Plug Suits and Penguins
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Chapter 5: Dual Duality
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The rain was a dull, lulling blanket of grey over the middle school. The majority of students opted to mill about in the building prior to classes to stay dry. Instead of the quad resounding a hundred competing conversations, the four walls of class 2-A acted as an echo chamber.
"Indoor voices," Hikari reminded everyone.
She was getting good at the Stern Raised Tone. At least she thought so. There wasn't a lot of weight behind it but the confidence in authority came through. Kodama remarked on it a few months ago, that chore designation in the Horaki house wasn't as shrill anymore, ever since she became a class representative. Less pleading, more commanding. Hikari tried hard to take the compliment.
The echo chamber swelled. A student near the back was imitating a dying cow for some reason. She cleared her throat against the din.
"Indoor voices."
The storm was quelled for a time.
Hikari looked over the classroom. She stood behind the teacher's dais organizing the day's attendance and lessons. Mr. Nebukawa was a nice man but orderliness was not his strong suit. Or following the day's attendance and lessons. Gentle prompts were required. And he was grateful, really, but sometimes Hikari felt she was more than a mere class representative.
And the other students knew it. There was more than a dais separating her from them.
She shook herself out of a self-pity party and her eyes landed on Shinji conversing with Rei. As in, a mutual exchange. The information did not immediately compute. But as she thought on it, the idea wasn't as bizarre as she first imagined.
They seemed on… improved terms, lately. Ever since the last Angel. Maybe fighting side by side drew them closer. How romantic. Not in a lovey-dovey way, but in a grand, sweeping adventure way. And Hikari did imagine something drastic like life or death struggles against giant monsters was something of a prerequisite in getting to know Ayanami. God knew she had tried with no discernible progress. Asking to sit with her at lunch, offering to tutor her since she missed so much school (not that it seemed to affect her grades one way or the other), inviting her to join study groups and extracurriculars. Zero curiosity in any and all of it. She was used to hearing a simple "no," or, on special occasions, "if I am ordered to." Which made sense now. Sort of.
So Hikari sadly, ashamedly, gave up trying. It was difficult to receive nothing for her everything. And it was too easy to follow the lead of the rest of the student body in relation to Spooky Ayanami. Ignore her. She was the invisible ghost girl, neither acting nor reacting, unaffecting. The class was no different with her attending than suffering her absence. Some days Hikari forgot she existed.
But Shinji had not stopped trying. And his persistence had somehow paid off. Hikari would love to know the hows and whys of that coup.
She watched surreptitiously. Shinji did most of the talking but his words weren't floating over Rei's head, lost to the ether. She focused on him. She responded. The level of acknowledgement from her of another human being was unheard of. Hikari witnessed other students and several teachers over the years try to engage, in various ways with various motivations, and all met the same placid failure. There was no spite or arrogance in Rei's dismissal, just a total lack of interest. Not like she was above them. Almost as if she herself felt invisible.
Shinji parted with Rei. She directed her attention back out the rain-slashed window as he headed to his desk. He happened to make eye contact with Hikari on the way. He stopped.
He smiled and waved. Hikari was dumbstruck. Other students simply did not do that to her, in school or out. What was Shinji thinking, disrupting the natural order with such brazen politeness?
So she stared. He grew uncomfortable. His raised hand crooked at a sad angle. His smile stretched thin across his face.
Hikari mentally kicked her own rear. She waved back with an apologetic smile.
Shinji tried and failed to discern why she looked like she wanted to beg forgiveness. He determined it must be his fault. As soon as the spontaneous moment of goodwill became too long to sustain itself, he offered a nod of understanding without understanding a thing, and made the three thousand mile trek to his school desk under the disdainful eyes of every human, living and dead.
He sat. And was rescued from deeper self-analytical flagellation by his friends. Toji and Kensuke flanked his sides.
"What. The hell. Was. That?"
"What was what?"
"The picture of innocence, this guy." Toji shook his head. "Kensuke, exhibit A."
He pushed his camcorder screen in Shinji's general vicinity, queuing up a recent recording. In slightly grainy footage, he watched himself wave at Hikari, who after a beat, returned the gesture. Huh, Shinji thought. That looked remarkably unremarkable. Was he being paranoid before? Stupid question.
Kensuke snapped the screen shut. He and Toji peered at Shinji. He realized they were waiting for him.
"Yeah?" he prompted.
"One more time: what the hell was that?"
"Uh, did I break some homeroom rule?"
"It, I…" Toji was close to ripping his hair out.
"When did you get on such chummy terms with the Class Rep?" Kensuke stepped in.
"Oh." A tense episode of Can You Keep a Secret with the Horaki Family? game show began running in Shinji's head. Complete with an upbeat theme song, but featuring lyrics of impending doom. "Um, she dropped off some printouts to me a week or so ago."
His friends waited for more. Much, much more. For some logical explanation behind recent word and deed.
Don't spill the beans! Don't spill the beans! Or you'll be blasted to smithereens!
"That's it!?"
"I was… just thanking her. It seemed like, uh, the right thing to do."
"… No. No, it was not."
"It's…" Toji was sputtering again. "It's the Class Rep."
"You're still relatively new," Kensuke told him, hoping to keep Toji from hurling Shinji's desk with Shinji in it out the window. "So you could be partially excused. No, it's our fault, really. We failed to properly inform you about the brutal, tyrannical Horaki regime that stifles all free breath in class 2-A. It is a poor, unwitting soul that willingly tries to make friends with her."
"You weren't here," Toji began, regaining a degree of clarity, "for the winter crackdown last year. Or the culture fest cancelation. Last March's Gym class march of misery."
"The Home Ec soup trials."
"Geometry horror show. The flashcards still haunt my dreams."
"In short," Kensuke said, "the Class Rep has worked us unmercifully. For no reward. Any iota of good-natured fun is squashed like a roach under her jackboot. Believe us. We have lived it."
"Bad enough you're chatting up Ayanami these days…"
Mounting a proper defense would have taken more time and self-confidence than Shinji had access to. The door croaked open and Mr. Nebukawa ambled into class. Hikari announced his arrival, demanding all students rise, bow and sit in short order. Shinji obeyed, trying not to imagine her as a pig-tailed drill sergeant. He had quite enough militaristic women in his life already.
After a not-so-gentle nudge from the class rep, Mr. Nebukawa took attendance. He scanned her notes and frowned.
"Ikari," he spoke.
"Yes, sir," Shinji replied as he stood, jolted from an entirely unpleasant matriarchal armed forces daydream.
"You haven't turned in the nature essay yet. Why not?"
He spoke without accusation or venom. Just a vague interest in getting conformity for the class notes. Boxes must be checked, not crossed.
Shinji searched for an answer that wouldn't sound completely pompous. Uh, because yesterday I was piloting a giant robot and singlehandedly holding back a walking nuke lest it blow up a major population center? And then had to call a taxi to collect my inebriated guardian/commanding officer from a pirate-themed bar later that night? Who threw up in my shoes as soon as we got home? Sorry. That paper about the splendor of the natural world sort of slipped my radar, Nebs.
"I ran out of time," he said.
Mr. Nebukawa hummed. "Representative Horaki. When was the essay deadline?"
She stood. "It was today, sir."
The teacher nodded. "Ikari. Stay after school and complete it."
And the day continued. Shinji dropped into his seat. The classes drifted over him. He kept glancing at Hikari. She looked straight ahead, diligently taking notes and supporting their teacher.
The final bell rang. The sky stubbornly spat out the last scattered raindrops. Wet windows filtered a low afternoon sun into class 2-A, deep prismatic orange cast over empty desks. Except Shinji, stuck in his seat, staring at a blank sheet of paper in voiceless, involuntary frustration. What was he supposed to write about? Maybe the lament for all the trees his Eva destroyed as the Fourth Angel impaled his guts and tossed him around the hillside? Or how the battle against the Fifth melted an entire mountain? Perhaps the next time he had a bird's-eye view of the countryside in Unit-01, desperately fighting for his life against monsters, he should stop and admire the scenery.
The classroom door groaned on its track, obnoxiously loud. Like a walrus being tortured for information. Hikari's efforts to inch it open discreetly failed the stealth check. She popped her head in, wincing against the noise.
"Ikari," she began. "Um, you're still here?"
That was obvious. He was at his desk, debating just how angry to make his essay. Somewhere between a cry for help and a hit list.
"Yes."
"Oh."
While not a prolific reader, she could see the chapter titles on Shinji. And the empty paper on his desk.
"Did you need help with the assignment?" she tried.
Chapter 1: A Stinging Annoyance
"No."
"Oh. Okay." The awkwardness of the situation, and still standing partway in the hall, got to her. She stepped into the class. It did not make things better.
"I said, no," Shinji told her.
Chapter 3: Growing Disdain
"Oh, yeah. Just, um, it is getting late. The janitors are making their rounds soon, so…"
"I had to sortie yesterday," he said.
Hikari did not expect him to verbalize that. "Ah…"
"And a lot of other stuff happened." His shoes were still a little damp from being in the washer overnight.
"Ah…"
His knuckles were white around his pencil. Graphite tip boring a hole in the dead center of the blank paper. He stared at her. His words came out like a curse.
"I ran out of time."
Chapter 54: Blind Fury and the Lost Penguin
"Please understand," Hikari began. "I can't always extend deadlines for missed work, even for students who are out, even for you. It's hard enough to keep Mr. Nebukawa focused on what he's teaching at the moment and extensions and absences really throw him off. But he means well. I know it's a dumb assignment but it's still an assignment we all had to do. I…"
Her words weren't reaching him.
"I'm sorry, Ikari."
Yeah, and? Shinji thought, was taking the breath to hurl it at her.
Here was the regret from her he had looked for throughout the day. Why after the fact? What good was it to him now? The essay deadline was still unmet. He was still stuck here. This private display of penitence wouldn't write the assignment for him.
Shinji stopped, and suffered a minor epiphany.
Like Kodama told him, what was public was public and what was private was private. Whether it was the Class Rep's severe fidelity to school rules versus her barely restrained glee at seeing Penpen, or Misato's selfless willingness to sacrifice herself as NERV captain versus her absolutely everything else. Neither would be able to complete their jobs the way they completed their private lives. Both were able to separate those aspects of themselves, even if others were not able to see it. Hikari and Misato might indeed be humorless authoritarians as Class Rep and Captain, but that wasn't the end all and be all of their personalities.
Shinji saw that firsthand as his guardian risked her life to save a city of strangers from a runaway mecha-turned-nuke. Her normal laziness, sloppiness, crudeness, immaturity, terrible dietary choices, poor taste in music and TV programming, suicidal driving practices, did he mention sloppiness because he forgot, and delight at Shinji's personal embarrassment did not negate her heroism. And neither did her heroism negate all the other crap. She was a complex mixture of all those things. Maybe the Class Rep was no different. Maybe everyone was no different.
"It's okay," he realized.
"What?" Hikari asked.
"I get it. I think." Shinji looked at her, differently. Almost for the first time. "I'm not mad at you."
The frustration evaporated in a heady rush. He already had trouble remembering how it felt, like a dream from weeks ago.
"You're not?" Hikari surprised herself with how relieved she was.
"I'm not." He glanced down at the paper. "I just don't know what to write about."
She approached slowly, looking for signs of disapproval. "Did you change your mind about help?"
He grinned sheepishly. "What about dinner for your sisters?"
"They'll survive without me for one evening. What about Penpen?"
"He won't starve. I taught him how to open sardine cans."
"You did? That's adorable!"
"But now I have to keep the cans locked in a high cupboard or he'll open all of them. Next time you're over, you can see it for yourself."
Hikari smiled at Shinji. "Why not write the essay about him?"
The windows dried. The rainclouds passed. They sat together in the empty orange classroom. Shinji wrote, about the fragile responsibility of caring for Penpen, learning what it took to look after another living thing. Patience, duty, improvisation, adaptation, even admiration. Penpen was a lone penguin, far removed from his natural habitat, away from others like him. But he learned to live, in a small apartment, taking small joy in what he could. Adjusting to what was before him to carry on. Even if it wasn't what he imagined, or thought he wanted. He might still whine, and impose, and make a mess of things, but he did not give up. He stubbornly refused to accept defeat. He survived.
The classroom was very orange. Hikari proofread across the desk.
"I think Mr. Nebukawa will like it," she said. "I mean, it's a pass/fail assignment. Even doing the bare minimum will get you a completed mark."
Like certain other students who wrote about clearing woodland for more basketball courts and who will remain nameless, Suzuhara. Aida's was decent. It felt like he spent a lot of time outdoors, under the stars. But there was something in Shinji's, a vein of personal aspiration. He wrote about more than just Penpen. Not quite a truth he knew, not yet.
"That's kind of a relief," he replied. "Thank you for the idea." The same, sheepish grin.
"You're welcome." Hikari watched him. She wanted to see that truth found for him.
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Next chapter: Dinner and no movie.
