Shinji Ikari Goes to New York
Chapter Seven - Always
Shinji arched his feet, gauging the weight of the travel pack. It seemed he'd lost about twenty kilos. Whatever was keeping him on the ground wasn't quite Earth-normal.
He turned to the girl. She was still staring down the hill.
"Where is house?" he asked.
"Down there." The girl replied. Her voice was quieter now. Different from stalk mode, though. She turned to him, but kept her gaze locked down the hill. "You should be able to see it just off the stairs." Her gaze flickered up, to the lunar surface, then back down to Shinji. "I have been away. Is this normal?"
Well, that was a relief.
Shinji shrugged. He'd tasted Misato's blood and seen Unit Two torn into so many parts. Part of him would always be back there, in the entry plug, vomiting up all the broken parts of his life in one long scream. So this wasn't even close to the end of the world.
"Something goings on," he said, just butchering it.
He started down the stairs. They were made of some white stone that might well have been marble, though the surface was too weathered to tell. The stairs glided down the hill in a sequence of switchbacked terraces. The weight of the pack and the kills was getting troublesome.
"I met your sister," the girl said. She hadn't moved. Was peering down at him from the terrace above.
"No sisters," he said, looking up at her, and so saw her step off the terrace.
She hit the stairs a sedate three seconds later, legs barely bending.
"Missy Kazurangi," the girl said.
"Mother," Shinji corrected, continuing down the stairs. Pushing right on through the surprise and suspicion. The house was close. Asuka was close.
"She came with your grandpa." The girl continued, heading down the stairs herself. "He was asking the family for…"
Shinji kept of walking. He had gripped the goose reflexively when the girl had started talking about Misato. His fingers had punctured into the kill's downy trunk, and now was leaving a trail of gelid red droplets down the stairs.
The girl was… a girl. Maybe a bit taller than him, but of a slight build. He had assumed she was a teenager. But Misato's father was long dead.
"How long…" he began, turning, but the girl wasn't there. She was further up the stairs, sitting. Might have sat down the moment she trailed off.
"How long did know her?" He asked, blending a few questions into an ambiguous soup. The girl did not respond. Her gaze had returned to the base of the hill.
Several minutes later, after another switchback, the girl appeared at the edge of the terrace above, sitting down between two rusty patio chairs, legs dangling off the side.
"Antarctica." The girl said, peering down at him. "Father gave Kazurangi money and support to go to Antarctica."
Her booted feet knocked at the molding below the terrace edge. A steady, sharp rhythm of two.
"For a minute there, I didn't know that." She continued, as he passed along below her. "I was just… coming home."
The knocking stopped, and a few moments later she hit the stairs behind him. A few quick steps, and she settled in behind and to his left, where the bulk of the goose's bent neck hid her.
For a time, they went on in silence. His body was beginning to appreciate the low gravity, to ache in different ways. The air was thin, and sterile, and there was no wind. The smell of the kills, of blood and drying brains, was growing sharp. Cloying. A distant cousin to LCL's industrial morgue stink.
"You speak Japanese," the girl said, or maybe asked, as they rounded the final switchback.
"Yes," Shinji answered.
"When you were talking to the moon, that was Japanese?" He heard the inflection this time.
"Yes," he said. His gaze was fixed at the edge of the hill opposite. Any second now, the house would be coming into view.
"No…Bo…Dy…" the girl said, carefully, stretched out, in mangled Japanese.
"Nobody," he repeated, and the girl made a sound. Maybe not with her mouth. Something low and blunted and dry. A series of sounds. He turned to look at her. The sound was familiar.
She stood at the edge of the terrace, looking down into the cemetery, a hand to her throat, the fingers there working. "Nobody" the word came out low, but it nearly perfect.
The girl coughed, resettled her hand. "Nobody," the word was perfect now. At a higher pitch.
Shinji turned and continued down the stairs.
"Live… die…" When he passed on below her, he half-expected her to jump on down again, but there was only that snatch of language, barely heard. Just the top of her head was visible from below.
The stairs ended. He stepped onto the brick path into the cemetery, and, just as the girl had said, the sharp, gleaming edge of a shingled roof dipped into view just past the hill's edge.
One last surge of energy flooded into him, and he broke into a run, plunging into the cemetery, eating up the distance just as quick as he could. Because this would help. Even if things couldn't go back to the way they had been, just being able to see her would help. Just being able to do this thing, would help.
He was midway through the cemetery, approaching a set of stairs that would take him onto a broad boulevard that appeared to bisect the sprawling area, and lead him right to the house, which was turning into a hulking, twisted shape, it's own kind of hill, in the distance.
Six years flummoxed with life. Six years without Asuka. Three years waiting for life to make sense, another three years waiting for an excuse to live any kind of life at all. And now, finally, he felt poised on the edge of catching up with the rest of the world. Properly coming back to life.
He was at the stairs down to the boulevard — at the top step, in fact. Mid-stride. And he missed that step.
And he couldn't get his feet out in front. The world was blurring around him, and he couldn't breath. Something in his chest popped, and then all the joints in his shoulders and arms followed, and he was over the boulevard, watching it float on by below him.
And then he was looking up, into the matte red purple trenches cut into the lunar surface, framing a scene out of hell.
There was a roiling shape above him, a silhouette framed by the scabby moon beyond. Two points of poisonous light shone from the tapered end of that shape, each seeded with a single black pit.
"So they can all just die." The words were Japanese, and spoken in an inhuman, warbling voice.
The ground came up to meet him, and Shinji bouncing off it, rolling some distance as the gravity failed to give him purchase. When he had gathered his wits enough to look up, the thing, the thing in the shape of a girl was walking towards him, like it was the easiest thing in the world.
The hand at her throat continued to work, fingers plunged in to the second and third knuckles, worming their way in the meat there.
He shrugged off the pack and got to his feet, backing away as the thing approached.
"So they can all just die," it repeated, back to sounding something like a person.
He ran to the edge of the boulevard, and up into the far cemetery. The thing was not giving up distance easily, matching him with no apparent effort.
"So they can all just die," it babbled in a more defined voice.
He stuck to the main path and tried to get orientated. This place was looser than the memorial site had been, but more chaotic. Tapered stone slabs and mausoleums and all kinds of things that were probably supposed to be statutes, though many seemed to have been executed with little effort or talent.
It was into a grove of vaguely aquatic shapes that he ultimately dove, after taking a sharp turn at a crypt. He stood between two distorted cones, just breaking line of sight with the main path.
The thing that had led him out of the forest walked up the path, went some distance past the collection of statues where Shinji stood, and then stopped.
He dipped low. Tried to keep his breathing slow and through his nostrils. There was a high moan of wind passing through the hills, but no other sound… except for the wet, sucking sound apparently produced by the thing plucking into its neck.
He began to move further away from the path, back toward the boulevard. Surely, if he could get to the house, something or this mess could be salvaged…
And then the words came. Those same words, again, and at a distance:
"Nobody cares whether I live or die."
"Nothing will change."
"So they can all just die."
And he was on the ground. One foot kicking himself forward mindlessly, sliding his forehead along the flagstones. He was crying, and near blind from it. And he was shrieking, not a new sound or an echo but a continuation of that old sound, the one that had nearly dissolved him, back when his throat had been full of Misato's blood and Asuka had been a sheet of crushed skin and bone, flattened by the collapsing walls of a destroyed entry plug.
He hadn't recognized the words until the thing had spoken just now, it's twisted up throat producing a perfect nightmare: Shinji's own voice.
The words he had said so long ago, that had brought an end to everything.
And now he was back there.
It was the end of the world again.