Chapter Eleven - Names
Came Shinji down the long hallway with its shafts of burning moonlight, and into an entryway more modest than his memory had suggested.
Felt like he'd lost ten pounds, even taking the travel pack and nominal gravity into account. He did not like feeling this good. It was difficult to trust that feeling. But…
Six months ago he had been handed a letter by a battered stowaway in the middle of being interrogated by the Yggdrasil's rag tag security force. Two months later in Vietnam he'd handed the detonator to that same stowaway so he could bring down the dam, drawing the fabrication plant's security forces away from the vault where the quantum annealers were kept. A month ago, he had landed in the United States with enough plundered technology to live like a king for generations.
He walked across the entryway. Looked up at the Word. Just a word. The world was small now, so dense with people and machines. It was wonderful and horrible, but he liked being small and doing the small things. There was a blissful anonymity in being interchangeable, and for a moment he considered what the girl had said out in the woods. Not a guest, a delivery man.
Perhaps it was safer to be that. To just be an anonymous force that made electronics appear. Wherever Asuka was, she just needed the stuff in the travel pack, not him. Why, he'd turn down the correct hallway and find someone sitting behind a desk, insist they sign a dummied-up receipt, and leave the travel pack with them. Then he could wander out into the landscape and find a path back home. Maybe in a couple years he'd get another letter, and the process would repeat. And this would just carry on and on, and small and cyclical eternity.
He stopped at the foot of the stairs, pleased to have banished a nightmare by invoking it.
He listened to the structure. It was hard to read. Not a groaning ruin, as it outwardly appeared, but something too tough to bow and creak. It felt more like a cave than a human place, and most of what he heard was deafening nothing. Somewhere on the second story of the entryway, the tell-tale skitter of mice, or maybe a cat.
Then: the sound of muted feet, the syncopation of an unhurried person. A shadow appeared on the front porch, closing with the door. In a burst of nervous energy, Shinji hoisted the travel pack again, trying to summon nonchalance. He drew the letter Asuka had sent him out of his breast pocket one handed and flipped it open. Something to contemplatively be looking at when she came in.
The knob turned, the door opened. Beyond were bald hills in scalding moonlight, the crumbling tops of the cemetery peaking over the lip of the drive like rotted teeth… and then the girl from the dead wood slid into view. Shinji deflated, dropped the affectation.
She looked at him oddly. A tight check, a glance. Then she was in and the door was closed.
"Do you know where everyone is?" He asked, thumbs pressing into the travel pack frame.
The girl didn't respond. Seemed to be looking into the middle distance. She walked over to a side table. Put something she'd been holding in one hand into a heavy vase that appeared to be made of cast iron, and rested her hands on the table.
Shinji took a deep breath, slower than he wanted to. Long journey. Last step. He started toward her.
"Do you have any siblings?" She asked, as he approached.
"No." He peered into the vase. Brambles?
"Family?" Her gaze remained fixed. "Other than Mi-Sa-To?"
"Dead," he simplified.
Silence descended. His punctured ankle throbbed. The damage still was not healing, but the pain had become a small thing.
The girl reached down and picked up a bramble stalk. When he saw the thorns, he realized it was actually a rose stem.
"The people in this house have not realized we are here," she said. "They are dangerous. They are my family, but may not recognize me. You think they expect you, but perhaps only one of them knows you are coming."
She balanced the stem on her palm and looked at him. "I propose a truce, until introductions are made."
Shinji nodded, in a way he hoped appeared patient and thoughtful. There was nothing she could have said that he would not agree with, if it meant moving this along.
"First, I need your name," she said.
"I told, I'm Shinji Katsura-"
"That is a lie," the girl said. "Part of it anyway. For this to work, I need to know who you are."
"You know who I am," Shinji said, feeling a bit of pique now. "One of those." He gestured up at the Word above the doorway. "A world killer."
The girl's expression changed. Her hand whipped out, smacking down the finger he'd been using to point.
"Name, asshole. Name." She repeated.
Shinji flexed the hand she had slapped. Gave the matter one last moment of consideration. The dangers. Vivisection. But she already knew the worst of him. "Ikari," the word came out unfamiliar, it had been so long since he had said it. "Shinji Ikari."
The girl watched him, expression changing again. Her brows might have been the key. They went together, she was angry. They rose a millimeter, and that meant… what?
"Shinji Ikari," she said, gesturing to herself with a quick twist of her outstretched hand. "Wednesday Addams. Why was that so difficult?"
Shinji did something with his mouth that wasn't a smile. Uttering his name had diverted him into a very particular headspace. Tokyo 3. Cicada. Angels. Eva. Unit One. Third Child.
"So, truce?" she said, holding out her hand. He took it automatically. Her fingers made a cage of his hand before he realized what she was doing. The rose stem was cradled there, long dead, thorns dry, hard as wood.
He didn't pull away, adrenaline spiking as he leaned in close, looming into her like a tilting tombstone, eyes locked on her. The response was sub-sapient. Animal. A response that expected the hand to tighten, and for this to turn into a contest where watching her face, watching pain appear there, would be how he knew he was winning.
This instinctive intimidation display appeared to be wasted on the girl, whose only movement had been to tilt her head to watch him in return.
For three long, hissing breaths, nothing happened. Wednesday Addams did not tighten her grip. Shinji mastered the impulse to do it first. By the third breath he had some dim awareness that this was probably the point.
"You look like a cheap cookie," she finally said, and relaxing her grip.
Shinji glanced at his hand, only saw one pale tract along the bulb of muscle below his thumb.
He absently wiped his hand against the travel pack, then looked down at himself.
"Cookie?" He said, in Japanese.
"English," Wednesday said. He glared at her, and in so doing watched her extract the rose stem from her hand, in which it was firmly lodged, each thorn reluctantly ripping free of pale skin. She returned the stem to the iron vase, and showed Shinji her hand, covered in a dozen dark cuts, when she saw him looking.
"Relax Antonio," she said, apropos of nothing. "I don't bleed."
"Fine, yes," Shinji said, the last of his patience draining away. "Now we can find your family?"