(✞ 💣✋ ✋ ❄ 👎)

I wonder if it was something about the weather, or the lighting, or the air.

Overall, there had been nothing greatly unusual about the time preceding.

Just before it happened, I recall walking home by myself in the evening light, on one of those occasional colder evenings that had grown unusual in our world.

The clouds were tinged with strange colors in some whimsical light of the evening, looking almost like a painting in the skies themselves, though even this strange, light beauty could not seem to rid my least favorite time of the day of the intrinsic aftertaste of melancholy.

Instead, the sense one got, or at last the sense I had, was of a heady, unral floating through the balmy merciful air, like the temporary suspension in the air at the end of a jump, in which you knew without a doubt that gravity was going to pull you down in the end.

I can't say if I was returning from NERV or another day at the community gardens.

One thing that stands out to me is a memory of walking by the base of one of the great towers coated with panels that dot the city-scape, the ones that are used both for the generating of solar energy and for the funnelling of some light from the surface down to the dephts of the geofront.

I noticed some of the light refracting on the crystalline surface of the panels and found myself sufficiently intrigued by the stray dancing colors to briefly pause in my steps.

I must have walked by it many times, never really sparing it a glance, but this time, this self-contained danced of basic physical properties filled me with something that seemed both a deja vu and a premotion, if that could be paired with the wonder of seeing something for the first time, yet understanding the fine components of its nature.

I don't think I even lingered for long, but the image of the rainbow lingered in my mind, as the did the temperature, which was xactly such that it was just in the pleasant range when combined with direct sunlight, but just the slightest bit cold outside of it.

My consciousness seemed wholly filled with a streak of textured, contradictory sensations until I made it to my room, where I discarded my clothes and curled myself up beneath by blanket, which seemed for once more like a welcome cocoon than a prison of sweat – and in that crysalis-like space, I let myself be lulled to sleep, in a dream-like state that seemed both empty and unreal, in the way that I had known almost everything within me was such, but in a manner that was peaceful and warm rather than cold and unsettling. A still emptiness, like that of an ocean before time, and a rather vague feeling that seemed at once to encapsule the melancholy of knowing something was over and strangest of all, a faint sense of satisfied contentment, even the happiness of leaving behind a task well done…

And I think now that where had been on that day truly must have been the community garden, because the sensations of wading through muddy fields and rice paddies continued themselves into a liminal, hypnagogic state.

Here, too, I seemed to be wading, trudging, laboring and shedding sweat, climbing unhill under an unforgiving sun, traversing mud and soil that gave way beneath my feet.

I was not surprised to see my plugsuit boots on my feet rather than my wellies, since I had been wearing it in the field on that one day when I fell into the water, but which didn't match that day at all was that my hands were not handling tools or plucking out seedlings from the cotton puffs they'd sprounted in.

My hands were not free – I was not allowed to simply look around here and do whatever I pleased, because I had a mission, a heavy burden to carry that was given to me from the moment I first awakened, like the karma of a previous life.

I might be in the fields, and the green, and the sunlight, but my life was not my own, my hands were at someone else's disposition, laboring to haul something heavy on my back, which in the periphery of my vision resembled a mirror image of my own suit, but it was perhaps an older model.

The other person did not stir with any sign of life, and yet I was forced to bring her wherever I went, straining heavily to bring her across the hills and fields before me.

Several times, I think the weak ligaments my ankle threatened to fold over the wrong way and I managed just barely to steady myself in time before the undue weight upon me could bring both of us crashing down.

But I had never known any life without the weight, so I'd grimly accepted it and pressed onward with gritted teeth.

I thought that if I could only carry her to her last destination, to the subject of her last regrets, I might finally be free from her weight and the labors that were hoisted upon me.

So I soildered onward and onward through the muddy terrain, the earth shapeless as if under a rain, amid swamped stalks of green poking out from the fertile soil.

From the red soil, the humans come…

"Did you know?" spoke a voice now, some presence in front of me that I could not fully place – I think it was a young man's, but I couldn't be sure, I couldn't afford to look up as I was weighed down by my objective. It was strangely familiar but in a way that was very distant, as if I had only briefly glipmsed him in a completely different dream, at the very end of it, while I was being strangled to death in a way that I don't think ever really happened…

It can be hard to tell, in a place like this, at the very border of consciousness, when ideas from all the different compartness run together like muddy earth.

I could not concern myself with whether I was seeing in the distance were in fact white feathers, for my mission only required of me that I avoid stepping or slipping on them, making them relevant only as obstacles in my path, and a bone thrown to my idle sense for beauty, needless as it was for a task such as this.

"Did you know? Humans come from Earth. And to earth you must return. But you are made of a different earth as everyone else, a pure, celestial earth of holy moonlight, that was never meant to mix with this tainted world below. Very soon now, there will come a time where you must return to the home whence you came."

"Nonsense," I retorted, taxed as I was by truculence of my labors, "I do not have such a thing as a home.", but then as soon as I'd said it, I found myself and my absoluteness softening as I realized the utter hollowness of my harshness. "I do not know where my home is."

I thought that I did not know anything, really, or very little at least, outside of my burden and my labor. I could not set it down; The only course left to me was forward, and so I continued, up the steepness of the slopes, up the irregularities of the ground, breathing heavily, feeling the wild uneasy pounding of my heart in my chest as I struggled to gulp for air.

At this point I could not cease the heavy breathing, nor could I stop the perspiration running down my face, or the hair sticking to my face, or the waves of heat washing down my body – I could not stop. I must press on, just a little longer, even though there was no horizon in sight, no goal but a red, red moon enthroned at the zenith of the night sky.

The drops of sweat kept dripping down, one, two, three, mixed in with some spots of blood. At first I thought that I must have unwittingly bitten my lip, or that the blood was coming from the figure carried on my back, covered in red streaks, but it wasn't long until I felt it streaking from my nose, with each crimson drop taking with it some portion of my body heat as I felt it hot upon my face…

I know very well what blood is, I know what bleeding means -

I know the redness of the evening sun, the rosy hues of animal flesh, the metalling tang in the smell of LCL… and I loathe it, all of it.

I hate the knowledge that not all blood must portend death, that it carries life and may portend the ability to carry life – I have read of such processes in books, years ago, and I recall distinct impressions of words like 'menarche', though I won't happen to me.

It has been said that in paradise we will no longer marry, but rather be like the angels in heaven, unstained by the red-handed trail of sin. It is such a unstained world that Comander Ikari seeks to create, so he has shaped me to be its vessel, his prototype of the new man, just as SEELE must have their own, crimson and pale as myself.

Instead I find myself deficient, stunted, sterile, deprived and excluded, like something very important was taken from me, like any future I might have had has been stolen from me before I was even born… left as a translucent world in a vibrant world whose very substance I can't ever seen to touch, a reflection of the only one sun, as the dead cold scarred moon is -

I have felt in myself some of the changes that come with that are supposed to come with the transistion from a child to a young woman, but I know that they will never be seen to completion – if anything, I've been told that the hormonal changes typical of maturation would likely precipitate the breaking down of the carefully maintained equilibrium between the disparate matter within by body, between light and earth, fire and dust. After all, the regimen worked out to stabilize my form even temporarily was worked out when I was a child, and even with it, constant artificial upkeep was required.

There would soon come a point where no degree of treatment, medication or calibration sessions would be able to prevent nature from taking its course...

The time remaining was short. In contrast to the medieval period for example, the present social mores set the legal threshold for adulthood somewhat later, so as a to allow for the completion of a longer education and the gaining of experience before an individual has full responsibilities thrust upon them, as well as likely a grace period for late bloomers, but nonetheless the average human reaches the 'Tanner V' end stage of puberty along with their final height and secondary characteristics at about fourteen and a half, with of some room for individual variation. I would never reach that end, or anything beyond it.

The sacrilege that may have been permitted in the incomplete form of a child would never be allowed to reach a state of full bloom. Even full-blooded angels looked more like humans in their larval forms, but the end products of their growth were incredibly different.

There was no way that a single body could do both – right at the cusp of physical maturity, the contradiction between the two paths would finally become too great.

The mongrel flesh could not keep growning, but neither could it shapeshift as a newly matured angel would, so its very fabric was set to crumble away into nothing.

The only bleeding that I could expect was the one that would herald the dissolution of this body, bits and pieces of it beginning to rupture as the inevitable mutual rejection of angel and human began to take its course.

All paths before me lead only into a sea of blood, even as the very world around me – the manifest scape of my soul – takes on that crimson hue of sunset, of meat, of an inevitable ending imbuing everything.

Proceeding from the desintegrating coprse I must carry with me, the blood streaks into my eyes, coloring everything I see.

No longer is it a land of lush greeny that I must wade through, but a carnographic fearscape dreamts up by some surrealistic painter, like a lumpy stew of organs from which I must ever pull my boots, dissolving and softening into a morass of fetid life.

But the hill alone remains, and still I must climb up its blood-stained slope, never wavering from my path, because I knew that every single path lead the same way, the event horizon was already crossed before my birth, all that I could otherwise have been had collapsed under the weight I was forced to carry across this amniotic, embryonic ocean whose contents progressively kept loosing the distinctness of their features, like fetal growth played in reverse.

At first I took the body parts in my surroundings to be a mass of anonymous flayed corpses, which I had paid no heed as I struggled onward to complete my task – but then I started recognizing them.

They ceased to be faceless, and the weight of their names burned heavily inside my mind:

I recognized the old ladies from the garnening club, stripped of their faces and yet somehow recognizable.

I saw the hand of the little raddish girl, suffocated in a futile attempt to reach out from within the piles of revolting bare flesh, all of them stripped crimson, and covered in crimson.

I saw Aida-kun, Hikari and her family, faceless dots among the flood of compressed, sardine-like crowds.

I passed Suzuhara, profusely exsanguinated from the stump of his leg.

Dr. Akagi, face up, with a small circular blood stain in front of her blouse.

I saw Inspector Kaji, crumpled in a corner as the crimson spilled straight out of him.

Major Katsuragi was not far from him, torn into at least two separate pieces.

I saw the remains of the Vice Commander and the Command Bridge staff, mashed into a puddle.

I saw the Second Child, her once treasured face marred with a great ugly hole, what remained of her arm split down the middle…

And worst of all, Ikari-kun's plugsuit, bloodied and empty and bereft of his presence, all he had once been now absorbed into the soaked hungry ground.

But I couldn't help them. I couldn't reach out to them.

I had no hands to reach with, not for as long as I was carrying my burden…

There was no room for me to do or be anything else until I had finally delivered it.

So I pressed on, though I could no longer say for what reason or purpose, what salvation might possibly be found at the end of a road at which all of this was sacrificed.

I continued the task only out of desire to be released of it, even knowing there would be little left of me to enjoy that release… indeed I think I may have been the very first sacrifice that was bled to set this world on its path.

Yet there was only one way for me to go, and thus I walked forward, if such a world could still have meaning in a world where all direction but the one have now ceased to exist.

But that one was soon going to fade also, as surely as you could no longer move north upon reaching the North Pole.

The head of the last sacrifice rolled before my feet, like a still-pounding heart on the steps of an Aztec temple (the young man from before?), and with that the opening rites were completed, and I at last arrived at the summit.

There I was met with a sight that I at first connected with confort.

A blissgul release, an agreeable coolness on a blistering day of summer -

Commander Ikari?

His hands, like all else, were profusely dripping with blood, but when he reached them out towards me, I hoped for an instant that he would take it, though I knew better -

I thought of him cradling me in his arms like a father and letting me rest from all this odyssey of agony…

But of course he didn't. He reached for that thing on my back – though the suit was empty, though the mass of blood that had once been within spilled out and all over his face and clothes -

And I thought, for a moment, that I felt really sorry for him, for the way he tried to scoop the spilled blood back into a shape it would no longer hold.

Whatever became of him, I would never find out.

He left, just like I always knew he would, but even though I had known this, even though I accepted it and did my best to curb all hope or expectation, it still hurt.

And even though it hurt, I still reached out for him –

But even if he had turned around, I never could have followed him.

There was blood coming from my eyes. Blood coming from my nose. Blood being spat out, coughed up, vomited forth, coing from every which way, egressing from every single orifice and even places that were never mean to be so, spurting from every little pore – lumps of hair falling down, clumps of flesh landing with wet sounds – I had tried to stop my fall with my arms, but their joints refused to keep their shape and bent sideways, coming to lay on the floor in a puddle spreading from all of me, knowing then I would end as thin liquid just as the one I had been sacrificed to revive – but already the lights of my thinking were going out, my trains of thought splintering, failing to even recall why it had once seemed so important to maintain cohesion, or what it even what that I'd wanted to hold onto…

The only place where I could exist or belong to... was already fading away….

…

I awakened in the deepness on the night.

The curtains of my room were all but pierced by the cold, pale light of a bright, foreboding full moon.

I knew that the vision had passed, but I could not keep myself from touching my limbs just to make sure that they were still there.

It wasn't real. None of that had happened. None of it should matter upon awakening, and yet -

I felt a lingering discombulation, a coloration of feelings remaining behind within my form, bleeding through into inevitable reality.

I tried hard not to think of it as a symptom of anything, and though I decided that I didn't, I spent a good while pacing myself in my room, going to the sink, covering my face in water, as if to convince some dim, inacessible part of mine that I could not presently be dying.

Not yet.

But I understood then, with prophetic certainty, than what I had just seen was exactly what was going to happen to me – the exact story of how I was going to lose everything.