Shinji Ikari Goes to New York
Chapter Five - The AskrTony
The space around Shinji was a cipher. No noise, no specific source of light, only the fuzzy suggestion of trees overhead below a blank sky and a few bare branches that brushed against his face as he started forward.
He meandered, getting a feeling for the path. It seemed to be packed dirt, not hard enough for his boots to sound, not loose enough for there to be any give. The ground dipped in the middle and rose at the sides, were the trees were a near-solid mass of overlapping trunks and branches.
The temperature was dropping. Had been dropping from the moment he pulled free of the tunnel. In minutes, his breath was coming out in a faint, silvery plume. The soreness and aches running through him were joined by the sensation of sweat-wet skin drying up in a frigid burn.
The feeling was… nostalgic.
Invigorating.
Back on Akari time, Shinji had made himself a tomb. It had been in the deepest parts of a beach cave, at the end of a vein in the bedrock he'd cleared of sand and shale over one long sweltering summer week. The resulting tunnel had been just wide and high enough to crawl through, and had run away from the ocean, up into the coastal hills. At the end of that worming channel, next to a plug of sandstone which, if broken, might have led even further into the hills, there had been an ovoid depression, off to one side. Just long enough for him to lay in.
Down there, laying in freezing sand that hadn't seen sunlight for at least a hundred thousand years, it had felt like the bottom of the world. A place where nothing could ever find him. Where it would be safe to die.
And he'd used the tomb. The compulsion usually came on at night, when he awoke in darkness and heard the building creak and the foxes cry and the waves breaking along the shore and knew that there would never be another human sound in the world unless he chose to make it.
And that it was all his fault.
The dead would swarm him. Small moments, little stories picked out, picked over, evergreen, everything around them was withered and near gone. These memories would loop and overlap until a single devastating recollection would emerge, fished free of the deep mental fissure that kept it crystal clear and razor sharp. That moment when he could have stopped everything, and instead… pushed right on through.
And that would be that.
He would leave whatever building he'd been sleeping in. Stumble down darkened streets, following the decline. Find that bald chrome bar, shining a rose silver if the moon was out, sticking up from among the fencing on the far side of the coastal street. The handrail would guide him down the access stairs and onto the beach. Midway down the heavy smell of the ocean would hit, blasting clear any sputtering efforts toward self-preservation.
He'd stumble along the beach and into the cave. He'd crawl in the darkness, by touch and feel, for hours, not because he couldn't orientate and make it to the tomb directly, but because he wanted to touch every stone, every distinctive landmark in the bedrock to certify and accumulate his intent. That it was the last time he'd be doing anything.
And then he'd slide up into that tunnel that never warmed, even in the longest summer. He'd crawl into that depression, deep beneath the hills, bury himself in the freezing sand. Legs. Torso. And then he'd just… wait.
Today, in a narrow copse of trees on the artificial landmass where the island of Manhattan had once been, Shinji Ikari felt the cold of that tomb wrapping around him once again.
And, of course, it didn't belong here, in this place. On the street, and in the memorial site, there had been the unpleasant chill of an early autumn evening. Maybe half an hour later, freezing cold.
Not impossible. He'd welcomed landfall of enough monster low-pressure fronts to know a 60 degree shift in temperature could happen inside a minute… but the air was still here. Death quiet. No thunder in the distance. Only the noise he made himself.
He kept on walking. Kept expecting to reach the edge of the tiny copse. But the path just kept on going. Had he misjudged its size? Gotten confused and turned around in the crawl? But surely he should have reached either side of the copse by now. Maybe there was a channel into the retaining wall that the path passed into, and he was already beneath the city. Didn't really explain the trees, though. And the drop in temperature was too extreme, without the thrum of some industrial heat pump to possibly explain it.
Another five minutes, and it was too much. He was off Akari time now, and things worked differently. He let the pack drop free, and turned to open it. To layer up with the few extra sets of clothes that he had.
And that was when he saw the thing that had been stalking him.
Small. Barely seen. A fox, was his first thought. Then he saw the slender tail that drifted along after, and identity clicked into place and… blue.
The fire was blue.
The thing watched him from across the fire, tail twitching back and forth.
Daniels had been wrong.
It wasn't a cat.
It was everywhere, the eyes in its fur shifting. Focusing at him as the thing wrapped around him, pressing in closer and closer.
Felt like he was being squeezed out of his own skin, and that something else was pulling at the nerves that had burst free, allowing him to feel/see/hear some distant, febrile message.
It was: Lightning in a bottle being melted in a kiln made of dynamite forever falling through the gaseous atmosphere of a super gas giant.
It was: The tap tap tapping of God's clock, and in the gaps between each tap, every living voice screaming, shrieking.
It was: Sand, burning dry sand in his fists, the bells of dying jellyfish bursting from between his fingers, thin pale tentacles hanging down, acid sizzling into skin wherever nematocysts kissed his arms.
He fell to the ground, slow and regular, like it was no big deal. Knees slamming into mulchy earth. His ears popped, leaking fluid, the pain sending him right back up to his feet.
Shinji looked around, blinking. Trying to get sorted. Shaking his arms because they… hurt? No. He stopped. Examined them. Why had he thought they hurt?
Stars twinkled overhead, and the moon was up there too, peering down from the edge of the gap in the forest above the path, nestling in a mantle of thinning branches.
He regarded the moon for a tense moment, a tingle crawling up his spine. No helping that. But the moon remained silent.
"Any ideas here?" he finally muttered in Japanese, looking away, looking around.
Something was wrong. His bearings were wrong. The path had shifted and…
He started forward, heading toward a bald hillock off to one side of the path ahead, and stumbled over the travel pack.
He stared down. When had he taken it off? The top was open. He re-secured it and pulled the pack back on. The metal frame was freezing, and he had a bad moment where he sure something had been broken inside. He was back in the pack, three layers down, before remembering him and Tucker had opted for the annealers that didn't require xenon gas and that, accordingly, he had no low temperature liquids in the bag. The bag's frame was painfully cold to the touch though. Bizarre.
He packed things up and, with some difficulty now, pulled the pack back on.
He meandered, getting a feeling for the path. Loose leaves, spongy dirt. The trees had been trimmed back. A proper trail. In the distance, some unknown animal cried out.
He walked up the hillock. Sat down at the top. Looked up at the moon.
"I just wanted to do something small," he said in Japanese. "Something I could feel good about."
The moon floated along, huger than he'd ever seen it that high in the sky. He breathed in and held it. Exhaled a moment later, and far too soon.
"Is this you?" He asked. "Is this how I get to you? Because if not…" Well, he wasn't going to beg. "If not, remember Japan. Small comma off the coast of the largest landmass. Used to be equatorial, now it's a few moments north. Misato Katsuragi. Your guardian. Just tell them that. Don't say anything until she shows up."
He paused a moment, disliking how the last part of that had come out so routine. Abridged.
Sorry," he tackled it head on. "Sorry, I'm…" distracted. In a weird kind a of trouble. My feet feel wrong in my socks, and the air is too thin, and you're looking quite large up there.
He did not say that. Didn't want to jinx the prayer. "It's time," he restarted. "I'm doing this thing, this small thing, and then I'm going back home." He paused. It usually hurt getting this part of it out, because he meant it, every time. "…you too."
The moon was moving from sight, away from the path. By his senses, in the wrong direction.
And, of course, nothing happened.
Well. Nothing apparent.
Shinji took a deliberate breath of the still, warm Central Park air, and allowed himself to believe that maybe Ayanami had heard him. Maybe she was in the shallows of New Yokohama right this second, walking to shore. Maybe tomorrow morning, Tucker would be at the door with an urgent message from Misato to come home, come home, she's back, she's back!
He smiled. Just a bit. Wiped his face. Felt the beginning of hope's predictable trajectory start yet again. Turned to head down the hillock, back to the path.
"Talking to the moon, huh?" a voice said from somewhere in front of him.
Shinji, mind bathed in the red orange tones of an infinite ocean somewhere between Heaven and Earth, merely said "Oh" and waited for what came next.