demonstrate, only to immediately get stopped by Sanada's firm hand.

"That doesn't mean you should." – the doctor admonished him. – "Try not to aggravate it if possible. And colonel, make sure he changes the bandage regularly. I assume you can recognize if infection sets in?"

"I got it covered, doc." – Shephard assured him before noticing that Yui wasn't alone. Slightly lagging behind her was a teenaged boy in a motorized wheelchair he was sure he had never seen in the facility before, especially with the big VISITOR badge hanging off the front of his collar and a face sporting the same overwhelmed expression Asuka had during her first time inside the Geofront. – "Who's the kid?"

Yui took a step back to stand next to the wheelchair, whose occupant looked more than a little nervous at the sudden spotlight. – "Allow me to introduce Shinji Ikari, the Gehirn representative here for consultation regarding Unit-01's repairs."

"Relative of yours?"

"My son."

The man remained in pensive silence for several seconds, looking back and forth between the two as Sanada finished giving instructions to Kaworu and the two of them came over, making Shinji visibly fidget from suddenly being the focus of attention from multiple strangers at once.

"...does being involved in next-level shit run in the family or something?" – Shephard finally said.

"Language, colonel. Shinji, this is lieutenant colonel Adrian Shephard, Confederate Armed Forces."

At that, Shinji finally perked up. – "You have a military liaison too?"

Yui was not surprised the least by the phrasing. As a defense contractor, it would make sense Gehirn enjoyed their own level of military oversight to ensure an actually productive cooperation, whether Gendo liked it or not. Then again, with what she knew of the man, she could perfectly imagine him having zero issues with catering to the needs of generals and admirals who cared more about results than costs. – "Sort of like that, yes. Next to him is Yoshiro Sanada, our chief physician, and this is Kaworu Nagisa, one of our junior civilian contractors."

That was a rather nice way to put 'volunteered child soldier in all but name' and she indeed saw an expression on Shepard's face that all but screamed so, yet to the man's credit he didn't say it out loud for once. She wasn't sure whether Kaworu actually told him how exactly he came to work for her but seeing how she hasn't yet received a notice of investigation from the labor ministry on allegations of coerced employment of a minor for hazardous work, she guessed the answer was no. Had she tried the same move with Asuka, the man would've likely skipped the official middlemen altogether in expressing his disagreement with Yui's recruitment practices.

Kaworu nodded. – "Hi." – he said before his expression abruptly shifted to one of resignation and he glanced at Yui. – "...do I have to take him in too?"

"Oh, no, we have a housing block."

"Wait, you do? Then why did I have to take in the colonel? No offense."

In the background, it was Shinji's turn to silently look back and forth between the two with an almost imperceptible expression of 'what did I miss?'.

"Security reasons. His daughter wasn't employed by us back then, remember? We can't quite let civilians roam around the premises without authorization."

"That and security already have their hands full keeping track of where I go and who I talk to." – Shephard interjected. – "No offense to them, doc, I know they're just doing their job. Still, kid, if you want me and my girl to get lost, say the word and I'll figure something out."

"Ah, no, it's okay." – Kaworu replied with a shake of his head. – "Truth be told, I'm sort of getting used to having someone around."

"Then if that's settled..." – Yui turned back to Shinji. – "I'll make the arrangements to have your luggage delivered, although without knowing your wheelchair's battery specifications, I'm guessing you'll need security escort to take you topside by car?"

"Um..." – Shinji spoke up tentatively. – "Can't I just... you know... live with you? I-I mean, I don't want to impose-"

Yui held back a sigh with more difficulty than she would have liked. – "Don't be silly, you aren't imposing, but it's a bit... complicated. I'm not home very often and I don't have a third room either."

"...third?"

Oh. She completely forgot to tell him on the way from Kyoto.

Well, shit (and no, that internal swear was not an invitation for the colonel to go ahead and call her a hypocrite).

This was going to be awkward.

"Oh, right. You don't know. Do you remember Rei? From back then?"

From the way his eyes widened, Yui got her answer. – "S-she's here?"

And for the bombshell... – "I haven't mentioned it but while you were gone, I adopted her, so she's living with me now. I don't think she'll mind you moving in, but we should still ask her."

"And speak of the devil." – Shephard muttered as he looked past Yui who was in the middle of silently bracing herself for getting justifiably verbally ripped into by a son for adopting someone else while not even poking her nose in his direction for a whole decade.

Yet it never came, for both mother and son slowly turned to look in the direction their unintentional herald directed their attention to.

At Rei standing stock still at the end of the corridor.

With those entirely unnecessary shades, the girl's expression was completely unreadable as she took a tentative step forward. Then another.

Then without saying anything she stormed forward, all but shoving Yui out of the way before coming to an equally as sudden full stop before Shinji.

He opened his mouth but the only sound that came out was a surprised yelp before Rei's hands shot under his arms and bodily yanked him out of the wheelchair so hard he practically went airborne before her arms closed around him and pulled him into a bone-crunching hug.

"...uh..." – Shinji tried to say with a face distinctly resembling that of a deer in headlights, sporting a hue that couldn't possibly be mistaken for anything other than a blush from sudden very close physical contact with a member of the opposite gender.

Rei did not even twitch.

"...um..."

Still no response.

"...h-hi..."

Rei's only answer was hugging him even tighter, making the older teen squirm in visible discomfort.

Behind her, Kaworu and Shepard shared a silent look, the latter subtly motioning in the other direction down the corridor and the former equally subtly nodding before they silently excused themselves. Yui meanwhile suppressed the mixed relief and unease she felt at the timely interruption from having had to explain herself before quietly stepping up to Sanada, who glanced at Kaworu's back before giving her a meaningful look.

"We got lucky."

"I know. If the colonel would've taken him to a hospital-"

"I know."

If such a thing was even possible, Rei became even quieter than usual once she finally pried herself off of her adoptive brother. Yui could tell Shinji had a thousand questions but he seemed to be more than a little intimidated by her once he managed to get enough breathing room to fully take her appearance in. That and the way he kept sneaking glances at her, only to immediately avert his eyes with flushed cheeks informed Yui that somehow, no matter how impossible that sounded to someone who personally knew both, Shinji Ikari seemed to have even more difficulty with women than his father had back in the day.

Especially women who demonstrated they were more than capable of physically manhandling anyone who touched them at an inappropriate spot without permission. Not that Yui expected Rei to do that to him, of all people, even with that incident last year when someone tried to cop a feel in a crowd and Rei's response was to shatter the offending hand's bones against a nearby metal column in a single blow. The hospital bill was not exactly cheap, but Rei got off without criminal charges once the reason for her reaction became clear.

Even when Yui decided to finally sit down and have that talk with Rei years ago, the girl flatly refused, insisting that she had neither need for, nor interest in, such information. And when Yui tried to ask about her daughter's periods, girl to girl, Rei's glare got positively murderous and the topic became taboo right then and there. It was only through Sanada as the girl's physician since childhood that Yui knew (within reason, doctor-patient confidentiality being what it is) Rei hadn't done anything hormonally stupid, which was a good thing. As volatile as she could be, Yui did not want to find out what a heartbroken Rei would be capable of.

Minutes later the three of them were passing down another corridor, Yui leading ahead with Shinji following and Rei silently in the rear.

"Really, it's okay." – Shinji insisted. – "It's motorized, I don't need to be pushed."

Rei completely ignored him. – "Does he have accommodations?"

"About that. He was asking if he could-"

"Yes." – Rei said immediately.

"- move in with us." – Yui slowly finished. Sometimes the girl had a positively infuriating habit of replying to questions before they were finished. – "But I told him we don't have another room."

"There is yours."

"And what about me?"

"Office."

Yui sighed, this time not even bothering to hide it. – "You know, one would think I'd have a say in matters regarding my own house..."

"He needs it more than you do."

"We have a housing block."

"He is not an employee." – Rei replied with a slight edge that let Yui know she will not budge on the matter.

She should've expected this, in hindsight.

"...is she always like that?" – Shinji asked his mother quietly.

"Worse, actually." – Yui admitted, remembering the still fading bruise on her neck. – "Before I arrange the delivery of your luggage, I think it's time we got to the reason why you're here."

"I read up a bit on the company online." – Shinji replied, his eyes suddenly focusing at something for a moment before looking back at her. – "Your primary portfolio is medical research and pest control against xenofauna and -flora. Are you looking for chemical manufacturing equipment involving specific environmental conditions?"

"No." – Although if such things were present in Gehirn's inventory, she wouldn't be averse to buying some. The labs could always benefit from upgrades at best, spares at worst. – "This particular project is something we've been working on for a long time now, under the highest level of secrecy. Even the government wasn't fully aware of it until a few months ago, when... certain events forced us to come clean, so to speak. As your father may have mentioned, President Keel personally mandated your assistance and while I have misgivings about it, I cannot deny that at the moment, we could use it."

"Father knew what you were working on?"

"He was involved in the initial conceptual plan shortly before he left the company and founded Gehirn, but his contribution is limited to outsourced R&D and manufacturing of elements we simply do not have the infrastructure to do by ourselves in a timely manner."

They continued walking for nearly a minute before Shinji carefully spoke up. – "Were... were those elements by any chance structural and armor parts?"

Yui almost stumbled mid-step as Rei's eyebrows rose. – "How do you know?"

Shinji averted his eyes to the side, looking almost guilty. – "If, um... if it's what I'm thinking of, I... may have been involved too."

Yui had to bite down a denial before it slipped out. As much as she didn't want to appear as putting him down, she wasn't stupid. There was no way Gendo wouldn't know what those parts were for, but it was even less likely that a mere intern would actually be put to work on such a high-profile and high-cost project.

...then again, she had Kaworu in her employ and he had neither previous experience with Evangelions in particular like Rei, nor previous experience with battleframes in general like Asuka.

But she had no time to mull on the matter, as the next corner they turned revealed the entrance to Unit-02's hangar. – "Here we are."

Shinji already looked surprised at the cavernous size of the room under the Geofront's ground level, yet that was before his head turned and finally noticed the Evangelion itself standing motionlessly next to the walkway they were now on. Still, Yui said nothing but just stood back and noted with internal amusement when his eyes wandered downwards and slowly grew to an almost comical size as realization slowly set in at the scale of what he was seeing. Without a word he drove his wheelchair all the way to the railing and looked over the edge, his jaw literally hanging open upon fully comprehending that they were over fifty meters above the ground below, yet Unit-02's head still towered over them.

When he finally looked back up, the stunned awe on his face was just priceless.

"I knew it!"

...that was not a sentence Yui expected to hear at all.

"What?"

Shinji pointed over the railing at the left shoulder in full view of their current position. – "Look, that frontal impact deflection plate on the shoulder rack attachment rig? That's my design!"

Silence fell over the three as Rei's eyebrows silently climbed up to her hairline in the background.

"...you don't believe me, do you?"

"It's not that." – Yui quickly said in an attempt at damage control while internally questioning just what the hell was a fifteen year old doing for a living at Gehirn that made him able to identify specific parts on sight. – "I'm just having a hard time believing they'd put something like this on your shoulders. I know your father, he's not the nepotistic type."

"I didn't mean I made all of it, just... the general idea for some things here and there." – Shinji explained. – "The engineers did most of it, they just... have other things to do. Other projects, other clients' stuff. So some little things are sent to me and they look it over before sending it to manufacturing. All the mails your people sent to us went through me, actually."

In truth, most of those were actually written by Yui herself and looked over by the PR department on the way out. If she had known, she wouldn't have left things formal, that was for sure. Even so, she had no excuse for not writing to him and she knew it. – "Ah, that makes more sense. Sorry for doubting you."

"It's okay. So, um... you need me to get you something new for it?"

"Not this one. In the next hangar."

It was fortunate that Unit-00's head finished being reattached just the day before, as Yui was not at all sure Shinji wouldn't lose the contents of his stomach upon seeing it in the state it used to be in. Many who worked on the repair team did, some of whom had to be rotated out when they repeatedly failed to get a hold of themselves. After all, reinstalling an Evangelion's head was not as simple as just sewing it back on, but also meticulously reattaching every single blood vessel and nerve fiber they could, in the correct order. Not fundamentally different from the work of human microsurgeons, but made significantly easier by the sheer size of the 'patient' relative to both the surgeons and the tools used by said surgeons. Yet at the same time the size difference meant that they could see every single tiny imperfection in the subject's flesh - and like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, not everyone had the stomach to see something like that on a humanoid form from so unnaturally close, even without blood and viscera being involved.

The hardest part was, of course, reattaching the spinal nerves themselves. Even after meticulously double-, triple- and quadruple-checking that every axon they mapped was attached to the right one on the other end, the risk of making a mistake and connecting a sensory nerve to a motoric one or vice versa could never be fully eliminated. On the one hand, making a 100% perfect job was not necessary as it would be on a human; thanks to the entry plug, an Evangelion's head was mostly vestigial beyond the eyes and what passed as the inner ear anyway. On the other hand, the task was made significantly harder by the fact that Unit-00 had lost an entire neck vertebra, making it a bit trickier to match up which nerve connected to which one even after the ones that exited into the neck at the spot of the injury were tentatively ruled out by process of elimination.

Even now, the cast around Unit-00's neck couldn't hide the fact that the Evangelion looked as if it was pulling its head between its shoulders in fear.

"We have two damaged models." – Yui gestured towards the wrapped-up stump at the end of the right arm, the edge of the bandage just barely visible over the edge of the walkway. – "This one is missing half of an arm, including the elbow joint. We only have one... spare, so to speak, and even that is a stroke of luck for us. Installation will proceed in a few days but at this moment we are not even sure if it will work, so we might need a prosthetic replacement."

"That doesn't sound too bad, I think."

"Unfortunately, the other damaged one will be difficult. In addition to an entire arm up to the shoulder joint, both legs have been severed and as you can imagine, those experience substantially more load."

Shinji closed his eyes with the low-key sigh of someone who knew where this was going. – "Let me guess. The knee joints are damaged."

"Destroyed." – Yui corrected. – "Along with most of the immediate connecting tissue."

"...tissue?"

"That is correct. As you yourself pointed out, we are a biotechnological company." – Yui joined Shinji at the railing overlooking Unit-00. – "Project Evangelion, for that is what it is called, is humanity's answer to the Combine's concept of synths, the final answer in ground warfare before weapons of mass destruction are involved. Each and every single one is a flesh and blood lifeform like you and I, bred to fight the battles we never could."

Behind her shades, Rei's eyes narrowed but she said nothing.

"As you can imagine, we cannot exactly grow replacement limbs on demand, strap them on and expect them to work." – Yui continued. – "Fortunately we happen to have one nonfunctional prototype in cold storage whose limbs we might be able to salvage for transplantation purposes, but making sure all nerves, blood vessels and connecting tissues are properly attached is but the first step. You see, the very reason why that prototype failed was insufficient limb strength to move under its own power, along with structural issues within the joint cartilage tissue that cause deterioration under heavy stress. We have since eliminated both issues in subsequent prototypes, but these obsolete limbs will likely require powered cybernetic reinforcement in order to maintain an acceptable balance between mobility and maintenance needs."

Shinji absently nodded but didn't take his eyes off of the Evangelion. In fact, his eyes looked almost unfocused yet as Yui looked a bit closer, they ever so slightly moved around as if he was trying to take in the details, but not quite.

"Did... I dump too much on you?" – she asked slowly.

The question seemed to startle the teen out of... whatever that was. – "What? No, no... I was just wondering since we came in how did you manage to scale up a battleframe this much." – He let out a nervous chuckle. – "Guess that answers it."

"Is Gehirn working on something like this?"

"Not... on this scale, no. And definitely not on a biological framework." – Shinji shook his head with another chuckle. – "I don't even know where to begin with how this shouldn't be possible... n-not that I'm questioning that it is! It's just... everything I know about materials and structural engineering tells me a battleframe of this size should collapse under its own weight and even if it didn't, the first time it tried to take a step forward the other leg would immediately buckle from the doubled load, a-and the joint and actuators would be-" – He abruptly cut himself off and blushed. – "S-sorry. I didn't mean to go off on a tangent like that."

Yui just smiled. She knew the type of intellectual who gushed about their field of expertise quite well from her own subordinates and it was a clear sign of passion. While she wouldn't have pegged her son as the engineer type the last time she saw him, he was evidently interested in the field on a more than casual level to be acting like this. – "I'm beginning to see why you're considering university already. In any case, your entry authorization and system access rights are being processed. I'll be able to supply you with structural information about the Evangelions to get you started but as I'm sure you can understand, certain parts are classified."

Chapter completed on 23/05/30.

I am not entirely satisfied with the reunion scene, but one must keep in mind that this is Rei we're talking about. Even this version of her is not exactly wearing her heart on a sleeve.

Shinji has also proven to be unexpectedly difficult to write, even with an extra year of maturity. It's not his personality that's the problem, it's writing him in a way that isn't 90% of him silently existing in the background because he's not assertive enough to speak up even if he's got something to add. To forestall any questions in this direction, I am fully aware of his intellectual portrayal in the series as having some difficulty with middle school physics curriculum. However, I'm personally of the opinion that it was more of a single-episode thing playing into the genre-classic 'monster of the week needs something special to defeat' formula the series still had at that point, similar to how the synchro-training to defeat Israfel never came up again afterwards either (beyond Asuka moving in on a permanent basis). While there are quite extensive real-world debates about just how much intelligence is hereditary, both of the elder Ikaris being scientists by profession definitely has to count for something.